Still Life by Richard Cobb

Author:Richard Cobb [Richard Cobb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571252978
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2008-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

THE OUTSIDE WORLD

I have little memory of politics. It does not seem to have been a political town. I had noticed the local headquarters of the Conservative Party, not because of that, but because Thackeray had lived in it while writing The Newcomes, giving the house, which faced onto the Common, a great deal of prestige in my eyes. If I had known anything about politics, I might have asked myself why the Conservative Party should have needed a headquarters in Tunbridge Wells. The M.P., Colonel Spender-Clay (a name that seemed to spell out affluence), if not hereditary, was perpetual, though I believe he did eventually have a successor at the end of the thirties. After the War the constituency was represented by the son of Mrs Wellington-Williams, a lady who played Bridge and lived in an enormous house on Frant Green, so perhaps being double-barrelled was a condition of acceptance.

I believe my parents regarded themselves as Liberals; at least, they read a Liberal newspaper for as long as it lasted; both professed concern for the Underdog (a concern I did not share, any sort of dog filling me with apprehension and loathing).

During the General Strike, my father had been sworn in as a Special Constable and had been provided with a blue-and-white striped armband and a wooden truncheon with a leather thong (which he was allowed to keep, for I still have it); but I don’t think he ever had to use it. Certainly, Whale and her colleagues below-stairs never went on strike. Apparently some of the trains were driven, it was said, by ‘undergrads’. Cook was a distant, malignant figure, who lived very faraway, somewhere in the north. The same year I do remember reading, on the front page of the Westminster Gazette, of the death of the King of Roumania, who had a beard; there was a photograph of him surrounded by a black border, so he must have been an ally. I don’t remember any political news in the weekly Children’s Newspaper; and there certainly wasn’t any in the Modern Boy. My mother and I once went to stay in a large and very magnificent hotel at St Leonards. In the drawing-room, there was a wireless and, during the 6 o’clock news, there were many references to an Anglo-Japanese Naval Conference.

When I was 13, there was much talk in the house about ‘going off the Gold Standard’. This was apparently a very dreadful thing to have happened, but it did not have any visible effects on Tunbridge Wells; no building fell down, there were no reports of sudden deaths, or of people throwing themselves out of windows, the event was not referred to in Sunday sermons, the shops – and, worse, the schools – remained open.

We never had a wireless before the outbreak of the War. But each Christmas Day, from some time in the early thirties, I was invited to the flat next door, the home of the widow of a bank manager, Mrs Stephens

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