Three Men in a Boat Read Online Free PDF

hatred of litter – hence, in part, his liking for Germany – and carried a sharpened stick with which to pick up rubbish; he once asked an eminent Turk what most impressed him about England, and was distressed to learn that it was the ‘dirty paper’ blowing about the streets. He remained a prolific writer, notching up – by the end of his life – some eighteen novels and collections of stories, twelve plays, three volumes of essays (including a second instalment of ‘Idle Thoughts’), a travel book and an autobiography; his secretary remembered how ‘he would walk up and down the study floor with his hands behind his back and dictate with marvellous ease page after page of pathos and humour. He would occasionally refer to his shorthand notes, and he would often rearrange the ornaments on the mantelpiece while dictating.’
    When World War I broke out, Jerome found himself torn between his dislike of German militarism and his fondness for the Germans themselves. He recalled seeing German officers strutting three abreast down the street, ‘insolent, conceited, overbearing, civilians compelled everywhere to cringe before them’, but he hated the wave of Germanophobia that swept the country in 1914, bearing dachshunds and mild-mannered German waiters in its wake, and distrusted atrocity stories about bayonetted babies and ravished Belgian nuns. He longed to enlist, and see something of combat for himself. Too old for the British army, he wangled his way into the French ambulance service at the age of fifty-six. Helping wounded men behind the front line at Verdun, amid the rain and the rats and the rotting corpses, he was sickened by what he saw, and filled with rage against the politicians whom he held responsible. He also ran a hospital for wounded animals, among them a donkey recentlyawarded the Croix de Guerre. Back in England, he joined Philip Snowden, Dean Inge, E. D. Morel and John Drinkwater in campaigning for a negotiated settlement to the war.
    Jerome died of a stroke in 1927, not long after being given the freedom of Walsall. The ‘boat of life’ had run out to sea at last, and how better to leave him than with the concluding words of
Three Men on the Bummel
, redolent as they are of Jerome the companionable, pipe-smoking amateur philosopher? Our thoughts, he wrote, ‘are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ’tis over.’
    Jeremy Lewis
Notes
    1 . Autobiographical quotations are from
My Life and Times
, published in 1926.
    2 . ‘Bummel’ is also German for a ‘stroll’. As befitted Jerome’s pose as an indolent man of leisure, a ‘Bummler’ is an ‘idler’ or a ‘loafer’.
    3 . Written by George Grossmith (1847–1912) and his brother Weedon (1854–1919), who also provided the illustrations,
The Diary of a Nobody
relatesthemisadventuresofaself-importantbutineffectualclerkwhoisdeferential in the office and regularly humiliated on the home front. Originally serialized in
Punch
, it was published in book form by Arrowsmith in 1892.
    4 . Comic verses written and illustrated by Jerome’s friend W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911): the first volume appeared in 1869, and a second followed four years later.
    5 . The supreme achievement of P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975); published in 1910, it is a masterly exposé of office life, and features the tyrannical bank manager Mr Bickersdyke.
    6 . John Foxe (1516–87) was a Protestant propagandist. His
Book of Martyrs
, published in 1563, left the English with an abiding suspicion of Roman Catholics and their ways.
    7 . Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) was a civil servant who wrote realistic novels about life in the East End slums.
A Child of the Jago
was publishedin 1896: his other novels include
Tales of Mean Streets
(1894) and
The Hole in the