A Little, Aloud

by Angela Macmillan

  One of the windows looked out over the green fields of England: the other looked back into Wales, past a clump of larches, at the Black Hill.

  Both the brothers’ hair was even whiter than the pillow-cases.

  Every morning their alarm went off at six. They listened to the farmers’ broadcast as they shaved and dressed. Downstairs, they tapped the barometer, lit the fire and boiled a kettle for tea. They did the milking and the foddering before coming back for breakfast.

  The house had roughcast walls and a roof of mossy stone tiles and stood at the far end of the farmyard in the shade of an old Scots pine. Below the cowshed there was an orchard of wind-stunted apple-trees, and then the fields slanted down to the dingle, and there were birches and alders along the stream.

  Long ago, the place had been called Ty-Cradoc – and Caractacus is still a name in these parts – but in 1737 an ailing girl called Alice Morgan saw the Virgin hovering over a patch of rhubarb, and ran back to the kitchen, cured. To celebrate the miracle, her father renamed his farm ‘The Vision’ and carved the initials A.M. with the date and a cross on the lintel above the porch. The border of Radnor and Hereford was said to run right through the middle of the staircase.

  The brothers were identical twins.

  As boys, only their mother could tell them apart: now age and accidents had weathered them in different ways.

  Lewis was tall and stringy, with shoulders set square and a steady long-limbed stride. Even at eighty he could walk over the hills all day, or wield an axe all day, and not get tired.

  He gave off a strong smell. His eyes – grey, dreamy and astigmatic – were set well back into the skull, and capped with thick round lenses in white metal frames. He bore the scar of a cycling accident on his nose and, ever since, its tip had curved downwards and turned purple in cold-weather.

  His head would wobble as he spoke: unless he was fumbling with his watch-chain, he had no idea what to do with his hands. In company he always wore a puzzled look; and if anyone made a statement of fact, he’d say, ‘Thank you!’ or ‘Very kind of you!’ Everyone agreed he had a wonderful way with sheepdogs.

  Benjamin was shorter, pinker, neater and sharper-tongued. His chin fell into his neck, but he still possessed the full stretch of his nose, which he would use in conversation as a weapon. He had less hair.

  He did all the cooking, the darning and the ironing; and he kept the accounts. No one could be fiercer in a haggle over the stock-prices and he would go on, arguing for hours, until the dealer threw up his hands and said, ‘Come off, you old skinflint!’ and he’d smile and say, ‘What can you mean by that?’

  For miles around the twins had the reputation of being incredibly stingy – but this was not always so.

  They refused, for example, to make a penny out of hay. Hay, they said, was God’s gift to the farmer; and providing The Vision had hay to spare, their poorer neighbours were welcome to what they needed. Even in the foul days of January, old Miss Fifield the Tump had only to send a message with the postman, and Lewis would drive the tractor over with a load of bales.

  Benjamin’s favourite occupation was delivering lambs. All the long winter, he waited for the end of March, when the curlews started calling and the lambing began. It was he, not Lewis, who stayed awake to watch the ewes. It was he who would pull a lamb at a difficult birth. Sometimes, he had to thrust his forearm into the womb to disentangle a pair of twins; and afterwards, he would sit by the fireside, unwashed and contented, and let the cat lick the afterbirth off his hands.

  In winter and summer, the brothers went to work in striped flannel shirts with copper studs to fasten them at the neck. Their jackets and waistcoats were made of brown whipcord, and their trousers were of darker corduroy. They wore their moleskin hats with the brims turned down; but since Lewis had the habit of lifting his to every stranger, his fingers had rubbed the nap off the peak.

  From time to time, with a slow mock of solemnity, they consulted their silver watches – not to tell the hour but to see whose watch was beating faster. On Saturday nights they took turns to have a hip-bath in front of the fire; and they lived for the memory of their mother.

