All the Tea in China

CHAPTER ONE

I was running, running, fit to burst my breast; the shot-gun pellets in my left buttock burning like a foretaste of hell. It is hard for a man to run after a vigorous passage of lechery with a young woman, harder still to do so when he is holding up his breeches. I stopped to draw breath, and to attend to the buttons of my small-clothes — and to listen. I could hear nothing behind me; in particular I could not hear the baying of my uncle’s great dogs, thank God. Why he should have been so upset at finding me in an embarrassing posture with my own cousin is a mystery to me: we were, after all, engaged to be married, he knew that.

After a while I started to run again, but more slowly now for I had a tryst with another young lady that evening and I felt that in all fairness to her, I should husband my strength. She, this other one, was there: in the shadow of the great magnolia tree in the northwest corner of the knot-garden beside her father’s castle. We embraced passionately.

“Karli,” she murmured as we drew apart after our first frantic embrace, “why does your heart thump so?”

“For love of you,” I lied valiantly. “It always thumps so when you are near, dearest one.”

“I am so happy that you feel so,” she said, still murmuring, “because I have such a wonderful piece of news for us.” My heart missed a thump. I cocked an ear for the baying of hounds but there was only the rustle of magnolia leaves and two hearts beating as one, although for different reasons.

“Tell me this fine news, my sweet and only love,” I said, furtively feeling the back of my breeches on the left side, “tell me it all, my Eve with the sweet little apples.”

“Karli, you have given me a baby, I am so happy I could cry!” Naturally, she started to cry. My heart now began to thump in earnest. I collected my wits.

“And have you told your father the Ridder, dearest love?” I asked diffidently.

“Of course not, Karli, he would kill you, you know that. No, we shall say nothing to him nor to Mama, we shall run away. We shall be very poor but you can work on the canal and I shall take in washing and we shall be so happy with our baby and our love in some tiny cottage far, far away from here.”

To speak plainly, this was far, far away from the future I had planned: my courtship of the Ridder’s horse-faced daughter had been an attempt to better my station in life: the thought of toiling on a canal-dredge all day and returning at night to a red-wristed washerwoman and a brat in a squalid cottage was not at all what I had had in mind for myself.

“I shall lie down now, dearest one of all,” she said, “and you shall have your will of me, you bad, shameless, wonderful boy.”

Love — physical love in those organs designated for it — vanished and shrivelled with an almost audible rustle.

“No, heart of my heart,” I whispered, “not tonight. Tonight is too sacred. I must be strong for both of us — I shall go home and pray for our happiness in store, in store for us three. You must go to your bed and take great care of yourself and of the little fruit of our love.” I was a wonderful liar in those days.

She meekly agreed. I have often observed that women, in some matters, are almost as stupid as men. After many a perfunctory kiss, I was running again. This time, home to my mother was where I was running.

I did not cry “Oy veh!” as I ran, because on my father’s side I am a Jew of the Sephardim, the aristocrats and scholars: our private language is Ladina, not the Yüddisch of the base Ashkenazim of the East. I have, of course, some smattering of Yüddisch but, frankly, I had no breath to cry “Oy veh!” or anything else. With my mother was where I needed to be, even if I had to take a bowl of her strong chicken broth.

You must understand that I was then a young — and am now an almost elderly — Dutch Jew, so of course I must be a liar. I understand that: it is of no importance. Words are words; truth is something precious you share only with your family. So do not burst a kishka trying to believe what I am writing: just enjoy. You will learn nothing of importance from this story except, perhaps, how to die; but then, you were born knowing that and in any case it only has to be done once. It is easy: ask anyone who has done it.

My nose was dragging on the ground by the time I reached my mother’s house: she must have been waiting, for the door opened before I could rattle the pin. She looked me up and down. I opened my mouth.

“First eat,” she said firmly.

“But Mama—”

“Eat!” she said and steered me to a chair. I yelped as I sat down to the table and, in the twinkling of an eye, my mother had hoisted me up and bent me over. She is — was, now, I think perhaps — a little woman and fat but strong. She put her hands to her cheeks and started to keen, but quietly, so as not to waken my father.

“Mama, please,” I said, “I am not badly hurt, I tell you truly.”

“Your great bottom I’m not crying about — but who made you those beautiful broadcloth breeches not two years ago, and who now has to wash the blood off and maybe darn twenty little holes?”

Still bent over the table, my face among the knives and forks and plates, I answered with dignity.

“Mama, I’m hungry. Yet.”

Without a word she flitted to the big iron kitchen-range and, by the time that I had adjusted myself to sitting on the right cheek of my bottom, there was a bowl of her best chicken broth steaming in front of me, scattered with those little crisp things; I forget the English word for them.

Five minutes later I wiped my mouth politely and she set before me a plate of delicate chopped liver, such as only she can — could — make.

When I had dealt honestly with that she asked me whether I was ready for my supper.

“I am sorry, Mama,” I said sheepishly, “but tonight I seem to have no appetite. And my bottom hurts.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, a trifle piqued, “the bottom I had almost forgotten. Get the breeches off, I shall look.”

“Mama, I am almost twenty — please!”

“That bottom I have washed a thousand times before you even knew it was a bottom. And men I’ve seen before — relatives I mean, naturally. Now quick, down with the breeches before they are spoiled.”

A few minutes later she said, “Such a baby, I never heard such squealing. And it’s not buckshot, the gamekeeper loaded his gun with rock-salt only.”

“Mama.”

“Yes, son?”

“This wasn’t a gamekeeper. It was your brother, my uncle; my Oom Kaspar.”

