Portrait of Elmbury (26 page)

“Good-bye, Colonel. I'll be back in time for the mayfly.”

He woke with a start and shivered. Then he grinned.

“A goose walking over my grave,” he said.

Miss Benedict had picked up the grey-lag and now she handed it to him.

“Don't leave it behind, Colonel; I don't want the horrid thing littering up my nice clean Christmassy bar.” She added: “Why, you're cold! You're all shrammed with the cold! Let me help you on with your coat, you'll catch your death else!”

The Colonel stood up stiffly, and as he did so Miss Benedict did the most extraordinary thing. Never in all her life, I'll swear, had she done such a thing nor ever would again. She blushed bright pink to the roots of her hair and kissed him on the forehead, underneath the mistletoe.

Festival—Blood and Thunder—Slums and Slum Landlords—Mr. Councillor Chorlton—Freedom's Battles—A Debt Repaid—Time's Revenges
—
I'd best go willing—Death of the Colonel—Good-bye to the Swan—The Shakespeare—Silence at Adam's Norton—The Millionaires come to Elmbury—Moths and Men—Munich-time— Twilight in the Shakespeare—Soldiers and Guns

I was back in time for the mayfly, and found Elmbury, at high summer, livelier and more crowded than I had ever known it. Cars and charabancs poured ceaselessly through the town. It seemed that those secret springs whence Money comes, which had dried up in 1931, had suddenly started to flow again; the motors, the buses, the sedate tourists and the cheap trips from Birmingham which flooded through our streets were the visible manifestations of that invisible stream.

Elmbury, revived, was bubbling with all sorts of activity. It looked as if both the Council's brochures were bearing fruit at last; for the Town now suffered a regular week-end invasion of paper-hatted holiday-makers visiting “unspoilt Elmbury,” and two aircraft factories were being built on the outskirts. There was a Fishing Match (five hundred anglers from all over Britain drank us out of beer, threw huge quantities of bread into the river and caught an average of three ounces of fish per rod: Mr. Chorlton called it a modern version of the parable of the Loaves and Small Fishes). There was a cricket week. And there was Elmbury's annual festival of plays.

I had had some part in promoting this festival. Some years
previously our old vicar, hounded and pursued by his creditors, had been compelled to give up the living, and shortly afterwards, having reached his wits' end, had died tragically by his own hand. The new vicar was an enthusiast for the stage, and since the Abbey badly needed repair we decided to try to raise the money by means of plays performed beneath the walls of the Abbey itself. There was good precedent for this; for in 1600 the Churchwardens, faced with a similar urgency, had “adventured upon themselves” to raise the necessary funds by “setting forth three stage plays within the Abbey on the first days of Witsun-week.” Their accounts for that year contained various items relating to the hire of “players' apparell” such as:

“Item iiij. Capps of green sylke.
  Item viij. Heades of haire for the apostles and
x
beardes.
  Item.      A face or vysor for the devyll.”

It was this which gave us the idea. We started in a fairly small and amateurish way, but the floodlights in the dark churchyard playing upon the tremendous West front of the Church discovered a strange and unearthly beauty that was not of our making and we knew that we had embarked almost by accident upon a great adventure from which there was no turning back. Amateur actors, however competent, were dwarfed by that huge and fantastic backcloth; the thing must be done professionally or not at all. So the next year we engaged a professional company, and timidly spent what seemed to be a great deal of money on lighting, amplifiers, costumes and props. But our fears were ill-founded. The weather miraculously kept fine, visitors came to our plays from all over England, and the annual Elmbury Festival became an established event.

Elmbury, of late years, had seemed to grow old and slumberous and apathetic—Mr. Rendcombe had reason to shake his head over it and complain that its atmosphere was wishy-washy and, like modern beer, lacked the tang and bite which once it had. Our Festival seemed to give new life to the place; and this new life manifested itself not only in enthusiasm but in vigorous opposition.
Before long we were involved in a storm in a teacup which was none the less tempestuous because the teacup was small. We were accused of blasphemy, irreverence, sacrilege, immorality and even drunkenness (because we had asked the magistrates to grant an extension to all the pubs during Festival Week); and nothing loth for a good row we accused our critics of narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, puritanism, and the Nonconformist conscience. It seemed that some old puritan yeast, which had lain dormant through the years, had suddenly thrown Elmbury into a ferment. The town split into two factions: those that were for the plays and those that were against them. The matter was fiercely debated in pub and pulpit. Even families became divided against each other. Mr. Rendcombe, when he walked down the street, looked younger and more dapper, and less melancholy. This was more like old times. “He smelleth the battle afar off and cries Ha Ha!” said Mr. Chorlton. The correspondence columns of the
Elmbury Intelligencer
were full of angry letters. Everybody was happy, everybody enjoyed the civil war.

And now I came back from another civil war, a fierce and fatal quarrel which was soon to engulf the world, and found Elmbury in the midst of its annual summer controversy. The actresses wore indecent dresses, said some; they danced upon the graves, said others; blasphemy, blasphemy, cried the Nonconformist conscience; drunkenness and debauchery, whispered the teetotallers. And the vicar got up in the Abbey and preached a gallant and glorious sermon in praise of beer.

If we had awakened an old puritanism, we had also stirred into life something equally old and deep-rooted: a delight in pageantry, dressing-up, and acting, so that I felt almost as if Merrie England was reborn. Everybody in Elmbury (except the puritans) seemed to have caught the theatrical fever. The Operatic and Dramatic Societies flourished; and a deputation
from the latter waited upon Mr. Chorlton, who was known to have produced plays at the prep school, to ask if he could suggest a suitable piece for their next season's production.

