Portrait of Elmbury (3 page)

Fishermen always have the same excuses.

I have devoted rather a lot of space to the Ham because it was part of the life as well as the landscape of Elmbury. I have called it the town's playground; by which I mean a very different thing from a playing-field. A playing-field associates itself with serious and organised games and sedate tennis-courts and terrible bouncing gym-mistresses teaching people how to keep fit. We had none of that nonsense. But Elmbury used its Ham for real “play”—all sorts of play, from catching tiddlers to poaching salmon, from birds' nesting to tumbling wenches in the hay.

And so, if you had climbed to the top of the Toot on a summer evening, you would have had the vision of Piers Plowman; which he had when he stood upon a higher hill not very far from Elmbury. You would have seen “a fair field full of folk” stretched out below. It was a very fair field indeed, with the townsfolk going to and fro upon it in the calm of evening; with the silver rivers ribboned all round it, the tumbling weir with small withy-grown islands in mid-stream, the old mill above its
placid millpool, and behind it the great Abbey rising up, massive and solid as England's history, and yet as airy-light as a dream.

But I must insist that Elmbury, although beautiful, was not a beauty-spot; for that implies, I think, a rather sterilised sort of beauty, unspoiled, preserved, and sacrosanct; whereas in Elmbury beauty and ugliness grew up side by side and merged into a single entity, indivisible and unique, in which you could no more easily separate and distinguish those two qualities than you could winnow out the good and evil in the heart of man.

Like wrecks out of a receding tide, the ruins of Elmbury's industries rose up among its slums: a disused flour-mill, rat-run warehouses, a derelict shirt-and-collar factory, and what was left of an establishment which once made mustard.

Three or four industries precariously survived: a big modern flour-mill, a maltster's, a collection of sheds and wharves and slipways where ancient craftsmen who loved their trade built boats of all kinds from canoes to river-steamers. But these concerns were not nearly sufficient to provide a living for a population of five thousand people. The town had known better days; for trade, which once came by river, now followed the railway, and the industrial prosperity of one nearby city, and the social prosperity of another, made a sharp contrast with Elmbury's backwardness. This was supposed to be the fault of a previous generation of Elmburians, who cold-shouldered the railway until the main-line had gone elsewhere and who, finding spring-waters of remarkable nastiness almost at their front-doors, failed to exploit them until half the fashionable world was curing its gout ten miles away. So Elmbury slumbered beside a branch line of the railway, and the ridiculous building which it pretentiously called “The Spa” saw no Beau Brummells, fell into disuse, and finally became a farm-house, keeping its name “The Spa Farm,” long after the majority of the people had forgotten why it was called so.

But for their obstinacy, then, but for the short-sightedness of those ancient Elmbury Die-Hards, the place might have been either blackened by belching chimneys or blighted by the withering presence of decrepit colonels drawing out their last meaningless days. Miraculously preserved from both disasters, the little town muddled along contentedly enough in its own haphazard way; and although I suppose a very high percentage of the population must have been technically “unemployed” there was much less poverty and very much less distress than you would find in similar circumstances in an industrial town. The city-dweller, when he is out of work, is generally helpless; there are few “odd-jobs” to be had, even if he were adaptable enough to be capable of doing them. But in the country and in the country-town it is different; and Elmbury was an odd-job man's paradise. The farmers in the neighbourhood needed casual labour for a dozen seasonal jobs, haymaking, harvest, fruit-picking, turnip-pulling and what not; a man could earn a few shillings and a quart of cider almost any day he'd a mind to. There was drovering, and there was timber-felling, and there was rick-cutting; thatching, ditch-cleaning, and hedging. Many of the Elmbury men could turn their hands to skilled and semiskilled jobs such as these. But there were more individualist odd jobs too. In those days; if a man knew something about bird-lime and decoys and clap-nets he could catch a dozen linnets or goldfinches on Brockeridge Common in a morning, and be ten shillings the richer when he had caged and sold them. Even the poorest people bred dogs or canaries or pigeons or rabbits in the backyards of their cottages; many worked allotments and kept chickens or pigs as well. Others got their living out of the river, building boats, netting salmon, cutting osiers, dredging sand, setting putcheons for eels. Almost every man and boy, as we have seen, was a devoted fisherman, but almost every one was a still more devoted poacher. There were other ways of catching salmon beside the legitimate nets or the rods of the rich; and
there were plenty of people willing to pay half a sovereign for a clean-run fish, no questions asked or answered.

