Martin Edwards - A Voice Like Velvet

Looking back, it seeemed to be a time full of quaint character studies, and other lessons.

An amazing time, now and then, but much more often tedious.

Growing up was a slow affair, and masters never grew up. They had no chance to.

No, he hadn’t liked his public school as much as he suspected he ought to have liked it. Everyone else seemed to like it, and apart from surface grumbles, nobody else seemed to mind being birched, or made to go for long and stupid walks on Sunday afternoons to some curious woods where shop girls hung about behind bushes and went: ‘Here they come, Doris! I’ll take the tall one!’ It was probably quite fun if you were ready for it, but Mr Bisham hadn’t yet got hair down his front, and so the point was entirely lost. Another thing everyone but himself seemed to be fond of, was rushing about the rugger field in an icy north-east wind, with somebody else doing a hearty tackle and bringing you down with a thud onto the frozen turf. Ernest Bisham’s idea of a thrill was rather different, and he found the only way to achieve it was to search for it in something by Conan Doyle. Another less known author also assisted his desire for drama, and there were moments when he donned a mask, made up out of a handkerchief soaked in school ink, and with a water-pistol tackled the more unmuscular from behind door or hedge. ‘I say, it’s that absolute swine Bisham,’ thin, piping voices would declare, enraged to the Heavens. ‘You scared me out of my wits, man!’ It was humiliating to know that a water-pistol held no fears, and that he was recognized at once solely because nobody else wanted to play this particular game. It was considered childish. Once, holding up Mr Deem, in error for a prefect, Ernest Bisham got six of the best and the advice: ‘If you want to dramatise yourself, Bisham, you’d better join the dramatic society.’ But when he did so they made him play Ophelia, which was somehow or other unsatisfying. Later, he joined the debating society, and although he attacked the public school system with some apparent success, claiming that it deprived chaps of all individual attention at the most critical time of their lives, he was thereafter labelled as a pansy, and for some reason a socialist. His unpopularity was odd, considering his ready manner, and sometimes he would be asked why he deliberately made himself unpopular. He would always explode with a protesting laugh, but, unable to reply adequately, he would wander away to beat a tennis ball up against the wall by himself, and thinking: ‘As soon as I leave here I shall be popular all right!’ He attacked the system of imprisonment, instancing Dartmoor, rather well at another debate, but likened it to the public school system. For that, he had to run the gauntlet of wet towels dressed in his pyjama jacket.

Now, when he sometimes sat on a public platform, much more cautiously airing the same views, whatever he said seemed to be greeted with popular applause. He would wait confidently for his cue, knowing whatever he said would be successful. ‘… So I will now call upon Mr Ernest Bisham, the well-known announcer, who has very kindly come all the way to Manchester to be with us today!’ To a storm of applause, he would stand before a sea of curious faces, and he would proceed to get in as much of his views against prison life, and its silly inhumanity, or his views against the repulsive habit of flogging, without letting it be thought he was either a socialist or airing the views of the BBC. At the end, there would be another storm of applause, and silly faces would throng round him and voices would say: ‘We always listen when you read the news, Mr Bisham! My mother-in-law thinks your voice is by far the best!’ Not one of them cared the slightest about his views on anything, least of all sex life in prisons. But it amused him, as life amused him with its odd antics. When magazines asked him if they could print his photograph and an article about his life, he was studiously vague about certain years. It was strange how lumps of years could safely be dropped from an article. It was a technique. And it was often convenient. Impossible to say: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, during those years I was simply appallingly broke. I had the dreariest of jobs—until my father died, you know—mechanic, salesman, oh, and cat-burglar.’ One item would be very colourful. ‘I must tell you about the afternoon I walked into a jewel shop in the city. I asked to see some rings and the bloke showed me about ten on a narrow tray. I said, thanks, chum, and stuffed them in my pocket. I strolled out—you mustn’t run when you’re a professional thief—each moment expecting bells to ring and hands to seize my left shoulder. But the shopkeeper must have had one or two, for in about two seconds I was outside and lost in the crowds.’ An asterisk and italics at the bottom of the page could add, in a dignified way: ‘By the way, I sent the rings back. When I got home that desperate day I found I’d landed a job. And in any case it’s too risky trying to sell jewellery of that kind in London.’ Yes, indeed, and it was still a problem to know what to do with it. The prisons were full of blokes who had tried to solve this unsatisfactory problem. He often thought old Mrs Clarkson might have had some useful suggestion to make. Her house was full of the most shadowy, stooping characters. They would creep furtively up her dark stairs at all hours, not a few going to bed during the day instead of during the night. But he had never risked it. He went on doing various little cat burglaries, just for the thrill, and to prove his beliefs about never getting caught, and in the hopes that one day he would think of what to do with the proceeds. Sometimes he chucked the proceeds into the Thames when he got bored with looking at them. Now and then he sent later proceeds to insurance houses he felt he might have cost too dearly. Mrs Clarkson would be curious about his little newspaper parcels and think they were fish and chips. She would accuse him of not liking her food.

He didn’t know what he would have done without her help in the first days of his break with home. And he often wondered now if it was Mrs Clarkson who had first given him his interest in the word ‘bulletin’. She certainly brought regular news bulletins to him for several years, scurrying back to the shabby little Hammersmith house to say: ‘No, Master Ernest, I tried again—but he just won’t speak. We shall have to wait.’ When at last Mr Bisham Senior’s obituary did appear in The Times , his will was reported to have mentioned a figure as large as thirty-three thousand pounds—five of which he was obliged to leave to his son through his mother’s will. His son instantly got an advance, threw a lot of surplus jewellery into the Thames and drank gin with Mrs Clarkson until midnight, when they changed to draught Burton. By four o’clock in the morning they were both completely and contentedly under the weather. They lost no time declaring that the old man hadn’t been such a bad sort after all, erroneous though the belief was in the cold light of day, Mrs Clarkson insisting that he had been a sort of Dick Whittington in his younger days, ‘and very human about ladies, my dear, excepting his own family, that is.’ Mrs Clarkson did not at once let drop certain pending surprises about the Bisham family, but proceeded to read the story of Dick Whittington to Ernest Bisham, who sat in her brown armchair with his feet on the table. It was Mrs Clarkson reading it.

He was never very partial to Dick Whittington’s story, having no particular fancy for Lord Mayors or for cats, though Mayors were jovial fellows with plenty of food and cash, and Mrs Clarkson had a cat in her kitchen with a highly developed dramatic sense, being fond of springing from great heights across gaps of at least fifty feet, or hurtling itself from the very jaws of infuriated Hammersmith buses into the basement area.