Jeremy and Hamlet

There was a certain window between the kitchen and the pantry that was Hamlet's favourite. Thirty years ago-these chronicles are of the year 1894-the basements of houses in provincial English towns, even of large houses owned by rich people, were dark, chill, odour- full caverns hissing with ill-burning gas and smelling of ill- cooked cabbage. The basement of the Coles' house in Polchester was as bad as any other, but this little window between the kitchen and the pantry was higher in the wall than the other basement windows, almost on a level with the iron railings beyond it, and offering a view down over Orange Street and, obliquely, sharp to the right and past the Polchester High School, a glimpse of the Cathedral Towers themselves. Inside the window was a shelf, and on this shelf Hamlet would sit for hours, his peaked beard interrogatively a-tilt, his leg sticking out from his square body as though it were a joint-leg and worked like the limb of a wooden toy, his eyes, sad and mysterious, staring into Life.... It was not, of course, of Life that he was thinking; only very high- bred and in-bred dogs are conscious philosophers.