Linda Malyon is a stringy, brown-faced, notch-haired girl who looks like a boy. She is the antithesis of country child freshness and she is as un-Juliet-like now as she will be at forty. As a member of “that lot,” as the Malyon family is known, she has inherited in one large generalized lump the shortcomings of two or three generations of her kin. According to the gossips, Mrs. Ede is angry with neither Persis nor Linda it seems. She just thinks that it has got to stop and it was entirely with this in mind that she took the bus into Ipswich and made a statement. The Welfare lady called on Linda a few days later, thinking of care-and-protection, and Linda trailed round the cottage, putting the Mirror and her brothers’ socks under the chair cushions, and the kettle on. The brothers, all small, were heaped up in armfuls like puppies and tossed into the garden. The Welfare lady took the opportunity to mention their ferocious energy as her opening gambit. They could be little buggers at times, Linda agreed. Would her mother ever return, did she think? (Mrs. Malyon has “gone off to London.” Everybody who disappears has gone off to London.) Not if she’s got her head screwed on, says Linda—“though, seriously, it’s better if she don’t.” The Welfare lady remembers Mrs. Malyon and the uproar she created, and mentally agrees. She is pretty well foxed about the current Malyon problem all the same. She expected some boy to arrive, fairly soon, and compound Linda’s already miraculously complex existence of schoolgirl–housekeeper and sister–mother, also hardened smoker and paperback addict (Georgette Heyer, James Bond, Barbara Cartland) but the wilfully managed affair with Persis amazes her. She would genuinely like to know why.
“But why, Linda?”
Linda tries to find an answer. She thinks of doing the washing before breakfast, getting the two youngest dressed and packed off to Mrs. Ede’s council house until the two eldest collect them on their way back from the village school, of doing her homework on the bus and doing the shopping in her dinner hour, of coming home and clearing up and listening to her father talk the hind leg off a donkey. Of a great camel’s hump of jobs and demands. And then going off to find Persis where he hedged and ditched—so slowly, people said, that bushes grew out of his reach while he was stretching for them—and enjoy his bothered kind of happiness and listen to his awful stories. But there is nothing here which is going to help the Welfare lady, who looks as helpless as Linda has ever seen her.
“I’m not pregnant,” she reminds her.
“But Mr. Ede—don’t you understand—he’ll go to prison.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours—partly.”
“I’m sorry for my part then.”
Linda is sorting the mending. The cottage is acridly sweet, dirty and cosy. Fish fingers wait to be cooked in the pan. The brothers are dribbling what looks like a toy cowboy hat through some stagnant cabbage stumps in a paroxysm of laughter and howls. Quiet! shouts Linda, and they are quiet.
The Welfare lady has written:
The case in which patient is involved is due to come to court on June 30th: the girl he is accused of assaulting is aged 14 years. Patient has known her and her family, who appear to be a rough lot, for about two years. Informant (patient’s wife) said that the girl was very well developed and precocious, looking much older than her age. She is said over the past two years to have followed Mr. Ede about the place continually and Mrs. Ede thought that she was as much to blame as her husband. Mr. Ede is said to have intercourse with the girl frequently and over quite a long period, and the girl is said to have been a willing, indeed enthusiastic partner. Mr. Ede is also said to have given her and her family money and cigarettes at odd times, and informant thought the girl’s father knew about and condoned the association with the patient. Mrs. Ede herself finally informed the Police of the affair because (a) she realized that the girl might at any moment become pregnant by her husband and (b) that she resented the time and attention he paid her. She appeared to bear him no real resentment, remarking that her husband was easily led. . . . Asked if she considered her husband over-sexed or in any way peculiar in this respect, she answered stolidly “No.” They have intercourse about twice or three times a week and she has never refused him. Patient, when not involved with girls, is said to be a good father and generous with money if he has any. Mrs. Ede said that she would never think of leaving him, nor would she ever. . . .
Persis stays out front as much as he can before the sentence (eighteen months), digging the garden, shouting cheerily to passers-by, insisting on his ordinariness. The men pass and say, “ ’night, Persis,” because he can’t very well be ignored. He has been county-courted for as long as anyone can remember. Poaching, nicking lead, failing with his hire purchase, fighting, driving uninsured, dozens of little illegalities. Two quiet, artful-looking sons, Tony and Arch, slipped away from home as soon as they could and long before anything could be known about them. Mrs. Ede has sent them each a copy of The East Anglian Daily Times containing an account of the case but they won’t answer. They have never written a line, not even at Christmas. They work in a supermarket in Ilford, but nobody in Akenfield knows this. “They done well for theirselves,” Mrs. Ede tells whoever may be enquiring. She is thin—almost as thin as Linda—and is rarely seen. Her face is heart-shaped and tiny with a big, strong handsome nose. Older people remember her dancing during the war at the American base, hokey-coky-ing night after night in her platform shoes.
