Portrait of Elmbury (7 page)

I never minded going back to school; because school, too, was fun. But always, even at school, Elmbury was the background, its rivers, meadows and lanes were unforgotten, and with Dick, Donald and Ted in the dormitory at night I would plan next holiday's expeditions. We must make another attempt to catch the big carp in Brensham Pond; after that we'd hunt the old willows for Puss Moth caterpillars and Red Underwings; and when it grew dark we'd light lanterns and “sugar” the trees in the rides for moths. We must tar the bottom of our old boat and make it watertight; we must go cubhunting in September, and we must ask Keeper Smith if he's let us beat when Squire started partridge-shooting; we must camp at the Hill Farm and help Farmer Jeffs with his harvest.

Elmbury and its green-and-brown countryside were always the stuff of our dreams. I was getting to know the place as Highlanders know their deer-forests: “every stick and stone.” I was growing my roots.

One evening in the summer holidays we were up in the larch plantation above Mr. Chorlton's cottage. Donald and Dick were searching for caterpillars and I was trying to stalk some fallow-deer which had escaped from a neighbouring park and which dwelt there as shyly as fauns in the thickest part of the plantation. Dick found a huge grey hawk-moth sitting on a larch trunk, and hearing his yelp of delight we gathered round him, admiring the unfamiliar monster, while he stood at the ready with the net. At that moment along came Mr. Chorlton, out for his evening stroll.

“Hallo, you rascals,” he said. “What's the excitement?”

“Big moth, sir. Looks like a funny sort of Hawk.”

Mr. Chorlton took one look over Dick's shoulder. “Good God,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Sphinx convolvuli,”
said Mr. Chorlton, “come all the way from Africa; and you three rascals pounce on him as soon as he arrives.” He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a large glass-bottomed pill-box. We should not have been more surprised if he had produced a white rabbit or a cage of singing canaries; for although we were aware that Mr. Chorlton knew all about Greek accents we didn't expect him to know anything about moths. “Now listen,” he said. “If Dicks nets him in his rugger-forward fashion he'll spoil him as sure as eggs is eggs. I'll box him for you. But in case I muff it Dick with his net must stand in the slips and you others at point and long stop.”

We watched breathlessly while Mr. Chorlton with miraculous calm persuaded the great moth into the pill-box. He handed it
to Dick. “Lucky beggar,” he said. “In thirty long years
I've
never found one.”

“But, sir, we didn't know
you
were a bughunter!” It was as if Zeus himself had come down to earth and we mortals, discovering his divinity, had exclaimed in awe: “We didn't know
you
were a god!”

“Come back to the cottage,” he said, “and I'll show you.”

The cottage lay among shrubberies of rhododendrons and its garden was full of flowers, pentstemon and tobacco-flower and valerian, which we were sure had been planted specially for the moths. He took us inside and sat us down in a room which was lined with books from ceiling to floor. We had never seen so many books in a room before. They mostly had Latin and Greek titles, and it seemed to us that all the wisdom in the world was enclosed between those four walls. Mr. Chorlton said: “I'll go and get the key of the cabinet,” and he left us free to explore the wonderful room. There was a net standing in the corner; and next to it a fishing-rod. In a jar on the window-still some caterpillars which none of us could recognise nibbled a sprig of birch. And Dick, wandering round the room, discovered a photograph entitled “Somerset C.C., 1895,” with Mr. Chorlton, in flannels and cricket-cap, sitting in the front row.

He came back and opened the cabinet doors. The glass-topped drawers slid out silently one by one while we stood and gasped. There were long rows of Swallow-tails, Clouded Yellows, tawny Fritillaries in infinite variety; Blues in every shade from pale azure to the kingfisher's own colour: hundreds of little Skippers; and then the Hawks, a whole row of Death's Heads, olive-shaded Limes, Poplars ranging from palest grey to burnt sienna, Eyed Hawks with sunset-flushed hindwings, exquisite pink Elephants (not those that topers see!) Bee Hawks and Humming Birds. But there was a gap above the label “
Sphinx convolvuli
”; and Dick, gulping hard and trembling with the ecstasy of glorious martyrdom, said suddenly: “
You
have him, sir! Put him in that space!”

“No,” said Mr. Chorlton; but hesitantly.

