Portrait of Elmbury (18 page)

I came back to Elmbury on a frosty February afternoon just four years after leaving my uncle's office. Those four years, spent partly in London and partly abroad, are no concern of this book. It took me so long to discover that in order to practise the craft of a writer it isn't really necessary to spend most of one's time drinking gin with other writers and discussing each other's books.

But meanwhile my roots remained deep-dug in Elmbury soil; I was irrevocably bound to the place. It did not seem at all strange, it seemed predestinate and proper, when a remembered rhythm in the clatter of the train on a bridge stirred me out of drowsiness and I knew that we were crossing Brensham Bridge two miles from Elmbury. I looked out of the carriage window. Hurray, I was home.

The black wood straggling over the hillside could be no other wood. Only sloe-bushes turn so deep a sepia, with purplish-black patches here and there, when the dusk falls in late winter; and that thicket at the bottom corner was unquestionably our prickly sloe-thicket where we used to find longtailed tits' nests and
where the keeper's terriers used to scratch their little dewberry-noses when they went whimpering after rabbits. And there on the skyline was the tall elm we used to climb, with last year's rakish crow's-nest still balanced in its fork. And there was the deep-cut lane winding down from Hill Farm to Elmbury, its hazels still decked with wisps of hay plucked from Jerry's laden wagons last year. I kept my eyes open for Jerry, but I had caught a glimpse of scarlet coats against Dogleg Spinney, and he would be down there on Demon, if Demon still galloped after the hounds.

Soon Hill Farm was out of sight and the slowcoach train was puffing along beside the main road. Now I knew every meadow, every hedgerow, almost every tree. There was the Tiddler Brook where as boys we slaughtered minnows; the rickyard where we sought red worms for fishing, among last season's rotting hay; the rabbit bury under the oak tree, the row of aspens where Mr. Chorlton found rare caterpillars, the post-and-rails where I once took an awful toss out hunting, the favourite stile where I and many another lad used to flirt with the wenches and carve our names with pen-knives.

Now we puffed past Cowfield Mill, the Carrant Brook, the big feggy field called Bull Pates, the ferryman's cottage, Northway Back Lane. The country round Elmbury wasn't strikingly beautiful. It was higgledy-piggledy vale country, made up of small farms and small fields with various and haphazard cultivations: homely, unspectacular, neither too rich nor too poor. My people, I thought, were like that too: homely, unspectacular, neither too rich nor too poor. Their heads were full of common sense mixed with a few foolish superstitions and salted with unexpected poetry. Their hearts were composed of kindliness and prejudice in almost equal proportions: just as their ribston-pippin apples were both sweet and sour. They were a people whom you had to know well before you could love them; but if you belonged to them you were sure there was no people like them upon the face of the earth.

We drew slowly into the station. There were the allotments, cabbage-stalks, hen-houses, pigeon-cots, onions, withered chrysanthemums,
various expressions of the individuality of the station-master and the landlord of the Wheatsheaf and the baker's vanman and the police-sergeant and the garage-hand, who cultivated each his little bit of private soil in his own private and haphazard way.

The short train stopped; and there was Perks the red-faced porter standing on the platform to welcome it, the third and probably the last train of the day, and shouting in a great voice although doubtless all the seven passengers were natives like myself:

“ULMBREE! ULMBREE! ALL CHANGE! ULMBREE!”

By the time I had talked with Perks and the station-master and seen to my luggage and arranged for the carrier to collect it, the swift dusk had fallen, and the little owls were calling in the trees as I walked into the town along Gander Lane. The hedges dividing the patchwork land were blurred and blackened as if they were drawn upon the landscape with a piece of burnt charcoal.

It occurred to me that one of the things I had missed most when I was abroad was the ordinary English hedge, which we take for granted, yet it is the very texture of our landscape, it is a theme which runs repetitive throughout the English countryside. The tall unkempt hedge of Gander Lane was made of hazel mixed with hawthorn, but it had elm, sloe, bramble, elder, and spindle-tree in it too; half a dozen shrubs composed it, yet it was homogeneous, it was a typical English hedge. In the spring the place was a great favourite of nightingales, which love hazels, of glow-worms, which like mossy hedgeroots, and of lovers, who take pleasure in quiet lanes.