  Because they knew each other’s thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking. And sometimes – perhaps after one of these silent quarrels, when they needed their mother to unite them – they would stand over her patchwork quilt and peer at the black velvet stars and the hexagons of printed calico that had once been her dresses. And without saying a word they could see her again – in pink, walking through the oatfield with a jug of draught cider for the reapers. Or in green, at a sheep-shearers’ lunch. Or in a blue-striped apron bending over the fire. But the black stars brought back a memory of their father’s coffin, laid out on the kitchen table, and the chalk-faced women, crying.

  Nothing in the kitchen had changed since the day of his funeral. The wallpaper, with its pattern of Iceland poppies and russet fern, had darkened over with smoke-resin; and though the brass knobs shone as brightly as ever, the brown paint had chipped from the doors and skirting.

  The twins never thought of renewing these threadbare decorations for fear of cancelling out the memory of that bright spring morning, over seventy years before, when they had helped their mother stir a bucket of flour-and-water paste, and watched the whitewash caking on her scarf.

  Benjamin kept her flagstones scrubbed, the iron grate gleaming with black lead polish, and a copper kettle always hissing on the hob.

  Friday was his baking day – as it had once been hers – and on Friday afternoons he would roll up his sleeves to make Welsh cakes or cottage loaves, pummelling the dough so vigorously that the cornflowers on the oilcloth cover had almost worn away.

  On the mantelpiece stood a pair of Staffordshire spaniels, five brass candlesticks, a ship-in-a-bottle and a tea-caddy painted with a Chinese lady. A glass-fronted cabinet – one pane repaired with Scotch tape – contained china ornaments, silver-plated teapots, and mugs from every Coronation and Jubilee. A flitch of bacon was rammed into a rack in the rafters. The Georgian pianoforte was proof of idler days and past accomplishments.

  Lewis kept a twelve-bore shotgun propped up beside the grandfather clock: both the brothers were terrified of thieves and antique-dealers.

  Their father’s only hobby – in fact, his only interest apart from farming and the Bible – had been to carve wooden frames for the pictures and family photographs that covered every spare stretch of wall. To Mrs Jones it had been a miracle that a man of her husband’s temper and clumsy hands should have had the patience for such intricate work. Yet, from the moment he took up his chisels, from the moment the tiny white shavings flew, all the meanness went out of him.

  He had carved a ‘gothic’ frame for the religious colour print ‘The Broad and Narrow Path’. He had invented some ‘biblical’ motifs for the watercolour of the Pool of Bethesda; and when his brother sent an oleograph from Canada, he smeared the surface with linseed oil to make it look like an Old Master, and spent a whole winter working up a surround of maple leaves.

  And it was this picture, with its Red Indian, its birchbark, its pines and a crimson sky – to say nothing of its association with the legendary Uncle Eddie – that first awoke in Lewis a yearning for far-off places.

  Apart from a holiday at the seaside in 1910, neither of the twins had ever strayed further than Hereford. Yet these restricted horizons merely inflamed Lewis’s passion for geography. He would pester visitors for their opinions on ‘them savages in Africky’; for news of Siberia, Salonika or Sri Lanka; and when someone spoke of President Carter’s failure to rescue the Teheran hostages, he folded his arms and said, decisively, ‘Him should’a gone to get ’em through Odessa.’

  His image of the outside world derived from a Bartholomew’s atlas of 1925 when the two great colonial empires were coloured pink and mauve, and the Soviet Union was a dull sage green. And it offended his sense of order to find that the planet was now full of bickering little countries with unpronou
nceable names. So, as if to suggest that real journeys only existed in the imagination – and perhaps to show off – he would close his eyes and chant the lines his mother taught him:

  Westward, westward, Hiawatha

  Sailed into the fiery sunset

  Sailed into the purple vapours

  Sailed into the dusk of evening.

  Too often the twins had fretted at the thought of dying childless – yet they had only to glance at their wall of photographs to get rid of the gloomiest thoughts. They knew the names of all the sitters and never tired of finding likenesses between people born a hundred years apart.

  Hanging to the left of their parents’ wedding group was a picture of themselves at the age of six, gaping like baby barn-owls and dressed in identical page-boy collars from the fête in Lurkenhope Park. But the one that gave them the most pleasure was a colour snapshot of their great-nephew Kevin, also aged six, and got up in a wash-towel turban, as Joseph in a nativity play.

