Portrait of Elmbury (11 page)

There was only one of the satellite villages which seemed to have no individuality or character of its own. This was Partingdon, which possessed a rich and generous squire. He ran the cricket club, the football, the village whist drives and had built the cricket pavilion and the village hall. His wife organised the Women's Institute and the Mothers' Union. His gardeners mowed the cricket field.

In Partingdon every well-behaved person was certain of employment; because the Squire employed everybody on his estate. He also housed them, arranged their recreation, and pensioned them when they were old.

There were no ill-behaved persons in Partingdon.

Yet this ideal village, where nobody ever got drunk or had illegitimate babies or sang bawdy sons or made revolutionary statements in the pub, seemed somehow unnatural and we always felt vaguely uncomfortable if we went there to play cricket or darts. It was the same kind of uncomfortable feeling which one has when one visits a hospital; Partingdon was a sterilised sort of place. “ 'Twould give a man the willies to live in Partingdon,” was the kind of remark one heard afterwards. The well-meaning paternalism had somehow emasculated it; and to go from thence to Adam's Norton just three miles away was like passing from a
prim chintzy drawing-room tea party into the company of merry men at a good pub.

The landlord of the Salutation Inn at Adam's Norton was a small merry man who reminded you sometimes of a towselled fox-terrier and sometimes, in his less decorous moments, of a minor and mischievous imp. His pub was noted not only for singing but for huge fires, which on winter nights he stoked continually so that people remarked that he was getting into practice. His reply was always the same: “I believes in being comfortable. You're here to-day and to-morrow you're bloody dyud!”

He had a moronic cousin who helped him in the bar, a good-natured oaf with a tremendous body and a tremendous voice for singing. This oaf was called Herb; and the landlord tells how once he went off to a Licensed Victuallers' Dinner at Elmbury and foolishly left Herb in sole charge. When he got back he asked him how he'd got on. “Fine,” said Herb, with a great grin. “They were all drunk by closing-time.” It began to be apparent to the landlord that Herb also was drunk. “How much money did you take?” he asked. Herb went to the till and counted it out laboriously. “Three and tuppence.”

Herb, though his voice was so powerful, knew only one song, which was called Dumbledumdollakin. It was a wonderful thing to watch Herb's enormous chest working like a blacksmith's bellows as he roared the chorus:

“Dumbledumdollakin,
  Dumbledumderry!”

and I often thought it was the only cheerful song they sang at Adam's Norton. All the rest were either sad, sardonic, mystical or obscure. They delighted most in those in which bawdiness and irony were mixed in equal proportion with a mournful nihilism, or in those which were mystical and almost meaningless like “Green Grow the Rashes O!”

“Two and two for the lilywhite boys,
Clothe them all in green-O!

This they sang exquisitely and with a sort of reverential air, as if they knew it was strong magic, which indeed it is.

In the early spring the epidemic of Foot-and-Mouth Disease gradually died out and the stock markets were reopened at last. Like flood water when a dam bursts the stock poured down the vale and off the neighbouring hills to the weekly Fair at Elmbury. The sheep indeed were like a flood flowing down Elmbury High Street, up Station Street, and into the market, where their dammed stream widened and flooded into a great pool as the separate floods, white woolled, dirty-grey woolled, ochreous and chrome yellow (for some had been recently dipped), joined together in one flock a thousand strong and belonging to fifty different owners. Their owners, their shepherds and their yelping collies added to the confusion as each tried to sort out his own. We clerks were called in to help; we rolled up our sleeves and plunged into the bleating flood, tackling, heaving, pulling this way and that, until our arms were greasy with lanoline off the fleeces and our breeches were covered with muck from the backsides of the nervous ewes. My uncle, seeing me at work, patted me on the shoulder and said: “That's the way, my boy: I believe in young men starting at the bottom”; and never realised that he had made a joke.

On market-days we always had about three jobs to do at once. We stood beside the auctioneer and took down the prices and the purchaser's name as each lot was sold; then dashed across to the little office at the market entrance and made out the purchaser's bills, took their money, gave them their receipts and strove to keep our books accurately; a job that would have taxed the arithmetic of a bookmaker's clerk.