The first person I met in the High Street was Mr. Chorlton, so I took him into the Swan Bar, bought him a drink, and commanded him to tell me the local news.

“Well,” he said, as he settled himself down with a whisky-and-soda, “as you know I have retired from schoolmastering. I couldn't stand the sons of gentlemen any longer; the latest generation was even worse than yours. How do I spend my retirement? I breed magpie-moths. I confine thousands of caterpillars in muslin sleeves upon my gooseberry bushes. I select each season the lightest-coloured moths and mate them, and my ambition is to produce one which is completely white. If I live for another ten years I shall do it; and die contented.”

“All those learned books on all your shelves-” I said. “Does the sum total of all their wisdom teach you that there's nothing better to do than breed a white magpie-moth?”

“If I had read them all,” said Mr. Chorlton cynically, “they might well have driven me to the conclusion that there was nothing more important. But I must confess that I haven't read 'em all, and lacking the complete wisdom of Diogenes I still take an active part in affairs. Let me tell you, my boy, that I am now a very notable person in Elmbury. You must take care how you speak to me. You must show me proper respect. ‘Scipio is the soul of the council; the rest are vain shadows.'”

“Good Lord!” I said. “
You
among the Town Scoundrels!”

“Even I. I was elected last November. You find it surprising? It surprised me. I never thought they'd vote for an old dodderer with a butterfly-net. But they did. I topped the poll. I'm told that Double Alley voted for me solid. I bribed little boys with caterpillars and they went about on election-day beating upon tin cans and singing

“Vote, vote, vote for Mr. Chorlton!”

So now once again I wear a gown. And once again I try to drum elementary truths into stupid people's heads!”

He would be a disturbing presence among the Town Scoundrels, I thought: like Socrates among the Athenians. I asked him why he had got himself elected, and he said:

“That's exactly what my fellow-councillors ask. They can't understand what I hope to get out of it. But really, of course, it's the schoolmaster's ancient vice: his passion for instructing and improving his fellows. I ought to know better after thirty years of it. I taught you the rudiments of Latin and Greek and the only result, as far as I can see, is that you write extremely immoral novels. Well, I thought I'd have a go at teaching adults for a change; but I find the Council Chamber very little different from the Lower Fourth. The only difference is that I lack my old authority!”

I sat late in the Swan bar, while Mr. Councillor Chorlton told me the news. Both comedy and tragedy had walked the streets of Elmbury during the previous few weeks. The tragedy overshadowed all. The vicar, continuing to give away every penny he could borrow, at last faced bankruptcy. His creditors had carried off most of the furniture from the vicarage. It was said that during the coldest snap of the winter he hadn't been able to afford a fire. Even Mr. Jeffs had taken pity on him and patched up the ancient quarrel, sending him a side of bacon as a token of peace. Yet the vicar, half-saint, half-profligate, possessing nothing save his mania of generosity, persisted in borrowing from the moneylenders in order that he might continue to give away what was not his to give. He shared his last bottle of port with the duns which were his only visitors.

Another piece of news was that Black Sal had at last been marched away to the workhouse. Comedy and tragedy accompanied her hand-in-hand. She went as to a wedding in all her dark and flapping finery, gaily and obscenely defiant, shouting an insolent rhyme:

“The silly old muckers
Have sent I to the Wukkus!”

But now, said Mr. Chorlton, she was dying. They had bathed her and sterilised her, and the shock had proved too great. In a cold, clean ward in that cold, cruel house she lay and babbled o' Double Alley.

Double Alley, said Mr. Chorlton, was in the news as usual. Last summer the inhabitants had pitched out into the street an earnest and blameless spinster, a holidaying water-colourist, who had dared to set up her easel in the very midst of their rabbit-warren and started to paint the terrible and beautiful scene. A well-meaning policeman tried in vain to dissuade her, suggesting that there were other parts of the town, equally beautiful and far less smelly, where she would not be so liable to embarrassment and offence. She replied tartly: “If I can look after myself in the slums of Naples I can look after myself in a sleepy little English country town.”

