Portrait of Elmbury (2 page)

“Black Sal,
Jolly old gal,
What do the Doctor say?
He wants to put her away
.
Poor Black Sal,
Poor old gal!”

It was related of her, in later years, that she died two deaths. The first occurred in her own home, and when the breath had ceased in her, her husband brought out a bottle of gin and shared it with some of the neighbours, either to celebrate his release from her or to sustain him in his loss. It is recorded that as he poured out the drink he glanced at the corpse upon the bed and remarked, sententiously: “Black Sal, thee's sarved me many a trick in thy time but never thee's sarved me a trick like this.” But Black Sal, half-way to Gehenna, smelled the gin, hastened back, and finished the bottle. After this first death she survived for many years, until at last, becoming destitute, she was taken to the workhouse where among other indignities she suffered that of being forcibly
washed. This killed her: and the chilly hard-hearted Institution provided no bottle of gin to lure her back to life.

Her appearance, in the days when she dwelt in the filthiest cottage of all Double Alley, was horrific in the extreme. She wore a black bonnet, a black shawl, and a black ragged skirt; her bonnet, which was tall, elaborate and decorated with black feathers, gave her the overdressed appearance of a witch on holiday, one of the Weird Sisters gone galivanting. Her face was almost as black as her clothes. When I began to learn Greek I thought of the Eumenides as Black Sals; but in spite of her frightful appearance, we children never feared her nor imagined that there was anything malevolent about her. She was just another character in the pageant; and when we met her in the street we said “Good-morning, Black Sal,” and she answered politely, “Mornin', Master John … Mornin', Miss Daphne.”

One more Hogarthian figure, and then I have done with them. Nobbler Price did not actually inhabit Double Alley, but kept a tiny greengrocer's shop nearby; he also possessed a weedy patch of back garden, abutting on the alley, and a miserable-looking nannygoat which was tethered to a peg and which demonstrated by its circumscribed nibbling the great truths discovered by Euclid and Pythagoras.

When Nobbler was drunk, he became maniacal. I saw him once careering down the street in his pony-cart, whipping his wretched little pony into a canter, while two stout policemen hung on to the bridle; and when they seemed likely to slow him up he picked up his mongrel dog that rode in the cart beside him and shied it with remarkable accuracy at the nearest policeman's head. It was Nobbler's chief obsession, when he was drunk, that he wanted to shoot his wife, of whom in sober moments he was extremely fond; but while with drunken clumsiness he searched for his shotgun, she would take shelter at a neighbour's house, where she remained until his fit passed. On one of these occasions, in frustrated rage, being determined to shoot
something
, Nobbler went out into his back garden and shot the nannygoat.

Yet when he was dead, many years later, Mrs. Price told me,
with tears in her eyes, “I miss him. … Yes, I miss Nobbler. You see, sir,
he was so good to I.”

And indeed the poor demented creature had his good qualities. Between bouts, he behaved to man and beast with the greatest gentleness; he was capable of strong loyalties and deep affections. He worshipped my father (who was often called to quieten him when he was drunk), and after my father's death, when the lovely house had been sold to be turned into an hotel, Nobbler and his wife became for a time its caretakers. It stood empty for months, and once a week—every Sunday morning—Nobbler would walk two miles to bring my mother a draggled nosegay, of peonies, columbines, stocks and marigolds, from the herbaceous border against the sandstone wall.

The appalling incongruity between our tall, beautiful house and the squat cavernous alley opposite; between our parents' smooth-flowing and contented lives and the drunken brawls across the street; between our spoiled and rather pampered upbringing and the ribby nakedness of the slum children: all this sounds very shocking now. But it was part of a larger incongruity with which we grew up, scarcely noticing it: the extraordinary higgledy-pigglediness, the rich seething hotch-potch of a thousand ingredients, which was Elmbury itself. Elmbury was a small town, and such are generally supposed to be dull, and to be associated with aspidistras, and to infect the souls of their inhabitants with something mean and crabbed and petty, with ignorant “provincialism,” and with something specially reprehensible and circumscribed called a “small-town mentality.” But Elmbury wasn't like that at all. It had infinite variety. It was splendid and it was sordid; but it certainly wasn't dull.