So that was how many of the Elmbury men lived. In the spring they'd do a bit of salmon fishing, fair or foul, hay-making in June; drovering on Saturday (a walk to the neighbouring market and a drunk in the pubs afterwards); plum-picking now and then—but this rather as a favour—for a farmer who was known to be free with his cider; illegal forays after mushrooms on misty September mornings; a few days' beating when Squire shot his pheasants: blackberrying; eel-catching at the first autumn flood; and the winter spent variously in building a new punt for sale or hire, caulking an old one, mending the salmon nets, pottering up the river after duck (or perhaps an otter whose skin would be worth a pound), ferreting for rabbits, poaching occasional pheasants, collecting betting-slips for a bookie, or any one of a score of pleasant, profitable, and adventurous ways.

Now the men who lived in this casual way—and there were several hundred of them out of our population of five thousand— possessed two advantages which were rare enough then and which are almost priceless to-day; they were independent of employers; and they were not conditioned to believe in the popular fallacy, that work in itself is a virtue. They worked when they wanted to work; and their work was fun. They were, in fact, a sort of privileged class; and their privilege was one which nowadays only a few great artists have. It was fortunate for Elmbury that its population included these few hundred truly free men; they acted as a leaven upon the whole community.

Their independence of employers gave them a vivid individuality. In those days, when sweated labour in the big industrial districts was sapping the vitality of whole populations and turning millions into rather inefficient robots, the men in the country towns were able to preserve their intelligence, their humour, and their pride. They still believed in a vague undefined something which they called their “rights”; and for all their poverty, for all the dirt and squalor in which many of them lived, they actually believed that they exercised some rights. They may have called themselves, variously, Conservatives, Radicals and
Socialists; but I think really they were the last true Liberals. They believed in Freedom without defining it; but they thought it was something to do with saying You-be-damned to all tyrants, great and small.

It is not surprising that out of such a fertile soil should blossom strange and fantastical characters. These rich and rare ones, who for all their oddity are somehow essentially and exclusively English, seem always to sport and flourish most freely in the atmosphere of the small and ancient towns which lie close to England's heart. “ 'Tis summat in the air as breeds 'em,” said old Fred Pullin, when I asked him why we had so many queer characters in Elmbury. He was a bit of a curiosity himself, now I come to think of it, that doddering old coachman who had driven my grandfather to his wedding and who followed my father to his grave. He had a remarkably ugly wife who bore the unusual name of Abigail, and when Abigail died old Fred promptly courted and married another one, although at that time he must have been well past sixty.

“It was something in the air that bred them,” and so, in common with many another old-fashioned market town, we had our minor Falstaffs (one in particular who regularly drank twelve pints of beer at a sitting and once ate a whole leg of lamb at a single meal)—our Pistols, Bardolphs and Nyms, our Mistress Quicklys, our Mr. Justice Shallow. For of course Shakespeare didn't invent these; they were his for the picking, familiar weeds in Stratford streets; and Elmbury in 1913, apart from a few trifling differences in such matters as drainage, was much the same sort of place as Stratford in 1600. Our little Falstaff was possessed of huge appetites and a vast belly, and was boastful and lecherous and cunning and cowardly yet withal had a twinkle in his watery blue eyes; he only needed a Shakespeare to breathe the immortal spirit into him, and he would have been Old Jack to the life.

