The Country Child

by Alison Uttley

  Sometimes he took an order for some coarse lace which he would have next time, or lavender prints for a new dress for Becky, or a sunbonnet. Then he shouldered his pack, lifted the basket on the wall, stooped under it, and hauled it on his head. He walked very stiff and straight down the paths with good-days fluttering round him, but before he went he solemnly blessed the house and the mistress, for her help.

  One day a rival turned up, to try to capture the old man’s trade. Margaret shook her head and he became insistent. Then his face lowered and he became threatening. Becky ran to the back door and blew the whistle urgently, one, two, three blasts. They echoed across the fields and Farmer Garland and Dan came out of a fold in the hills. Becky waved a cloth and blew again. They put down their implements and started home at a trot, for the whistle was only used in emergencies or to bring the men to meals.

  Margaret went to the dog and began to unloose the excited snarling animal. But the man turned from out of the doorway where he had impudently entered and walked away, cursing and swearing revenge. Becky and Margaret followed him at a distance to see him safely past the buildings down the hill. They returned agitated and fluttering like hens that have been disturbed by a hawk, but triumphant to tell the story to the men whom they saw coming across the near field.

  ‘He won’t trouble you again,’ said Tom, calming them, and he was right. He returned to the town from which he came. Country folk were too hard-hearted, he said.

  Old John Barley, the pig-sticker, came in the autumn to kill the fat pigs for Christmas. He rode over the hills and down the valleys from a far-away village, on a little white pony, long-haired and shaggy, so small that his feet nearly touched the ground on either side. He still wore the country smock-frock, white as milk, embroidered heavily on both shoulders and at the back, but although Joshua wore one, too, for milking – a coarse, heavy, linen frock which Becky found difficult to wash and iron – the pig-sticker wore his all the time. His white beard and whiskers made him look like Rip Van Winkle returning from the Catskill Mountains when he rode down the fields and into the farmyard on his ancient little steed.

  But he was not welcome. Susan bade a tearful goodbye to her friends the pigs and retired to the top of the house where she lay with her fingers in her ears, weeping and sick with misery, but often she was away at school when he came.

  Dan put the broad wooden bench, the pig-killing table, in the yard, and locked up the dog. Becky boiled the great copper full of water. Joshua sharpened the knives at the grindstone, turning the stone so that it whizzed on the steel.

  Then Tom Garland and Dan brought the first happy fat pig, grunting and quietly protesting, from the pig-cote under the lilac trees and elders, now thin and dropping sad leaves, into the paved yard. It trotted, snuffling at the moss, unsuspicious.

  When it was seized by Dan and Old Joshua and lifted on the bench it realized its betrayal and resisted with all its might, squealing bitterly. Becky, also protesting, was called out as often as not, to hold a leg, for the pigs were enormous and heavy after their fattening. Tom Garland hated the cries and was very glad when it was over, and the heartrending human-like shrieks had ceased.

  At last the bustle of pork and bacon began. Joints were weighed and sent in baskets covered with clean white cloths to the houses in the villages. Sides were rubbed with saltpetre and carried to stone benches where they lay for weeks. Drip, drip, drip sounded the brine as it dropped in the quiet of night down the runnels and into the brown crocks.

  There were scratchings for breakfast, delicious morsels of crisp fat, pork for dinner, trotters for the men’s suppers, jellied pork, huge pork pies, big enough for twenty men, besides innumerable brawns and dainties which were sent to the poor in the little villages. But Susan was never happy whilst these sides lay in the back kitchen; she always felt the pigs might come to life again, like Lazarus, and run squealing to ask why they had been slain. Only when they were brought hard and stiff to the kitchen and hung on one of the walls with bunches of thyme and rue, and sage and marjoram, spreading their perfume over them, did she lose her fear, and know they were no longer pigs, but bacon and hams.

  6

  The Circus

  ‘You’d better go getting turnips today, Dan,’ said Farmer Garland one morning, after Dan had come back from the station with his load of empty churns.

