Portrait of Elmbury (27 page)

Mr. Chorlton, who had a small pension from the school and a very small private income, was probably the only Councillor who was capable of giving an independent and unbiassed judgment on every issue. The others feared him for this reason and also for his wit, which was sharp and mordant and of a kind unfamiliar to them who hadn't experienced it in their school days. He puzzled them; and they complained that “they never knew where they were with him,” they never knew which side of the fence he was going to come down. The Conservatives always voted as good Conservatives; and the Liberals always voted as good Conservatives too unless the issue were connected with beer
¹
; and the two Labour members, of course, always voted against all the rest. This was a reasonable state of affairs because you knew exactly where you were; but Mr. Chorlton was an uncertain quality, he changed sides as frequently as Warwick the Kingmaker and at times he even voted with the Labour members. This annoyed everybody; for the Labour members, both of whom were excessively stupid, felt certain there must be a trick in it if the solitary representative of the “gentry” voted on their side, while the Elmbury Diehards complained that Mr. Chorlton was being “disloyal to his class.” (Surely the most fantastic loyalty that any man could be expected to observe!)
The whole Council was disturbed by his refusal to play the game according to the rules.

As Independents must, he offended everybody in turn. He made a blistering speech about the Deputy Mayor in the debate on slum clearance. He fought hard for a pub on the new housing estate and tore the Liberals to bits when they opposed it, telling them they had forgotten the very meaning of the word Liberal. He described the workhouse, criticising its severity and its barrack-room atmosphere, as “that concentration-camp for the old and helpless” and the new Town Library, which had been designed by the Borough Surveyor, as “that perfect example of the public lavatory style.” A notice pointing the way to the real public lavatories excited his scorn by referring to them as “public conveniences”—in Gothic lettering. A proposal to cut down some fine old trees in the public gardens (which, to the distress of our puritans, were much frequented by lovers at night), provoked him to plead for their reprieve on the grounds that they were “more sinned against than sinning.”

What most dismayed his fellow-councillors was their own uncomfortable suspicion that he was very often right. The Mayor put their feelings in a nutshell when he got up, bewildered and half-apologetic, to defend the sign which pointed the way to the public lavatories. “We all know Mr. Chorlton has had the benefit of a very good education and he ought to know what's good taste and what isn't. I saw that notice before it was stuck up and I thought the lettering was very nice and dignified; but Mr. Chorlton says it's vulgar. And I thought it was nicer to say conveniences and more decent; but Mr. Chorlton says that's vulgar too. Now I always thought it was vulgar to say lavatories; so I don't know if I'm on my head or my heels.”

The only people in Elmbury who really approved of Mr. Chorlton were the alley-dwellers and Mr. Rendcombe. The latter, of course, saw him as a survival of the “good old days”
when gentlemen sat on the Council and spoke their minds freely and firmly, having no customers to please and no vested interests to serve or fear. (Incidentally, Mr. Chorlton's speeches and interpolations provided the
Intelligencer
with plenty of good copy.) The alley-dwellers loved him for his independence and for his stout-hearted defence of all kinds of freedom. Everybody, of course, praised Freedom with a capital F—the abstract idea of Freedom; the Liberals and the Nonconformists praised it more than anybody else. But whenever there arose a particular issue in which freedom was involved it seemed to the poor men of Elmbury that it was Mr. Chorlton who fought for it and the Liberals and the Nonconformists who opposed it. They voted, whenever they could, to restrict a man's freedom to drink a glass of beer. They voted against the cinema opening on Sunday. They voted against dances being held in the Town Hall. They voted, every time they got the chance, against Fun, while paying lip-service to something they called Freedom which seemed to mean their own freedom to stop people having fun.

But Mr. Chorlton fought stoutly for all these little, personal freedoms; and Double Alley gave him their votes and their gratitude to a man.