“Please,”
begged Dick; as a man might offer up his one,
his only ewe-lamb as a burnt offering to a god, and yet the cry escapes him, “Please,
please
take it quickly, lest I repent!”

Mr. Chorlton, who was infinitely wise and who knew all this, didn't hesitate any longer. He said: “I'll keep him, then, because I've got a cabinet to keep him in; but he's still yours and you can come and see him whenever you want to. And now,” he added, “we'll celebrate the capture of the first living Convolvulus Hawk Moth I've ever seen.” He went to the sideboard and fetched glasses and bottles. For himself he poured out a glass of port; for us, fizzy lemonade, into which he tipped enough port to make it pink. “This wine,” he said, “is Mr. Cockburn's rarest and most precious; and it's the last bottle; and a great many people would have fits if they knew I poured it into fizzy lemonade. But Convolvulus Hawks are rarer even than rare wine, and deserve a proper libation when they appear.”

We drank to the moth ceremonially; then we sat down, and there was a moment's silence, and suddenly we all three asked questions simultaneously:

“Sir, have you read
all
the books in this room?”

“Sir, are you really a fisherman as well?”

“Sir, did you play cricket for Somerset?”

Mr. Chorlton poured himself out another glass of port.

“I've read most of the books; not quite all; but I've still got a few years, I hope, to go on reading. Yes, I am a fisherman, and one day I'll teach you how to catch chub with a fly. And I did play for Somerset, and fielded against Archie Maclaren's 424, which as you know is the highest score in county cricket. Look it up in Wisden, and you'll find out roughly how old I am; if you can do the sum, which is doubtful.”

It was dark before we left. We made Mr. Chorlton show us the caterpillars—which turned out to be Kentish Glories—and then he tied us each a chub-fly out of a starling's feather and a brown hen's hackle, and finally we persuaded him to read us the Frogs' Chorus from Aristophanes which always delighted us with its deep-throated “Brekekoex-koex-koex.” He said good-bye to us, and added:

“Now for an hour I am going to contemplate
Sphinx Convolvuli
and finish the port.”

“The whole bottle?” asked Donald, full of awe.

“The whole bottle,” he said firmly.

As we went down the drive between the dark rhododendrons Dick put into words what we were all thinking. “He can read a Latin book as if he were reading the paper,” he said, “and Greek as easy as English. And he knows every moth that flies. And he's a fisherman. And he's played county cricket. What a mixture of things he can do!”

“And the port,” we said. “Don't forget the port. He's going to drink the whole bottle!”

I think we all resolved that when we grew up we'd be like Mr. Chorlton; and it wasn't a bad resolution, for I've never met another man who could so beautifully walk the tightrope between the
bios praktikos
and the
bios theoretikos
and get so much pleasure out of the two kinds of life which lie on either side.

We had other schoolmasters.

Pistol, Bardolph and Nym were back from the war, unchanged and unreformed. Pistol complained that the damp trenches had touched up his sciatickee, Nym had a new wound, this one in his backside, Bardolph had seen no Germans, for he had spent most of the time in gaol. These three musketeers, to the great alarm of our parents, now took us under their distinguished patronage, and taught us how to set wires for hares, how to caulk a leaking boat, how to cook moorhens on a camp fire, and how to look innocent when we had our pockets full of things which shouldn't be there. Others contributed their knowledge and experience to make sure that we had a liberal education. A man called Jim Meadows, who was a porter and billposter employed by my uncle's firm, showed us how to make bird-lime out of boiled holly-bark and, with a decoy, to catch linnets and larks on Brockeridge Common. I don't know whether the Wild
Birds' Protection Act was in existence at that time; I think it was; but it made no difference to Jim Meadows, who went about openly carrying clap-nets with which he cleverly swept goldfinches off the thistle-heads. He lived in an alley—not Double Alley, but one nearly as bad—where he kept in a home-made aviary canaries, bullfinches, jackdaws, magpies and even owls; he also kept, uncaged, somebody else's wife.

