Authors: Henry Williamson
Closing the journal, he swallowed bread, cheese, and pickled onions and went on with his novel. About two thousand words had flowed from his pen when he heard Julian’s footfalls.
“There’s a dance at Turnstone, Phil, and I suggest we both go,” he said through the open window. “And I’ve a surprise for you. To whom do you think I have been talking in the pub? J. D. Woodford!”
“What, J. D. Woodford down here?”
“Yes. I said to him, ‘Oh then you know Phillip Maddison—my friend, whose first novel you recently read for Hollins? He’s only a few yards away, writing a sequel to that masterpiece of romantic inexperience.’ J. D. Woodford’s reaction was most amusing. ‘As a matter of fact, dear boy,’ he replied with almost unseemly haste, ‘since a toss I took in the hunting field six months ago, my memory has been liable to go phut at any moment. That’s why I’m down here in South Devon, doctor’s orders, Channel air recuperation and all that, you know. Keep my incognito, I don’t want it to be known in the very least, don’t you know, that I’m J. D. Woodford, author of the
Jacob’s
Ladder
trilogy. Call me Porky, dear boy, everyone calls me Porky’.”
“You’re making it up.”
“I swear I’m not!”
“What’s he like?”
“A medium-sized man, with Alpine-shaped head, buck teeth, Charlie Chaplin moustache, and eyebrows like stag-beetles. Obviously a very great lover of nature!”
“Well, J. D. Woodford must have disguised himself effectively from a long-headed Nordic type! I really don’t want to meet this swanker.”
“Oh, he’s an amusing enough fellow, Maître. His one idea is to make as many people as possible tight in the shortest possible time. By God, Phillip, I’m damned glad I came down here! It’s a great place! Come along, old boy, come to the dance! It’s a poor heart that never rejoices.”
“I’m no good at dancing.”
“Nor am I. Come on, ‘all is experience’!”
Phillip looked at Julian’s face with disfavour. Obviously Julian had been reading his journal; also he didn’t want to prop up a bar and have to swallow cold beer. It gave him indigestion, and he was still afraid of another haemorrhage. Even so, it might be fun at a village hop. Jumping up, he put on his old trilby hat, decorated with shot-holes from his gun one afternoon when the two of them, after rabbits, had amused themselves shooting at the hat flung in the air.
“I’ll catch you up, Julian.”
His mackintosh cape hung on the nail in the flimsy staircase door, made of the cheapest wood and painted with the cheapest paint, putty-coloured, by the landlord. Fastening the cape—War Surplus Disposals Board cavalry—over his shoulders, he hastened after Julian in the cloudy starlight, taking deep breaths of the cool air.
The Social Club room, where the dance was being held, was built above some small shops. It was reached by wooden steps, protected by a hand rail. Going up, Phillip saw through the open door a large oil-lamp hanging from the ceiling and shedding dusty yellow light on the red faces of the dancers. Older people sat sedately on forms and chairs round the walls. The Lancers was in progress; dust arose with occasional laughing shrieks of girls. At one end of the room a youth with long hair thumped upon a piano with yellow keys; at the other end a trestle table was laden with cream and jam cut-rounds, cakes, bottles of lemonade, tea urn, and a plate with coppers and some small silver lying in it. Phillip had half-expected a band with flute, fiddle, and old-fashioned serpent, as in
Under
the
Greenwood
Tree.
Across the road two ponies were tethered to the iron ring in the wall of the inn. Looking around, he realized that he was an object of some amusement; youths had come to the door, he saw grins and heard tittering; and pretending to be unaware of them by a casual scrutiny of faces, went down to find Julian. At the bottom of the steps a shortish man nearly bumped into him. The stranger greeted him in the friendliest way, taking his hand and shaking it hard, while exclaiming, “Hullo, dear boy, how are you? Answer’s a lemon, what? What? Laugh and the world laughs with you. Come and have a drink! What, you don’t want one! Oh, rot my dear boy! Weep, and you weep alone! Go to blazes, go on! Come on, my dear boy, over the road and have one!”
The stranger’s friendliness drew Phillip into the bar crowded with men, smoke, loud talk, and the warm air generated by bodies and two oil-lamps. His new acquaintance, wearing a check suit of horsey cut, pushed a way through to the bar, greeting many faces and being greeted with respectful good-fellowship. He called loudly for a pint of beer for Phillip, a double whisky for himself, and drinks for everyone in the room. Julian, pint in hand, stood in one corner, talking to several intently listening men.