She didn’t say anything, she stood back and folded her arms. While I was explaining, delicately, how things had been when my uncle burst in upon us, she pursed her mouth in a way which was not wholly condemnatory. I could see that she was thinking of how things could be arranged with decency. Before she could give a verdict I said, “Mama?”

“Yes, son?”

“Mama, there is a little something else.” I told her about the Ridder’s daughter at the castle. She did not clap her hands to her cheeks, she did not moan; she gave me a long, blank look, so careful not to be frightened that it frightened me.

“Just like your father,” she said at last. “A stallion, a mad stallion.”

I gaped at her amazedly. My father, slight, silver-haired, gentle, a bookworm, was snoring gently upstairs over his treasured copy of Jakob Böhme’s Mysterium Magnum, that great and ridiculous work by another philosophical cobbler. (The sign over our door read Jooss v. Cleef, Saddler and Maker of Riding-Boots to the Nobility and Gentry” but my father was, in effect, a cobbler.) To speak of my father as a mad stallion was purely absurd: he was, as I have said, snoring gently upstairs over his book of recondite philosophy.

Except that, at the moment I am writing of, he was standing in the doorway.

He nodded courteously at me and then looked at my mother.

“Give the boy some money, Annike,” he said. “Give him as much as we can afford, get him to Rotterdam and England. I am not proud, but I will have no son of mine flogged in public.”

Again, he nodded kindly at me and vanished. Before I had drawn three deep breaths, before even my mother could begin to speak, he reappeared and thrust a fat volume into my hands.

“Read,” he said. “Then read again. Get it into your mind.”

I have the book in front of me as I write: it is Flavius Josephus on the History of the Jews, printed by Marten Schagen in Amsterdam in 1736; Haverkamp’s edition, bound in speckled calf. I must read it one day, to appease a gentle ghost who was once the best and kindest cobbler in our Province.

My mother finished dressing my wounds in haste, then bustled about, putting all my good clothes into a bag made of carpet and filling up a little canvas bag with food.

“Now,” she said, “quick. Down to the wharf. Old Gerrit’s barge is tied up there for the night and he will be at the inn, drunken old fool that he is and a shame to his wife. Get under the tarpaulin and sleep. Not in the middle part of the boat, it is full of German coal; in the forepeak there is a cargo of Delft, your clothes will not get so dirty. Mind, when I say Delft, I talk of the rubbish they call Delft nowadays.”

Her eyes roved the room, as did mine; this time, perhaps, for the last time. From every wall and dresser, interspersed with lustrous copper-ware, twinkled the finest accumulation of blue-and-white Delft in Gelderland — and Noord Brabant. My mother had a passion for it; she would walk twenty miles through our flat countryside, divided by canals like rulers, to haggle for a fine old piece she had heard of. In the diamond-glazed corner-press were perhaps twenty pieces of the real Ming blue-and-white porcelain, some of them were of the true eggshell-ware, quite different from the so-called eggshell sold to common sailors, which my mother contemptuously called “dock-ware”. She had often told me of the long journeys by camel along the Silk Road from China of the real porcelains; their arrival in Venice (where some of the plainer pieces were “klobbered” with gilt and Venetian red over the original glaze, obscuring the simple blue brush-strokes) and so to our United Holland Provinces where the clever men of Delft had long ago imitated them almost to perfection — except that the “body” (they called it the arcanum, the secret matter) long remained a mystery, for the Chinese were as secretive about their China clay paste as they had been about the silkworm hundreds of years before; and except, too, that the slick miracle of the Chinese glazes was never quite repeatable. The old plateelschilders of Delft did wonders (and by 1720 they had winkled out the secret arcanum) but they could never quite recreate the ringing body, the succulent glazes, the delicate, off-hand brush-work of the Chinese. And they could not fool people like my mother, much as she loved the work of De Paeuw (The Peacock), Het Jonge Moriaenshooft (The Young Moor’s Head), De Dobbelde Schenkkan (The Double Jug) and all the other fine little workshops (named after the breweries they took over after the great fire of 1654 when the gunpowder-boat almost destroyed the town of Delft). Fortunately for them, there were few people like my mother. Fortunately for me, I was one of those few because, from my very childhood, she had played games with me and her treasures until I could tell pottery from porcelain with one flip of the back of my finger-nail, soft-paste from hard-paste with one nibble of the tooth, lead-glaze from tin-glaze with one caress of a wetted finger. Blindfold.

To speak plainly, I was not over-interested and had at times almost suspected that her preoccupation with pots was unwholesome, especially since my remote father sometimes gave me a moment of his time to explain that earthly treasures were but ordure and the only true riches were in the mind, where heaven existed. At my age, of course, I knew that heaven was neither earthly treasures such as Ming porcelain nor the recesses of my spiritual mind, but was contained in the bodices and drawers of young women. I am older now but I shall not pretend that I am much wiser.

“In the morning, early,” my mother continued, “I shall go down to Gerrit’s barge in the neighbour’s cart and shall explain things to him and give him some money. I shall give you some money too; not very much but enough to get you to England. I shall bring, in the cart, a chest of Delft — not of the choicest but good enough for the English. My sister’s cousin writes that in London today they are crazy for blue-and-white wares and cannot tell Wan-Li from De Metalen Pot. You shall walk around and about and listen without talking and so find out what the English will pay, then you shall take a little shop to sell the Delft from. Slowly, patiently; don’t push, don’t hawk; they will hear about you and they will come to you. The money I bring tomorrow will be enough for you to get established. If you do not whore too much, that is.”

“Such a mother as I have!” I cried with real affection, clasping her in my arms so far as the fatness of her little body permitted.

“Such a son as I have,” she said, without expression on her face, pushing me away. “Some more of this good chicken broth? No? You are a fool, where will you get such broth in England, where they eat beef rolled in suet every day? Now go, quickly, before the angry fathers arrive with dogs and whips. Go. I have to spend the whole night packing pieces of Delft in soft cloth, there is no time to listen to bad sons talking from the fronts of their mouths.”

