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I
Henry Waxman
THERE are so many cross-roads in the average person's existence without any sign-posts to point the right direction, it's a wonder we dont lose our way oftener. If I had taken a different turning at half a dozen points, I might now be a London cabby (probably with a red nose; cabbies always have red noses!) ; an office man in Cheapside (in a pepper-and-salt suit) ; an army officer billeted in a flea-bitten mud town in the Sudan, or a civil service employee in China, wearing an embroidered satin robe and sitting at a teakwood desk (if I hadn't already been killed in a revolution). 32
as.
Trie Ston?
of My1 Life
We give you herewith the true story of an Englishman and a scholar, a veteran of the World War, and a man of a thousand adventures, who hopes for another thousand of them
By
My cabby complex dates back to the age of five, when my mother used to take me up to London and would allow me to crook a finger at one of those proud beings perched up so gloriously high above the common run of mankind behind his cab. They were usually stout, and looked so top-heavy that I always expected to see the horse leave the ground at any moment and dangle in the air. Once inside the cab, my mother would allow me to poke up the trap-door in the top (with the umbrella that all Britishers carry) and discuss our destination with a beery voice rumbling out of sight above our heads. And it seemed to me then that no career could possibly equal that of driver of a hansom.
Here is a queer thing. From the first I can remember I seem to have been traveling toward California. Even in those days it was the best advertised spot in the world and, from the glowing adjectives describing it in articles and travel-folders, the word "golden" stuck in my childish mind. Then "the Pacific" ! • How different that would look from the cold, gray Atlantic I knew! In imagination I saw California as a fabled land with towers shining in some strange sun by the shores of a fairy-tale sea. I made up my mind then that some day I would come to golden California. And here I am !
"K/Tv childhood home was a big, brick, suburban villa ■** A on the banks of the river, at Richmond-onThames (printer, dont omit the hyphens !). Father was an importer in the city and comfortably well-to-do — we had dogs, riding horses and a trap.
My recollections of the house are very vague.— houses to a child are simply places to eat and sleep in — tho I have a scar just above one eyebrow to prove that this particular house had a long, steep flight of stairs to fall down. The thing I associate with being a child is the river — the deep, slow-moving Thames. English people enjoy their rivers more than Americans, or perhaps American rivers are not leisurely and deep and placid like ours, but in a hurry to get somewhere in the world. On Sundays and bank holidays the Thames is always covered all the way from London to Oxford with canoes, sculls, flat-bottomed boats of excursionists, gay with striped blazers and parasols.
I used to punt fourteen miles up the river and never found a spot where the water was not deeper than my twelve-feet pole.
Tho I was born in England, my people are Scottish