“Good luck, dear boy, jolly good luck!” gabbled the new acquaintance, offering a pint of beer. Julian’s description certainly fitted him: buck teeth, bushy black query eyebrows, and a moustache the waxed ends of which stuck up like the horns of a goat.
“You must shave, dear boy,” he burbled. “Of course you must! Goo’ Lor’ yes. Can’t allow you to run about like this, of course not! What, a young chap like you with a beard! To blazes with the idea! Have another! Drink up, get on with the good work! Oh, rot, you haven’t got dyspepsia! Rot, I’m over fifty, dear boy, and have had three wives, and I haven’t had a day’s dyspepsia! Look at me. My motto is, ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you’. Goo’ Lor’, yes! Every time a coconut! Come on, drinks all round, landlord, fill up their glasses like blazes! You’re an author!” he yelled through the din.
“I try to be.”
“Well, no harm in trying, dear boy. None at all. Goo’ Lor’ no! Do you write under your own name? My writing name is not my real name, of course. Goo’ Lor’ no. Staying here incognito, dear boy.”
Seeing Phillip’s remote look he poured a double whisky down his throat, and ordered another, which appeared to give him courage to say, “Naughty boy, telling your friend that you knew J. D. Woodford, and that he had read your book! However, forget it, dear boy, forget it, laugh and the world laughs with you! I’ll gladly help you if I can. Of course I can, gooloryes! Call me Porky, dear boy—that’s my nickname. Forget all about my being a writer. I don’t want it known—goolorno. Reminds me of my toss in the huntin’ field. Lost my memory, gooloryes. Keep the secret, dear boy, and drink up! Go to blazes, of course you will—landlord, another pint! A young fellermelad like you, too! Shave, dear boy, shave! Mustn’t run wild, you know! Goolorno.”
As soon as he could Phillip got away, leaving Porky in the act of greeting someone else. Looking back, he saw a horny hand about to grasp the half-empty glass he had left behind. Entering the dance room as a shrill whistle pierced the noise, he observed a little man in a blue suit stalking up and down the floor, blowing his whistle again as he cried sternly, “Take your partners for the Waltz!”
Standing near a bunch of shy youths against the wall he recognised the girl he had met on Malandine sands during the previous summer with Jack O’Donovan, and made his way to where she was sitting with other girls. “Shall we dance?”
“All right.”
“I hope you’ll forgive my wearing hob-nailed shoes!”
“It’s quite all right.”
“I’m living down here now.”
“I know.”
He told her how he cooked in the large double-cooker, rabbits, bacon, potatoes, pearl barley and onions in the same pot. She said that if he wanted eggs he could always get some at her father’s farm at market price: they were getting eightpence a dozen from the dealers, and he needn’t pay more. After the dance, which ended at midnight, he walked down the village street with her, saying goodnight at the wooden footbridge which led by a back way into the farmhouse.
*
Phillip avoided Porky as often as he could, now that the swallows had come back with blue skies. Not so Julian; and it wasn’t long before Porky refused to have Julian in the furnished cottage at Esperance Cove which he rented for £1 a week. Julian spoke with equal contempt of Porky. Phillip found Porky as difficult as Julian; drink made ordinary conversation impossible. In drink Porky spoke rapidly, disconnectedly, intolerantly, breaking into and ridiculing every remark Phillip tried to make. He imagined that a sensitive and perhaps repressed childhood had caused Porky to boast when he felt free among strangers. But Porky’s alcoholic boastings were boring, for underneath his Bohemian camaraderie he had a limited and conventional outlook.
“Rot, my dear boy, rot! I was a commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in Wales for three years, and you’re talking rot, utter rot! No prisoners were killed after surrendering in battle!”
Another time he posed as a colonel of hussars. Also he had
been in the workhouse for three weeks “on principle” (this to confound a remark Phillip made about the benevolence of the Old Age Pension). He had advised Lord Castleton how to run
The
Daily
Trident,
and also to buy
The
Weekly
Courier
—this after Phillip mentioned that the Chief had disliked Bloom, editor of the Sunday paper on which he had worked.
“Rot, dear boy, you’re talking absolute rot! There never was an editor called Bloom anyway. Don’t boast, dear boy, don’t boast, it doesn’t become you! Calling Castleton, whom I know as well as I know my own face, ‘the Chief!’ As though you were playing Cowboys and Redskins, dear boy! Utter rubbish! And telling Warbeck that you knew J. D. Woodford!”
