The Country Child

by Alison Uttley

  The double white lilac at the garden gate and the purple and lavender bushes hanging over the pig-cotes budded, and the lovely soft apple-green leaves burst through the javelin points. Starlings built in the hole in the giant apple tree which overshadowed the lawn and horse-trough, the ancient tree taller than Windystone itself, perhaps older, hollow as a skull, yet soon to be covered with blossom and little green fruit.

  Doves cooed in the larch plantation, under the blue-speckled sky, jays screamed in the spinney and flashed their wings defiantly at the stealthy gamekeepers.

  Magnificent pheasants rang out their challenge as they flew boldly clattering over the garden to the Druid Wood. Squirrels ran up and down the mossy walls and chased each other up the nut trees by the cowsheds. A yellow stoat crept warily over the wall by the yew trees and rats slunk in the shadows of the stackyard towards a hen coop. The cock crew with a shrill note and the hen clucked to her chicks and cried fiercely, with flapping wings. The shadow of a hawk went over the young chickens, death in the blue sky, and every chick ran obediently to its mother, except one tiny stray upon which the savage claws and beak swooped.

  Tom Garland ran out with his double-barrelled gun many a time a day, for it was Nature’s birth time, and the little creatures were in danger from their enemies. The men had been busy since early in the year with the sheep, and now the lambs were merry curly-haired little rogues, with twinkling eyes and black sturdy legs.

  They spent their baby days in Whitewell field, near the house, cropping a few morsels of short sweet grass, nuzzling and suckling from their mothers, and playing like schoolchildren.

  A lamb ran calling plaintively after a sheep, but she walked on, eating steadily, heartless, as he tried to push under her. He stood, puzzled, his first disillusion, and then, bleating and crying, he found his own true mother. With tail wagging and little firmly planted legs, he drank until the impatient mother gave him a push and sent him off to play. He stared round and then galloped to the others who were in the midst of a game.

  Every year, for two hundred years at least, lambs ran the same race in Whitewell field. In other fields they had their odd games, but here it was always the same.

  By the side of one of the paths stood the oak tree, with the seat under it, and a short distance away stood the great spreading ash. The lambs formed up in a line at the oak, and at some signal they raced to the ash, as fast as their tiny legs would go; then they wheeled round and tore back again. They held a little talk, a consultation, nose-rubbing, friendly pushes, and then off they went again on their racetrack.

  On the first of May the cows left their winter quarters in the cow-houses, and were turned out to graze in the fields. That was a day to remember. Becky put her hands on her hips and shouted with laughter at their antics as they came pushing, tumbling through the gate and galloped wildly up and down the hills, with outstretching tails and tossing horns. They flung their heads back and blorted, they stamped their feet on the cool soft earth, they leapt like young lambs and danced with their unwieldy bodies on their slender legs.

  Cows that had long been jealous attacked each other with curved horns, and the farmer and Dan stood ready with forks and sticks to prevent any harm. They raised their noses in the air and sniffed the smells of spring, and they ran to the streams and water troughs, trampling the clear fresh water, drinking deeply with noisy gulps. They explored their old haunts, rubbed their flanks against their favourite stumps and railings, scratched their heads, polished their horns, and then settled down to eat the young short sweet grass.

  The bull in the byre stamped and roared to be free with them, but he was dangerous, his horns were short and deep, and his eyes red. No man turned his back on him, but Tom never let him think he was master. They had had some tussles and he obeyed the farmer, but old Joshua kept away from him.

  There were deaths as well as births on the farm, losses as well as gains. One day a man was seen waving and shouting as he came running across the Alder Lease. Tom stood at the back door, looking down the hill at the meadows below, straining to hear what he said. It was the servant from Oak Meadows and he pointed as he ran to a hollow by a wall out of sight. When he got near enough the words floated up the hill, ‘A cow fallen in the ditch yonder.’

  ‘Get the ropes, quick,’ cried Tom, with fear in his voice, and he and Dan ran down the fields with the heavy ropes and Joshua followed with a spade. Becky went too, to give a hand in pulling the poor beast, and Margaret stood pale and anxious at the door.

