The Shop in Hastings, from This Was a Man: Some Memories of Robert Mannin, by Ethel Mannin (1952)

Another feature of Hastings was a shop at the edge of the old town and the fishing quarters, with glass cases outside, full of every kind of shell, and boxes covered with shells, and shell necklaces, and shells painted with views; and dried starfish there were, and the hedgehog-like shells of sea-urchins, and shells like great horns–cornucopia such as one saw in paintings of goddesses of plenty, shells with rosy interiors, shells like great silver snails, shells that were flat plates of mother-of-pearl, and long narrow razor-like shells, and black ‘devil’s purses’-—a most wonderful and exciting shop. And just as you could listen forever to the blind men playing the violin and the piano together, so you could gaze at this wonderland of sea-treasures forever. What is good should never end, the moment be extended into eternity.

Only a few years ago I went back to Hastings, and to my great joy the shell shop was still there, and I could have sworn the same shells were in the glass cases, and I gazed as raptly in my forties as the child with not a decade of years to its name had gazed, in summers that seemed always hot and sunny. We do not, fundamentally, change; of that I am convinced. Life knocks us about, pushes us around, this and that happens to us as our bodies increase in size and our minds expand in receptivity and power, but the core of the individual remains the same-—delighted with cornucopia shells, frightened of dogs, shy of strangers, the anxieties and the eagernesses better under control, but induced by very much the same experiences. And, given a chance, we are still capable of that ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ which makes it possible to hear-—quite plainly—the sea’s murmur in a shell.

This Was a Man: Some Memories of Robert Mannin is a slender tribute to her father that Ethel Mannin wrote several years after his death. She later wrote that she considered it her best work. The book certainly displays a tenderness, a wistfulness, that is rarely found in her own memoirs.

Robert Mannin led an unexceptional life. Born in Westminster when that area of London still had its share of slums, he took advantage of what little education he had to earn a low-paying position as a mail sorter in the Post Office, where he worked for over thirty years. When he retired, he and his wife took a small house in the countryside near London, and he spent many of his last days living with Ethel. He died on Christmas Eve, 1949, in the public ward of a London hospital. At his funeral, “No one wept, and no one felt constrained to utter any of the conventional falsities.”

This Was a Man: Some Memories of Robert Mannin is a tribute more to his character than his accomplishments. by his daughter’s account, he was a pleasant man who held no great credos aside from an almost-Buddhist sense of peace with his fate. He refused, for example, to leave his bed and evacuate to a shelter during the bombing raids on London. “If a bomb’s got Bob Mannin written on it,” he told Ethel, “then I’m for it whatever I do, and if it hasn’t there’s nothing to worry about!” Although he loved to tell stories about the music hall performers, such as Little Tich and Marie Lloyd, that he saw in his youth, he was could also spend hours sitting in Ethel’s garden doing nothing more than watching the clouds in the sky. His relaxed approach to life hardly rubbed off on his daughter, though, who wrote that, “My own inclination is always against procrastination or postponement, just because ‘tomorrow’ so soon becomes ‘today.'”