Over it and dominating it rose the huge square tower of the Abbey: the finest Norman tower, some say, in the world. The Abbey itself, bigger than many cathedrals, loomed vastly out of its churchyard chestnuts and yews. But there was none of that
“odour of sanctity,” which usually belongs to cathedral closes, about the immediate neighbourhood of Elmbury's great church: no cloistered quietude, nothing sanctimonious or grave. Outside the churchyard gates the main road ran north to Birmingham and south to Bristol, and up and down it the heedless traffic flowed. Just across the road, exactly opposite the church, was a good, solid, half-timbered pub; it had a garden hedged with thick impenetrable yews, a secret place hidden from prying eyes, where old men played bowls till the light faded and younger folk played more mischievous games in the twilight. But adjoining this delightful garden (at the bottom of which a willowy stream flowed) was a large horrible red-brick building like a public lavatory; this was the grammar school. And beyond it was an untidy-looking rubbish dump, a noisome wilderness into which the town's sewage was discharged, loved only by rats and terriers and crows and little boys.

At the other side of the Abbey things were equally chaotic. There were more pubs—small squalid ones with spit-and-sawdust bars. There were Elizabethan almhouses, enchanting but scarcely habitable, which American tourists always wanted to buy, lock, stock, and barrel, so that they could carry them home, as explorers' trophies, to the States. There were tumbledown cottages, dirty and overcrowded, with whole families sleeping in one small bedroom; roses in their pretty little front gardens, bugs in their beds. There was a dreadful “Italian Tea Garden” with umbrellas like striped mushrooms shading the tables on the lawn. There were shops which sold trivial souvenirs to visitors. There were allotments, smelling of dead cabbages and live pigs. And there was a pleasant cricket-field, margined by willows and cressy streams, its green turf hallowed by the feet of W. G. Grace who once played there, its pavilion roof still bearing honourable scars from the big hits of Gilbert Jessop.

The town itself, which straggled along the main road for half a mile or so, consisted of a haphazard assortment of ancient half-timbered houses and shops—some of these leaned across the street towards each other, like old wives gossiping—with later Georgian buildings among them, and the inevitable alleys, dozens
of alleys, leading off the main road into the ruinous rabbit-warren of Elmbury's slums. There were hundreds of acres of these slums. They were scandalous; they were far worse, probably, than many of the slums in London's East End; but the extraordinary, the almost unbelievable thing about them was that as well as being terrifying they were curiously beautiful. The narrow crooked alleys, fantastical enough by day, at twilight seemed to belong to a Grimm's fairy tale. By the time the moon had risen their metamorphosis was complete; they had dissolved into a monstrous and yet enchanting dreamland, they had become part of a City of Beautiful Nonsense. The tottering hunchback cottages leaned shoulder-to-shoulder like drunken men; if one of them fell down they'd all collapse in a heap. Their ragged eaves nearly met across the alley, fretting the tattered strip of sky into which crooked chimney-stacks intruded dangerously. Nothing was orderly, nothing rational. The chimneys defied the laws of gravity and even the stout oak beams which were the bones of the cottages were not straight, but bent like elbows—as if a forked tree had once stood there and the cottages had been built around it. One expected that when the doors of the dwellings opened there would emerge not people, but hobgoblins and dwarfs; and often enough there did.

The alleys nearest the river—and these were the dirtiest and most insanitary of all—often reminded visitors of parts of Venice; and here it was a common sight during the summer season to see a devoted artist squatting at his easel surrounded by cheeky urchins, ferociously painting a row of filthy and exquisite hovels, and chewing antiseptic lozenges like mad.

But the way to see Elmbury as a whole, to see it in all its squalor and all its glory, was to climb to the top of a nearby hill, a little hump like an overgrown haycock, curiously called the Toot. From here you could watch the light changing on the Abbey tower, so that sometimes it seemed as insubstantial as a dream, a
grey ghost-tower brooding over the town, and at others, especially at set of sun, it smouldered and shone like a growing affirmation of faith. There are few towers like it in all the world, and one of them is at Caen in Normandy. On a day in June, 1944, I lay upon the forward slope of just such a little eminence as the Toot, and watched Caen burning around its Norman tower; and I thought that but for the geographical accident of our English Channel I might have watched Elmbury burn so.

