UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Pride of Cobden's Yard
By GRAHAM DUKES (St. John's College, Cambridge.) pERHAPS not one in a dozen of the people who go daily to and fro in the High Street could direct you to Cobden's Yard. It lies quietly, set among the shops and the warehouses, unseen and almost forgotten. You will find a low brick archway between the Modes de Paris, where young ladies with coloured finger-nails work, and George's Saloon, where frying begins at six in the evening and dinner may still be had in a paper bag for eightpence. Through that archway is Cobden's Yard—just seven old houses in a row, with narrow windows and barn doors. Beyond, the washing lines hang across an untidy wilderness of motor-tyres and mossy bricks.
There is very little to see from the lace-curtained windows; simply the wall across the alley, and the high gas-lamp flicker- ing at the end of its once exotic iron bracket. Even the sky is framed and patterned by the web of wire which modern life has woven around the Yard. At night, after the lights in the High Street have died down at twelve, and the gangs of lanky singing youths who roam the pavements have gone home, the constable on beat and the folk of Cobden's Yard are the only people left in town. They will tell you how, two years ago, the furniture-store over the way caught fire in the small hours. Sergeant Browning raised the alarm a few minutes after two o'clock, and, by the time the engines came swinging round the corner, Cobden's Yard was at work in slippers and overcoats, rolling settees and wardrobes out of the building to safety.
The life and soul of the Yard is Granny—SO, maybe; who can say ?—at number seven, where the brass latch shines as brightly as any in the row. Mr. Morgan, the bricklayer from next door, comes in every morning before work to lay the fire, and Mrs. Morgan lends a hand with the shopping. For her part Granny takes in. messages and parcels, helps with the darning and looks after the babies on a Saturday night.
That is the spirit of the Yard. There are people who look up at the powdering stucco and the primitive communal out- houses and shake their heads. " Slums," they say simply as they go away. Cobden's Yard can never be a slum. The word suggests depravity, not only of buildings but of people faith- less people coarsened by a life of squalid hopelessness. The people in the Yard are not like that. After the big fire, when the furniture-company asked how it might best show its gratitude, Mr. Simms, the railway-guard, called a conference at number two. There were people from every house but one, crammed into that, twelve-foot-square living-room, and the unanimous verdict 'was: Could they have a battery wireless for Granny ? If Enoch Skelding, from number five, who has a certain weakness for the bottle, has been indulging on a Saturday, it is usually Jack Morgan and Mr. Simms who bring him in from the street and put him to bed. Ten to one he will be round in the morning to thank them. When there is an accident in High Street, number one, Cobden's, is the place, as every policeman knows, where Mrs. James will have lint and ban- dages ready, and a kettle of boiling water on the hob at any hour of the day. All the same, everyone in the Yard has a feeling that its end cannot be far away. Back to back with it, Gladstone Terrace has stood silently for fifteen years behind rotting shutters and barred doors; it was condemned at the same time as the Yard; but it was cleared and stripped before the war began. Cobden's was reprieved " for the duration," and by that slender licence alone it lives on. Damp is its enemy—damp that rises through the sinking tiles of the alley and the brick floors of the houses; damp, oozing in from the shell of the terrace and condensing into rivulets behind the peeling wall- paper. No, there will be no fight to stay in Cobden's Yard when its time comes. Wages are good today, and rent (it costs eight shillings a week to live in the Yard) is no longer the first consideration.
But it will be many years before the new housing-estates have found anything comparable with the good neighbourliness which is the pride of Cobden's Yard. Go to the much vaunted Holly Park Estate outside the town, and talk to the people. You will find that the neat little rows of semi-detached houses, each with its own garden and hedge, are too often replacing squalor, not by social pride, but by a nauseating petty snobbery. There are very few roads out there where the local Enoch Skelding can expect to be put to bed by good neighbours. Some of therm will be busy telephoning complaints to the police, and the rest will be peering through the chink in the curtains, turning up their noses, and thanking Heaven that they are not like Enoch Skelding.
The truth of the matter seems to be that in 90 years people in Cobden's Yard have found the secret of living together happily, and Granny is its keystone. If you had come in June, you might have found her sitting on her doorstep in the sun- shine, and around her a group in aprons and headscarves, standing with arms folded, busily setting the affairs of the world to rights in a hearty Black Country dialect. Now that it is winter, you will be welcome to the wheelback chair beside the range in its glory of brass and blacklead. " One up and one down " is the architect's name for these houses. Behind the living-room, the tiny larder aria the narrow boxed staircase are packed, together with the larder and staircase of a house in the Terrace, into a space twelve feet by five. In the living-room itself the gaslight has darkened the low ceiling. Grandfather, in waistcoat and uncollared shirt, looks down across 40 years from his gilded frame over the sideboard, and smiles stiffly from the misty oval prints on the mantelpiece. There is a kitchen table in the middle of the room with an embroidered runner across it, on which the new radio stands so that Granny can reach it without getting out of her chair.
And if the flowered wallpaper is whitened and pocketed in some of the darker corners, and- the door does not keep out the winter any too well, it is kindly to forget these things. Granny has forgotten them a long, long time ago, if indeed she ever noticed them. For her there is everything in number seven, and Cobden's is the widest world which she will ever wish to know now. The doctor, who calls in on a Monday afternoon, has given up talking to Granny of Eventide Homes and such- like. He makes her an afternoon cup of tea and stays for a chat. "A bit of the old rheumatism ? kilkep yourself ,well wrapped up, old lady. None of us get any younger, you know."
He closes the front door behind him and steps out into the Yard. Sometimes, under the archway, he stops to speak to young Billy from number four, standing with his old bicycle- wheel rim, looking up and down the High Street at the world outside. You'd better be running along indoors, young man," he says. " It's getting cold." Billy stares after hint until he is out of sight.
And then Billy turns and potters solemnly back on his grubby little legs along the Yard, his rusty hoop dragging after him and calling up a heavy echo from the sodden tiles. The mist rises to meet the dancing shadows thrown by the gas-lamp. Daddy will be home soon from the works, and for a brief glorious interval between tea and bedtime there will be bright- ness and warmth and fun in Cobden's Yard.
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