Double Alley, however, was unlikely to survive much longer. The elder of those two tomboyish girls, Dick Perkins' daughters, who as long ago as 1917 shocked their neighbours by putting on breeches and going to work on the land, had inherited her father's little estate when he died. He had been a successful cattle-dealer, and had invested his profits in Double Alley itself, buying up his neighbour's dilapidated hovels one by one as they came into the market. When he died it was discovered that he owned almost every cottage in the Alley: twenty-nine cottages which brought in a total rent (in the unlikely event of every tenant being able to pay) of less than three pounds a week. His daughter, meanwhile, had married; and her husband, an
enterprising young greengrocer, had just got himself elected to the Council.

There had recently been a number of cases of T.B. and the Medical Officer of Health wanted to condemn every house in the alley. At last the way was clear; for there was no opposition from the new slum-landlord who but twenty years ago had been a slum-dweller herself. She had no memories of the place which were not horrible; now she would wipe out Double Alley and those memories with it, and reckon her life from that fortunate day in 1917 when she strode boldly past the scandalised neighbours, into the green fields, into a new world.

The Victorians who saved Elmbury from the railway-junction which they thought would blacken the countryside and destroy their quietude must now have turned in their graves; for Elmbury, where three roads met, had become a junction indeed and the traffic which came together at its Cross was far noisier, far more destructive of amenities, and incidentally far more dangerous to life and limb than the railway would have been.

On Saturdays and Sundays, and especially on Bank Holidays, it was practically impossible for any but the most agile to cross the High Street. The noise was so great that gossipers had to shout to make themselves heard; and even at night during holiday-time the flow of cars and charabancs did not pause and the noise would have kept us all awake had we not developed some sort of defensive mechanism so that we ceased to hear it; as men who live beside a waterfall become oblivious of its roaring and would only hear the silence, a terrible roaring silence, if the waterfall should suddenly dry up.

However much we might regret our lost quietude, there was no remedy; and even if there had been I daresay the majority of Elmbury people would have put up with the traffic for the sake of the trade which came with it. By no means all the charabancs passed through; you could see a score of the green or red monsters
drawn up in the town's new car park almost any afternoon —and probably fifty or a hundred cars. The streets, the shops, and the pubs were always full, the tradesmen prospered, and the long queue of unemployed shrank to a few dozen unemployables.

Mr. Parfitt, during these halcyon days, should have made a small fortune; for it was he who had first taught Elmbury how to pick the well-lined pockets of tourists and holiday-makers. But somehow or other he seemed to have lost his touch. He did well enough with postcards and models of the Abbey in Festival time; but for the most part the new generation of holiday-makers merely glanced at his dusty shop window and passed by. Perhaps he had gone out of fashion; for even the Long Man had ceased to be popular and a dozen of the figures littered the dark corners of his shop, unwanted, neglected, and covered with dust. It was a sign of the times, he told me, as he picked up and mournfully dusted one of these masterpieces which looked particularly woebegone by reason of its having been broken at its most vital joint. “People to-day,” said Mr. Parfitt sadly, “would be downright
frightened
to have one of these things in their bedroom. What they want is something with the opposite significance. They don't want to have children; and more's the pity, say I.”

But Mr. Parfitt's genius had deserted him. Puzzle his old head as hard as he might, he could not think of a charm against child-bearing.

The autumn, of course, brought the international crisis which we had already learned to associate with August and September. It blew over and life in Elmbury went merrily on. There were less trippers, for these were summer migrants, but in consequence of the crisis work was speeded up on the aircraft factories. There was employment and good money for every one; indeed, there was a local shortage of labour and about a hundred Irishmen came to the town to make it good. The pleasant, unfamiliar
brogue of County Cork introduced a new gaiety into our streets; its owners brought to Elmbury also the filth, the fights, and the squalor which accompany Irishmen wherever they go upon the face of the earth.