It is a great wonder to me that we ever succeeded in balancing
the books when market was over. The record of a multitude of transactions, involving two or three thousand pounds, was scribbled in pencil on a greasy or rain-soaked sheet smeared probably with marking-paint or sheep-raddle. Sums as difficult as “69 tegs at 56/6” had to be done “in our heads” among all the distractions of the crowded market: squealing pigs, cursing drovers, dealers shouting their bids, cows running amok, greetings and badinage flying hither and thither. The little “market office” where the purchasers paid their bills was always filled with an assortment of noisy, angry, disputatious or drunken people. There were always half a dozen arguments going on which we had to settle. An old woman had lost the hamper in which she had brought her ducks to market. Somebody else had taken the wrong lot of pigs. A drunken dealer angrily denied that he had bought 12 heifers at £17 10s. Two farmers were having a political argument. A man in a hurry to catch a train emphasised his urgency by banging with a stick upon the rickety table.

“‘A didn' 'ave no call to take th' 'amper as well …”

“Walked off with they under my very nose, 'e did, twelve little weaners, an' there was one screwey one amongst 'em, an' I said to our Alfie, I said, Mark 'em on the arse with blue crosses, and so 'e did, and I'll 'ave the law on 'im as took what 'e'd got no right to. …”

“Never looked at the auctioneer, never so much as blinked me eyelid. As a matter of fack when they was knocked down I was 'avin' a pint at the Red Lion. …”

“Wot I thinks is this, there be three pestses us has to contend with, rooks and wireworms and Ministers of Agriculture. …”

“Nah then,
nah
then, bloody fine clurk you are, bin waitin' ten minutes, got to ketch me trine to Bairmigum…”

We learned the virtue of patience in a hard school; for everything had to be explained very slowly and carefully to people who were partially illiterate or partially drunk or both. We have a term in Elmbury which is used mainly by wives to describe the state in which their menfolk return from the fair: the term is “market-peart.” “Peart” signifies sharp, like rough cider or an unkind word. The man who is market-peart is raw and ultra-sensitive; his women know that they must feed him and let him be, and avoid the provocative word.

This was our maxim too. We must humour them. Dealers who could appraise the exact value of a bunch of heifers or a close-packed penful of ewes were incapable of doing the simplest sum of addition or subtraction. They scarcely ever wrote out their own cheques. They would sign them (usually with a blunt indelible pencil, which they first sucked, so that the signature was a blue smudge) and then they tossed us the cheque so that we could fill in the amount they owed. Once, when I was very hard-pressed, I lost my temper and snapped “For God's sake write it out yourself—can't you see I'm busy?” There was no answer. I threw the cheque back. Still no answer. I looked up, surprised that I had got no angry reply. Instead of the red-faced infuriated bully I expected to see, a man with gentle and timid eyes glanced furtively over his shoulder at the impatient crowd behind him, then swiftly leaned down towards me and whispered: “Scribble it out for me, Mister, please, it won't take a minute. I never had no schooling. Except to sign my name I can't manage writing.”

I still remember my embarrassment and shame, and I remember also the amount of the cheque—it was three hundred and seventy-two pounds ten. The dealer who couldn't write was a far richer man than my uncle, or any of the Elmbury doctors, or the manager of the Bank.

Not only were we subject to these numerous distractions while we dealt in happy-go-lucky fashion with several hundreds of pounds but we were extremely haphazard ourselves. We had
been told that it was part of our duties “to get to know the farmers”; we interpreted this—correctly, for it was the only way—as “to have drinks with the farmers.” So we would frequently dodge backward and forwards between the market and the Red Lion, with our pockets stuffed with cheques and notes, and perhaps would borrow five bob from the takings to buy a round of drinks. Yet we were hardly ever short when we came to balance at the end of the day. Bank clerks would have been scandalised by our conduct; because they have a worshipful attitude towards money. They see money in terms of respectability; because respectability means credit balances and cheques that are always honoured. We, who never in those days had more than a few shillings of our own, saw money made and spent by feckless farmers as if they were lords; and we crammed the crumpled notes into our pockets as casually and contemptuously as if we had been lords and millionaires too.

