The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (20 page)

Looking back, I see that I have described my Aunt Tibby's pub, garden, food and drink without having described my Aunt Tibby herself. In some ways this is rather difficult; in another way, not. For in many ways my Aunt Tibby was, strangely enough, not at all unlike an Uncle Silas in skirts.

I do not at all mean to suggest by this that she was a misshapen old female rapscallion who ate too much, drank too much, told too many lies or was fond of slap and tickle in the bar. She was in every way above reproach in these things. I simply mean that she gave the same impression of many-sidedness, craftiness, wisdom and that deep native cunning that was his charm. I simply wish to convey that she was, like him, a very deep one indeed.

She was a fairly tall woman, angular, long-armed and rather iron-clad about the bust. I cannot remember ever having seen her in anything but black. Her hair was black too and was invariably scraped up into a kind of big oval pincushion on the top of her head. Her dresses always had high lace collars, boned at the side, and the only luxury in the way of ornament that she ever permitted herself was a round silver brooch at her neck.

You might well expect from this that her face would be one of exceptional pallor, high resolve and severity. In fact it was a very deceptive face. It was, in the first place,
very red. It flamed with myriads of tiny tangled crimson veins and its mouth was sharp and thin. Its deception lay in the fact that because of its redness you expected it to be jolly and because of the thinness of its mouth you expected it to be severe.

The truth was that it was both severe and jolly. The mouth appeared to be full of the sternest unspoken reprimands. It was only when you looked at the bright clear blue eyes that you saw that they were almost constantly laughing. Then you saw that all the myriad crimson wrinkles of her face seemed to be laughing too. And sometimes, to your great astonishment, she suddenly winked at you.

I must here remove what I feel may be one further mistaken impression about her. She was not abstemious. Like my Uncle Silas she very much liked a tot of this or that. She was very partial to a drop of whisky. Under the iron-clad bust she was ripe and warm. She took a drink with her customers and liked a joke at the bar.

But she was also a disciplinarian and what she would never permit, as my Uncle Silas discovered, was any monkey business. She always insisted, for instance, that her barmaids were well-spoken, clean, good to look at and well behaved.

‘I like a girl with pride about her,' she would say. ‘I'll have no sluts here. I like my girls to be looked at, but they'll behave themselves or they'll know the reason why.'

My Uncle Silas was never a very frequent visitor to The Haymakers, and after the end of the eighteen-nineties, in fact, he ceased to be a visitor at all.

Why he ceased to be a visitor was one of those things which, for reasons best known to himself, he did not choose to tell me. My Aunt Tibby told me instead.

‘About that time I had a very pretty little maid named Thirza,' she said. ‘Rather an unusual name, but then she was an unusual girl. Came from a very nice family, four boys and three girls, all the girls very dark and very nice looking. Thirza was the eldest. Dark glossy hair, dark eyes, very nice little figure and very capable hands.'

The reason for my Aunt Tibby's mention of the hands was because, as she explained, the girl was a very capable cook.

‘You get girls that are good behind the bar and nice to the gentlemen and so on,' my Aunt Tibby said to me, ‘but cooking they can't abide. But Thirza wasn't only good behind the bar and nice to the gentlemen. She could cook. She wanted to cook. She wanted to learn.'

‘A treasure.'

‘A treasure,' my aunt said. ‘Worth her weight in gold. Quick as a little linnet. In fact that's what she looked like—quick and bright as a linnet and just about as nice as could be. I wouldn't have lost her for the world.'

Another remarkable thing about the girl, my Aunt Tibby said, was the speed with which she would pick up things, and soon my aunt was teaching her to make the famous raised game pies, the Mrs. River's Hunting Irish Stew, the eel pie, the chicken pudding, the cheese cakes and all the rest.

‘And then one day,' she said, ‘I think it would be the latter part of the summer of '98, I'll be burned if your Uncle Silas didn't drop in one evening.'

‘Trouble?'

‘Not immediately,' she said. ‘You know Silas. He thinks about women a lot, but he thinks of his belly first. I knew what he was after. He wanted to gorge himself on home-brewed and game pie. I used to keep a fair drop of
home-brewed in those days. It came from the farm up the hill and it was very powerful.'