  Susan sat wavering over her toast, one eye on Dan and one on the clock. At any moment her father would say, ‘It’s time for you to be off,’ and she would put on her hat and cape, snatch up her bag and run helter-skelter down the garden, past the orchard, and into Dark Wood. She would perhaps dart through the tall buff gate and pick an apple on the way, for the trees were heavy with fruit, and any day now she would find long ladders reared against the trees, and clothes-baskets full of green and red and yellow apples, besides pyramids heaped on the ground in the long thick grass. Yes, a little yellow apple would be best, she thought, from the low knobby tree whose branches she could reach when she jumped. Even as she thought she saw herself leaping with sudden swoops and jumps, her bag flapping at her head, seizing a sweet-smelling apple, half yellow half pink, dangling just within her reach, and snapping off the stiff knotted twig and two leaves.

  But Dan’s next words sent the apple from her mind, and left it hanging in the tree again.

  ‘There’s a circus coming to Broomy Vale this week,’ he said, as he stuffed his mouth full of bacon, and waited to see the effect of his announcement.

  Susan stared with her cup in the air, her great eyes fixed on his face, as if she would read his inmost thoughts.

  ‘It’s a wild beast show, and it’s coming for a night,’ he mumbled, when he could speak.

  ‘Can I go? Oh! can I go?’ Susan jumped up and ran to her father, pulling him by the arm. He took no more notice of her than if she had been a moth.

  ‘Any lions and tigers coming?’ he asked slowly, after a long minute spent in meditation, during which Dan’s jaws champed, and Susan stood transfixed, longing, listening for a word.

  ‘Aye, there’s a power of lions and elephantses, and Tom Ridding says he seen it at Beaver’s Den, and it’s wonderful what they does.’ The words rushed out in a spate, and Dan filled his mouth again and took a noisy drink of tea from his basin.

  ‘Can I go? Can I go?’ shouted Susan suddenly, urgently, desperately.

  ‘Be quiet, wench, will ye?’ exclaimed Tom, exasperated. He hated to be hurried in his decisions. ‘Be off to school with ye.’

  ‘Thank God for a good breakfast,’ she said, hastily folding her hands and screwing up her eyes. ‘And, please God, let me go to the circus,’ she added to herself.

  She jumped up on tiptoes to pull down her cape and tam-o’-shanter from the hook behind the door, picked up her satchel and ran off, without thinking of the little yellow apple nodding its head in the misty morning.

  She talked of nothing else that day, and all the girls told of the circuses they had seen, clowns and elephants, ponies and lions. Broomy Vale was too far for any of them to go from Dangle, and they begged Susan to remember everything if she went.

  ‘If you’re a good girl,’ answered her mother, when she got home and asked the question that had danced in her head all day, and that was as much as she could get out of anyone.

  On Saturday there was no doubt; they were all going except Becky, who had a hamper of green walnuts to prick, and Joshua, who liked his evenings by the cosy fire.

  The milking was over early, and Dan washed his face and polished it with a cloth till it shone like one of the apples. He changed his corduroys to Sunday trousers, and put on a blue and white collar. He dipped his brush in the lading-can, and sleeked his hair in front of the flower-wreathed little glass. Then, after harnessing the pony in the best pony trap, he left her with a rug on her back, and walked down the hill, with a Glory rose pinned in his cap and a spray of lad’s love in his buttonhole, to take the field path over the mountain to Broomy Vale.

  Mrs Garland wore her purpl
e velvet bonnet trimmed with pansies, which Susan loved and admired so much. She drew a little spotted veil over her face and peeped through like a robin in a cage.

  Susan’s eyes shone out from under her grey serge hat, which her mother had made and trimmed with the soft feathers from a pheasant’s breast. She, too, looked like a bird, an alarmed, excited, joyful hedge sparrow, as she hopped up and down. On her shoulders she wore the grey cape with a grey fur edge which she wore for school, old-fashioned and homely, lined with scarlet flannel to keep her warm, and this flapped like a pair of wings.

  The pony champed her bit and shook her head impatiently with a ring of bells. She softly whinnied and grunted with impatience, and stamped her foot on the stones. Joshua went out and stood by her head, talking soothingly to her.

  Becky polished up the trap lamps, and put in fresh candles. Then Tom Garland came downstairs in his Sunday clothes, smelling of lavender, with his horseshoe tie-pin in the spotted silk tie, and a silk handkerchief peeping from his breast pocket. Margaret looked up at him proudly, he was the best-looking man in England, she thought, and Susan put her hand in his.

