Old Lovegrove

Old Lovegrove was the saddler of Lower Binfield, the invented Oxfordshire market town where George Bowling grew up. A saddler made and sold saddles, harness and the rest of the leather gear that working horses needed, and his shop was in the High Street. Bowling narrates Coming Up for Air as a man of forty-five in 1938, and the saddler belongs to his account of the town before 1914. Lovegrove is the father of Sid Lovegrove, who at about thirteen was leader of the boys' gang, the Black Hand, that Bowling's elder brother Joe belonged to.

The one scene he gets is a beating. Bowling is describing how children were brought up in the town at that time. It was still thought proper for a parent to say don't all day long, and men boasted that they would thrash the life out of a son caught smoking, stealing apples or robbing a bird's nest. In most families it stopped at the boast. Old Lovegrove caught his two sons, great lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed, and walloped them so that you could hear it all over the town. Bowling adds one more fact in the next sentence: Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker.

Later in the same part of the book he serves as an example of a tradesman who could not see what was coming. Small shopkeepers of that generation believed that with thrift, hard work and fair dealing a man could not go wrong, and Bowling says plenty of them carried the belief as far as a bankrupt deathbed or the workhouse. Even Lovegrove the saddler, he writes, with cars and motor-vans staring him in the face, did not realise that he was as out of date as the rhinoceros.

The trade did go. When Bowling came back to Lower Binfield during the First World War for his mother's funeral, which was the only time he went home after joining the Army in 1914, Sid Lovegrove had been killed on the Somme and old Lovegrove had shut up the shop and was living in a cottage near Walton on a tiny annuity, meaning a small fixed sum paid to him each year for the rest of his life. Bowling notes on the same visit that there were practically no horses left in the town, because every horse worth taking had been commandeered for the war.

On his last visit, in June 1938, Bowling walks round the churchyard reading the names he grew up with. Lovegrove is one of them, and what he remembers of the man is the big brown beard.