Portrait of Elmbury (6 page)

There was one day that fell in early December, more exciting than Christmas itself; the day of Christmas market. Always on this occasion my father's firm provided sandwiches and drinks for all comers: dealers, smallholders, cowmen, shepherds, drovers. (The more substantial farmers were entertained to luncheon at the Swan.) Great were the preparations on the day before the market. Enormous joints sizzled in Old Cookie's oven; baskets of loaves lay everywhere about the kitchen, huge pats of yellow butter, tongues, sausages, pasties. Maids were busy all day cutting sandwiches, which were piled on dishes and covered with napkins. There was an air of bustle and festivity all over the house; but, alas, the festive spirit coupled with the near approach of Christmas was too much for Old Cookie; when the last joint was roasted, she got drunk. Lachrymose, incoherent, completely plastered, she confronted my mother and was given the sack. Next morning, sick and repentant, she was re-engaged.

Although the sale did not begin till half-past eleven, the first beasts began to pass our window as early as half-past nine. Thenceforward for two hours there passed down Elmbury High Street a procession such as might serve as a country counterpart of a Lord Mayor's Show. But here were no city financiers whose riches were scraps of paper locked in safes—riches which might disappear to-morrow if somebody else juggled with his shares more cunningly. Here was solid wealth, the real wealth of
England, a sight that would have warmed old Cobbett's heart to see: fat oxen, sleek and ponderous, white-faced Herefords curly haired between their straight horns, Shorthorns as rich-red as the fresh-turned loam, dark as the winter ploughland where the sweat stained their sides; flocks of sheep, broad and flat-backed so that the collies could run about on top of them, thick-woolled, black-faced Oxfords, whose multitudinous breaths in the frosty air made a mist which moved as their great flocks moved like rivers down the street; and huge fat waddling pigs, sows whose bellies had brought forth great litters and which now brushed the earth between their short legs, bacons, porkers, Large Whites, Large Blacks, Middle Whites, blue-mottled cross-breds, sandy Tamworths, and the ancient dappled breed of Gloster Spots.

Here was the annual harvest of the great stock-fattening farms which lay in the rich valleys of the two rivers; here was a season's consummation, the happy outcome of the marriage between English weather and English soil, delivered by the skill and patience of men whose grandfathers had owned their farms before them. To this end the turgid waters of last winter's floods had left their rich alluvial deposit in the meadows, so that the spring grass sprang more greenly; to this end in Elmbury Ham in June, and in a thousand such great hayfields, sweaty men with pitchforks had built a village of sweet-smelling ricks; to this end swedes and turnips and mangel-wurzels, plump roots nearly as big as a football, had alternated in their proper rotations with golden corn and brown fallow on the slopes of the gentle hills which rose from the valleys. And now the purpose of all these labours was manifest. Down the street towards the market on slow hoofs waddled the Champion Beast, great-shouldered, broad-sided, deep-flanked; and a hundred more that were nearly his match. No man so poor that he would not taste a steak on Sunday; no family in such straits that they would not see a joint on their table on Christmas Day.

Just as the Lord Mayor's Show provides its moments of comic relief, so did this splendid progress towards the Christmas market. The calf that planted its legs four-square and flatly
refused to budge, though one man heaved at its halter and another pulled its tail; the fat goodwife with a couple of cackling geese under her arms; the bull which entered Double Alley and rampaged about there, so that even the Hooks made common cause against it: all these events were matters for mirth and jesting. And later in the day, when the market was over and the farmers with bulging pockets rollicked home—when the drovers rich with Christmas tips began their Christmas pub crawl—when the butcher who had bought the Champion Beast paraded him through the town with rosettes upon his horns, a mighty fat butcher with a mighty fat beast—what merry greetings passed, what practical joking went on! I shall never forget the butcher's face wreathed in smiles as he met Mr. Jeffs who had bred and fattened the champion; beaming at each other, they shook hands, and the crowd in the street cheered and shouted. I shall never forget the butcher's obvious pride that he had paid the highest price for the best animal. Nowadays, it seems to me, too many people take pride in having bought something cheap; but the butcher was proud because he had bought something good, and had paid well for it.

