Home County
Isabel Colegate
Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood Richard Cobb (Chatto & Windus £8.95)
kYone who cares to sample the flavour of a middle-class life in the Home Counties in the 1930s need do no more than °Pen Richard Cobb's Still Life and read Pages 15 to 22, in which he sends a representative selection of that class on four successive trains from London to Tun- ,bridge Wells. It is too good a piece of bravura prose writing to spoil by quotation. Reading aloud is to be recommended, though breath control needs to be good if 9oe is not to run out of steam before slow- Ing down through High Brooms (inhabited ,s'Y 'very rough people'), skirting the Recreation Ground (even that a little risky 1,_°r middle-class children) and thundering through the last tunnel to draw up at the Platform, where with any luck if one is on the last train James will be there to meet °Ile with the car — he is pretty reliable, Suet' a find — and one hopes that nice man Is on the barrier, he's so polite, always has a word, quite makes one glad to be back.
This is not the 'middle class' of present- 'lay usage, that is to say anything that is not orking class. This is the 1930s middle class, not the nobility or the gentry or the county, not the upper middle class or the lower middle class, not the working class or the wandering class, but the middle class. Richard Cobb grew up among its now vanished certainties, in pre-war Tunbridge Wells. Recollecting it, he applies — to the place and to some of its inhabitants, among them his own parents and himself as child and adolescent — the method he uses as an historian. He begins with topography. He gives us compass points, approaches, areas, streets, houses, before he begins to open doors. Here's the church and here's the steeple and here come all the little people, les petites gens whose historian he supreme- ly is, private people in their time and place. So as well as the ladies in their hats and gloves back from shopping in Town, or off to bridge or tennis or croquet, we have R. Septimus Gardiner, Taxidermist, in his one- storeyed wooden shop with its window full of squirrels on branches and fierce-looking pike and humming-birds and badgers, and young Mr Love, Fruit and Veg, who mar- ried the author's nanny and took her down a social peg or two; and Mr Weekes's horse- drawn hearses as well as the contents of Mrs Cobb's dressing-table; and various parasols, tussore dresses and panama hats as well as Doctor Footner who still visited his patients in a carriage (Mrs Cobb, being of a medical family, thought only doctors trained at Bart's any good); and the best place to go for hatpins as well as the batty Black Widow who haunted the Common; and the Limbury Buses, a family of four whose daily routines were immutably fixed and magnificently idle; and old Mr Evans, who asked the young Richard Cobb to tea and showed him his collection of water col- ours of the Norfolk School.
All this, having been first apprehended by the acute senses of childhood and representing as it does for the author a lost world of unchanging values, comes through his exuberant but transparent prose with some of the peculiar numinosity with which childhood endows objects, places, smells, stuffs and the oddities of individuals, but overlaid (not overpowered) by adult irony. He uses this ironical tone, as well as a highly selective approach to autobiography, with great skill as a means of elucidation. The description of his mother's paranoia in her old age is no less moving for being also, to some extent, comic. The prose style rarely falters, though there is an odd use of the phrase 'much that', usually in the sense of `much as' — 'much that I knew every foot- path... I could not see myself on the run,' when the sense is 'well though I knew every footpath...' — which makes one wonder whether Professor Cobb may have been momentarily thinking in another language.
Old Mr Evans, of the water colours and the teas, had a niece, the novelist Margiad Evans. Much later, Richard Cobb sent her some stories; she answered politely, but ad- vised him to go back to history. He did, but, he says, to 'history of an increasingly peculiar sort'. He is peculiar as an autobiographer too; but wonderfully good.
Previous page