It was all boring and a waste of life to be with Porky when he was half drunk. Mentioning fox-hunting, Porky flipped his hand in Phillip’s face. “I’ve been a master of hounds before you were born, dear boy! You don’t know a stirrup from a brow-band!”
Phillip could not say anything without Porky either capping it scornfully or dismissing it contemptuously. When not diminishing his reluctant listener Porky would urge Phillip to drink up and get married, “get on with the goo’ work, dear boy, get on with the goo’ work like blazes.” He quoted his own record and age as an example to be followed.
“Brenda, dear girl, will shortly present me with another, my seventh, dear boy! She’s twenty-four, and I’m fifty-one—I get on with the goo’ work, gooloryes.”
In the cottage where once or twice he invited Phillip to supper, Mrs. Tanberry, a gentle quiet woman, seemed perpetually anxious about her husband. The cottage was filled with dogs, which certainly loved their master. Any stray found a home with Porky; he was generous and kind to children, too. Phillip liked him for it; and foolishly tried to give the older man advice not to squander his money in the various pubs. Porky snapped his fingers.
“You’re only a boy, my dear boy, only a boy!”
Sometimes Porky would hire a car and drive around the coast, stopping at one inn after another and paying for drinks all round, and then cashing a cheque. Phillip went with him once, torn from his evening warm brooding over his book. Julian came too; inevitably he and Porky quarrelled: a miserable, worthless evening for Phillip.
The regulars of the pubs Porky visited had only one attitude to this phenomenon: they followed him as they followed a
herring or mullet shoal. Mr. Tanberry was ‘a proper gen’l’m’n’. He was said to be a millionaire. He had won the Calcutta Sweep. He was a brother of the ‘Earl of Cranberry’, and ‘wrote his name different because he wanted to be disguised’. Porky basked in these rumours, he lived them as realities.
“As a matter o’ fac’, dear boy, I was born with the title ‘Honourable’ to my name, but don’t use it. These are democratic days. The war stopped all that nonsense.”
Village folk, Phillip noticed, disregarded spelling: there were three brothers in the village, each spelling his surname differently: Prawle, Paul, and Preel, he told Porky.
“Old custom, dear boy. My ancestor, Sir Walter Rally, spelt his name differently on different occasions, like me. I can’t spell either. No Eton boys could in my day, goolorno!”
“I suppose ‘Tanberry’ is a variation of ‘Cranberry’,” replied Phillip, with a straight face. “I did read somewhere that the Tanberry was used on one of the Knights’ shields in the War of the Roses.”
“That’s right, dear boy. That was where my ancestor was made an earl, as a matter of fact, for saving the king’s life. Only we don’t talk about it in the family, y’ know. Bad form and all that.”
Porky’s remarkable hospitality in the pubs stopped abruptly. One morning, hearing what had happened from Mrs. Crang, Phillip went down to Porky’s cottage in Esperance Cove. There were rumours of scenes in the Anchor Inn, of beer having been thrown in Porky’s face by the landlord’s wife. The constable was seen to call at the cottage. The servant girl had given notice.
A grey and shaky Porky sat in his chair smoking dried tea-leaves and reading
Home
Notes.
The cottage was acrid with smoke, his pregnant wife’s eyes red with weeping. They had a boy with them, child of a former wife, and a little blue-eyed girl who sucked her thumb and stared at Phillip. He realized that the family had no food, no milk for the little girl, so he returned for all the money he had, seven pounds, and gave it to Brenda Tanberry. “Don’t tell Porky,” he said. “It’s for the children, and you.”
“I hardly know how to thank you, Phillip——”
“It’s a present, Brenda, so don’t tell anyone, will you?”
He left after a few minutes, and on going outside to the lane found both the tyres of his motor-bicycle flat, cut by a knife. He pushed the Norton home, belt off for ease.
That evening when he went to the Ring of Bells for a pint of mild, hoping to read over his chapter quietly, Porky arrived. The bar was soon half-full, for word had gone round. The coal strike crisis was on. Porky let it be known that his order for the new motor-car from Queensbridge had been cancelled, owing to “those damned miners”, and he was buying a horse and trap instead; though what was the connexion between a motor-car and miners in Porky’s mind was not clear.
Soon Porky was calling Phillip a “damned miner” because he did not agree with Porky’s remedy for the crisis, which was to “shoot every dam’ miner and then send the rest back to work”. Porky grew furious as he declaimed against Cook, the miners’ leader; he would “tear his intestines out, wind them round his neck, stamp on them, and grind them into the dust.”