‘Game pie in the summer?'

She stared at me very severely.

‘You'd be surprised,' she said, ‘how often pheasants break their necks on telegraph wires.'

And I could have sworn she winked at me.

‘Well, he stayed quite a while that night,' she said, ‘gorging himself on cold pie and home-brewed and generally getting sauced up, but it wasn't until he was nearly ready to go home that he caught sight of Thirza. She'd been in the kitchen all afternoon and evening, getting things ready for a big fishing party we had next day.'

I asked her how my Uncle Silas had reacted to his first meeting with this delightful creature.

‘Uncommon quiet,' she said. ‘Too quiet. I didn't like it at all.'

She went on to say something about still waters running deep and it was on the tip of my tongue to make a poorish pun about still Rivers running deep too when she said:

‘He was back next day.'

‘More game pie?'

‘And he was back the next,' she said. ‘And the next. And the next. The reprobate. The old rascal.'

‘You must have been getting very short of pheasants by this time,' I said, and she gave me one of her sharpest, severest looks.

‘Sometimes,' she said, ‘I think you're a chip off the old block. You've got that same artful, mischievous look in your eye.'

I accepted this flattering comparison with my Uncle Silas in silence.

‘On the fourth visit,' she said, ‘I caught him pinching her.'

‘Fourth visit?' I said. ‘Not only uncommonly quiet. But uncommonly slow.'

‘I caught her sitting on his lap in the cellar,' she said, ‘and him sitting on a barrel of home-brewed. Very merry and bright and saying he was going to marry the girl.'

‘Marry the girl?' I said and I started to say something about how remarkably well my Uncle Silas must have been enjoying himself when she became very severe again.

‘I could see myself losing a very, very good girl,' she said. ‘One way or another.'

I did not suggest that if I knew my Uncle Silas I knew which way that would be. I merely asked what sort of shindy she'd kicked up about operations in the cellar and how soon she'd got somebody to throw him out of the pub.

She was most affronted.

‘Somebody?' she said. ‘I can throw them out myself when the time comes, thank you! There's never been one I couldn't throw out yet.'

And she gave me one of those half-stern, half-winking looks that were part of her formidable, baffling charm.

‘No: I didn't throw him out,' she said. ‘I invited him back the next Sunday.'

‘More game pie?'

‘“Silas,” I said to him, “if you're going to marry the girl you'd better taste her cooking. You can't marry a girl without tasting her cooking. Your belly knows better than that. Come back on Sunday and Thirza shall cook you a pie.”'

My Aunt Tibby went on to tell me how my Uncle Silas, proud and strutting as a peacock, came back the following Sunday; how she filled him up with all the home-brewed he wanted; and how at last, in the evening, she had him sitting down in the parlour, waiting for his pie.

‘“Made and baked by Thirza,” I said to him when I put it down. “That'll show you whether she can cook or not.”'

It was, it seemed, a very large and handsome pie.

‘Pheasant?' I said.

‘Well, it was very rich,' she said. ‘I'll say that. And so was Silas's face when he took the top off.'

She regarded me for a moment with that almost prim sternness of hers, without the flicker of a smile.

‘I justly forget,' she said, ‘whether it had four toads and eight frogs in it or four frogs and eight toads. Or whether it was three live eels and two slow worms or——'

Suddenly she broke off and lowered the lid of her left
eye with crafty swiftness, giving a pained sigh that reminded me so much of my Uncle Silas when the tales were tallest and the burden of telling the truth was too much to bear.

‘Of course,' she said, ‘that was many years before your time.'

My Uncle Silas was very fond of fishing. It was an occupation that helped to keep him from thinking too much about work and also about how terribly hard it was.

If you went through the bottom of my Uncle Silas's garden, past the gooseberry bushes, the rhubarb and the pig-sties, you came to a path that went alongside a wood where primroses grew so richly in spring that they blotted out the floor of oak and hazel leaves. In summer wild strawberries followed the primroses and by July the meadows beyond the wood were frothy with meadowsweet, red clover and the seed of tall soft grasses.

