I had begun well-nigh to hate children. The schools, you see, had not yet reopened, and urchins played under our windows till half-past nine or ten o'clock at night. I frequently had work in the evenings that demanded close concentration, and it mostly happened that, when I sat down to it, as if by appointment the noise began. I do not know which howl or thump or bump was the most hideous. Iron hoops, driven with a hooked iron rod, were bad, but the shouts and whoops and calls, all in a blood-curdling Cockney accent, were worse; for while by great resolution you can nerve yourself to endure an iron hoop, you never know which yell or shout a child is going to emit next. These had all the horror of unexpectedness. I used to make mental bets on it, and I was always wrong.... And then sometimes there would come an endless racket that resembled nothing so much as a fire-engine in full career, which, on descending, I should discover to come from a diminutive cart at the end of a string, pulled by a toddler of four.
Sometimes these noises drove me half frantic. I carried my papers from the dining-room to the drawing-room—thence to the bedroom—I even tried the kitchen; and this, mark you, was important work, work that has since, I may say without boasting, become of national value. I spoke to policemen—I even used the power of beauty, and got Evie to speak to policemen—but only to be told that they were as helpless as I: "Children is eddicated now, and not as afraid of bobbies as they used to be." And on a fatal evening I was so unthinking as to distribute a number of pennies in order to buy an hour's peace for a calculation that seriously involved the interests of three shipping lines. That settled it. Thenceforward I was never without children. One Sunday afternoon I forgot myself and boxed the ears of the biggest of them. That brought round a parent—not a father, but a mother.... Ugh!——
And the house itself was far too small. Billy Izzard's sketches on our walls shook to my tread, and passing vans made the very foundations tremble. In order to get even our small belongings into the place Evie had to put boxes inside boxes, and boxes inside these again, so that in the finding of a garment she had not worn for some time the whole tiny bedroom floor was choked with boxes. Save for the little recess in the kitchen, the triangular cupboard under the stairs was the only storage accommodation we had. With the greatest care, Evie could not always avoid hanging an old skirt over my best hopsack (West's, Bond Street), or mislaying some article of which I had need in the very moment of bolting for my bus. And worst of all was that screen on the verandah that gave us nothing to look at but a short slope of parched green. Verandah Cottage! By Jove, yes!...
One other thing I will mention, though this did not come till the winter. The neighbouring house, which hitherto had been a tomb, became alive. I never knew the reason for this sudden awakening, nor whether Schmerveloff had suddenly found himself reduced to taking in lodgers, or whether he was merely holding out a helping hand to co-revolutionaries in the hour of their need; but I do know that presently he began to have a succession of extraordinary visitors. Hairy, uncouth-looking men, with soft hats, came for a week or a month, and brought their women, fat, spare, astrakhan-capped or bare-headed. They wore smocks and embroidered portières, and worked at peasant industries. One of them had a child, the sweetest of little girls—but oh, her sweetness vanished from me when she began to play at all hours in the garden, shouting, crowing, and impossible to turn away! I went so far as to wait on Schmerveloff himself about this dreadful child, and was told that, inconvenient as these things might be to me, the question was not a private one at all. It was a Social Question. Society oppressed them, they oppressed me; it was Society that was wrong.... I told our fellows this afterwards, when the Aliens' Act was drafting; Robson was immensely amused. "What did you say?" he asked.... Of course there was nothing to say....
And then, about Christmas, the Social Question became acute indeed. For the development of the peasant industries the most Asiatic barber-robber of the lot set up a furnace, a lathe and an anvil....
No wooden walls (save Nelson's) could have kept that racket out....
Had the sum of the world's beautiful things been added to, I could have grinned and borne it, but it was beaten copper-work the Asiatic made.
And I could do nothing.
I pass on.