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other schoolmasters.
    Pistol, Bardolph and Nym were back from the war, unchanged and unreformed. Pistol complained that the damp trenches had touched up his sciatickee, Nym had a new wound, this one in his backside, Bardolph had seen no Germans, for he had spent most of the time in gaol. These three musketeers, to the great alarm of our parents, now took us under their distinguished patronage, and taught us how to set wires for hares, how to caulk a leaking boat, how to cook moorhens on a camp fire, and how to look innocent when we had our pockets full of things which shouldn’t be there. Others contributed their knowledge and experience to make sure that we had a liberal education. A man called Jim Meadows, who was a porter and billposter employed by my uncle’s firm, showed us how to make bird-lime out of boiled holly-bark and, with a decoy, to catch linnets and larks on Brockeridge Common. I don’t know whether the WildBirds’ Protection Act was in existence at that time; I think it was; but it made no difference to Jim Meadows, who went about openly carrying clap-nets with which he cleverly swept goldfinches off the thistle-heads. He lived in an alley—not Double Alley, but one nearly as bad—where he kept in a home-made aviary canaries, bullfinches, jackdaws, magpies and even owls; he also kept, uncaged, somebody else’s wife.
    Old Jim introduced us to the dawn and the dusk, taught us much about walking in the woods at night, about traps and nets and ferrets, and above all about birds. For although he caught and caged them, inflicting great cruelty without even understanding that he was being cruel, he loved birds and knew more about their songs, their nests, and their habits than many naturalists who write books. Jim couldn’t write at all; in my uncle’s office, if it were necessary for him to sign anything, he would explain, “I’m no scholard,” and make a cross on the paper: Jim Meadows, his mark. Yet he made a lot of money, partly out of the canaries, which were famous songsters, and partly out of antique furniture, which he could price more surely than most dealers. Whatever he made he drank; and when he was drunk he would go off and commit an assault upon the pusillanimous husband of his mistress, adding injury to insult.
    A professional fisherman called Bassett was another of our holiday schoolmasters. He got well paid by the gentry for taking them out in his boat and showing them the likeliest places for sport, yet he would often sacrifice the chance of earning ten shillings to spend the afternoon with us and to teach us what he knew. He taught us one thing that nobody else could: he taught us to be quiet. Chatter and sudden movement he abominated; he was the
stillest
person I have ever known, as still as the cat waiting for the mouse, as the stilt-legged heron fishing in the shallows. When he rowed the boat you could not hear the splash of the oars nor the creaking of the rowlocks; whenever he moved his action was slow, calculated and completely silent. He was a hard taskmaster; he would never let us rest our rods on the side of the boat—“Birmigum fishing,” he called that: the city dwellers’ Sunday afternoon out. Always we must hold them,although they were much too heavy for us, in aching arms until we got a bite. If the float bobbed, there must be no exclamation, no schoolboy’s yelp of delight when the fish was hooked. And when we caught one it must be killed silently and swiftly—“kill it as if you were a murderer,” was his grim and blood-chilling instruction—lest it flap about on the floor boards and drive the others away. He had never read
The Compleat Angler
but old Izaak’s motto, “Study to be quiet” was his also.
    When fishing was over, he would take us home to tea. His house smelled strongly of napthaline; for whereas Jim Meadows’ was full of live birds—there you might share your