I kissed her, picked up my bag of clothes and my bag of food and went out of the door, closing it gently. It opened again in an instant and my mother thrust a soft bundle inside my coat. Before I could ask what it was she was telling me.

“It is the blanket your grandmother wove for you before you were born. You well know that you have never been able to sleep without it. People you don’t need, not even me after the milk in my breasts dried. I understand you, my son; I looked into your eyes ten minutes after you came out of my belly. You will never understand yourself, thank God. Take the blanket and run.”

Then once again I was running, but now very gently and quietly; listening and running, running. All the dog I could hear barking was the Schipperke — “the Little Skipper” on Old Gerrit’s barge at the wharf ahead of me — and he would know me as soon as I drew near enough to speak to him and give him the piece of bread, dipped in chicken-broth, which I had thoughtfully slipped into my pocket.

He bit me gently about the ankles as I stepped aboard, then he ate the piece of bread and remembered that he liked me. I crept forward and undid enough lashings of the tarpaulin to enable me to creep in amongst the cases of pottery. The little dog, Kees — all Schipperkes are called Kees just as all dachshunds are called Waldmann — came in with me and licked my nose, while I rummaged in the food-bag. There was a little bundle of the greenish, twisted Sumatra cheroots such as my mother knew I loved, along with a box of waxed lucifer splints. I bit the end off a cheroot, moistened it carefully, relishing the treacly taste of the outer leaf, and struck a lucifer. The little dog, as quick as lightning, reached forward and patted it out. I had forgotten that all barge-dogs learn to put out sparks before they learn anything else. I tied him up with my neckerchief and fed him morsels of smoked eel while I lit another splint. There are few things nicer than smoked eel eaten with a green, sticky Sumatra cheroot.

When I had finished I pushed the little Kees out from under the tarpaulin and rested my head upon the bag of clothes. I did not hear Old Gerrit come aboard.

CHAPTER TWO

There was a gentle but vexing schlipp-schlopping noise which annoyed me into wakefulness. “Piss off!” I said in Dutch but in a friendly way to little Kees, already intent as I was to become a dog-loving Englishman, my new life.

The noise did not piss off, nor the little Schipperke was not there licking my nose or stealing my mother’s good smoked eel. The schlipp-schlopp came from outside the fusty cell of crates and tarpaulin in which I had spent the night; indeed, it came from outside the very boat itself. We were, that is to say Old Gerrit, Kees and I were under way; we were moving down the canal under sail and as I became awake I found that I needed to be sick. Quickly. I fought my way out of the fore-peak, found a side and achieved the sickness. It was the wrong side that I had found. The side from which the wind was blowing. This was unpleasant. I made my way aft, stumbling over things. Old Gerrit — who else? — was at the tiller with a nasty old pipe upside down in his toothless mouth. (His barge was one which still had the steer-board but he preferred to use the tiller for he was lazy, lazy.) He flicked an eye at me. His only eye.

“There is the bucket, there,” he said, pointing with his chin. I streamed the bucket over the side, cleansed myself as best I could and sat down upon the taffarel. “Taffrail” I later learned to call it: it means the rail enclosing the aftermost part of a vessel.

I had known Old Gerrit since I was a little child — say, ten years — and had always liked him: he looked like all the pictures in all the story-books. His chin almost touched his nose; he had no teeth at all in front but some, I think, at the back, for there he clenched his pipe and often, when we children teased him, munched and crunched off the end in fury and spat out a spray of clay pieces. His pipes were always very short. One of his eyes was covered with a shiny pink patch, tied on with a piece of ribbon; he once let us look underneath and wonder at the tiny wrinkled hole. The other eye was not nearly so nice: the eyeball was a rich chestnut-brown and the iris wobbled about in it like a raw egg in a bucket of blood.

“Your mother was here this morning,” he snarled. “We talked. Talked as best we could over you snoring like a sow pigging. Here.” And he kicked towards me a paper packet, a heavy one. I picked it up, looked it over carefully. It was sealed with my father’s ring and the wafers had not been disturbed.

“Why do you look so carefully?” he said. “Am I a thief to steal stivers from babies?”

“Are you?” I answered.

“Go and do something nameless to your sister.”

“I do not have a sister, Old Gerrit.”

“You are sure of that? Your father has sworn to that?”

I undid the packet. It contained one thousand gulden. I stowed them about my person, while Old Gerrit spat noisily over the side. A woman on the canal-bank berated him, calling him a disgusting old man, for the colourful spittle had landed upon her bleaching-lawn. Old Gerrit shrieked back that he had been a disgusting young man and that he saw no reason to change at the behest of fat, adulterous laundresses. Her reply, interestingly narrating his intimacies with his dog, was mercifully borne away by the wind as our boat drew a little wind and passed out of earshot. Dutch ladies are very clean and, except for laundresses, modest of speech.

“What else did my mother leave, Old Gerrit?” I asked.

“A chest of old pots for you. A few stivers for me: not nearly enough for conveying a nasty young fornicator to Rotterdam but I am no man for arguing with women.”

“No,” I said.

“Especially women like your mother.”

“Yes,” I said. “But what else did she leave?”

His eye wobbled at me menacingly for a moment and then, snarling and farting, he reached under a pile of nameless rubbish in the cockpit and fished out a big stoneware bottle of the true Z. O. Genever: this is a kind of gin but not at all like what is sold for gin in England.

“It was for me,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, gently taking it from his hand. I drank thirstily, thrust the bottle back into his hand, ran to the side and made another offering to the Lord of the Canal.

