Mr Hicks

The Lamplighter Mr. Hicks was a long, thin, gangly man whose beanstalk height was brought to an abrupt halt by a flat, peaked, tweed cap. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles perched on the bony ridge of a long, thin nose. He had a permanent sniff, a ruddy complexion, and gave off an exotic aroma. The complexion and the aroma, I now realise, were the results of a combination of alcohol and mint humbugs. I never saw him dressed in anything but a suit; always the same suit. Once upon a time it must have been black, or perhaps a dark blue, but over the years it had acquired an almost metal-like sheen and a matching verdigris hue. I suppose he wore a shirt of some kind, but you couldn’t tell; he usually had several layers of jumpers or sweaters under his jacket, while around his neck he wore a choker –a scarf tied in a particular way. I never knew him to wear an overcoat, even on the coldest and foggiest of winter nights; he just got larger and the jacket got tighter from increased layers of sweaters. On the afternoon when I first made his acquaintance Mr. Hicks looked improbably thin and tall. I must have topped out at about forty inches in those days, while all six foot-something of Mr. Hicks was about three rungs up on a narrow wooden ladder propped against the single lamppost that stood outside Staples Road council school. The lamp was dark, and Mr. Hicks appeared to be stuck. It took him almost a minute to realise that a possible, though miniature, rescuer was staring up at him. He clutched desperately at my shoulder as I got him down and, then, as he clung to his ladder and me I got my first whiff of humbug and whisky. He noticed my reaction and promptly offered me a humbug if I’d climb the ladder and turn on the gaslight. No sooner said than done, and a moment later the lamp was lit and I was sucking on a “bullseye”. Even in those far-off, artless days I’d been warned not take gifts from strangers but it was plain that Mr. Hicks was a harmless innocent; besides, a large, black and white, boiled bullseye was something I usually saw only at Christmas. The bullseye was indescribably tasty, and as Mr. Hicks set off to light his next

lamp, I trotted beside him contentedly sucking while he spoke about the problems of being a lamplighter. In those days our houses and the village streets were lit by gas. The street lamps in our village were very handsome, the kind you might have noticed in movies or BBC costume-serials set in Victorian times. In fact, even though the old Queen had been dead for more than thirty years, our lamps dated from some time in her reign. They all had an entwined VR, for Victoria Regina embossed on the small, wedding-cake-tiered pedestal that formed the base for each lamppost. The post was a fluted column of cast iron; about ten feet tall, on which sat a six-sided glass lantern topped with a cast replica of the royal crown. The symmetry of it all was only slightly offset by a thin arm, about eighteen inches long, jutting out at right angles where the lantern sat atop the post. Inside the lantern there were two gas mantles set on either side of a small, constantly burning, pilot flame. Below the gas mantles there was a pivoting arm like the crosspiece of a set of weights or a balance. At each end of the arm hung a little chain ending in a small ring. In the floor of the lantern there was a hole. By pushing a hooked stick through the hole you could pull down on one ring to turn the light on or pull on the other to turn the light off. Turning the gas lamps on in the evening, and off again in the morning, was a very important job; particularly in the winter when it grew dark soon after four-o-clock in the afternoon, and didn’t get light until about eight thirty in the morning. Despite his complaints to me on that first afternoon I walked with him, it was plain that Mr. Hicks was very proud of his position as official lamplighter to the village, and I soon realised that, whatever his difficulties, he would never allow a lamp to remain dark when it should be lit. As far as a sense of duty was concerned the council had chosen the right man and had equipped him well. When he was about his professional duties he carried a long stick like a boat hook, while slung over his shoulder he had the narrow wooden ladder with two hooks on the end designed to loop over the bars that jutted from the lamp columns. In the pockets of his jacket he carried a

supply of spare mantles and control-arm chains. If the mantles broke, as they often did, or if the chains on the control arm got tangled, his duty was to climb the ladder, unhook one of the glass panes, and effect running repairs. However, as I was to discover later, there were days when he was most reluctant to climb the ladder. On particularly cold or foggy nights he’d fortify himself with a tot or two to keep out the cold. He claimed that the alcohol never affected him, but somehow or other it made the ladder rickety. I also found that on these evenings his aim wasn’t as sharp as usual -he sometimes found it hard to get the boat hook through the hole. Quite often when he did succeed in correctly focusing the hole he’d push the pole too hard and break one of the delicate mantles. The first day I walked the lamp route with Mr. Hicks his aim was pretty good. The only repairs required involved untangling two sets of chains. While Mr. Hicks was attempting to hook his ladder over the lamp arm I just shinned up the post like a sailor up a mast and untangled the chains in no time flat. Mr. Hicks was delighted; I think he recognised the value my monkey-like ability could be on the days when the ladder grew rickety. Nothing was said about the subject that night but as we came to the last lamp Mr. Hicks gave me a mint humbug and implied that another one would be available if I cared to walk the lamp route the next night. Back home my mother plainly saw no harm in my giving a helping hand to “poor, simple Mr. Hicks” and I was pleased to find him waiting when I came out of school the next afternoon. I was the ideal assistant for Mr. Hicks. When a mantle needed changing or the chains untangling, I would quickly shin up the fluted column and do whatever was needed while Mr. Hicks unshouldered the ladder and used it to lean on. It took us a bit more than an hour each evening to walk the lamp route. That hour was the highlight of my day. Mr. Hicks spoke to me man-to-man. He told me all about his work in his mother’s shop, and told me about some of the exotic things they got down from London, “special like”, for the gentry who lived in the big houses in Spring Grove. He read “The Daily Mail” every day and talked to me about Herr Hitler, Signor Mussolini, the League of

Nations, the Great War, and the communists who were misleading the thousands of unemployed miners in Wales and the shipbuilders “up North”. He always concluded his report of world events with the unarguable pronouncement, “Mother says…”. Mrs. Hicks was a true daughter of “The Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets”; and those afternoon walks and talks as a lamplighter’s assistant convinced me how great it was to be English and so much better than all those “foreigners”. I didn’t know whether my school teachers would think it right to agree with all the potent prejudices pontificated by Mr. Hicks’ mother, but her views on the news were certainly more interesting than the prayers, Bible readings and turn-the-other-cheek homilies I got from my own mother. For two winters I went with Mr. Hicks to turn on the evening lamps. I never went with him in the mornings –presumably his aim and his ladder were steadier in the morning hours. Neither did I go with him on Saturday; my job was an unspoken commitment for school days only. Nobody tended to the lights on Sunday –nobody worked on the Sabbath, so I guess the lamps must have stayed alight from Saturday night until Monday morning. For my five nights work Mr. Hicks gave me a penny a week, one humbug per night, and -as a sweetener- every Friday night there was a twist of newspaper containing three sticky humbugs or bullseyes. My brothers took two of the humbugs and my mother took the penny. She put a hapenny (halfpenny) in the missionary collection box for the poor little heathen black boys and girls in Africa. The other hapenny went into the family exchequer -I was a worker at eight.