  There was a confused noise of ‘Gee-up’ and ‘Whoa, steady now,’ as the pony backed and Margaret and Susan climbed in. Becky stood ready with the rugs and whip, and some chlorodyne lozenges to keep out the night air.

  Then Tom Garland followed, bending the shaft with his weight, as he put his foot on the step. The trap shook and groaned as he climbed in and gathered up the reins. The pony ambled slowly down the steep hill, her front feet slithering as she tried to grip the stones, her haunches high, the harness creaking. The trap was so tilted that Susan and Mrs Garland hung on tightly to the back of the seat to keep from sliding over on Fanny’s tail, or suddenly diving on to her back. Tom Garland’s whole attention was spent in holding Fanny up and keeping the trap wheels from catching on the great stones projecting from the wall on one side, or running over the bank on the other. The end of the whip wrapped itself in the blackberry bushes and patches of gorse. Branches of beech lashed Susan across the face and would have swept off her hat, but the elastic was tight under her chin, biting her flesh in a red mark, smelling friendly and happy, too.

  The fog which lay in the valley came up to meet them, white, writhing, curly shapes, floating along the ground, climbing the air. Cows in the fields, through which the road fell, loomed out like giant beasts which hardly stirred until the trap was almost upon them. At the gates they clustered, sleepy, rubbing their necks on the smooth warm wood. Susan jumped out to pull back the latch and hold open each gate for the pony, and when they had passed she let it go with an echoing clang as she sprang through the disturbed cows to the step of the trap.

  Fanny always began to run before she got to the bottom of the hill, as if she rejoiced that the flat easy road was coming. The trap swayed and rocked as if it would fall over the steep bank, Tom Garland gripped the reins more tightly, shouting, ‘Steady, Fanny, my lass, steady,’ and they swung down to the level turnpike, where the pony tossed her head and pranced with high steps and jingling bells and hard clicks of her hoofs, curvetting like a unicorn going to fight a lion.

  Broomy Vale was crowded with sightseers. It wasn’t often a circus came to those parts, and everyone with a horse and cart drove in. Tom went round with the pony to the ‘Bird in Hand’, and Susan and Mrs Garland waited in the street, watching the bands of young men in leggings and bright waistcoats, with flowers in their caps and sticks in their hands escorting young women with gay ribbons round their necks and in their hats, holding up their skirts whether they needed it or not, to show their delicate ankles and fine buttoned boots. There were little families, children shouting and laughing, eyes shining, mouths wide open.

  Stout farmers and round-faced shopkeepers, little old ladies in silk mantles, tottering, whiskered old men, greeted them with a ‘How d’ye do, Mrs Garland? Fine night for the circus.’ For a moment Susan sent a thought winging through the dusky night to the silent hills, to Roger asleep in his kennel, and Becky and Joshua sitting by the fire, pricking the shining green fruit with darning-needles, their stained hands wet with juice. She could smell the rich earthy smell and hear the ticking of the clock, slow and insistent, and the dull roar of the flames. She hugged herself with delight at being in all the bustle and clatter of the little market town.

  Children went by, blowing trumpets and twirling noisy wooden clackers, and hanging on to their parents’ tails with tightly clenched fists. Babies cried, and were quietened with threats of lions and tigers. Carts rattled down the twisted cobbled street, into the inn yards, lurching against the pavements. Wide-eyed boys leaned against the little shop windows, and clanged the bells as they went in to buy a penn’orth of bulls’-eyes or a stick of liquorice. Above all could be heard the blaring of the brass band outside the circus, and the trumpeting of the elephants.

  Tom Garland joined them and they walked along the narrow street, with Susan squeezed between them, towards the circus.

  ‘It fair dithers me to be among all these folk,’ said Tom, stopping to look round, and holding up the traffic behind him. ‘Where they all come from I don’t know. Who’d believe this was Broomy Vale? It’s fair thronged, and no mistake.’

  ‘It is,’ agreed Margaret. ‘I hope we shall get in the wild beast show, that’s all. Isn’t that Dan over there?’

  They saw Dan walking down the middle of the road, wedged in the crowd with a mincing young woman on his arm.