  There it lay on its back where it had slipped in the wet treacherous grass, as it tried to get the bright patch across the little ditch. A child could have scrambled out, but the cow’s legs were twisted, and it moaned very softly.

  They put the ropes round it and hauled, but the sloping field and sudden drop made it difficult, the five of them could not move it. It lay with agonized eyes, imploring help. Its leg was broken, perhaps its back was injured, and above was the blue sky and larks singing.

  ‘Get the gun and a cartridge,’ muttered Tom, and Becky hurried up the steep hills and across the fields. But it was too late, it was dead, and there it lay, a great white lump, smeared with mud and grass. They walked up the hill a sad procession, weary, disheartened. Margaret met them, troubled.

  The next day a knacker took it away, some silver for the skin, that was all. It went down the hill with its legs sticking out, tragic and unreal, and an empty stall had to be filled.

  Then someone, one of those folk who walk up and down the hills staring at nothing and asking foolish questions, left the gates open. Duchess’s foal, a chestnut with a star, glossy as the nut itself, got out and ran in his young innocence to the new horse who was a kicker. He let fly, and Prince was lamed, spoilt.

  They had the vet, and his leg was rubbed and fomented, but he would always limp. Tom grew grave and worked harder than ever. Susan’s heart burst with sorrow, but between herself and the grown-ups existed a barrier she could never cross.

  Days grew longer and the mists of dawn were swept away by the sun growing stronger. Heavy scents of the earth itself filled the air as the plough turned up the deep brown soil. Duchess and Diamond walked up and down the ploughland, and Dan guided them in the hollows and low hills as he drew the straight lines on the earth. Thrushes sang on the sycamore trees which stood round the walls of the ploughland, with long, pink, swelling buds.

  Primroses made pale pools of light under the hedges, and along the steep banks, where they grew in spite of winds which suddenly swept up the valleys and over the hills with a fierceness which tore the blossom from the pear trees. But the flowers on the banks were small, short-stalked little ones, whilst those under last year’s leaves in the hedgerows were large and fine.

  Margaret, Becky and Susan went off to the fields to pick cowslips, for the time had come to make cowslip wine. It was a cowslip day, too, a day of scents and pale gold colours, of glittering budded trees and little winds which clasped their skirts and tickled their ankles. The sky was fair, soft, yellow as a cowslip ball, and clouds like butterflies flew across it.

  They each took a small basket, and Becky and Margaret carried two clothes baskets between them. They left these under a tree on the side of the hill whilst they gathered the most fragrant and elusive of all field flowers.

  Cowslips have whims and fancies on the hillsides. They love and they detest, they pick and choose their dwelling place. They do not come up year after year in a wealth of yellow, like their neighbours the primroses, whose buds Susan knew would always lie in their nest of deeply veined green leaves among last year’s oak and beech under the hedges. They grow in clusters in family groups on the exposed hills, moving and migrating, a patch here one year, and gone the next to a sunnier spot.

  Some years they sprinkle the meadows with heavy gold, and at other times they hardly come up, their flowers are small and reluctant, as if they wish just to peep out, and then to return to the warm earth.

  But this was a good year, and Becky
and Mrs Garland picked rapidly, filling their baskets and pouring the yellow flood into the clothes baskets. Susan worked slowly, whispering to the flowers, searching for larger and larger ones, condoling with little ones, and leaving two together lest one should be lonely.

  She snapped the crisp stalks and sucked many a tiny scarlet-spotted floret to get the honey from the bottom, like a bee, which she resembled in her brown frock as she crouched on the grass. Now and then she found an oxlip, a king among the cowslips, and then she held it up to the sky, shut her eyes, and wished:

  ‘I wish for a pony all my own.

  I wish for curly hair.

  I wish to see a fairy.’

  Oxlips share with falling stars, the new moon, white bluebells, the first cuckoo, and four-leaved clover the property of granting a wish.

  ‘Do get on, Susan,’ called Margaret, pausing for a moment to rest her back and to look at the child with her face uplifted. ‘Your basket isn’t half filled.’

  ‘I was wishing, Mother. I found a family of oxlips.’

