Howard Spring

"Once I wandered away from my brothers and sisters and went into a near-by field, and right out in the middle of it I lay down in grass so high that no one could see me. The red sorrel from that angle rose like spires and the dog-daisies trembled against the blue with fantastic loveliness. The silence was so great that I could hear the grasses making a small commotion like the trees of a forest in which I was a beetle. I shut my eyes and tried to forget that I was anyone at all. I tried to imagine that I was a stone lying on the ground; and I remember snatching myself up from what must have been something near to unconsciousness and rushing away frightened."

"Though blind chance took me to a newspaper office, I was happy there at once; and I have been happy in newspaper offices ever since. It was clear from the first that the way up was through the reporters’ room; and the way to the reporters’ room in those days was by learning shorthand. It was a lucky thing for me that there was another boy in the office who shared my passion for learning shorthand. It is the easiest thing in the world to learn; but when we had learned the principles there came the question of practice. We solved this by coming to the office at eight each morning. Our work began at nine, and for an hour before that time we harangued and declaimed to one another from a volume of Sir Edward Clarke’s speeches, borrowed from the office library."

"On one of those occasions, for a variety of subjects, I had won three pounds worth of books. It was in the happy days when the volumes of the Everyman Library cost but a shilling apiece. Decorously the students walked up and received their books—one, two or three. But, with a lust for quantity, and to the devil with morocco bindings, I had staked out my claim on Everyman. On my first call, I was received with ironic cheers as I bore away a toppling pile of thirty volumes; and when, called later, I added another thirty to the store and walked back to my seat, chin firmly pressed into the topmost volume, there were roars of laughter. It was a business getting home those sixty volumes. I had taken the precaution to provide myself with plenty of string, and what is more I got on to a tram, a rare thing to do in those days."

"All these things were in the “front room.” We had all that fanatical devotion to the “front room” which is peculiar to the poor. It was a sacred place. A room of our own to work in would have suited me and my brother splendidly. But the whole family, including us, still crowded into the kitchen for all purposes. It was a fine, comfortable kitchen with an open fireplace, a cheerful room to be in if you had nothing to do but read or talk. Not so good, though, if you had any other sort of work to do. The simple fact is, of course, that the use of one room for all purposes, in a house with a beggarly income and no servants, arises from the necessity to save money and labour. Using another room would mean laying fires, and fires would mean money, and so would light. That is what really lies behind all the old jokes about the unused “parlours” of the poor. But the consequence is the creation of the “sacred” feeling where the parlour is concerned. Even in the summer-time, when light and fire were not in question, one kept out of it."

"In the long run, what do we have but our memories?"

"Unsatisfactory indeed the world seemed to Mr Menheniot. He was pushed about in bus queues; he was snapped at by café waitresses. In the Underground unpleasant voices shouted "Hurry along! Hurry along!" and the sight of all these people hurrying along - Why? Where to? - amid clanging gates and roaring wheels, out from and in to holes bored in the earth, left him sick for another way of living. Never, never, he thought, could he be happy in the world about him: the world that the war had knocked sideways and that seemed to his frightened imagination as though it would not be straight again but must topple right over."

"After I had eaten my evening meal I wandered out on to the beach where the tide was coming in sharply, a tumble of white in the darkness. I walked as far as the cliff beyond the beach, and I sat down there on a tussock of sea-pinks, listening to the surge of the water, watching the stars that the clouds covered and unveiled and the cluster of humble lights half a mile away that was Penmael. I felt lonely. My body was warm, but I was chilled to the soul's marrow. This was the oddest feeling I had ever known: this loneliness. Aloneness was something else. I had sought it eagerly, welcomed it when found, but I had never been lonely in my aloneness. Now I was so lonely that I could stand it no longer."

"I wasn't an artist of any sort, but I thought I knew something about how artists' minds worked, and I didn't believe that to change an external situation had much to do with it. It was what they did with whatever was lying about that mattered."

"the self-contained life"

"It is courteous to respect a fellow-being's right to privacy by providing him with a room of his own; but it can be torture to make him feel that that room is where he is expected to be, out of one's way."

"To be the only possessor of news that will interest many people is always to be in a powerful position."

"[Swithinbank] had dreamed of this show, and here was the dream come true, because he had made it come. What had I ever dreamed of except to be tucked in under a warm blanket of safety? And what had I ever done to make even that true? Nothing."

"I was beginning to see that my whole life had been a flight from the possibility of unearthing the sort of man I really was."

"And there's so much gossip in the [countryside], Mr Menheniot. It makes a person uncomfortable."

"She had scuttled to earth like a beetle that knows it is in danger of being trodden on."

"The world is an onion, Mr Menheniot, skin within skin, and anyone who thinks it's nothing but the outside one that lies in the dung can have it if he wants it. A real man of the world knows them all, down to the heart's core of the thing. Not all on the surface, is it, like a nice David-Cox water-colour."

"There are men to whom a marriage is eternal and who are crippled for ever when it ends, largely, I think, because of the passion and completeness of their own contribution to it. They embark their all in one frail craft, and, if that goes, the wreck is total."