“Waste,” he said.

I drank some more; this time I kept it down and felt better.

“What is there to eat, Old Gerrit?”

What he said is not usually considered edible.

“No, seriously Old Gerrit, I am hungry — aren’t you?”

“There is a jack-pike and a perch, only a couple of days old; cook them, never mind the smell. Also some onions, you will find them.”

I found the fish — they took little finding, they almost found themselves — and the onions. Spitefully, I did not throw them over the side, I cooked them up for Old Gerrit, who grudgingly praised my deftness with the skillet. I myself ate smoked eel on good rye bread from my mother’s bag of food; capped it with another mouthful of the good Hollands and lit one of the Sumatra cheroots. Suddenly it was a good morning to be alive in; the sun sparkled on the little waves of the canal, crowning each one with a golden star, the sky was as blue as the finest Ming hawthorn-pattern jar; I had a thousand gulden in my pockets, my boots rested on a case of good Delft and before me lay adventure: London and London girls — city girls, not fat cousins and the pregnant, pudding-faced daughters of country Ridders.

Life was good. It is still pretty good but not good in the way that it was at that moment.

I was so happy that I gave Old Gerrit a cheroot: not one of the Sumatras of course but an old one from my pocket, good but a little cracked. He eyed it with disgust, crumbled it up and stuffed it into his nasty old pipe. He was famous for his ill manners.

After Hertogenbosch (“Bois-le-Duc” they still called it in those days) we had a fair fresh breeze for the Willemstad Hollandsch Diep — the nose of the barge positively “cut a feather” — and by evening we were tied up at Willemsdorp. Old Gerrit said that we would do the last leg, to Rotterdam, on the following day; he was tired and thirsty, thirsty, for I had been doling out the gin in small portions for his own good and because I, too, liked it.

I helped him with the brails — pieces of string which secured the big sail — then raced him to the inn and ordered something hot, which proved to be disgusting: sour cabbage and the belly-fat of a pig. I stayed my hunger with the speciality of the house which everyone else seemed to be drinking: rum stolen from the British Navy, served hot and spiced and with a little baked apple in every jug.

I fell in with good company at that inn; one young fellow of about my own age took my uneaten dinner and scoffed it greedily while his brother told jokes of a dirtiness then unknown to me. The jokes were very funny. When I told these brothers that I was bound for England they said that they and their father were sailing there too, on the next morning’s tide, very early. They were for Harwich but they reckoned that for a consideration they could take me to the Pool of London first. We haggled all evening, I pretending to be near destitute, and finally settled on six gulden (nearly half an English sovereign) for the passage, ten stivers (almost a shilling) for each hot meal and two stivers for every refreshment in between. I was right to trust them: thieves would not have asked such high prices — indeed, they would probably have offered to take me free, and robbed and perhaps murdered me.

By first light we three young fellows had drunk ourselves sober again and made our way to the wharf where their little ship lay, anchor a-cockbill, their father pacing up and down. To me the ship looked like the ordinary kettle-bottomed Dutch smack but they told me it was an English craft, built on the Humber: what the York-shiremen call a “billy-boy”. Years later I came to realise that their trade was probably that of a hoveller: one who ranges about in bad waters in hopes of finding ships in distress. Sometimes, it was rumoured, helping ships to get into distress. But they were kind to me and kept their word faithfully and I remember them with much friendship.

We got my crate of Delft aboard with exaggerated care, then my dunnage. I bade farewell to Kees and left a silver coin — perhaps I was not so sober after all — for Old Gerrit. I also gave him the old blanket of my childhood — such things were foolishness now. It would make a bed for Kees, the little dog.

To my surprise, on board the old round-ended, ketch-rigged “buss” there was the lads’ Mama: a Mama just like mine but bigger and with a better-grown moustache. She gave me a pot of coffee all to myself and a big slab of honey-cake and a smile. As I bit into the honey-cake I heard a squeal behind me and jumped around, but it was only the Mama scratching “St II” on the slate. Such coffee and honey-cake I would cheerfully give two stivers for today; indeed, I think I would give more if I had to.

All I knew about ships in those days was to do as I was told — and quickly — not to meddle helpfully without being told and, in between that, to keep out of the way, with my head low because of the boom. A man could go through his life with three such basic pieces of wisdom; I sometimes wish I had never learned more.

Well, I did all these things: I helped with the brails and gaskets and the rest, then crouched low against the windward rail. The old-fashioned, flat-bottomed smack bounced on the water rather than floated and, when we came to the “gatt” of the Diep, and the wind was almost dead foul, she heeled over so far that I thought we were about to founder. The lads and their parents had oilskins but I had none: soon I was so drenched and cold that my chattering teeth would not have let me pray even if I could have recalled a prayer. The Mama was singing cheerily but this was of no help. After a while I crept into the “kajuit” or cuddy — a little sleeping-shed forward where my gear was stowed — and delved into my clothes-bag for some dry breeches. I also found a smelly old blanket in a hammock and wrapped myself up, feeling homesick, heartsick and, simply, sick.

Later, as I was almost becoming warm, the motion of the vessel abated and the deck became once more nearly horizontal. I came to believe that I would perhaps after all survive. One of the lads came in and hung up his streaming oilskins.

“We are clear of the Diep now,” he said cheerfully, “and we have a fair beam wind. We shall make a fast crossing. Have you been sick? No? Good. Have you any gin? You have? Very good!”

We drank a little. I had not realised that it was what I had been needing. We drank a little more. The sun began to shine, or at least it seemed so.

Later still the Mama came in with a splendid pot of coffee for me, this time with some thick slices of rye bread covered with thin, tasty slices of smoked beef. I made a face; a polite face, but a face.