At the end of the second meadow a little river, narrow
in parts and bellying out into black deep pools in others, ran along between willows and alders, occasional clumps of dark high reeds and a few wild crab trees. Some of the pools, in July, would be white with water lilies, and snakes would swim across the light flat leaves in the sun. Moorhens talked to each other behind the reeds and water rats would plop suddenly out of sight under clumps of yellow monkey flower.

Here in this little river, my Uncle Silas used to tell me when I was a boy, ‘the damn pike used to be as big as hippopottomassiz.'

‘Course they ain't so big now,' he would say. ‘Nor yit the tench. Nor yit the perch. Nor yit the——'

‘Why aren't they so big?'

‘Well, I'm a-talkin' about fifty years agoo. Sixty year agoo. Very near seventy years agoo.'

‘If they were so big then,' I said, ‘all that time ago, they ought to be even bigger now.'

‘Not the ones we catched,' he said. ‘They ain't there.'

You couldn't, as you see from this, fox my Uncle Silas very easily, but I was at all times a very inquisitive, persistent little boy.

‘How big were the tench?' I said.

‘Well, I shall allus recollect one as me and Sammy Twizzle caught,' he said. ‘Had to lay it in a pig trough to carry it home.'

‘And how big were the perch?'

‘Well,' he said, rolling his eye in recollection, in that way he had of bringing the wrinkled lid slowly down over it, very like a fish ancient in craftiness himself, ‘I don' know as I can jistly recollect the size o' that one me and Arth Sugars nipped out of a September morning one
time. But I do know as I cleaned up the back fin and used it for horse comb for about twenty year.'

‘Oh! Uncle Silas,' I would say, ‘let's go fishing! Let's go and see if they're still as big as hippopottomassiz!'

But it was not always easy, once my Uncle Silas had settled under the trees at the end of the garden on a hot July afternoon, to persuade him that it was worth walking across two meadows just to see if the fish were as big as they used to be. Nevertheless I was, as I say, a very inquisitive, persistent little boy and finally my Uncle Silas would roll over, take the red handkerchief off his face and grunt:

‘If you ain't the biggest whittle-breeches I ever knowed I'll goo t'Hanover. Goo an' git the rod and bring a bit o' dough. They'll be no peace until you do, will they?'

‘Shall I bring the rod for you too?'

‘
Rod
?' he said. ‘For
me. Rod
?' He let fall over his eye a tremulous bleary fish-like lid of scorn. ‘When me and Sammy Twizzle went a-fishin, all we had to catch 'em with wur we bare hands and a drop o' neck-oil.'

‘What's neck-oil?'

‘Never you mind,' he said. ‘You git the rod and I'll git the neck-oil.'

And presently we would be walking out of the garden, past the wood and across the meadows, I carrying the rod, the dough and perhaps a piece of caraway cake in a paper bag, my Uncle Silas waddling along in his stony-coloured corduroy trousers, carrying the neck-oil.

Sometimes I would be very inquisitive about the neck-oil, which was often pale greenish-yellow, rather the colour of cowslip, or perhaps of parsnips, and sometimes purplish-red, rather the colour of elderberries, or perhaps of blackberries or plums.

On one occasion I noticed that the neck-oil was very light in colour, almost white, or perhaps more accurately like straw-coloured water.

‘Is it a new sort of neck-oil you've got?' I said.

‘New flavour.'

‘What is it made of?'

‘Taters.'

‘And you've got two bottles today,' I said.

‘Must try to git used to the new flavour.'

‘And do you think,' I said, ‘we shall catch a bigger fish now that you've got a new kind of neck-oil?'

‘Shouldn't be a bit surprised, boy,' he said, ‘if we don't git one as big as a donkey.'

That afternoon it was very hot and still as we sat under the shade of a big willow, by the side of a pool that seemed to have across it an oiled black skin broken only by minutest winks of sunlight when the leaves of the willow parted softly in gentle turns of air.

‘This is the place where me and Sammy tickled that big 'un out,' my Uncle Silas said.

‘The one you carried home in a pig trough?'

‘That's the one.'

I said how much I too should like to catch one I could take home in a pig trough and my Uncle Silas said: