Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (14 page)

The old man listened, fed some sticks to the fire, then knocked out his pipe on his leggings.

‘You best fasten the windows, missus,’ he said. ‘The Old Bugger seems to snatch ‘em weekends.’

He wheezed at that, and coughed a bit, then relapsed into a happy silence. His wife considered him brightly for a moment, and then turned with a sigh to our Mother.

‘Once you had to run to keep up with him,’ she said. ‘You can talk to him now all right. He’s no longer the way as I remember. The years have slowed him down.’

Her husband just cackled and stared at the fire-bars as though he’d still a few cards up his sleeve…

A week or two later he took to his bed. He was bad and was said to be wasting. We went up again to the bank-side cottage to inquire how the old man was. Mrs Davies, looking frisky in a new yellow shawl, received us in her box-like kitchen – a tiny smoked cave in which had been gathered a lifetime of fragile trophies, including some oddments of china, an angel clock, a text on a string by the fireplace, a bust of Victoria, some broken teapots and pipes, and an engraving of Redcoats at bay.

Mrs Davies was boiling a pot of gruel, her thin back bent like an eel-cage. She bade us sit down, stirred the pot madly, then sank into a wicker chair.

‘He’s bad,’ she said, jerking her head upstairs, ‘and you can’t really wonder at it. He’s had ammonia for years… his lungs is like sponges. He don’t know it, but we reckon he’s sinking.’

She handed us boys some hard peas to chew and settled to talk to our Mother.

‘It was like this, Mrs Lee. He took ill on the Friday. I sent for me daughter Madge. We fetched him two doctors, Dr Wills and Dr Packer, but they fell out over the operation. Dr Wills, you see, don’t believe in cutting, so he gave him a course of treatment. But Dr Packer, he got into a pet over that, being a rigid one for the knife. But Albert wouldn’t be messed about. He said he’d no mind to be butchered. “Give me a bit of boiled bacon and let me bide,” he said. I’m with him there of course. It’s true, you know – once you’ve been cut, you’re never the same again.’

‘Let me finish the gruel,’ said Mother, standing up. ‘You’re trying to do too much.’

Mrs Davies surrendered the ladle vaguely, and shook out her shawl around her.

‘D’you know, Mrs Lee, I was setting here last night just counting all them as been took; and from Farmer Lusty’s up to the Memorial I reckoned ‘twere nigh on a hunderd.’ She folded her hands into a pious box and settled her eyes on the ceiling. ‘Give me the strength to fight the world, and that what’s to come upon us…’

Later we were allowed to climb up the stairs and visit the old man in his bed. Mr Davies was sinking, that was only too clear. He lay in the ice-cold poky bedroom, his breath coming rough and heavy, his thin brown fingers clutching the sheets like hooks of copper wire. His face was a skull wrapped in yellow paper, pierced by two brilliant holes. His hair had been brushed so that it stuck from his head like frosted grass on a stone.

‘I’ve brought the boys to see you!’ cried Mother; but Mr Davies made no answer; he just stared away at some shiny distance, at something we could not see. There was a long, long silence, smelling of cologne and bed-dust, of damp walls and apple-sweet fever. Then the old man sighed and shrank even smaller, a bright wetness against the pillow. He licked his lips, shot a glance at his wife, and gave a wheezy half-giggling cough.

‘When I’m gone,’ he said, ‘see I’m decent, missus. Wrap up me doings in a red silk handkerchief…’

The wet winter days seemed at times unending, and quite often they led to self-slaughter. Girls jumped down wells, young men cut their veins, spinsters locked themselves up and starved. There was something spendthrift about such gestures, a scorn of life and complaining, and those who took to them were never censured, but were spoken about in a special voice as though their actions raised them above the living and defeated the misery of the world. Even so such outbursts were often contagious and could lead to waves of throat-cutting; indeed, during one particularly gloomy season even the coroner did himself in.

But if you survived melancholia and rotting lungs it was possible to live long in this valley. Joseph and Hannah Brown, for instance, appeared to be indestructible. For as long as I could remember they had lived together in the same house by the common. They had lived there, it was said, for fifty years; which seemed to me for ever. They had raised a large family and sent them into the world, and had continued to live on alone, with nothing left of their noisy brood save some dog-eared letters and photographs.

The old couple were as absorbed in themselves as lovers, content and self-contained; they never left the village or each other’s company, they lived as snug as two podded chestnuts. By day blue smoke curled up from their chimney, at night the red windows glowed; the cottage, when we passed it, said ‘Here live the Browns’, as though that were part of nature.

Though white and withered, they were active enough, but they ordered their lives without haste. The old woman cooked, and threw grain to the chickens, and hung out her washing on bushes; the old man fetched wood and chopped it with a billhook, did a bit of gardening now and then, or just sat on a seat outside his door and gazed at the valley, or slept. When summer came they bottled fruit, and when winter came they ate it. They did nothing more than was necessary to live, but did it fondly, with skill – then sat together in their clock-ticking kitchen enjoying their half-century of silence. Whoever called to see them was welcomed gravely, be it man or beast or child; and to me they resembled two tawny insects, slow but deft in their movements; a little foraging, some frugal feeding, then any amount of stillness. They spoke to each other without raised voices, in short chirrups as brief as bird-song, and when they moved about in their tiny kitchen they did so smoothly and blind, gliding on worn, familiar rails, never bumping or obstructing each other. They were fond, pink-faced, and alike as cherries, having taken and merged, through their years together, each other’s looks and accents.

It seemed that the old Browns belonged for ever, and that the miracle of their survival was made commonplace by the durability of their love – if one should call it love, such a balance. Then suddenly, within the space of two days, feebleness took them both. It was as though two machines, wound up and synchronized, had run down at exactly the same time. Their interdependence was so legendary we didn’t notice their plight at first. But after a week, not having been seen about, some neighbours thought it best to call.

They found old Hannah on the kitchen floor feeding her man with a spoon. He was lying in a corner half-covered with matting,and they were both too weak to stand. She had chopped up a plate of peelings, she said, as she hadn’t been able to manage the fire. But they were all right really, just a touch of the damp; they’d do, and it didn’t matter.

Well, the Authorities were told; the Visiting Spinsters got busy; and it was decided they would have to be moved. They were too frail to help each other now, and their children were too scattered, too busy. There was but one thing to be done; it was for the best; they would have to be moved to the Workhouse.

The old couple were shocked and terrified, and lay clutching each other’s hands. ‘The Workhouse’ – always a word of shame, grey shadow falling on the close of life, most feared by the old (even when called The Infirmary); abhorred more than debt, or prison, or beggary, or even the stain of madness.

Hannah and Joseph thanked the Visiting Spinsters but pleaded to be left at home, to be left as they wanted, to cause no trouble, just simply to stay together. The Workhouse could not give them the mercy they needed, but could only divide them in charity. Much better to hide, or die in a ditch, or to starve in one’s familiar kitchen, watched by the objects one’s life had gathered – the scrubbed empty table, the plates and saucepans, the cold grate, the white stopped clock…

‘You’ll be well looked after,’ the Spinsters said, ‘and you’ll see each other twice a week.’ The bright busy voices cajoled with authority and the old couple were not trained to defy them. So that same afternoon, white and speechless, they were taken away to the Workhouse. Hannah Brown was put to bed in the Women’s Wing, and Joseph lay in the Men’s. It was the first time, in all their fifty years, that they had ever been separated. They did not see each other again, for in a week they both were dead.

I was haunted by their end as by no other, and by the kind, killing authority that arranged it. Divided, their life went out of them, so they ceased as by mutual agreement. Their cottage stood empty on the edge of the common, its front door locked and soundless. Its stones grew rapidly cold and repellent with its life so suddenly withdrawn. In a year it fell down, first the roof, then the walls, and lay scattered in a tangle of briars. Its decay was so violent and overwhelming, it was as though the old couple had wrecked it themselves.

Soon all that remained of Joe and Hannah Brown, and of their long close life together, were some grass-grown stumps, a garden gone wild, some rusty pots, and a dog-rose.

My Mother was born near Gloucester, in the village of Quedgeley, sometime in the early 1880s. On her own mother’s side she was descended from a long static line of Cotswold farmers who had been deprived of their lands through a monotony of disasters in which drink, simplicity, gambling, and robbery played more or less equal parts. Through her father, John Light, the Berkeley coachman, she had some mysterious connection with the Castle, something vague and intimate, half-forgotten, who knows what? but implying a blood-link somewhere. Indeed, it was said that a retainer called Lightly led the murder of Edward II – at least, this was a local scholar’s opinion. Mother accepted the theory with both shame and pleasure – as it has similarly confused me since.

But whatever the illicit grandeurs of her forebears, Mother was born to quite ordinary poverty, and was the only sister to a large family of boys, a responsibility she discharged somewhat wildly. The lack of sisters and daughters was something Mother always regretted; brothers and sons being her lifetime’s lot.

She was a bright and dreamy child, it seemed, with a curious, hungry mind; and she was given to airs of incongruous elegance which never quite suited her background. She was the pride, none the less, of the village schoolmaster, who did his utmost to protect and develop her. At a time when country schooling was little more than a cane-whacking interlude in which boys picked up facts like bruises and the girls scarcely counted at all, Mr Jolly, the Quedgeley schoolmaster, found this solemn child and her ravenous questioning both rare and irresistible. He was an elderly man who had battered the rudiments of learning into several generations of farm-hands. But in Annie Light he saw a freak of intelligence which he felt bound to nurture and cherish.

‘Mr Jolly was really educated,’ Mother told us; ‘and the pains he took with poor me.’ She giggled. ‘He used to stop after school to put me through my sums – I was never any good at figures. I can see him now, parading up and down, pulling at his little white whiskers. “Annie,” he used to say, “you’ve got a lovely fist. You write the best essays in class. But you can’t do sums…” And I couldn’t, either; they used to tie me in knots inside. But he was patience itself; he
made
me learn; and he used to lend me all his beautiful books. He wanted me to train to be a teacher, you see. But of course Father wouldn’t hear of it…’

When she was about thirteen years old her mother was taken ill, so the girl had to leave school for good. She had her five young brothers and her father to look after, and there was no one else to help. So she put away her books and her modest ambitions as she was naturally expected to do. The schoolmaster was furious and called her father a scoundrel, but was helpless to interfere. ‘Poor Mr Jolly,’ said Mother, fondly, ‘He never seemed to give up. He used to come round home when I was doing the washing and lecture me on Oliver Cromwell. He used to sit there so sad, saying it was a sinful shame, till Father used to dance and swear…’