  Since then, fourteen years had passed and Kevin had grown into a tall, black-haired young man with bushy eyebrows that met in the middle, and slaty grey-blue eyes. In a few months the farm would be his.

  So now, when they looked at that faded wedding picture; when they saw their father’s face framed in fiery red sideburns (even in a sepia photo you could tell he had bright red hair); when they saw the leg-o’-mutton sleeves of their mother’s dress, the roses in her hat, and the ox-eye daisies in her bouquet; and when they compared her sweet smile with Kevin’s, they knew that their lives had not been wasted and that time, in its healing circle, had wiped away the pain and anger, the shame and the sterility, and had broken into the future with the promise of new things.

  THE SELF-UNSEEING

  Thomas Hardy

  Here is the ancient floor,

  Footworn and hollowed and thin,

  Here was the former door

  Where the dead feet walked in.

  She sat here in her chair,

  Smiling into the fire;

  He who played stood there,

  Bowing it higher and higher.

  Childlike, I danced in a dream;

  Blessings emblazoned that day;

  Everything glowed with a gleam;

  Yet we were looking away!

  READING NOTES

  A group in a nursing home found the description of the farmhouse in the story very evocative. References to washstands, ‘The Light of the World’, the Staffordshire spaniels, the glass-fronted cabinet and the family photographs on the wall retrieved many similar memories. They were interested in the fact that the old men were twins and wondered what it must have been like for the brothers to have spent their whole lives together. They talked about the men living ‘for the memory of their mother’, of family homes and of their need to know that their home would stay in the family. They found a lot to talk about in the final sentence – in particular the phrase ‘the healing circle of time’.

  George thought that the poem seemed easy enough when he first read it but ‘got deeper’ the more he thought about it and each line presented the group with food for thought. Someone else felt that the last line spoiled the thought of ‘blessings emblazoned that day’ and they talked about whether happy memories must always be tinged with a certain sadness. Finally, each member of the group went on to describe the first house they could remember living in.

  Senior Moments

  PICKWICK PAPERS

  (EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 22)

  Charles Dickens

  (approximate reading time 16 minutes)

  Samuel Pickwick Esq. is portly, affable and reasonably well off. He is founder and president of the Pickwick Club. He and the other members: Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman make journeys through England and report their findings to the rest of the club members. Sam Weller is Pickwick’s personal servant and in this extract they are staying at an inn in Ipswich where Samuel Pickwick has been sitting up late after dinner talking to a fellow guest . . .

  Mr Pickwick sat himself down in a chair before the fire, and fell into a train of rambling meditations. His mind wandered and flew off at a tangent and then it came back to The Great White Horse at Ipswich, with sufficient clearness to convince Mr Pickwick that he was falling asleep. So he roused himself, and began to undress, when he recollected he had left his watch on the table downstairs.

  Now this watch was a special favourite with Mr Pickwick, having been carried about, beneath the shadow of his waistcoat, for a greater number of years than we feel called upon to state at present. The possibility of going to sleep, unless it were ticking gently beneath his pillow, or in the watch-pocket over his head, had never entered Mr Pickwick’s brain. So as it was pretty late now, and he was unwilling to ring his bell at that hour of the night, he slipped on his coat, of which he had just divested himself, and taking the japanned candlestick in his hand, walked quietly downstairs.

  The more stairs Mr Pickwick went down, the more stairs there seemed to be to descend, and again and again, when Mr Pickwick got into some narrow passage, and began to congratulate himself on having gained the ground-floor, did another flight of stairs appear before his astonished eyes. At last he reached a stone hall, which he remembered to have seen when he entered the house. Passage after passage did he explore; room after room did he peep into; at length, as he was on the point of giving up the search in despair, he opened the door of the identical room in which he had spent the evening, and beheld his missing property on the table.