  ‘Work comes before wishing. “If wishes were horses beggars would ride”,’ returned her mother, and she bent once more to the task. But Susan saw a troop of tiny beggars with green rags floating from their arms, riding through the meadows on the oxlips’ backs, whipping their steeds with chimney-sweepers whilst the oxlips tossed their heads, and champed at their bits and rang their bells.

  The cocks crowed, one against another, and the hens ran to meet Tom Garland as he crossed the field. They trotted behind him, red, white and speckled, their little feet scuttering, their heads strained forward in expectant haste, jostling, pushing, like the rats after the Pied Piper. He waved his hand to the cowslip-pickers in the next field, and disappeared in the barn. The hens and cocks waited outside, cackling to one another.

  He leaned over the half-door, and sent a golden rain of Indian corn over them. More hens came fluttering, screaming, and screeching under the gates, through the hen-gap in the wall, and running down the narrow stairs from their house, lest they should be too late.

  The workers returned for dinner, and then went off to the fields again. Susan was tired, but her help was needed. All day they picked, and Dan joined them for an hour until the baskets were full. They carried them home at milking-time, piled heaps of scented blossoms and Susan ran in front, singing and shouting, her tiredness all gone.

  She opened the gates and closed them carefully after the baskets had passed. She called to the echo, ‘Cowslip wine’, and the echo answered. She startled the rabbits which sat up under the walls with little praying paws uplifted, wondering at the unusual noise in the quiet fields. She led the mare by the forelock from the farm gate, where it stood waiting to be invited within to the warmth.

  The kitchen fire was low and the house looked dark after the light of the fields. Becky fetched sticks from the barn, and soon the flames roared up the chimney. Susan took the big copper kettle to the troughs, where the ferns were unfolding their brown fists. She dipped the lading-can into the water until the kettle brimmed over on the ground and the water ran though the wall down the cliff. Then Becky carried it in and lifted it on the stove.

  Margaret sliced some cheese and put it in the Dutch oven and Becky went off to help with the milk. Soon the milkers came home with their cans for cooling, measuring, and scying.

  But after tea they placed the clothes baskets on the hearthrug and drew up their chairs, to finish the cowslips. They picked off the ‘peeps’ and dropped them into an immense earthenware crock, but the green stalks and sheaths were thrown on the floor.

  Tom Garland sat outside on the stone bench whilst all the ‘peeping’ went on, and looked over the valley below, where his fields dipped down to the river, and then climbed up to the rocky slopes above. Even at that time the vivid mowing fields could be distinguished from the pasture land, which was dull green, all hills and hollows, with springs and woods breaking its colour.

  Masses of black lichened stones like crouching elephants broke through the earth, and sheep lay close under their shelter, and rough-coated stirks pressed against them.

  All round the violet dusk was creeping, and a mist already lay in the bottom fields, hiding the bushes and hedges in its soft white cloak.

  Then solitary lights shone from farms far away, and one on the highest spur of a distant hill twinkled like a star.

  ‘Noah Peace has one of those new lamps, I reckon, it shines as bright as the full moon,’ called Tom to his wife through the open doors and passage. His voice was low, in keeping with the quiet of the hillsides. He stared at the light, pondering, dreaming, wrapt in the creeping dusk. Inside the house was the happy murmur of voices, but the sounds of night were sad.

  An owl called anxiously to his mate and an answering mournful cry came from the orchard. A little bird ruffled the yew trees and the leaves rustled drily. Molly, the Jersey cow, mooed sadly in the cow-house, calling the calf which had been taken from her. A rabbit screamed like a child in the beech wood deep below the house, and Tom turned from the light on the hillside to stare through the dusky trees. A late blackbird cried ‘Tchink, tchink’ as it heard the hidden danger. In the Greeny Croft a horse cropped regularly and raised its head to snort. Far away a dog barked, so far that it seemed to be on another planet, a ghost dog.

  Margaret left the cowslips and trimmed the lamp in the half-dark. She hung it from the hook above the table and lighted it with a speld from the new-cut bundle on the shelf.