“Yes, Mum,” said the policeman. “But begging your pardon, Naples ain't Double Alley, if you see what I mean.”

She didn't see what he meant. Indeed, she would have to belong to Elmbury to understand Double Alley. She intimated tactfully that she considered herself too old to be the object of any interference; that she was too widely-travelled to suffer any embarrassment; and as for offence, if he meant the smell she had some excellent aromatic lozenges. She added: “Mark my words, young man, these quaint people and I will soon be on the best of terms.”

That was where she was wrong; for she failed to reckon with one very important characteristic of the Double Alley folk: their pride. They might be drunkards, ne'er-do-weels, wantons, sluts; they were indeed filthy, lewd, incestuous, the lowest of the low; but in spite of that and perhaps because of that they clung fiercely
to certain absurd and apparently incompatible notions about the dignity of man.

They who in the past had bundled out many a prying welfare-worker and a District Visitor and a curate's wife and the local Lady Bountiful for the same reason, now drove forth the water-colour painter, and chucked her easel after her, because it hurt their unreasonable pride that they should be regarded in the same light as animals at the Zoo. Frightful indeed was their squalor; but it was their own business. Their sins cried out to heaven; but that again was their business and heaven's. Their poverty was shocking and shameful to see; all the more reason why it should be hidden from men's eyes.

The wretched woman, during the course of her ejection, was heard to remark that Double Alley was a public highway and that she had as much right there as anybody else; and this was certainly true. But in practice the Alley, because of its squalor, was never used as a thoroughfare, and the inhabitants had come to look upon it as their own. The woman's very entry into the place seemed to them an unwarrantable intrusion into their privacy; and
because
that privacy happened to be such a very unpleasant privacy they bitterly resented her sitting down upon her folding canvas stool in the middle of it. If you live in a pigstye you don't keep open house.

So the “quaint” people, old wives, young sluts, and little guttersnipes—the men for the most part held aloof—chivvied the lady artist out of the Alley and went yelping at her heels down the High Street. And of course she was very angry indeed. She wrote a letter to the local paper in which she declared her opinion that “these brutish creatures—she could scarcely term them human beings—would be fitter subjects for the brush of Hogarth than for herself.”

Maybe, said Mr. Chorlton dryly; it was probable that the lady was not so good an artist as Hogarth. As for the “brutish creatures,” they had demonstrated by their actions that they were very human indeed. The pig, said Mr. Chorlton, betrays neither pride nor shame in its stye. The inhabitants of Double Alley had shown that they possessed a kind of pride and a kind
of shame and even a kind of dignity, which is the property solely of mankind.

Mr. Chorlton told me one more story before dinner-time; and that was pure comedy. It concerned Mr. Brunswick, who kept a small unprosperous haberdashery and who had been affronted recently by the erection on the opposite side of the street of a large shop belonging to one of the “Chain Stores” which sold not only haberdashery but many other things in “cheap lines” also. The particular group of plutocrats concerned had bought a fine half-timbered dwelling-house for conversion into their new shop. Let no one fear, they had said, lest the result should give offence. Far from it; the appearance of the street would actually be improved, for they would employ the best architect and instruct him to make sure that the building was in keeping with the architectural tradition of the town.

“God help them,” said Mr. Chorlton, “I believe they really think they have kept their promise. They wrote to the council and asked if the Mayor would attend a formal opening; and they said they were sure the building was ‘one of which the town might feel justly proud.'” What they did, of course, was to build something resembling their idea of Ye Olde Village Shoppe magnified five times. Wherever they had removed the original half-timbering they had painted imitation half-timbering on the white walls. The name of the firm was displayed in enormous Gothic lettering; and beneath it the firm's motto, also in Gothic lettering, MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO.

(“Don't ask me,” said Mr. Chorlton, “why these extraordinary people, who sell mainly girls' cheap underwear, should have chosen that particular motto. If only they'd consulted me, I'd have thought of lots of suitable ones!”)