Persis’ war was even more sensational. While on guard duty in the army he had shot his sergeant for not giving the password. There had been a court martial and Persis had to be acquitted of manslaughter. This business was unknown to the village on account of the wartime morale laws but it is now used by the defence in the Linda case to establish Persis’ state of moral irresponsibility. It astounds Akenfield. Persis, they read, is of “low intelligence” and a kind of murderer. There is no connection here with winking, flannelling, girl-chasing, cheating Persis. Mrs. Ede stays inside and paints the entire house from top to bottom, with Radio Caroline turned up so high that she wouldn’t hear a knock if it was made with a hammer. Linda brings her two little brothers to be minded while she is at school and Mrs. Ede looks at her with a silent “now look what you’ve done” but no more than this. Her father says, read, read, read—you must want your bloody head seen to!
16. LIMITATIONS
You will say that I am in the scheme of things,
A unit in the crumbling earth;
Trees are barren:
Chance I’m a barren tree.
Link me with circumstance if you must . . .
—HERBERT READ, The Analysis of Love
Lana Webb · aged twenty-three
Could Lana be spoken to? Yes, apparently, provided that one did not demand an answer. She belongs to the village and she is emphatically not a recluse. If folk avoid her, that is their look out! She makes it plain that she has not withdrawn from life, complicated though life may be. She is here, smooth and still, washed and tidy, decent enough for anybody who might drop in. Her name is written in as many different places as that of anyone else, the chapel register, the school attendance book, the electoral roll, at the newsagents (Secrets, Honey, Lucky Star, True Romance—she is a great reader and is well known for always having her nose stuck in a book) and at the National Assistance Board. Everybody in Akenfield knows Lana and if they don’t come to see her, “Well, that’s their loss!” laughs her Gran. The joke is a good one and momentarily engulfs them both. They emerge from it like divers from a pool, shaking their heads and dashing moisture from their eyes with the backs of hands.
“You’re lucky that it’s only your eyes that are running!” says Lana.
Gran turns away with a “hoop-hoop!” Her shoulders shake. “Now don’t start me off again, there’s a good girl,” she says.
They both have to raise their voices in order to be heard above the crackling pop coming through the fretwork sunburst of a thirties wireless. The lino is translucent, like sucked toffee, its pattern all licked off by the duster. Shini
ng ornaments, shining blacklead, shining skin on Lana’s strong bare legs hanging out of their mini-skirt. Regularly, and much louder than anything else, there is the dungeon-like rattle of a chain being wearily dragged in and out of a barrel. It is Terry, Gran’s dog. He is a collie aged thirteen with fat dusty haunches and golden eyes which need wiping. He was fastened to the barrel when he was one and has never been unfastened since. “Terry!” calls Gran. “He has what we have—don’t you, boy?” “Good boy!” shouts Lana.
The cottage is partly a soldier’s resettlement hut of the First World War and partly a railway carriage, and is quite inordinately pretty. The two units are set in an L and the join is covered with house-leeks and stone-crop, cushions of grass and Paul Scarlet roses. Brass carriage handles glitter behind leaves. Little paths maze around and are edged with beer bottles, their necks driven into the earth. It is a toy house for playing mothers-and-fathers in. Except that the fathers, big, clumsy, nasty things, have long since been ousted from the game. Their speckled photographs glare down from the walls. Both dad and grandad have been dead for years—“Why, you hardly knew your dad, did you, Larn?” cries Gran with relief. “Now my husband,” she points to a boy-scout with his hat set on a bamboo table like a meal, “he lasted for a long time.” Her eyes show patience, resignation, God’s will being done.
Lana glances guiltily at the pictures because of Ken. He is in her handbag, along with a facsimiled autographed photo of Ringo Starr, her birth certificate and her horoscope. But somehow there is no need to fret about Ken, who is a kind, stout man of perhaps thirty-eight with his pockets stretched out with bibles, and change for his insurance round. Ken has known Lana since she was twelve. “And it shows the kind of chap he is that it never made a scrap of difference to his feelings for her,” says Gran.
Lana prinks in the armchair in which she has been sitting all this time and there is the distinct flap and squeak of drenched rubber.
“The doctor himself said that it was nothing to be ashamed of,” declares Gran.
“Of course not!” one agrees in a fiercely “civilized” voice.