From the Toot you could see, too, how clumsily and how untidily the town sprawled about the church: and how the rivers were a recurrent theme running through its history and the lives of its people. Two broad streams joined at Elmbury among a confusion of small brooks. These snaking waterways almost isolated the town even in summer; and when the floods rose in the winter they sometimes cut it off altogether, so that milk was delivered by rowing-boat and people punted through the back streets. At such times the meadows round Elmbury disappeared beneath a huge inland sea; and no doubt it was this annual flooding that made them so fertile and rich. There never was a greener countryside than those few square miles in which Elmbury was set, and what gave it a particularly fat and sumptuous appearance was the size of those river-meadows, which were large and liberal, pasturing fifty beasts apiece and yielding at haytime not one meagre rick but a whole rickyard. The biggest of all was Elmbury's own field, called the Ham, which lay in the triangle between the confluent rivers and the town. It was something of a legal curiosity, and mixed up in its title-deeds were some of the principles of feudalism, capitalism, distributism, and communism. The hay crop belonged to a number of private owners, including the squire and the Abbey; their boundaries were marked mysteriously by means of little posts. They did not, however, mow their own hay; the Vicar didn't come down from his vestry with a pitching fork; so the hay crop was sold each year, in little parcels none of which by themselves would have been worth the trouble of mowing. It was bid for by groups of men, little combines, who saw to it that they bought contiguous pieces of sufficient area to make a sizable rick. But while the hay crop
was private property, the meadow itself, the soil that grew the hay, belonged to “the burgesses of Elmbury”; these burgesses, the householder, the ironmonger, the draper, the chemist, the doctor, possessed no cows or sheep to graze upon it, so they too each season sold the aftermath by auction and distributed the proceeds, according to an ancient law, among the owners of the houses having a frontage on the main street. Nobody got more than a few shillings for his share; but at least every man, woman and child in Elmbury had the right to walk and play in the field, which gave them a good possessive feeling about it. It was always “our Ham.” In the winter we shot snipe there, and sometimes hares, without let or hindrance. In the spring, when the patches of ladysmocks were silver-white like pools of lingering flood-water, we hunted for plovers' nests and listened to the whistle of the redshanks and the weird sad cry of the curlews which came to the Ham in breeding-time. In May, when buttercups gilded it, and the grass was as high as your waist, the courting couples used its cover for their amorous games, flattening out neat circles where they had lain, as if they had rotated on their axis, which perhaps they had, so unquiet alas is love.

But in June the lovers' hiding-places were laid bare, and those same lovers, probably, were toiling and sweating on the wagons, bringing in the hay. Three big rickyards grew up like little towns. Then, while the quick-growing aftermath painted the field green again, and the ochreous sheep or the white-faced Hereford cattle were turned out to graze on it—then the Ham became more than ever Elmbury's playground. Cricket pitches, on which the ball broke unpredictably, made brown scars on the turf. From the banks of the river jutted out numberless fishing-rods; little boys with willow-wands conjured up minnows, bigger boys dapped with houseflies for bleak, middle-aged tradesmen perched sedately on wicker creels legering for bream, while the more energetic ones, swift of eye and wrist, fished for roach, and the more adventurous wandered here and there, carrying a jar of minnows, live-baiting for perch. The “gentry,” possessing more expensive tools, threw big hackled flies over flopping chub. And the very old, and the very stupid, content with the mere
dregs of angling, heaved enormous lobworms impaled upon enormous hooks into the deepest and stillest backwaters and then went to sleep until Fate, in the guise of a shiny yellow eel, accepted at last their unheroic challenge.

Meanwhile along the towpath, on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons paraded those who were not immediately concerned with fish: shopkeepers and their wives taking the same leisurely stroll they had been accustomed to take, maybe, for twenty years; mothers wheeling their babies out for an airing; boys and girls “walking out” prior to courtship; and so on. But even these would pause now and then to watch the motionless or the gently-bobbing float. “Caught owt, Willum?” “Nobbut daddy-ruffs and tiddlers.” “Wants a fresh o' rain, like as not.” “Maybe. But maybe there's tempest hanging about somewheres.”