  ‘Hello, that’s the cobbler’s daughter, as is a dressmaker. I didn’t know Dan was walking out with her. He could do better than that, a young woman with a peaky face and no sense. She do look a Jemima in that hat.’

  But Dan and his Jemima walked on, unconscious of the criticism.

  A vast tent stretched itself in the Primrose Lea, with the river and steep smooth hills on one side, and the churchyard on the other. Around the field were caravans and booths, washing hanging out to dry in the sweet wind, men in blue shirtsleeves carrying buckets of water. Little foreign babies leaned out from the curtained doors, sucking their fingers, staring with dark eyes at the gaping crowd. Dogs were tethered to the undersides of the blue and red caravans, and here a canary in a brass cage, there a little lamp showed in the cosy interior. These moving homes were as exciting as the wild beasts themselves, which could be heard padding and shuffling in the closed boxes.

  But there was no time to look at more. The bandsmen with puffed-out cheeks blew their trombones and beat their drums, and they were swept on to buy their tickets at the gay red and yellow window. They entered the tent with its surprising soft floor of grass, and its moving ceiling of canvas, hanging in lovely folds above their heads, and walked to their places halfway between the red baize-covered seats for the gentry and the low rough forms for the poor people, the ploughboy and the servantgirl, the stonebreaker and the hedgecutter. Susan was so dazzled by the flaring naphtha lights, and so ravished by the savage smells, and so frightened by the roars of wild beasts that she could not see where she was going, and clung blindly to her mother’s hand, stumbling over people’s feet, and kicking their backs. At last they sat down on the high seat, and looked about them at the rows and rows of white faces queerly mask-like under the blazing lamps.

  When the clowns came in with painted faces and baggy white trousers and pointed hats, she was too much surprised to laugh. She thought they were rude to the ring-master, and feared they would be sent away for impertinence. Her father laughed loudly at their sallies but she only stared, astonished.

  Mrs Garland looked down at her. ‘They don’t mean it,’ she whispered, and Susan smiled faintly as they tumbled about.

  But when the animals came in, it was a different matter. Four white horses, with scarlet saddles, and bells hanging from their bridles, danced in sideways. They marched, waltzed, and polkaed round the ring in time to the music of the band. A troupe of tiny Shetland ponies, with tails sweeping the ground, and proud little heads nodding, pranced round, swinging
in time, like the veriest fairy horses on a moonlight night. A black mare, glossy as a raven, lay down in the ring, and the riding-master stood on her side to fire a gun. Pigeons flew down from the tent roof, with a ripple of wings, and perched on the gun’s barrel, whilst he fired again. They fluttered off, spreading their fan-like tails, and picked up grains of corn from the grass, just like ordinary birds.

  ‘Look at those pigeons! Isn’t it a lovely sight?’ sighed Margaret happily, and Susan nodded violently. It was so beautiful, she couldn’t speak, her eyes and her mind were too busy absorbing all these strange delights.

  Then there came a piebald pony with a beautiful girl who only looked about fourteen. She kissed her fingers lightly to the clapping audience, and, with a touch of her fairy foot on the ring-master’s hand, she leapt on to the broad back of the pony. Round and round she cantered, all eyes fixed on her young face. The ploughboys cooled towards their lasses and vowed to wed her, if they had to join the circus to do it. Susan decided she would not be a missionary to the heathen savages. Dan felt in his pocket for the packet of almond rock he had bought for his young woman; he would give it to this maid or die.

  She stood up with her dainty feet a-tiptoe, dancing up and down to the motion of the fat little pony with his splashes of chestnut brown. Her rose-garlanded short skirts with their frilly petticoats stuck out like a columbine’s, and her yellow curls with the wreath of pink buds floated in the wind behind her. She must be the happiest person on earth.

  The admiring lowly clown held up coloured paper hoops, and she leapt lightly through, with a soft tear of paper, alighting safely each time on the wide back beneath. Susan’s hands went up and out in excitement, her fingers trembling, and Mrs Garland quietly took a hand in hers, and smiled at her neighbour.

  When the young rider finally jumped to the ground, and kissed and bowed as she led away her pony, Susan clapped so hard and continued so long after everyone else had finished, that the people in front stared round to see who was enjoying it so much.