“Getting to know the farmers” took me some time. The first step was to know their names; for it was regarded as elementary good manners to address a man by his correct name when you greeted him and shook him by the hand. City-dwellers, conscious of their unimportance, aren't so particular. They know there are so many people like them; they don't expect to be remembered. But a farmer is used to being known on the roads, in the shops, in the pubs, for twenty miles around. He is aware of his own personality. He is Mr. Jeffs of the Hill Farm or Mr. Nixon of Downend, and he expects everybody to know it.

There were no short cuts to this knowledge, as I discovered when I greeted a fierce red-bearded man as Mr. Trewin on the strength of the name on his dray; but his name was Mr. Yarnall, he had bought the dray at a sale, and Mr. Trewin—it seemed— was his deadliest enemy.

The next step was to visit the farmers in their own houses. Encouraged by my uncle, who abominated motor-bikes, I bought
a new horse and rode him from farm to farm, visiting perhaps half a dozen villages in a day, Brensham, Kinderton and Overfield in the morning, Dykeham, Tirley and Tredington in the afternoon. Farmers, who on the whole live isolated and solitary lives, are always glad to see a visitor. They always asked me in to have a drink, and if by rare chance they were teetotallers they offered me cider which was often more potent than whisky. Their lovely rambling farmhouses were always cool in summer and warm in winter when a great open fire burned in the living-room. These farmhouses were very gracious places. The furniture had been passed down from generation to generation; it was generally good and sometimes rare. And how well-appointed the kitchens were; what an array of dishes, saucepans, coppers, ladles, kettles, all spotless and shining bright, how well stocked were the larders, what variety of herbs and spices were there, what great hams hung from the ceiling! The farmers had been brought up to know what was good and to abhor the cheap and the shoddy. The gun standing up against the wall was generally a Green or a Purdey; it was never a cheap foreign make. The farmer's boots were always good boots (the sticky ploughland would have found them out if they weren't!), his breeches and his jacket were made by a good country tailor out of the best cloth he could buy. He had learned—as he of all men should learn—that it pays best to buy the best.

I often wondered how much money these successful farmers made. They were certainly not rich in the sense of having a lot of capital behind them; they didn't have much money to spare to invest in property or securities, though their farming-stock and cultivation alone locked up perpetually a capital amounting to thousands of pounds on a big acreage. Mr. Tempest the bank manager once told me that I would have been surprised how small in relation to their capital their incomes actually were: £800-£1000 per annum was the average for a 350-acre farm in a good year. But of course this only represented what went through the banking account and was shown in the Income Tax return; lots of transactions would be conducted in cash, and probably the whole of the
personal
expenses of the farmer—drinks and meals
on market day and so on—would be paid for in cash out of money that properly belonged to the farm. Moreover, the farmer and his wife, and the whole of his usually large family, would live off the farm to a great extent; they wouldn't need to buy milk, butter, bacon, eggs, chickens, vegetables or fruit, so their cost of living would be at any rate halved. Probably the real income of these men was nearer £1500 a year; and they had very little to spend it on. Clothes lasted them till they wore out; neither they nor their womenfolk were much concerned with fashions. Hunting was free, or indeed showed a profit, because they would often buy young horses at the beginning of the season and sell them as “made hunters” in the spring. Shooting cost no more than the cartridges (and the sale of rabbits balanced even that cost). Doctor's bills were infrequent. The car and most of the cost of running it were a charge upon the farm. The only other expense was the education of children; but this was not heavy, for the boys went to Elmbury Grammar School, and the girls to the High School, where the fees were fairly low. In any case the girls, by helping in the house, and the boys, by working on the farm, more than paid the whole cost of their own education; the wages of the equivalent hired labour would have come to much more.