Portrait of Elmbury (23 page)

Badger Brown, however, was devoted to this pastime, and was equally proud of his scarred and blinded terriers and his own scarred and mangled hands, which had already lost one finger. He spent more time digging for badgers on other people's farms than in cultivating his own; but apart from his mania for persecuting this harmless and attractive animal, he was a decent enough fellow, the last of a long line of yeomen and little squires. He said now:

“In many cases the farmers got their labour for nothing. My grandfather farmed two hundred and fifty acres and kept forty milking cows; but he never employed a man.”

“How did he manage that?” we asked.

“No, he never employed a man nor a woman either. He had twenty-one children. Two died, so he had nineteen left to do the labour: eleven girls and eight boys. The girls did the housework, the dairy, and the milking, looked after the poultry and fed the pigs; the boys did the work in the fields; while my grandfather lived like a lord.”

“What about your grandmother?” we asked. “She seems to have done a bit of work too!”

“She died with her twenty-first.”

“There you are,” said the cobbler. “There are your Good Old Times. Ask any woman to-day whether she'd like to go back to them.”

“Grandfather,” said Badger Brown, “had peculiar views about women. He used 'em rough and he brought 'em up hard.
You talk about your modern girls knowing everything about everything—the Bishops are always preaching that they know too much; and you talk about the Victorian maidens fainting at the sight of a mouse. But my aunts, bless their hearts, used to regard it as one of their ordinary feminine duties to take the cows to the bull. And I suppose the girls to-day, who know all the Facts of Life, would think
that
pretty shocking!”

The Colonel nodded his old grizzled head. “Reminds me of a story,” he said. “A prim old lady walking down a lane meets a little girl leading a cow. ‘Good-morning, little girl,' she says, ‘you're very small to be leading such a big moo-cow. Where are you taking her?' ‘To the bull, Ma'am,' says the little girl. ‘Dear, dear,' says the old lady, very shocked indeed. ‘Dear, dear, how dreadful. Couldn't your father do that?' ‘No, ma'am,' said the little girl politely. ‘It has to be a bull.'”

The Colonel threw back his head and laughed his delightful laugh. But Miss Benedict's disapproving eye was upon us; and we knew that it was high time to change the subject.

Mr. Benjamin, I suppose, was the person you'd least have expected to find among the Swan fellowship. At times he looked utterly incongruous. These were the occasions when he was going to Birmingham or had just come back. “Got a little business in Brum,” he would say; and we accepted the formula, knowing perfectly well that his little business was a red-headed widow (for Sparrow, his henchman, had told us so). In his Birmingham clothes, his cheap city suit, light-grey homburg, diamond tiepin and all; Mr. Benjamin looked flashy and cheap: completely alien to the Swan and to Elmbury. And yet somehow or other he belonged, he was part of the pattern of Elmbury's life. I sometimes thought he had a chameleon quality. When he went to Birmingham he became a Brummagen Jew; back in Elmbury, in workaday clothes, with his spaniel at heel and a gun under his arm, he seemed to change—not his race, he could never change
that—but at any rate his whole attitude to life. He became one of us.

He was fond of all kinds of sport, especially shooting, and he didn't mind getting wet, which was rather remarkable in a Jew; for they are a people who like to keep their feet on dry land. Everybody liked him, for we knew of certain great kindnesses he had done to foolish gamesters who had betted themselves nearly into bankruptcy. There was a story that Jerry, in his madcap youth, had owed Mr. Benjamin both his horse and his motor-bike, these being the only possessions he could offer in settlement of a debt of nearly two hundred pounds. Mr. Benjamin kept them long enough to teach him his lesson, then sent them back with a note:

“I am too fat to ride your horse and I should break my neck on your motor-bike. It will save me a lot of doctor's bills if you will allow me to call it all square.”

Yet as soon as he got on to a racecourse Mr. Benjamin was metamorphosed back into the quick-witted cheapjack Jew who made his living by his wits and his slick patter.

You don't as a rule find people of Mr. Benjamin's race in small country towns. They are happier in urban communities. But our local historian, Mr. Rendcombe, discovered in an old chronicle a curious anecdote about a Jew who lived in Elmbury in 1259.

