Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories

by
H. E. BATES

And Other Stories

 

 

 

A Note from the Family

Foreword by Lesley Pearse

The Enchantress

Lost Ball

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

The Place where Shady Lay

The Yellow Crab

Daughters of the Village

Where the Cloud Breaks

Mrs Eglantine

Thelma

The Snow Line

The Spring Hat

An Island Princess

Bonus Story
The Grace Note

 

A Note on the Author

My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel
The Darling Buds of May
, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

My grandfather's short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them – especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets – a new lease of life.

There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates's most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as
The Mill
and
Dulcima,
to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler', which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the
Guardian
in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air', a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

If you would like to know more about my grandfather's work I encourage you to visit the
H.E. Bates Companion
– a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates's publications, can be found. I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

Tim Bates, 2015

 

We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates's short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes – you can sign up to the H. E. Bates's mailing list
here
. When you sign up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

I have always believed that H.E. Bates was the absolute master of short story writing. He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus world would stay with you long after you'd finished the story.

When I first started writing I tried my hand at short stories, assuming quite wrongly it would be easier than attempting a book. Bates was my guiding light; there appeared to be a simplicity about his work that I sought to emulate. I did get a few short stories accepted by magazines, but they could never be in his league. I certainly never created anything as lovely as 'The Watercress Girl'. Did any writer before or since? I think I found it in a magazine and read it curled up in my aunt's spare room one wet school holiday and then went on to rush to the library to find more of his work.
Fair Stood the Wind for France
was the first book I borrowed and I was totally hooked on his work, but it was always the short stories I really admired the most.

 

Lesley Pearse, 2015

Nearly fifty years ago I knew her as a rather plump, fair-skinned child with eyes of brilliant hyacinth blue and long ribbonless blonde hair that hung half way down her back in curls.

Her mother was a gaunt, hungry faced, prematurely aged woman who, with sickly yellow eyes sunk far into her head behind steel-rimmed spectacles, treadled feverishly all day and half the night at a sewing machine, in a black dress and apron, closing boot uppers, in the dirty window of a little house in one of the narrow yards we used as short cuts at the railway end of the town. Her father was an ex-pug grown coarse and fat who worked little, boozed a lot and spent most of his time in a pub called
The Waterloo
, re-telling for friends and strangers alike the story of how—incredibly as a light-weight—he had won impermanent fame and a silver belt as a champion twenty years before.

On Sundays her mother skulked furtively to Methodist Chapel, wearing a black dress that might well have been the one she worked in, an old black straw hat without trimmings and black button boots worn badly down at the heel, looking like the poorest of the poor. In a town like Evensford, where
boots and shoes are made, even the poor have no way of acquiring public derision more swiftly than to be seen in boots or shoes that need heeling badly. It is not merely a point of honour not to do such things; it incurs a sharp communal scorn. But no one felt either scorn or derision for Mrs Jackson. Nor did anyone ever seem to know the cause of her state of perpetual mourning, but as the years went past I guessed—correctly—that it was not mourning at all. She was merely saving for Bertha.

The yard in which they lived was no more than a slum alley eight or nine feet wide and only those who lived there knew what went on behind the narrow backways that, bounded by fearsome little privies on either side, were no more than naked asphalt squares from which the fences had been ripped down. That stretch of the town, low down by the station, was called The Pit. To come from The Pit was the social equivalent of having leprosy. Sometimes a deaf mute, a scrawny wild-eyed man of thirty or so, stood guarding the upper end of it, making the noises of a caged animal and spitting at passers-by. It was a place of loafers playing crown-and-anchor under smoky walls, of yelling women in perpetual curling rags and men's caps who leered down to
The Waterloo
with beer jugs in their hands and made twice-weekly visits, with rattling prams, to pop-shops.

On Mondays Bertha's mother went to the pop-shop too; on Saturdays she redeemed whatever she had pawned. It is my guess that she went about in apparently perpetual mourning only because whatever clothes she otherwise possessed were in almost eternal pawn. And they were there because of Bertha.

Even as early as these days they started calling Bertha the princess. At ten she was already big for her age. She had already a clean, splendid sumptuous bloom about her. Her
eyes were most wonderfully clear and brilliant, with a great touch of calm and candid pride about them. Her hair was magnificent. It is quite common to see young girls with hair of palest bleached yellow and of extraordinary lightness in texture, but Bertha was the only child I ever saw whose hair was the colour of thistledown and of exactly the same lovely insubstantial airy quality.

