Portrait of Elmbury (10 page)

“It's a bad job, Mr. Jeffs, a bad job.”

“Aye, 'tis a bad job”; and Mr. Jeffs shrugged his shoulders and accepted it, as he accepted bad seasons, floods in haytime, or thunderstorms at harvest which cost him five hundred pounds. But he did not wait to see the slaughterer begin his grim business; he turned away suddenly, muttered something we could not hear, and with bowed head made his way back towards the house.

The cause of the disease was a virus; but nobody knew how the virus was spread. There was one theory that foreign straw, used in the packing of imported goods, brought it to the farms; another that it came on the feet of starlings and other small birds which in the autumn conduct mass migrations from Holland and Belgium across the North Sea to Britain. Once the virus was planted in the soil or grass any one of a dozen agents might bear it elsewhere and spread it about the countryside: rooks, stray dogs, night-prowling foxes, far-wandering hedgehogs, the tyres of the corn-merchant's lorry and, of course, man himself—the farmer when he went to market, the cattle-dealer travelling from farm to farm, the poacher who knew no boundaries, the squire's guests at the shoot, even the vet himself.

Therefore, as soon as an outbreak was confirmed, the Ministry's experts must carry out a very thorough piece of detective work. What stock had been bought or sold recently, and where had it come from? Who had visited the farmer during the previous week?—A commercial traveller selling cake? Good; his movements would be investigated. Farmer Jackson from The Mythe?—We must keep an eye on his cattle. The Squire's agent,
looking at the gates?—We must find out where he went afterwards. And so on.

Sometimes these inquiries had embarrassing or comic consequences. The son of a farmer whose cattle got the plague had been secretly courting a neighbouring yeoman's daughter whom his parents disapproved of. Torn between fear of the Ministry's inspector, fear of his own father, and fear of the girl's father (whose cattle he might have infected) he eventually confessed; and, thinking that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, married the girl into the bargain.

But there was precious little comedy during that dark depressing winter, which in memory smells of disinfectant and burning flesh. The post-war prosperity which had made our farmers rich now suddenly ended; there had been two bad seasons in succession, followed by this plague of foot-and-mouth. The closing of the markets froze whatever assets the farmers had; and private dealing ceased too, for no stock could be moved on the roads unless it was going straight to the butcher. Moreover, for the first time perhaps, farmers were not as a matter of course welcomed on each other's farms; who can tell, each thought, but that
he
has the scourge, unbeknownst, and brings it on to me upon his boots? So the flow of money ceased and soon the people of Elmbury found themselves face to face with a severe local depression. Tradesmen had bad debts, the first since the war; bank managers wore long faces; dealers, having nothing to deal in, took to drink. Even my uncle's firm, which had stood like a rock through many economic storms, began to feel the effects of this one. Our turnover at markets had been two or three thousand pounds a week; there wasn't much profit in the foot-and-mouth valuations, and there was certainly no pleasure as we went upon our grim errands through the muddy lanes, with the stench of burning always in the air, and always in the evening the glowing ashes of the fires dotted along the horizon, like beacons warning of invasion.

But this invasion came stealthily, invisible, unheard, unheralded, as random as the winds. That wheeling flock of starlings drooping to roost in Towbury Wood might be the
carriers of it. The red fox slinking down the hedgerow as he set out upon a mating prowl might take the virus twenty miles in a night on his soft pads or between his toes. Even Poor Tom, the half-wit who was trying to empty our rivers, might bear it upon his feet as he shuffled with his leaky bucket towards some distant brook.

Partly as a result of this epidemic, partly through national and world causes which we knew nothing of, a cold wind of economic depression began to blow through the vale; Elmbury felt it too, the townspeople as well as the country-folk turned up their collars, put their hands in their pockets—and found nothing there. Elmbury had no independent industries; it was simply a market or clearing-house for the produce of the farmers on the one hand and the goods of the industrial cities on the other. It bought corn, cattle, sheep, pigs, eggs, butter and garden produce, consumed them, or distributed them to the big towns; it sold in return agricultural machinery, cars, lorries, cattle-cake and the various domestic goods which its tradesmen obtained from the manufacturers. But eighty per cent of these goods were bought by the farmers and others who got their living from the soil; theirs was the only real purchasing power, because they were the only real producers. In fact Elmbury was a perfect example of a “country-town”; because without the country it would have perished.