“Eat!” she commanded in the very accents of my own Mama. I ate. To my surprise — and her satisfaction — I ate it all.

“That was good, mevrouw,” I said as I captured the last, errant crumb.

“For two stivers, jonge, it was very good. We are not thieves in this ship.” Seeing that I was somewhat abashed, she leaned forward and planted a great, noisy kiss on my mouth. Courteously, I did not wipe it off until she had left the “kajuit”. In a little while I went out onto the deck, where I smelled for the first time the true smell of the open sea, carried by a fresh breeze and enriched by a clean sunshine. Once again, it was good to be Carolus Van Cleef at that moment and in that year.

Dinner, early in the afternoon, was capital: it was the last old-fashioned Dutch dinner I ever ate. It was of thick pea-soup, so thick you could have built castles with it, served in pewter bowls. In each of our bowls there was a good piece of beef sausage, the trotter of a pig and all sorts of little bits of salted pork. Half a century later my mouth still waters at the memory of that simple meal. To tell the truth, so do my eyes, for I have grown sentimental and silly. (But not so silly as to be deceived when certain grandchildren and distant cousins kiss me sweetly because a rich old man may soon be writing a will.)

Dinner, as I have said, was very good and we all gobbled and belched in honest Dutch style, then lay back in the sunshine, listening to our bellies chuckling with the pleasure of it.

The wind backed into the East and soon we had almost a following wind; every stitch of sail filled and drawing to it. Now it was a lovely day; the Mama made me more pots of coffee, brought me more honey-cake and squeaked away at her slate.

Whenever she was out of earshot the lads told me more wonderfully dirty stories; some I can remember to this day, I am ashamed to say. (It is strange that only the English and the Dutch can tell stories which are both dirty and funny; the Germans and the Americans can only tell dirty ones, the French only funny ones, the Italians only pitifully bad ones. I have never heard a good story from an Italian. The Irish, the Scotch and the Jews are in a different category: they can only tell Irish, Scotch and Jewish stories.)

Towards the evening of that day everyone agreed that we had indeed made a splendidly fast passage and that, because the tide was foul for working up the Thames, we would drop our hook outside the town of Ramsgate. Soon we three lads were in the pram — a kind of a dinghy — and the elder cried “Vaart!”, a word which strikes strangely on an English ear but simply means “give way”. However, no sooner were we a cable’s length from the ship than the father hailed us to come back. A nasty, lumpy little lop was growing up in the sea and he feared that the anchor would not hold. He was vexed about this: he explained that to go into the inner harbour was expensive and I realised that this would cost him a good little piece out of my passage-money.

“Of course,” he mused aloud, “we could go round the North Foreland and get inside the Hook of Margate. There is a good jetty there, but we could not tie up for the night …”

They all looked at me. I was at first puzzled, then I understood. I was not, in those days, the ruthless old bugger who now writes these lines; that family had been kind to me and it seemed a small thing to accommodate them. I generously offered that, if they would put me and my crate and dunnage ashore in that beautiful city of Margate and buy me something hot and nice for supper, I would pay them the agreed passage-money in full and make my own way up-river to London Town in the morning. They all beamed at me, every one, and the Mama embraced me warmly and we all struck hands on the bargain.

Almost as soon as we had rounded the Foreland and were turning Margate’s Hook, the Margate itself appeared as a wondrous aurora of light which, as we drew in, resolved itself into a pearl-necklace of gas-lights: I had never seen anything so entrancing in my life, it seemed to be one of the fabled Cities of the Plain. Such a place was sure to be bursting with tasty dinners and young, sinful women: the sea-voyage, although short, had sharpened my appetite for both.

The father decided not to go ashore and, in lieu of the promised hot supper, gave me back thirty of my stivers, explaining that he preferred to take advantage of the fair wind to try to be off Harwich by dawn, because of the Margate dues and the lop of the sea. I think now that, speaking plainly, he did not want to have to buy costly suppers for the lads and their mother as well as me; also, I think that he may have fancied that on such a night there might well be coasters in difficulties who would be glad of his kindly assistance. When he and the lads had lumped my gear onto the jetty and had made their farewells and were busy about the work of the boat, the Mama gave me another of her big, succulent kisses; not, this time, of the motherly sort. I think I have already told you that in those days I was a fine-looking young fellow and still had both of my hands. (Indeed, even at my present advanced age, which I do not propose to divulge, some of my friends are kind enough to tell me that I could still easily find another pretty young wife and beget a son. But do not be afraid, my loving grandchildren and distant cousins: I have long ago realised that it is cheaper to buy rashers of bacon than to keep a pig — more hygienic, too. Indeed, who, in these dreadful days when good Englishmen are fighting brave Dutch Boers in Suid Afrika, would want to push more babies into the bellies of women?)

CHAPTER THREE

Margate Jetty was bewildering and my carefully-learned English Language and Literature deserted me quite. As soon as I set foot upon it I was besieged by a throng of ribald porters competing for the lucrative privilege of carrying my light bags, although none of them seemed so concerned about my exceedingly heavy chest of Delft. Also, there were lodging-house ladies, touts for inns, genteel persons offering me the programmes of circulating libraries, bathing-women thrusting their cards into my pockets, fly-men importuning me in words quite incomprehensible and one saucy young — or almost young — woman who pretended to know me and shouted “Holloa! My young brockley-sprout, now then for the tizzy you owe me from last Easter?” The platform of the jetty was very low and the crowds on the shingly, gas-lit beach added to the uproar with more coarse comments upon me, my breeches, boots and general appearance until I was on the point of tears — or of punching some of them upon their noses.

At that moment there was a sort of eddy at the far end of the jetty and the crowd parted in a respectful way. A little round gentleman emerged, laying about him with his elbows until he had cleared a space around me.