“A Jew at Elmburie fell into a privie upon the Saturdaie, and would not for reverence of his Sabboth bee plucked out, wherefore Richard de Clare Earl of Gloucester kept him there till Monday, at which time he was dead.”

This story delighted Mr. Benjamin, who maintained that it was evidence of our ancient and deep-rooted anti-Semitism which, said he with a wink, made it practically impossible for him to earn
a living among us. But we thought it showed that our sense of humour hadn't changed much in seven centuries and we were secretly rather proud of it; feeling that we should do the same thing to-day if we got the chance, not because the man was a Jew, but because he was such an awful prig; and prigs we abominate.

I think Mr. Benjamin rather liked being teased about his unfortunate predecessor. He had learned this much about us: that we only teased people we liked.

“Take care,” we would warn him on Saturday, “take particular care not to fall down the privy to-day!”

“Down the plug-'ole,” Mr. Benjamin would say. “That's me. Poor old me. Ho! ho! ho! Down the plug-'ole. Poor old me!”

Of Sparrow, who served Mr. Benjamin with dog-like devotion and seemed almost to follow him at heel like another spaniel, it is more difficult to find good things to say. He was an unmitigated rascal, entirely without shame; indeed perhaps it was because of his very shamelessness that we tolerated him. He was said to have stolen a puppy one Saturday afternoon from a rich old lady called Mrs. Fothergill and to have sold it back to her for five guineas on Sunday morning, calling at her house and saying how sorry he was to hear of her loss, “but as it so happens, ma'am, by a lucky chance I've got a pup that's the very spit-image of the one you lost.” The story goes that he got away with it and even boasted afterwards that he took the risk out of sheer kindness of heart. “I thought the poor old leddy would be lonesome-like without her pup.” It may be true; he was impudent enough for anything.

He was a fisherman (like almost everybody else in Elmbury) and a great liar. The fish he caught always weighed about three times as much as anybody else's; we thought they must be filled with lead. “Caught a chub this evening,” he'd say, “and he's
four pound and three ounces by the kitchen scales; I'll go t'ell if 'e 'ent.” That was his favourite oath with which he concluded every sentence: “ 'Tis true; I'll go t'ell if it 'ent.” We thought Mr. Sparrow would go to hell anyhow. He caught roach weighing two pounds and pike weighing fifteen, and if we doubted he assured us it was true, he'd go to hell if it wasn't, he'd weighed the fish. We couldn't argue with the kitchen scales.

One day his wife had a baby, and the District Nurse, having left her spring-balance behind, used the kitchen-scales to weigh it. It was certainly a fine fat baby. It was just a shade less than twenty-two pounds.

Mr. Rendcombe, the editor of the
Intelligencer
, besides being the local historian of the Swan company was also the one who had the longest memory; it was to him that people would refer to settle arguments about such questions as whether the great frost was in 1894 or 1895, or who was Mayor in the year of the Queen's Jubilee. He was a dapper little man of more than seventy whose paper maintained on a parochial scale the traditions of freedom, integrity, and independence upheld by the great
Manchester Guardian
itself. Woe betide the person, party, or sect that attempted to challenge that independence. The
Intelligencer
was a dangerous animal which when attacked defended itself; and Mr. Rendcombe, in his day, had put Mayors in their places and even dared to write a critical leading article about the Justices of the Peace. Indeed, the Council so greatly feared his lively comment—and, even more, his too-accurate reporting—that they had lately taken to transacting most of their business in Committee, to which the press was not admitted. The
Intelligencer
was swiftly roused by this threat to its freedom; and its leading article thundered with the authentic thunder of which from time to time we still hear a faint rumbling in the leaders of Old Auntie
Times
.

One Councillor, a remarkably illiterate man, complained to
Mr. Rendcombe (who politely paraphrased his speeches) that he was being unfairly reported. Mr. Rendcombe promised to put the matter right; and next week he did.