  Mr Pickwick seized the watch in triumph, and proceeded to retrace his steps to his bedchamber. If his progress downward had been attended with difficulties and uncertainty, his journey back was infinitely more perplexing. Rows of doors, garnished with boots of every shape, make, and size, branched off in every possible direction. A dozen times did he softly turn the handle of some bedroom door which resembled his own, when a gruff cry from within of ‘Who the devil’s that?’ or ‘What do you want here?’ caused him to steal away, on tiptoe, with a perfectly marvellous celerity. He was reduced to the verge of despair, when an open door attracted his attention. He peeped in. Right at last! There were the two beds, whose situation he perfectly remembered, and the fire still burning. His candle, not a long one when he first received it, had flickered away in the drafts of air through which he had passed and sank into the socket as he closed the door after him. ‘No matter,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘I can undress myself just as well by the light of the fire.’

  The bedsteads stood one on each side of the door; and on the inner side of each was a little path, terminating in a rush-bottomed chair, just wide enough to admit of a person’s getting into or out of bed, on that side, if he or she thought proper. Having carefully drawn the curtains of his bed on the outside, Mr Pickwick sat down on the rush-bottomed chair, and leisurely divested himself of his shoes and gaiters. He then took off and folded up his coat, waistcoat, and neck-cloth, and slowly drawing on his tasselled nightcap, secured it firmly on his head, by tying beneath his chin the strings which he always had attached to that article of dress. It was at this moment that the absurdity of his recent bewilderment struck upon his mind. Throwing himself back in the rush-bottomed chair, Mr Pickwick laughed to himself so heartily, that it would have been quite delightful to any man of well-constituted mind to have watched the smiles that expanded his amiable features as they shone forth from beneath the nightcap.

  ‘It is the best idea,’ said Mr Pickwick to himself, smiling till he almost cracked the nightcap strings – ‘it is the best idea, my losing myself in this place, and wandering about these staircases, that I ever heard of. Droll, droll, very droll.’ Here Mr Pickwick smiled again, a broader smile than before, and was about to continue the process of undressing, in the best possible humour, when he was suddenly stopped by a most unexpected interruption: to wit, the entrance into the room of some person with a candle, who, after locking the door, advanced to the dressing-table, and set down the light upon it.

 
The smile that played on Mr Pickwick’s features was instantaneously lost in a look of the most unbounded and wonder-stricken surprise. The person, whoever it was, had come in so suddenly and with so little noise, that Mr Pickwick had had no time to call out, or oppose their entrance. Who could it be? A robber? Some evil-minded person who had seen him come upstairs with a handsome watch in his hand, perhaps. What was he to do?

  The only way in which Mr Pickwick could catch a glimpse of his mysterious visitor with the least danger of being seen himself, was by creeping on to the bed, and peeping out from between the curtains on the opposite side. To this manoeuvre he accordingly resorted. Keeping the curtains carefully closed with his hand, so that nothing more of him could be seen than his face and nightcap, and putting on his spectacles, he mustered up courage and looked out.

  Mr Pickwick almost fainted with horror and dismay. Standing before the dressing-glass was a middle-aged lady, in yellow curl-papers, busily engaged in brushing what ladies call their ‘back-hair.’ However the unconscious middle-aged lady came into that room, it was quite clear that she contemplated remaining there for the night; for she had brought a rushlight and shade with her, which, with praiseworthy precaution against fire, she had stationed in a basin on the floor, where it was glimmering away, like a gigantic lighthouse in a particularly small piece of water.

  ‘Bless my soul!’ thought Mr Pickwick, ‘what a dreadful thing!’

  ‘Hem!’ said the lady; and in went Mr Pickwick’s head with automaton-like rapidity.

  ‘I never met with anything so awful as this,’ thought poor Mr Pickwick, the cold perspiration starting in drops upon his nightcap. ‘Never. This is fearful.’

  It was quite impossible to resist the urgent desire to see what was going forward. So out went Mr Pickwick’s head again. The prospect was worse than before. The middle-aged lady had finished arranging her hair; had carefully enveloped it in a muslin nightcap with a small plaited border; and was gazing pensively on the fire.