As we have seen, it had no industries that were not directly connected (e.g. flour-milling) with agriculture; it had no considerable population of rentiers, for it was not a residential town, and the retired colonels and rich widows preferred to live in more fashionable places; and it had not yet discovered its one valuable and “invisible” asset, the traffic in tourists, nor was it self-conscious enough, in 1924, to exploit it.

So when the farmers lacked ready money, there was scarcely a man or woman in Elmbury whose livelihood was not affected.
The doctors, the dentists, the vet found that their bills were not being paid; the publicans sold less beer; the ironmonger's premises remained overstocked with tools and implements which he could not sell; the draper was the poorer because farmers' wives bought fewer new clothes; grocer, tobacconist, butcher, took less money and had less to spend in their turn; and Mr. Tempest the bank manager received anxious letters from his head office inquiring why so many of his clients' accounts showed balances in red.

'Twas all the fault of the Foot-and-Mouth, people said; and blamed, as usual, the Ministry of Agriculture. We did not know, then, that there were other and more profound causes of the trade depression, connected with sterling and the gold standard and international markets; we did not know that the wind of which we felt the sharp edge already was a mere zephyr compared with the blast which would soon wither us. We were blissfully unaware of the storm that was brewing in London and New York and Amsterdam; so we put all our troubles down to the autumn epidemic of Foot-and-Mouth, and looked hopefully to the spring.

Though my uncle and his partners went about with grave faces, and shook their heads over their December balance-sheet, we clerks were nothing loth to be idle, and spent the time very pleasantly sowing a winter crop of wild oats.

There were two other youths articled to my uncle, tough and happy-go-lucky fellows who mistrusted me at first because it had been reported to them that I had been to a public school, was probably lahdidah and sissy, didn't drink beer, and wore plus fours instead of the conventional breeches and gaiters. Sure enough I arrived in the hateful plus fours; and it was also true that at the age of seventeen I wasn't very familiar with pubs. Both matters were soon put right. I bought some breeches which were even yellower, and some gaiters which were even shinier,
than theirs; and to match both breeches and gaiters a horse (eight pound ten from a friendly dealer) which although spavined and gone in the wind was possessed of a flashy and exhibitionist nature, and bucked me through the plate-glass window of Mr. Tanner the greengrocer the first time I rode it.

As for pubs, by Christmas time there were very few in Elmbury or in the neighbouring villages which I didn't know. On Boxing Day we drank our way from the office to a dance at Brensham Village Hall which involved stops at the George, the Shakespeare, the Black Bear, the White Bear, the Trumpet, the Cross Keys, the Fox and Hounds, the Royal Oak and the Railway.

It was a useful apprenticeship which I served with these two merry ruffians; for I am sure it is a good thing to learn about drinking when you are young. At seventeen you are an experimentalist; and your methods are empirical. You learn by trial and error, you make yourself sick, you make yourself sozzled, but you're very unlikely to make yourself a drunkard. Not so the man who has remained a teetotaller until he is thirty. He has been brought up in the belief that drink is an evil, and that it is only tolerable if taken “as a medicine” or “in strict moderation.” So at some time when the winds of the world blow unkindly about him, chilling his thin teetotaller's blood, he takes a drop “as medicine” and perhaps he takes two or three drops because after all that is “strict moderation”; but—mark this carefully—he is too old and too set in his ways to undertake empirical experiments, he hasn't the guts to get roaring drunk to see what happens. Instead he applies reason to the matter, and takes each day just as much as he thinks will “do him good” (biologically the right amount to do him the maximum harm). He's afraid of the stuff; and the man who is afraid of it is already halfway to a toper's grave. He discovers that it takes a little more “to do him good” every month or every week; and down he goes to his dreary end, without even having had his money's worth of fun.