The crisis had one other consequence. The Elmbury company of Territorials, which at that time I commanded, received a sudden unexpected influx of recruits. During the early thirties it had dwindled to a mere handful; one August I had marched shamefacedly to camp at the head of seventeen men. Now, with the new recruits, I had nearly seventy. This was not due to a sudden access of patriotism; the lads of Elmbury were not at all anxious to go to war. But they had suddenly realised that if there was war there would certainly be conscription. They hated the idea of “being fetched.” I asked one sullen-looking and unmartial youth why he had joined up. “If there be a war,” said he, “they'll come and fetch I. I'd best go willing.”

Elmbury men were known in the battalion for their tireless marching and their good night-fighting (which was not surprising for almost all were poachers) but also, I regret to say, for their obstinacy. They were easy to lead, but hard to drive. Even in khaki they kept their sturdy independence. Sometimes they sang a song they had learned from their fathers: “We won't be buggered about, we won't,” and they meant it. They made first-class soldiers; but if they were badly handled they quickly came near to mutiny.

I now handed over the command of these stout-hearted and turbulent citizens in uniform to a lad of nineteen who was, like them, an incorrigible poacher, who could stalk, shoot, fish and ride, and who being anarchic himself could understand their particular brand of anarchy. For my part, I had determined that when war came—we no longer thought of it as “if”—I should fight it in the air; for I had just learned to fly a Moth, had discovered a brave new world of cirrus and cumulus, and was bemused by the strange beauty of the sky's snowy regions, its unearthly continents of cloud.

But when the crisis was over, we bundled away the thought of war for another year, accepting the respite but knowing it was only a respite, and, heedless once more, polished our hunting-boots and wiped the oil off our gun barrels. Winter came early, in a swirl and scurry of November snow and we listened for the honk of the first geese on the north wind. I did a reconnaissance of the flooded, frozen, river-meadows with Michael, the boy who had taken over my Territorials; we promised the Colonel to let him know as soon as the grey flocks arrived.

But they were tardy, and when they came at last it was too late. Just before Christmas I met the Colonel out partridge-shooting. It was rough, hard walking, and by mid-morning I realised he was in a bad way. Our host didn't know it, and set a good pace for the guns as they walked in line over the wet, feggy fields. The Colonel couldn't keep up, so I dropped back and walked at his side. He put his hand up to his heart. “It gets me here,” he said. But he wouldn't give up. Slowly and painfully he dragged himself along.

We came to a tall fence. I got over first and took his gun. He climbed up somehow or other on to the top of the fence and put his hand on my shoulder. He must have been in agony, for his face was quite grey. He had angina, though I didn't know it at the time. There was an awkward ditch on my side of the fence. “Sod it,” he grunted, “I shall have to jump.” I stood ready to catch him. I loved him very much, and it was awful to see the sweat running down his grey haggard face which twitched with pain. But he was indomitable. I saw his face suddenly crumple into a grin. The thousand creases, the little crows' feet around his eyes, appeared as if by magic and for a moment he was his old self again, gnomish and naughty, mischievous as a boy.

“By God,” he said. “
I wish I had a good fat woman to fall on.”
He jumped down and I caught him; he was as light as a child. We walked on for a little way, but the ground was squelchy
and soft. He had to give up at last, and I took him home in my car. On the way he said: “John, I shan't shoot again.” I tried to cheer him up. “Nonsense,” I lied, “you'll be better in a day or two,” but he had felt that invisible dagger in his chest and he knew, I think, that its wound was mortal. He slowly shook his grand old badger-grizzled head.

I saw him once again, about a week later, when I called to ask how he was. He had just finished planting an oak-tree, but even that little task was too much for him, and I had to help him into the house. He had always been a great one for planting trees; his farm was dotted all over with saplings in various stages of growth. I think his choice of an oak to plant on that last morning, a tree so slow-growing and so long-living, was a sort of gesture of defiance to the blind Fury with the abhorréd shears. It would stand there with luck, beside the little pool in his Home Field, for hundreds of years after he had gone. His great-grandchildren might know the summer shade of it. There was a sort of continuity, a sort of comfort, in that.