And so dusk fell, and the lamplighter went round with his long pole, the gas lamps glowed yellow, even that wan, cloudy nebulus that burned at the entrance to Double Alley, and the last of the country people went home. Only a few belated drovers still hung about the pubs; and the first carol-singers gathered round our front door to tell their old tale of peace on earth and goodwill among men.

But peace on earth had ended when I was seven. Already the Volunteers, re-named Territorials, had marched out of their dark and dusty creeper-clad Drill Hall, and the citizens who had always laughed at them for playing soldiers cheered them all the way to the station. Those farmers' sons, small tradesmen, keepers, poachers and hobbledehoys thereafter played soldiers in Flanders
for the better part of five years. They were maimed, blinded, and slain; and they added proud battle-honours to the colours of a regiment which already possessed more battle-honours than most. Two of my cousins marched at the head of them; one was killed in 1915, the other lasted until the Somme, when company officers could not expect to last any longer.

But after the soldiers had gone, it was a long time before the war began to have any visible effect upon the life of Elmbury. My mother collected vegetables for the Navy; and I remember the garden looking like a harvest festival, with piles of cabbages, cauliflowers, lettuces, beets and marrows on their way to Scapa Flow; but how they got there, and what state they were in when they arrived, we never knew. A big house nearby was turned into a military hospital, and convoys of ambulances occasionally passed our window. Men in blue uniform, on crutches or in bath-chairs, became a familiar sight in the street. Christmas markets were less festive, perhaps because there was less to drink; and Nobbler Price became more sober. Mr. Hook sought sanctuary from his wife in the Army.

And a stranger thing occurred in Double Alley. There was a barrel of a man, some twenty stone of him, called Dick Perkins, a genial rogue with mischievous and watery blue eyes, a drover turned cattle-dealer, who lived there presumably because it amused him to live there—for he was prosperous enough to live elsewhere if he had liked. He had two buxom daughters; and one morning these young women dressed themselves up in green jerseys and tight breeches and went off to work on the land. Double Alley, which had witnessed many shocking things, was never so shocked as by this tomboyish gesture. Where indecency was commonplace, the trousers were regarded as the height of indecency. The outraged neighbours came out in a bunch to stare.

“The hussies!” exclaimed Old Nanny, as we too stared from our window. “They'll never dare to go back there!” she added; and of course they never did. You wouldn't go back if you'd lived in a farmhouse and worked in the green fields. The emancipation of the Misses Perkins had consequences, as we shall see. It was a
break with Double Alley's tradition; and it was the beginning of the end of Double Alley itself.

That must have been about 1916. Thereafter the war grew sterner. Officers who were billeted on us from time to time stayed for shorter periods, and always it seemed only a few weeks after they left us that we heard they had been killed. My father, aged fifty, and sick unto death, put on a red armlet and drilled twice a week with a Boer War rifle, or guarded railway bridges against imaginary and ubiquitous “spies.” Recruiting posters became more frequent and began to betray a slightly hysterical note. Recruiting marches took place in the town.

Even Pistol, Bardolph and Nym were caught up in the maelstrom. These battered veterans of forgotten and possibly apocryphal skirmishes always went about together and generally got into trouble at the same time. They drank, begged and stole as a trio; recently the tall thin one, Pistol, abetted by the others, had knocked a policeman's helmet off, in private spite, while the policeman innocently stood directing traffic at Elmbury Cross. They were still tolerated, although they were such a nuisance, because of their humour, or I suppose I should say “humours” in the Elizabethan sense; they were “characters.”

Now one day, as we watched a military band marching bravely down the High Street, on one of the frequent recruiting parades, with a smart squad of carefully-picked soldiers behind it, and behind them a rag-tag-and-bobtail of sheepish-looking civilians who had taken the King's shilling, we were astonished to see Pistol, Bardolph and Nym bringing up the rear. It must have been almost the last time we looked through the Tudor House window; my father had died, and the lovely house was to be sold. Already the auctioneer was busy cataloguing the furniture, posters advertising the “desirable residence” were stuck up on the walls.