  A new star now shone across the valleys, through the trees with their delicate lacework, to the hills. Somebody far away said, ‘Garlands have just lighted their lamp,’ and shadowy people looked from their windows to their spur on the great hill, the only light in all the rolling darkness.

  Moths dashed against the window with tiny thuds, and Margaret cried, ‘Come in, Tom, the night air is bad for you.’

  Tom slowly raised himself and closed the outside shutters. Margaret cottered them and tapped to say they were fast. Then he shut the door and left the fields to their sleep.

  Susan was sent to bed, and Becky took her candle to fasten the remaining shutters.

  The pile of peeps was growing high, and on the floor lay a mountain of pale green cowslips, robbed of their beauty and sweetness.

  The biggest copper preserving pan was lifted down by Dan and Tom, from its shelf, where it gleamed across a broad corner over the settle. Margaret made a syrup in it over the fire and Becky measured the peeps with the wooden measure, pouring them into yellow pancheons from the dairy. They both ladled the hot liquid over the flowers and took them to the stone benches to cool.

  The next day Margaret added some brewer’s yeast which Dan had brought up fresh from the village when he went with the milk, and stirred it with the big wooden spoon. In the cool morning, in the sunny afternoon, and at night when candles were lit she stirred the bowls, whirling the little flowers round and round in the scented liquor. For nine days the pancheons stood there, stirred every day by someone, visited every night and morning by Susan. The little withered flowers lay bunched together floating on the surface, the liquor was dull and lifeless.

  Then Margaret strained it through muslin and poured it into a barrel with a quart of brandy. There it stood, bunged up, catching the cobwebs and dust in the stone chamber, waiting till it was ready to be bottled. It would change to a sparkling yellow wine, and Margaret would give little fluted glasses of it with a biscuit to morning visitors, the curate for subscriptions, Sir Harry when he came for a chat with Tom, an occasional dealer. It was more precious than elderberry wine, which was the drink for cold weather, for snow and sleet.

  16

  The Three Chambers

  Every day was more beautiful than the last. The banks and hedgerows were blue with bird’s-eye and ground ivy, and the sun bloomed in the sky like a great shining rose in a blue garden. Clouds like white unicorns, elephants, castles and dragons moved across the heavens from the Druid Wood to the far-away beech plumes where they d
isappeared in the far-away world. Little winds came twinkling down the distances, ruffling the treetops, until they too ran away to the big towns where they would be lost in dirty streets, striving in vain to get back to their own leafy homes.

  Sweet smells came from the woods, of young bracken and moss, and the gum of the tasselled larch trees. In the hedges the wild cherry with filmy blossom raked the sky as if it sought for wisps of cloud to hang with its flowers. The first bluebells were out, the short-stemmed tiny ones which grew among the grass, always a little higher than the blades. In the woods soon the great sheet of blue would spread like a lake reflecting the sky, bluebells with long juicy stalks, snapping with a click as you picked them, leaving a thread of heavy juice on fingers and thumb. But the small flowers had their day first, the black chimney-sweepers, the yellow mountain pansies which fluttered in the short soft grass of the highest pastures, among the gorse and rocks, and the blue bird’s-eye.

  All day long something nid-nodded at the casement windows, climbing up the broad stone mullions, tapping at the glass, like a robin who wanted to come in. Sprays of budding tea roses, gold and cream with deep red leaves, soon to hang creamy-petalled and heavy with scent, but now tightly closed, knocked at the bedrooms and peered in at the stone room. Young green honeysuckle flapped its streamers against the landing windows, and another bush swayed round a gable of the house. Scarlet japonicas, which Susan must never, never touch, clasped the mullions of the parlour and kitchen. Shoots of pear and plum pushed against the old rooms, the apple chamber, the cheese chamber, precious blossom which would bring bad luck if you so much as picked a petal.

  But the elm tree rapped at the attic windows, Tom’s giant ‘ellum’, the friend of his childhood, which threw its shadow endearingly over the house and poured the soft delicate bunches of green pennies down the chimneys and through many an open window. Little discs of light and shade danced across the lawn, and ran in and out of the damson trees and lilac, flickering on the water troughs, and stone paths, as the trees swayed up and down.