So I thank the good god Dionysus for the company of Stan and Geoff, those rip-roaring sons of yeomen who taught me the rights of the matter when I was seventeen. The worst consequence
that happened was a spill off the back of a motor-bike when we skidded at forty round a sharp corner slick with frost. I was thrown slap into some milk-churns which were standing on the grass verge; and I daresay I should have hurt myself if I had been sober.

Village dances were minor Bacchanalia, and would probably have shocked the Bright Young Things of Mayfair who at that time were very much in the news. It is a fallacy that country boys and girl dance the polka and sing folk songs; the favourite dance of the 1924 season was the Charleston, and Ern, the leader of the band, who also played centre forward in the football team, sang hot jazz. As for drink, there was the pub next door; and our village virgins weren't too finicky to enter its little bar nor too unsophisticated to drink gin and Italian.

My memory of the affairs is made up of noise, kisses, and warm sticky hands. But they weren't just village hops; a dance was an occasion, and the farmers' sons wore tails and white waistcoats, the girls wore their best and most exiguous frocks. It was the accepted custom towards the end of the evening to lead your heart's fancy outside, snow or fine, and to walk with her down the dark lane where you might or might not find a car to sit in. (For most of the young men came on motor-bikes, nor was it very unconventional to ride to the dance on horseback, as I did before I'd saved up enough money to buy an old Triumph). The astonishing thing, remembered in tranquillity, is the fortitude of those village maidens, who would face frost and blizzard in a thin scrap of a dress all for the sake of a little inept and rough-and-tumble love-making.

The dozen or so little villages that lay in a circle about Elmbury were as planets to her sun. Economically, they were sub-markets, smaller distributing centres for goods, smaller receiving centres for produce; but each was a social entity nevertheless, each had built around its church, pub, shop, and village hall a local tradition. All shared the common tradition of Elmbury; each possessed its own individuality and character, as the different sons of one mother.

Thus Brensham was the cricket-village. As long as men could remember its village green had been rolled and mown till it looked every summer like a billiard cloth. If you passed through Brensham after work in the spring you'd scarcely fail to see old Briggs the blacksmith rolling the pitch, and some of the village boys loosening up their bowling-arms or knocking a ball about the nets. Each Brensham generation gave one or two professionals to the county team; and often you would see a Harlequin cap on the village green, as Mr. Chorlton, standing behind the net, taught the yokels how to slam a loose ball round to leg.

Yet the neighbouring village, Kinderton, had no cricket team and was noted for darts and drunkenness, which it practised simultaneously. The Men of Overfield had a tradition of poaching; there was a permanent gipsy camp on their common, and a gipsy admixture in their blood—dark and sombre men, they were, who would never tell you whither they were going nor whence they had come. Dykeham folk were fishermen and liars, to a man; they had a stuffed pike in their village pub which they said weighed twenty pounds and had been caught on a minnow; yet it was common knowledge, outside Dykeham, that the creature had weighed just twelve and a half pounds and had been picked up dead after the draining of Dykeham Pond thirty years ago.

The Tirley people were famous boatmen; as indeed they must needs be, for their low-lying village was half-flooded for three months of the year; they were Rough Islanders indeed.
At Tredington, which was river-rounded too, the people grew osiers and were handy at making baskets and wickerware. The village of Warren was noted for fair women and also for promiscuity; its illegitimate birth-rate was the highest in the county, a fact of which it was proud and boastful. Flensham was well known for its footballers; Marsham by reason of the fact that every cottager possessed a pig; Oxton for wheelwrights; Lower Hampton for woodmen; and Adam's Norton for singing— everybody sang in Adam's Norton, its church choir often came to Elmbury and sang in the Abbey, while in the Salutation Inn (which was the curious name of the Adam's Norton pub) you could hardly hear yourself speak for the hollering of old songs and new songs and particularly of bawdy songs, which the wicked old men of the village had invented and matched to hymn-tunes and handed down to their sons.