We had also our rich eccentrics, lesser John Myttons whose crazy equestrian feats are remembered still (“Those are the double gates that his lordship jumped one day when his fox crossed the railway”)—squires who built strange edifices which are known still as their Follies—cranks who indulged extraordinary hobbies, such as letting loose wild animals in their grounds and surprising their neighbours with antelopes and flamingos. And among humbler folk we had a gallery of merry rascals, scallywags, drunkards and ne'er-do-weels straight from Dickens and Surtees; while as it were at the extreme end of the mental spectrum there were our genuine lunatics such as Black Sal dressed all in sable topped with her great flopping black bonnet, and Poor Tom who thought he had Heaven's commandment to empty the river and who might have been seen almost any day happily baling it out with a leaky bucket.

It is true, of course, that one remembers the freakish and forgets the commonplace; and Elmbury was neither Bedlam nor a scene out of
Henry the Fourth
, but a quiet respectable country town in the streets of which during a morning walk you would have encountered plenty of stolid
petit bourgeois
and prosperous tradesmen who fitted in with the popular conception of small-town dwellers; aspidistra-loving, unenterprising and dull. Yet even some of these had their heroic hours, when they played boisterous pranks upon each other at municipal elections, painting each other's houses with politically odious colours, Tory Blue or Liberal Scarlet, and indulging in school-boyish practical jokes of the kind that are out of fashion nowadays.

And even some of these, ordinary enough to look at, suffered strange metamorphoses and were beckoned by sudden adventure. There was a rather oafish-looking youth, a country boy called Alf, who came in from a neighbouring village for a game of cricket on Saturday afternoons—who entertained us with his sweeping cow-shots and annoyed us by his unwillingness to chase long hits in the outfield—now who'd have thought that one day our Alf would be playing for England, and making just the same cow-shots and displaying, even at Lord's, the same charming
nonchalance towards boundary-hurrying balls at long on? There was a ragged boy out of the alleys who when war came put on the khaki simply because it was better than rags, and went to France simply because it was more comfortable than the alley, but who became a sergeant and at Paschendaele was seized with a divine fury and when all his officers had been killed led half a company forward through the mud; and when they had been thinned out to half a platoon still he led them, until at last he fell; and he would have won the V.C., men said, if there had been anybody left to recommend him.

And there was a modest shy lad, the son of a schoolmaster, who collected fossils and bits of rock, and who went quietly off one day without saying where he was going; and when he came back, years later, we learned that he had been with Shackleton to the South Pole.

Goodness knows, my own relations were bourgeois and ordinary enough: country doctors, lawyers and auctioneers; but even they sported a few eccentrics and contrived to express themselves, when they had a mind to, without any pettifogging regard to convention and smug routine. My great-grandfather on my mother's side, going his doctor's rounds in a gig, encountered one morning a very aggrieved prize-fighter, pacing furiously up and down beside a famous landmark called the Four Shires Stone. When he asked the large and murmurous crowd what was the matter, my grandfather learned that they were all very angry and disappointed because the prize-fighter's opponent had taken fright and failed to turn up. “I have a long morning,” said my great-grandfather promptly, “what with measles and confinements and one thing and another, but if somebody will hold my horse I shall be delighted to give the gentleman a fight if he is willing.” They fought with bare fists, and my greatgrandfather did so much damage to the prize-fighter's face that he had to stitch it up for him. He is said to have demanded his
fee for this service. He then wiped his hands and went on to the confinements and the measles.

His son, my mother's father, inherited the practice, and
his
form of self-expression was to break his bones out hunting. He avoided breaking his neck, however, and miraculously died in bed. By all accounts, he was a man much loved; even the gipsies, whose wandering tribes he doctored, knew him as their friend, and often when he was riding on his twenty-mile round he would stop for breakfast or dinner at one of their encampments. Gipsies have long memories; and only two years ago I was told that the tinkers still talk of him, and his mercurial chestnut mare which danced and pirouetted continually, while my grandfather sat it like a jockey, one light hand on the reins, the other holding his little black bag.