by Laurie Lee
Fred sat for a while, sucking his tea, and we gazed at him with wonder. We all knew Fred Bates, we knew him well, and our girls often said he was soppy; yet only two hours ago, and only just down the lane, he’d seen drowned Miss Flynn with no clothes on. Now he seemed to exude a sort of salty sharpness so that we all wished to touch and taste him; and the excited girls tried to hold him back and make him go through his story again. But he finished his tea, sniffed hard, and left us, saying he’d still got his milk-round to do.
The news soon spread around the village, and women began to gather at their gates.
‘Have you heard?’
‘No. What?’
‘About poor Miss Flynn… . Been and drowned herself down in the pond.’
‘You just can’t mean it!’
‘Yes. Fred Bates found her.’
‘Yes - he just been drinking tea in our kitchen.’
‘I can’t believe it. I only saw her last week.’
‘I know: I saw her just yesterday. I said, “Good morning, Miss Flynn”; and she said, “Good morning, Mrs Ayres,” - you know, like she always did.’
‘But she was down in the town, only Friday it was! I saw her in the Home-and-Colonial.’
‘Poor, sad creature - whatever made her do it? ’
‘Such a lovely face she had.’
‘So good to our boys. She was kindness itself. To think of her lying there.’
‘She had a bit of a handicap, so they say.’
‘You mean about those fellows?’
‘No, more’n that.’
‘What was it? ’
‘Ssssh!’
‘Well, not everyone knows, of course….’
Miss Flynn was drowned. The women looked at me listening. I stole off and ran down the lane. I was dry with excitement and tight with dread; I just wanted to see the pond. A group of villagers, including my sisters, stood gaping down at the water. The pond was flat and green and empty, and a smudge of milk clung to the reeds. I hid in the rushes, hoping not to be seen, and stared at that seething stain. This was the pond that had choked Miss Flynn. Yet strangely, and not by accident. She had come to it naked, alone in the night, and had slipped into it like a bed; she lay down there, and drew the water over her, and drowned quietly away in the reeds. I gazed at the lily roots coiled deep down, at the spongy weeds around them. That’s where she lay, a green foot under, still and all night by herself, looking up through the water as though through a window and waiting for Fred to come by. One of my knees began to quiver; it was easy to see her there, her hair floating out and her white eyes open, exactly as Fred Bates had found her. I saw her clearly, slightly magnified, and heard her vague dry voice: ‘I’ve been bad, Mrs Er. It’s my mother’s spirit. Shewon’t let me bide at night… .’
The pond was empty. She’d been carried home on a hurdle, and the women had seen to her body. But for me, as long as I can remember, Miss Flynn remained drowned in that pond.
As for Fred Bates, he enjoyed for a day a welcome wherever he went. He repeated his story over and over again and drank cups of tea by the dozen. But his fame turned bad, very suddenly; for a more sinister sequel followed. The very next day, on a visit to Stroud, he saw a man crushed to death by a wagon.
‘Twice in two days,’ the villagers said. ‘ He’ll see the Devil next.’
Fred Bates was avoided after that. We crossed roads when we saw him coming. No one would speak to him or look him in the eyes, and he wasn’t allowed to deliver milk any more. He was sent off instead to work alone in a quarry, and it took him years to re-establish himself.
The murder and the drowning were long ago, but to me they still loom large; the sharp death-taste, tooth-edge of violence, the yielding to the water of that despairing beauty, the indignant blood in the snow. They occurred at a time when the village was the world and its happenings all I knew. The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.
It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know - the blood and beliefs of generations whohad been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley - tree-clumps, corners in woods - that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian. The women in their talk still used these names which are not used now any more. There was also a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned.
In our grey stone village, especially in winter, such stories never seemed strange. When I sat at home among my talking sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard the long details of hapless suicides, of fighting men loose in the snow, of witch-doomed widows disembowelled by bulls, of child-eating sows, and so on -1 would look through the windows and see the wet walls streaming, the black trees bend in the wind, and I saw these things happening as natural convulsions of our landscape, and though drymouthed, I was never astonished.
Being so recently born, birth had no meaning; it was the other extreme that enthralled me. Death was absorbing, and I saw much of it; it was my childhood’s continuous fare. Somebody else had gone, they had gone in the night, and nobody tried to hide it. Old women, brighteyed, came carrying the news; the corpse was praised and buried; while Mother and the girls at their kitchen chorus went over the final hours. ‘The poor old thing. She fought to the last. She didn’t have the strength left in her.’ They wept easily, sniffing, and healthily flushed; they could have been mourning the death of a dog.
Winter, of course, was the worst time for the old ones. Then they curled up like salted snails. We called one Sunday on the old Davies couple who lived along by the shop. It had been a cold wet January, a marrow-bone freezer, during which three old folk, on three successive Saturdays, had been carried off to their graves. Mr and Mrs Davies were ancient too, but they had a stubborn air of survival; and they used to watch each other, as I remember, with the calculating looks of card-players. This morning the women began to discuss the funerals, while we boys sat down by the fire. Mrs Davies was jaunty, naming each of the mourners and examining their bills of health. She rocked her white head, shot her husband a glance, and said she wondered who would be next.
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 week-ends.’
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, h
er 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. Hishair 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 oreach other’s company, they lived as snug as two podded chestnuts. By day blue smoked 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 Woman’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.
MOTHER
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 connexion 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 severalgenerations of farm-hands. But in Annie Light he saw a freak of intelligence which he felt bound to nurture and cherish.