“You want a costume play?” said Mr. Chorlton; and they agreed, yes, it was fun to dress up, they would like a play in costume.

“And, of course, a thriller?” Mr. Chorlton went on.

“Of course,” they said.

“With two or three good murders?”

Yes, they said, murders always went down well in Elmbury.

“And lots of blood?” asked Mr. Chorlton.

They approved of lots of blood.

“Excellent,” said Mr. Chorlton. “We will produce
Macbeth.”

And now they were all learning their parts. You heard the mighty majestical lines of Shakespeare in every shop, every pub, even at the alley's mouth. “How now, you secret, black and midnight hags?” said Mr. Brunswick when he came upon his wife gossiping with two old women in the street. “What bloody man is this?” was the housewife's greeting to the butcher delivering the meat. It was a good game and almost everybody played it; and the unfamiliar words didn't come awkwardly from Elmbury lips, our rough country talk and our rather broad accent didn't mangle the lines but gave them freshness and clarity and a new vigour. They suddenly seemed to belong to our own times; and one was reminded that Shakespeare's speech was probably not unlike our own, and that Burbage, far better than many a drawling actor of to-day, could have made himself understood in Double Alley.

All this liveliness, the Festival controversy,
Macbeth
, the new factories a-building, the charabancs full of trippers and fishermen, caused Elmbury's queer hotch-potch to boil and bubble merrily all through the summer and autumn. The periodic row about
slums and housing blew up again in the Council. Elmbury was making an honest attempt to clean up its appalling alleys and had built a small satellite town, consisting mainly of workmen's cottages, on some parkland two miles away. There were plenty of sites where more houses could be built if necessary, but this didn't entirely solve the problem. In the first place it was often difficult to persuade the slum-dwellers to move; for many of the older people, strange as it may seem, had a sentimental attachment to their own hovel and to their own squalid surroundings. The new housing estate, with its gardens, its trees, its little patches of green, seemed to them a howling wilderness. They said in effect: Our alley may not be very beautiful or very comfortable, but it is all we know, all we have ever known; surely you will not uproot us at our time of life? As far as the old people were concerned, the plea seemed justified. Unfortunately they generally lived with their children, upon whom they were dependent and who in turn had young children; and it was these whom we wanted to save from the slum.

The second difficulty was the cost of the new houses. The rents were higher than many of the Alley-dwellers could afford; and the twopenny bus fare into Elmbury, if they worked there, or if they wanted a drink in the evening, was an additional charge upon their slender means. The teetotallers had seen to it, of course, that there was no pub in the satellite town; and this was another hardship on the old people who while they lived in Elmbury had always been able to hobble across to the Wheatsheaf or the George but who were too infirm to manage the longer walk to the bus-stop and the journey in the crowded bus. The warmth, the cheer, the fellowship of their local pub had meant a great deal to them. Fresh air, clean wallpaper, a bath they didn't use and a garden they couldn't cultivate were no adequate substitutes.

The third problem was, of course, the attitude of the slum landlords, some of whom sat on the council. The only way of shifting the population of the alleys was to condemn the least habitable dwellings; and the Council showed itself extremely reluctant to condemn houses owned by such people as the
Deputy Mayor, the oldest councillor, and the most influential Alderman.

I don't mean that there was any deliberate “graft.” Apart from two or three careerists who were out for what they could get, the councillors were ordinary decent citizens who were mostly tradesmen and had the outlook of tradesmen. It is a first principle of trade that you don't offend your best customer if you can help it; indeed you will be prepared to stretch your conscience a bit to avoid offending him. This was precisely what occurred in the Council. Mr. Y, let us say, is a prosperous baker who happens also to own a few slum cottages. You, who sit in the Council with him, are a builder by trade and you have good reason to suppose that Mr. Y is going to invest in a new bakery and will give you the contract to build it. He has also bought a bit of land and is thinking of building a house for himself to live in when he retires; you are likely to get the contract for that too. Now when the question of condemning Mr. Y's slum cottages comes before the Council, are you going to speak and vote in favour of it? Mr. Y is your friend as well as your potential customer; but he's a man who is easily offended, touchy, a bit awkward-tempered. You know he'll never forgive you if you vote against his interests. He won't even understand that you were actuated by conscience; he will persist in believing that you were satisfying some private grudge against himself. “What does
he
want to butt in for?” Mr. Y will say, “it isn't any of his concern. I've always been his good friend; I've never hurt
him.”
And indeed, if things had been the other way round, Mr. Y wouldn't have dreamed of “putting his spoke in.” He will be genuinely hurt by your action; and you certainly won't get the contract for the new bakery.

Knowing all this, what do you do about it? If you're a man of very high principles you'll vote according to your conscience; if you're a bit of a hero you'll even speak in favour of condemning Mr. Y's cottages. But suppose that times are bad and you've got an overdraft at the bank and your son is a clever lad whom you want to send to college—and that contract might make all the difference to his career?

Then perhaps you will persuade yourself that Mr. Y's tenants are really quite happy where they are (which is probably true) and that Mr. Y, who is quite a good landlord, will probably do the cottages up, and make them habitable (and incidentally give you that little job as well). So you decide to lie low and say nuffin'.

That's why Elmbury had such a job to clear its slums. The Council didn't consist, as some people tried to make out, of a lot of wicked men; but merely of a lot of fallible men. The evil lay not in their hearts but in the system they served.