“Vy, vot’s this,” he bellowed, “carn’t a poor foreign young chap pitch up on a British shore without being mocked and jostled? Leave him be, I say, and you two take his box to the shipping-shed.” With that he turned to me and lifted his huge white hat, bowing as well as his roundness would permit.

“John Jorrocks, M.F.H.,” he said. “Merchant of Great Coram Street.”

“Tea-grocer,” said someone in the crowd.

“I glories in the name of tea-grocer,” he retorted magnificently. “I imports none but the finest, both green and black, and has them earlier than anyone helse in the City.”

“My name is Carolus Van Cleef, Sir,” I said when he had finished, “and I am travelling to London to start a business selling Delftware.”

“Vy,” he cried, “ve’re practically in the same perfession: I sells the scandal-water and you sells the cups for the old tabbies to drink it from!” He seized my hand and shook my arm like the handle of a pump. “Come to the White Hart and share my ’umble repast, for the inner man tells me it’s supper time. You might as vell put up there, too; best beds in Margate and does you proud in the matter of wittles.” So saying, he linked arms with me and, having bidden two ragamuffins to carry my bags, marched me off to the inn. I studied him surreptitiously as we walked. He wore a rough-napped, unshorn-looking white hat, a blue coat with metal buttons, ample laps and outside pockets bulging like those of a Dutch burgomaster, a handsome buff kerseymere waistcoat and the tightest pair of dark-blue, stocking-net pantaloons you can imagine: they might have been painted onto his splendid thighs. The costume was completed by a pair of great Hessian boots with tassels, and a white tie around his neck with a gold pin in the form of the head of a fox — a most bizarre touch, it seemed to me.

“This is most kind of you, Mr, ah, Emmeffetch,” I said diffidently. He looked at me puzzledly, then roared with laughter, shaking and wheezing and slapping the splendid thighs.

“No, no,” he cried at last, “Jorrocks is the name, ‘M.F.H.’ is but the title, ‘the guinea stamp’ as Nimrod says. It is mere hinitials and means Master of Fox-hounds: the finest handle anyone could lay to his name. Fox ’unting, my dear young Sir, is my werry life: the himage of war with none of the guilt and only five and twenty percent of the risk to life and limb. If ever I am wisited with the last infirmity of noble minds I fears it will be caused by my ungovernable passion for the chase.” He jingled the silver in his pockets moodily. I was greatly puzzled: his words seemed irrational but the other English seemed to hold him in deep respect. Clearly, I had much to learn. However, I was just old enough to know that I should hold my tongue: some people learn this too late, some never learn it. It was a good thing that I did not speak, for Mr Jorrocks had not done.

“When there’s neither hunting nor shooting going on,” he cried, waving his arms about in a prodigal fashion, “what’s a man to do with himself? I’m sure you’d despise me if I went fishing: the werry word’s a sickener.”

“Yes, perhaps,” I said, “but fish are good to eat, no?”

“You’re a most persuasive young cock!” he cried, slapping his great thigh again, “and I daresay that our host, Mr Creed, may have something of the sort fit for our supper. And, even as I says it, here we are!”

Mr Creed, the landlord of the White Hart, greeted my new friend in an obsequious way and promptly agreed to find me a room — it was, it seemed, merely a matter of turning two bagmen out. They could, he was sure, find lodgings more suitable to their purses and condition in a “flea-trap” further down the street, for he explained that they were but “glass-of-water-and-a-toothpick gents” who “fought every threepence on the bill”.

It was a snug room and the little maid who came to change the sheets whilst I was washing flirted her eyelashes at me in the most promising way. She seemed to be overworked and tired, but contrived to give the impression to me that she was not too tired. When I pinched her tight little bottom she smacked my face so gently that it was almost a caress. For the time being, however, my thoughts were on higher things. Supper, to be exact. When she had gone — after having promised to bring in a warming-pan as I retired — I concealed my store of gulden in various parts of the room, locked the door and made my way downstairs to the coffee-room where my excellent Mr Jorrocks awaited me. We were soon joined by a friend of his whom he addressed variously as “The Yorkshireman”, “Mr York”, “Mr Stubbs” and “Sir Tees”. I could make nothing of all this but I held my tongue for my Mama had often told me that the English were, to speak plainly, not quite like other men.

“Now then, my young cock,” cried Mr Jorrocks, clapping me on the shoulder (this is the mark of an Englishman: Prussians punch you in the ribs to show their friendship, Italians pinch you cruelly on the cheek), “now then!” he cried, “let’s see if a row of Dutch grinders can out-do a British set!”

I was hungry. I was also a Dutchman. Also, I had studied the English Language and Literature.

“Lay on, Macduff!” I cried, “and cursed be he that first cries ‘hold enough’.”

“A werry noble sentiment, worthy of Nimrod himself. Vy, I declares I could eat a helephant stuffed with grenadiers and wash them down with a hocean of malt liquor!”

We settled down at the table and squared our elbows. Mr Jorrocks had been boiling, on the coffee-room fire, an Imperial Quart and a half of Mr Creed’s stoutest draught port, with the orthodox proportion of lemon, cloves, sugar and cinnamon: it was perfection. The table was adorned with beautifully-dressed dishes of shrimps, lobsters, broiled bones, a cold knuckle of veal, an aitch-bone of beef, fried ham, a few grouses and some poached eggs. Having trifled with the shellfish a while to tickle our appetites — there was but one lobster each, although large — Mr Creed brought in a dish of Dover soles which vanished like the dew upon a rose. Now ready for a real gullet-tickler, I speared a grouse and called for a plate so that I might pass it to the good Jorrocks.