“Mr. Goodacre rose and said, ' What I means to say Mr. Mayor and what I means is I have riz to take up your valuable time to say as how I feels, and there's many in this chamber and out as feels with me, as how I feels that the Council if you sees what I means is wasting of a lot of valuable time by argifying about this matter about which I feels, and there be others as feels it too, 'tis not worth the argifying about, being something about which you feels just how you feels and nothing what anybody else can say will alter what you feels nor make you feel any different about a matter which I thinks should never be allowed to take up the valuable time of this 'ere Chamber and of you Mister Mayor and my fellow members who feels, I'll venture to say, very much the same about it as I feel. …”

Mr. Goodacre didn't complain again.

Within the limits of his splendid integrity, Mr. Rendcombe managed to make his paper much livelier, it always seemed to me, than many a consciously-bright London news-sheet. Even his reporting of the most trivial cases in the Magistrates' Court was vivid and readable. If a vagrant was fined for being drunk and incapable, Mr. Rendcombe was not content with the bare statement:

“Alexander MacDougall, of no fixed abode, was fined ten shillings,” etc. …

He began his report in a way which compelled you to read it:

“A sinister, uncouth-looking man, calling himself Alexander MacDougall …”

But Mr. Rendcombe could talk as well as he could write; and he was at his best in the Swan bar on a winter's night when Miss Benedict had warmed the beer and spiced it with rosemary to set his tongue wagging. He would talk, as a rule, about old times; and in particular about the weather and about local politics, both of which it seemed had been far more spectacular in the old days than they were to-day. He would say, in reply to the Colonel, who was prognosticating a hard frost:

“No doubt, Colonel, we shall have a frost, but I doubt if it will be a hard one. We don't get the weather we used to. Now take the frost of 1895. It started freezing about Christmas and continued until well into March. That was a frost if you like! I remember Mr. Jeffs—not the present Mr. Jeffs, but the old gentleman, who died in 1914—I remember him driving his pony and trap all the way from Elmbury to Dykeham along the middle of the river.”

“There was a fairish frost in 1917,” said Anderson the cobbler. “I minds them roasting an ox on the river in that year.”

Mr. Rendcombe, to whom anything which had happened in the twentieth century was recent history and scarcely worth talking about, dismissed the frost of 1917 with a gesture. “Your memory plays you false, Mr. Anderson! There was a frost in that year; but it was nothing to that of 1895. And you may be sure they didn't roast an ox in 1917, for it was during the war, rationing was in force, and such a thing would never have been permitted. No: the ox-roasting was in 1895. The beast was given by Mr. Trewin's father and slices were sold at twopence each in aid of the Elmbury poor. And very good they were, too. I well remember it. The roasting was arranged by Mr. Nixon, who was at that time the proprietor of the Shakespeare. And the
heat from the fire melted the ice, but 'twas freezing as fast as it melted. We also erected a printing-press on the river.”

“What on earth did you do that for?” interrupted the cobbler.

“We printed, in the form of a single sheet, a special souvenir number of the
Intelligencer
. I have a copy in my office now; and you are welcome to see it, Mr. Anderson, if you like. It is a very unique and curious thing: a copy of the
Intelligencer
printed on the river, right in the middle of the river, right in mid-stream!”

According to Mr. Rendcombe, almost everything had deteriorated both in quality and quantity since the beginning of the twentieth century. Everybody agreed about beer and whisky; but even food wasn't what it was.

“You ought to have known the Market Ordinaries in the old days,” he would say. “In this very hotel, or in the Shakespeare when Mr. Nixon had it. Calves' heads; roast beef; mutton and caper sauce; and that wasn't what they call a choice, mind you, a man could have the lot—and did, if he called himself a man. And in their season there'd be elvers, or salmon, or eels. People despise eels nowadays; but we Elmbury folks used to think of them very highly, very highly indeed. It was always the head of the house who cooked the first dish of eels in the autumn; and a very elaborate business it was, I can tell you, nine different sorts of herbs and spices, and first the frying, and then the stewing: it took two days to prepare 'em! And by then you were so hungry having smelt the delectable smell of 'em hanging about for so long, that you filled your belly so that you never wanted to see another eel, not till next autumn came round. Yes, we did ourselves well, we knew how to eat, in those days.”