She was always beautifully dressed. It used to be said that her mother, sitting up into the small hours or surreptitiously working on Sunday afternoons, made all her dresses for her, but years later I met a woman, one of two sisters, the proprietress of a very good class dress shop at the other end of the town, who said:

‘Oh! no. Bertha's clothes all came from here. We made them for her, my sister and I. And her underclothes. I suppose it would surprise you to know that that child never had anything but pillow lace on her petticoats? And always paid for.'

At thirteen she already looked like a girl of sixteen or seventeen. She was tall, with full sloping shoulders and a firm high bust. Her legs were the sort of legs that make men turn round in the street, at least once if not twice, and she had a certain languid way of swinging her arms, with a backward graceful pull, as she walked. All this time her mother sat at the little window in the yard, treadling with sick desperation, almost insanely, at the sewing machine, and her father sat in
The Waterloo
, working his way through the chronicles of his history as a light-weight. You never saw them together.

At fourteen she put her hair up. There was a good deal of it—it had been her mother's eternal pride never to cut it at all—and now, not so light in colour, though still very blonde and airy in texture, it made her seem an inch or two taller, giving her better proportions.

By this time she was working in a boot factory. In those days women went to work in the oldest clothes they could find, pretty shabbily sometimes and often in the sort of thin black apron that Bertha's mother wore, but Bertha went to the factory exactly as she had previously gone to school: with her own impeccable quality, beautifully, fastidiously dressed.

Already, by now, she looked like a young woman of twenty and already, people began to say, you could see all the old, eternal danger signs. It was only a question of time before girls of sensational early maturity found themselves in trouble, disgraced and tasting the fruits of bitter unlearned lessons. Girls of fourteen who went out of their way to look like women of twenty, dealing in the deliberate coinage of voluptuous attractions, had only themselves to blame if they bought what they asked for. The time had come for Bertha's fall.

Just under three years later she astounded everybody by suddenly getting married—quite undisgraced—to a retired leather dresser with a modest income, a most respectable Edwardian house enclosed by an orchard of apple and pear trees and a taste for driving out in a landau, in straw hat and cream alpaca suit, on summer afternoons.

William James Sherwood was a neat, courteous, decorous man of the old school, very gentlemanly and of quiet habits; and the whole thing was a sensation. No one could say how it happened.

‘But she comes from The Pit!' they said. ‘She's from The Pit! From
there
. And seventeen. How do you suppose it happened? What possessed him?'

When a man of seventy marries a girl of seventeen who is remarkably mature, fastidious and beautiful for her age it never seems to occur to anyone that all that has possessed him is a firm dose of taste, enterprise and common sense. Consequently
it did not occur to anyone that William Sherwood might have made, in Bertha, a good bargain for himself.

‘But she's from The Pit!' they kept saying. ‘She works in a factory. And the way she walks. The way she fancies herself. She isn't his kind. She can't be. Look who she comes from—the poorest of the poor. Her mother scraping and saving at shoe-work, her old man cooked every day in
The Waterloo.'

Presently Bertha was to be seen driving out with William James Sherwood in a laudau on fine summer afternoons. By the way she sat there, upright, composed, holding a parasol over her head, one hand resting lightly and decorously on the side of the carriage, you could have supposed that she had rarely done anything else but drive in landaus for the better part of her seventeen years. But there was something else still more surprising and more interesting about her. She looked supremely content and happy.

For the next three years she went on matching herself, her ways and her appearance to William James Sherwood. She behaved more like a woman contentedly settled in her middle thirties who had been born and brought up in a quiet country house, of good family, than a girl still in her teens who had been brought up in The Pit, on pawn-shop bread. Sometimes in summer you would see her not only driving out in the landau but walking, quietly, slowly and in thoughtful conversation, with William James Sherwood, in the orchard of apples and pears. They looked like a couple locked in the most harmonious tranquillity. It was easy to see that he was fond of her. His ways had obviously become her ways. In the swiftest and most unobtrusive fashion the daughter of The Pit, the child of the coarse ex-pug, had become a good wife, leaving all trace of any other self behind.