“No no, my young Sir,” he cried — but civilly — “Ve don’t do that here, alvays eat the farmer before the gentlemen.” Whereupon he drew the aitch-bone of beef towards him and helped me generously to the lovely, bloody slices encircled with marbled fat. Then we ate the grouses. Then we tried the fried ham with some poached eggs. Then Mr Jorrocks called for “three bottoms of brandy, hot, with” and we took the broiled bones in our fingers and gnawed happily.

Mr Jorrocks and the Yorkshireman seemed content but I wanted cheese. I asked diffidently for some of it, not being sure that the British used such things.

“Cheese?” cried Mr Jorrocks, “Cheese? Vy, wot a young Trojan you are, to be sure. Cheese you shall have, and in habundance. Mr Creed, I say Mr Creed, bring this young fighting-cock one of your Stiltons — the werry ripest, for he deserves no less!”

A strange thing, shaped like a bucket, was brought in and reverently placed upon the table. It stunk very nicely, not as rich as a Limberger but strong. There were little things burrowing busily in it but Mr Creed quietened them with a soup-ladle of hot port. No one else was hungry any more but I ate great store of it, spread upon strange biscuit-like things called Thick Captains. The others, I think, admired my appetite, for they applauded every mouthful. I do not think that they were making fun of me; they were kind, kind. Then we concocted a bowl of some hot drink of which I forget the name, which we drank, saying many a kind word one to another. Then we were given a chamber-candlestick apiece and made our ways upstairs to bed. Mr Jorrocks and Mr York, climbing the stairs ahead of me, seemed to be a little random in their choice of steps.

When I had stripped to my shirt and washed, the little maid came in with the promised warming-pan and spoke to me reproachfully.

“How late you are, Sir,” she said. “Some of you gentlemen have no consideration for a poor girl. Why, see, I’ve already changed into my night-shift, all fresh-washed, and am shivering with cold!”

“So you have, child,” I said compassionately, “and so you are. Come, let me warm you.”

“Oh Sir!” she cried a few moments later.

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” she said, “You mistake me. I am not frightened. It is just that … well, have you been wounded? There, I mean?”

I thought for a moment. I realised.

“No my little love,” I murmured, “all of us, ah, Dutchmen are born like this.”

“Goodness gracious,” she said. “But, does it not make any difference?”

“Let us see,” I said.

Some twenty minutes later she was agreeing fervently that the difference, if any, was for the better. But women are notoriously feather-brained and she awoke me at least twice — I forget — in the night to reassure herself that my “novelty”, as she coyly described it, was as adept as she had seemed to remember. I contrived to reassure her, for in those days I was even younger than I now am.

From that day to this I have firmly believed in the properties of the excellent English Stilton Cheese: my table is never without it.

I was awakened in the dark before dawn by certain young persons scrambling out of my bed, giving me a sleepy kiss and fending-off my sleepy advances.

“It’s all right for some,” she cried, “who have nothing to do but take advantage of poor innocent girls and then slug a’bed half the day themselves!”

I made placatory noises, grasped her and danced her lovingly round the room while I ascertained with finger and toe that my various little stores of gulden, concealed here and there, were intact. They were. She, I need scarcely, say, was not: a further three-minutes’ romp made sure of that, her protests making the interlude the more enjoyable. Before she left, frantic about the work she had to do, I gave her a whole gulden; I was young in those days and foolish.

Washed, dressed and shaven, I sought out Mr Jorrocks’s room — “you can tell it by ’is snoring,” said the other, uglier chamber-maid — and entered after a series of knocks, each one louder than the other.

“Come, my good friend!” I cried cheerily, “be stirring! Dawn is breaking!”

The shapeless lump under the bed-clothes wriggled in an irritable fashion.

“Let it break,” came the grumpy answer, “for it owes me nothing as I knows of.”

“But I had hoped, Mr Jorrocks, that you might join me at breakfast, as my guest, unless you are feeling, how is it, below the weather…?”

“Below the weather?” he bellowed, bounding out of bed with a thump which must have shaken the whole inn, “under the weather? Wot a imperent young game-cock you are, to be sure!” He smoothed out those parts of his ample nightshirt which had become entrapped in the folds of his person, his good temper quickly restoring itself. “No man shall say that John Jorrocks could not face his breakfast, come what may. Now, let me adwise you to take a restorative dip into Mother Hocean whilst I perform my ablutions and attend to my toilet. I shall look for you in the coffee-room in one hour precise, when we shall see who can eat most of that Macduff you spoke of so freely last night.”

Even at that hour the shingly shore of Margate was a heaving mass of bathing-women who came rushing towards me, avid for my patronage. I turned tail and fled. With one of the White Hart’s towels in my pocket I crossed to the Ramsgate side and found a stretch of deserted beach below the Preventive Service Station. I found that it was easier to swim in the sea than in the fresh water of the canals of my native land, but the water tasted curiously salt. A quick towelling and a brisk run brought me back to the White Hart at just the moment that Mr Jorrocks emerged from the inn’s kitchen, where he had been giving final directions for our breakfast. He rubbed his hands as he sat down. I, too, sat down, rubbing mine.

In the end I had to give him best. He had, after all, had a great deal more sleep than me and, you see, the appetite which my dips — one into Mother Hocean — had afforded me could not discount the healthy fatigue and strain upon the digestive organs.

“Wot?” he cried, dexterously trapping the last fourth of a muffin from my defeated plate, “Wot? ’Ave I made you cry ‘capivi’, my young prize-fighter? Vell, it’s nothing to be ashamed of; ask anyone in the Surrey ’Unt vether they’ve ever seen John Jorrocks outfaced when his knees are under a breakfast-table. Indeed, you’re the finest contender I’ve ever squared up against … consider Mr York, there,” and he pointed with his triumphant fork to a pallid apparition in the coffee-room doorway, “consider him, I say. I’ll wager you a hat — a guinea hat, not a 6/8d Goss — that he can get down no more than a pint of porter and a pair of ripe bloaters!” The apparition turned greenish and vanished.