Old Jim introduced us to the dawn and the dusk, taught us much about walking in the woods at night, about traps and nets and ferrets, and above all about birds. For although he caught and caged them, inflicting great cruelty without even understanding that he was being cruel, he loved birds and knew more about their songs, their nests, and their habits than many naturalists who write books. Jim couldn't write at all; in my uncle's office, if it were necessary for him to sign anything, he would explain, “I'm no scholard,” and make a cross on the paper: Jim Meadows, his mark. Yet he made a lot of money, partly out of the canaries, which were famous songsters, and partly out of antique furniture, which he could price more surely than most dealers. Whatever he made he drank; and when he was drunk he would go off and commit an assault upon the pusillanimous husband of his mistress, adding injury to insult.

A professional fisherman called Bassett was another of our holiday schoolmasters. He got well paid by the gentry for taking them out in his boat and showing them the likeliest places for sport, yet he would often sacrifice the chance of earning ten shillings to spend the afternoon with us and to teach us what he knew. He taught us one thing that nobody else could: he taught us to be quiet. Chatter and sudden movement he abominated; he was the
stillest
person I have ever known, as still as the cat waiting for the mouse, as the stilt-legged heron fishing in the shallows. When he rowed the boat you could not hear the splash of the oars nor the creaking of the rowlocks; whenever he moved his action was slow, calculated and completely silent. He was a hard taskmaster; he would never let us rest our rods on the side of the boat—“Birmigum fishing,” he called that: the city dwellers' Sunday afternoon out. Always we must hold them,
although they were much too heavy for us, in aching arms until we got a bite. If the float bobbed, there must be no exclamation, no schoolboy's yelp of delight when the fish was hooked. And when we caught one it must be killed silently and swiftly—“kill it as if you were a murderer,” was his grim and blood-chilling instruction—lest it flap about on the floor boards and drive the others away. He had never read
The Compleat Angler
but old Izaak's motto, “Study to be quiet” was his also.

When fishing was over, he would take us home to tea. His house smelled strongly of napthaline; for whereas Jim Meadows' was full of live birds—there you might share your bread-and-butter with a pecking magpie—Bassett's birds were all stuffed. He was the local taxidermist; and he had a strange limitation for although he could skin a bird or an animal both quickly and cleverly—he taught us the trick of it—he was absolutely incapable of stuffing them in a lifelike way. To sit for long among the birds and beasts in Bassett's back room was to indulge in a palæontologist's nightmare; those finches, gulls, hawks, kingfishers, jays did not belong to the present, but to some dark and remote past, they were the prototypes, the remote amorphous ancestors of our birds, those badgers, squirrels and stoats had a lizard quality, they belonged to the forests of the Coal Age rather than to our English woodland. They all suffered from the same kind of distortion, as if you looked at them in a concave mirror—for they were all to a ridiculous degree attenuated. They looked as if they had been starved for months and then for weeks painfully extended on a rack. In particular the stoats and weasels, by nature tenuous, at Bassett's hands became almost eel-like; they were dreadful. And there was a heron with its long thin neck stretched out so that it looked like a pterodactyl.

Yet Bassett was proud of these creatures of his fantasy. He never tired of showing them off to us. In particular he was proud of a peregrine falcon which he had shot himself. If you have ever seen a peregrine, or any other kind of hawk, you will know that the most striking thing about it is the beauty of its eyes. But the artificial eyes which Bassett had seen fit to insert in his peregrine's head could not by any stretch of imagination be said to resemble
a hawk's; they might perhaps have looked realistic in a stuffed goose. The effect was too terrible for words. Bassett had a box of “assorted eyes” which he had bought from a dealer; and he pulled them out at random, without respect for the size or nature of the creature he was stuffing. In consequence most of his birds had the appearance of bleary drunkards or squint-eyed lechers.

But we always enjoyed having tea at his house, although to Mrs. Bassett the parlour must have seemed a Chamber of Horrors indeed. There were fishing-rods everywhere, with hooks dangling down haphazard so that they were likely to catch you as you passed by. A damp fishing-net smelling of waterweed leaned against the table. A bucket of live-bait provided a hazard in the doorway. On the floor lay a basket with half a dozen moribund eels. A side-table was littered with scalpels, scissors, skulls, skins, and cakes of arsenical soap, to say nothing of a stick of cyanide for taking wasps' nests. (Yet Bassett's six grubby children all survived.) There were sure to be wasps' grubs, maggots, and worms in tins, and pike-spinners with more random hooks to catch the unwary.