It was high summer, the last summer of the war. The band blared, and the soldiers marched stiffly at attention, left, right, left, right, never a foot wrong; then came the newly-recruited rabble, shuffling, out of step, looking curiously ashamed, not, I
think, because they had joined up, but because they had held back for so long. Somebody from the entrance of Double Alley called out: “There goes young Bert—at last!” and there was a ripple of laughter. Then came Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. They wore their medals; and they looked like soldiers. They threw their shoulders back, and they cast away all the infirmities which their flesh had inherited from their folly, and they marched. A passing policeman stared at them in astonishment and they shouted some piece of merry rudeness at him. We couldn't hear it, but he roared with laughter and shouted back: “Now we shall have a bit of peace for a change!”

I suppose they were the dregs of England's man-power. Nym was lame from a wound he got at Mafeking; Bardolph suffered from rheumatics; and Pistol was lame also, but this was not, as he asserted, from the thrust of an assegai, but through falling off a fence, and breaking his leg, while trying to escape from a keeper who had caught him poaching. Crippled though they were, by God they could march. Somebody shouted in jest: “We must be in a bad way if we've come down to that!” Black Sal came suddenly out of the dark entrance and ran into the middle of the street, pirouetted there screeching and fell in behind them, doing a sort of goose-step. Then suddenly the band stopped blazing, the order was given: “March-at-ease!” and the soldiers slinging their rifles broke into song with “Tipperary.”

“Good-bye—
Double Alley!”

improvised the three old warriors; and Double Alley cheered them as they went off to their last war.

Country Prep School—Entomology and Port—A Liberal Education — The Scholar Fisherman—The Young Alchymist—Anarchic Interlude—The Facts of Life—Business Man

Shortly after this I was sent to school, underwent certain metamorphoses, and was transformed from a pampered and coddled brat into an extremely tough little ruffian. This was largely due to the glorious prep school, a gracious Georgian house in its own grounds about ten miles from Elmbury, where I learned to tickle trout and to read Virgil; to swim a length under water and to enjoy English history; all about catapults, and a little about Attic Greek.

The poaching, the swimming, and the catapult-shooting I acquired partly by the light of nature and partly through the companionship of three other boys, Dick, Donald and Ted, who had the reputation of stopping at nothing short of murder. The Latin and Greek I learned from a man who loved the classics and knew how to teach them. One day, when I had been consistently slow at finding the verb in my Latin unseen, he sent me to the Headmaster with a note. The note was folded but conveniently unsealed. Naturally I wanted to find out what had been written about me and what was my probable fate. I hid in the lavatory and tried to read it. But the sentence was in Latin. For the first time in my life it seemed really important to construe a Latin sentence. My mind worked at three times its usual pace, I found the verb more quickly than I had ever found the verb before, and when I had the hang of the sentence I was encouraged to
continue on my journey towards the Headmaster's study; for it said: “Do not beat him with too many stripes.”

This wise scholar, Mr. Chorlton, had a cottage at Elmbury where he spent the holidays. He was a link with home, and for this reason I never felt exiled. The school was such a civilised place that terms passed quickly; and in the holidays I never wanted to go to the seaside, but always returned to Elmbury, where Dick, Donald and Ted were near neighbours.

And now with my new-found freedom and my awakened intelligence I began to find out more about Elmbury than I had ever known before. I explored the rivers and the brooks, the field-paths and the woodlands; discovered one by one the villages and hamlets; made friends of poachers and foes of keepers; and enjoyed a kind of Richard Jefferies boyhood in which holidays coincided with seasons and each season had its special delights. Easter holidays were birds'-nesting holidays (curlews and redshanks on the Ham; plovers on the ploughed land; finches in the hedgerows; whitethroats in the nettles; magpies and hawks in the highwood on the hill!) Summer holidays, long and leisurely, were divided between fishing and butterfly-hunting, swimming and “messing about in boats.” At Christmas we followed the hounds on foot, skated on the frozen floods, learned to shoot rabbits (and other game) with .22 rifles, went ferreting with farmers, fished for pike.