“There you are!” he cried, “Wot did I say? Wot is ’appening to the youth of Old England when a slight breakfast daunts them? Where are the ’earts of hoak? Waiter, pray fetch me a few more of these capital prawns and another slice of that delicate Cambridge brawn, for I vows that my muffin-mill is almost stopped — needs hoiling — and I have promised Mrs J. that I shall not eat butter, lest I spoil the trimness of my figure.”

“Do you stay here long, Mr Jorrocks?” I asked, with some trepidation.

“Vy, no; I and Mr York came but to stay a five pound note in Margate this delightful weather (plus eighteenpence vich Mr York furnished) and it is now all but spent. We leaves on the steamer at eleven o’clock sharp.”

I summoned the waiter and asked for my bill. Mr Jorrocks took it from me but not, as I had hoped, to settle it. He took out a silver pencil-case and scrutinised the slip of paper carefully.

“Wot did you use by way of candles?” he asked.

“One,” I said. “For perhaps five minutes.”

“Imperence!” he cried, scratching out the item on the bill. “Now, ‘hearly call in the morning’?”

“Well, I do not think so.” He scratched some more.

“Wails for the vaiter — left blank.”

“Vails?”

“Perquisites, honorariumbs, tips as the bagmen call ’em.”

“Ah, I see. A shilling, do you think?”

“Fourpence is werry ample.” He scratched again. “And the chambermaid?”

“I think,” I said carefully, “that she has already been availed.” He handed me back the bill and I made great show of rummaging in all my pockets to find enough silver to make up the sum.

“My word,” said Mr J. as I rummaged, “I believe I am getting oldish. I fancy a true fork-breakfast would have made a stiff ’un of me. It’s all werry well for you great Dutch cormorants but I has a thriving warehouse and a great red-faced wife to see to.” I did not understand but I made polite noises as I gathered together the amount of the bill.

“See here, young spadger,” he said, presently, “if you should be a little short of tin, by vich I means swag; since I have taken a fancy to the way you can deal with your prog, by vich I means your wittles, pray come and spend a night or two at Great Coram Street. Mrs J. vill be delighted to see you” — his voice lost a little conviction at this point — “and you shall have a h’aired bed, good wear and tear for your teeth and all that sort of thing found you. Pray do me this kindness, do. The steam-packet leaves at eleven prompt and it will be strange if I cannot persuade the Captain to take your chest of tea-cups aboard, although he has no cargo-bottomry.”

I found this puzzling. First, I had been assured that the British were not an hospitable folk. Second, I was well aware that this day was the Sunday.

“But today is Sunday,” I said, diffidently. “Is it thought proper here to make so long a journey on this day?”

He chuckled fatly.

“My dear young sir,” he said, “in England ve sees no more sin in taking a journey on a Sunday than in cheating one another on the Monday!”

“Mr J., I cried, “I feel that I have come home.”

“Werry obliged,” he said, “I’m sure. Now, pack your traps and we’ll retrieve your box of ware from the shipping-shed, for there’s little enough time left before the steamer commences its wulgar ’ooting.”

Indeed, by the time that I had made a small, sentimental farewell to the little chambermaid, packed my traps, met Mr Jorrocks on Margate’s far-famed jetty and struck a bargain with two surly longshoremen over the movement of my chest of Delft into the steamer, the ’ooting was, indeed, becoming urgent. It was a beautiful steamer, named the Royal Adelaide — after the Queen before this one, you understand — painted magnificently in pea-green and white; flags flying, decks swarming with smart bonnets and bodices: I had never seen anything so fine. Well might Britannia rule the waves; I felt my heart swelling with new-found patriotism, for I am easily moved.

Mr Jorrocks and I found a corner of the deck on which to settle; our various possessions firmly ensconced beneath our bottoms. He was nursing on his lap a great wicker hamper, at which I stole a glance once in a while.

“Prowisions,” he said, patting the lid. “Breakfast is all werry well but — ’ow keen the sea air is! I ’ave brought but a knuckle of weal, half a ham, some genuine Dorking sarsingers (made in Drury Lane), a few plovers’ eggs and some sherry white. Yes, and I believe some chickens. Werry acceptable they’ll be before we gets to the Savoy Stairs, you may depend upon it.”

He was right, I have never met a man of so much acumen. The sea air was, indeed, keen, keen. The knuckle of weal and the other little snacks were, indeed, welcome. I gained, I think, his respect, by agreeing that he should have the last chicken if I might have the last few plovers’ eggs.

There was a sort of orchestra on the steamer, comprising one flute, one lute, one long and one short horn, also a harp played by a fat lady in a puce gown. They played quadrilles and other things to which I could not master the steps but it was pleasing to be taught them by young ladies who giggled. One of the young ladies had a gentlemen friend who tried to hit me with his knuckles. I made his nose bleed. When I lifted him up and apologised, he tried again to hit me and I had to make his nose bleed afresh.

“’E wos a beauty before you put the paint on!” cried the young lady, still giggling.

“’E is an uncommon fine young warbler,” said Mr Jorrocks gravely, “now where shall we turn for a song?”

In default of the young gentleman with the bloody nose I sang a song in my own language, then, emboldened, another, with words which I was tolerably sure no one on board would understand. After this, I was besieged with more lessons in dancing by other and more desirable young ladies; at least one of which, I fancy, took place behind a ballast-box, but I forget, for I am old now, old.