Gran and Lana’s eyes meet in wordless discussion. Yes? Yes. Gran goes to a cream-painted door and opens it with a flourish in which candour competes with pride. There is evidently another addition to the toy house which cannot be seen from the road and which makes it an F, not an L. It is a long white room with windows wedged open on either side, and the wind hurtles through it. It is blowing some twenty pairs of knickers. Pink, white, blue, flowered, plain, nylon, cotton, they jig happily above a galvanized zinc bath in which sheets are steeping. Gran closes the door and Lana, her expression faintly amused and challenging now, rises from her chair and goes off somewhere to change. The movement causes an odd Alice-like transformation. Sitting, she is a slumped odalisque. Standing, she is a very big little girl. The door of the second-class compartment clicks behind her.
“You should just see her room,” says Gran. “Like a little princess’s, and she does it all herself. Of course, it hasn’t been all honey. It’s been a struggle, I can tell you. Only He knows. But neither of us would say thank you to a change now. What with my bit of pension and her bit of National, we’re quids in.”
Lana’s past is as much an open book as her present. Her father was an American, her mother Gran’s daughter. The daughter was known as a “good girl” and had thus been tricked, bewitched or raped by the American. But it all worked out for the best and from the time Lana went to school until her mother’s death from a heart attack when the child was fourteen they were “all in all to each other.” Lana didn’t have children as friends; there was no need. She had Mum, who walked her to and from school until the day she left. She slept with Mum in the second-class compartment and it was in this room, with “Smoking” frosted on the windows, that Mum cut out and made all Lana’s clothes from giveaway patterns in the women’s magazines. Every Saturday night Ken arrived in his black-japanned Morris and drove them to his Mum’s in Ipswich, where they watched television. Gran now went on this outing with Lana, who sat on a pile of Daily Expresses which Ken provided. The whole village agreed that Ken had been wonderful.
Lana had wetted the bed as a child, of course, said Gran. But you couldn’t call that Incontinence, could you? This had begun six years ago and Lana hadn’t been dry since. “Wet as a ditch, day in, day out.” She got through fifteen pairs of knickers a day, not to mention all her bed-linen. And pads and rubbers and anything you like to mention. She had had two operations and they had made her worse (Triumph). She don’t feel a thing.
Lana returned to her chair at this point. Did she knit, perhaps? Do anything? “Glory, no!” laughs Gran. Both shook with merriment at the very idea. “You see,” explained Gran, “Incontinence is a way of life. Those were the doctor’s very words, weren’t they, Larn? She can’t go to the pictures, not to the chapel, nor nowhere.”
“And Ken?”
“Ken’s got his Mum, hasn’t he?”
Gran picks up a jug and begins to water her pot-plants. A swing-wing bomber from Bentwaters knifes up the iridescent Akenfield afternoon, its scream momentarily and intolerably trapped in the cottage.
“Blessed Yanks!” says Gran—“If ever I should swear!”
17. THE VET
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
—GEORGE ORWELL, Animal Farm
Dr. Tim Swift · aged fifty-five · veterinary surgeon
Tall, intelligent, with the red-brown skin and clear eyes of the “Ipswich” period Gainsboroughs, Tim Swift has been forced to take more than the usual complacent or pragmatic look at the new animal farming methods which have engulfed Akenfield. Since he arrived in the village twenty years ago he has seen, either a miraculous improvement of livestock in the area, with subsequent cheap and easily available food for all, or an unparalleled exploitation by man of the animal kingdom. He is quite unsentimental, but birds and beasts happen to be his patients, so he has to recognize their interests. A line has to be drawn between what is economic or simply convenient, and what is cruel. Where animals are concerned, cruelty is a bent noun. The number of creatures in Britain which meet agony and strange deaths via vivisection, sport and factory-farming is incalculable. Special pleading is re-worded every ten years or so to accommodate the torture and slaughter. Emotion, anger, pity, retribution are siphoned off into the R.S.P.C.A.’s advertisement in The Times—“Dog left seven days without food”—or in such splendidly dotty animal concern as that which drove two English ladies to succour the cats of Venice. Rural society created this dichotomy of feeling in the first place. The countryman knew how far the code allowed him to go with the various creatures which were his friends, servants, amusement and food. The code wasn’t particularly humane by enlightened standards but, when observed, it stopped men being disgusted by each other. Bear-baiting, cock-fighting (mains are still held in Cumberland and Westmorland), otter-hunting, coursing and stag- and fox-hunting channelled off the more primitive blood-shedding instincts while using, as do armies, ritual graces for the kill. In a word, people knew where they were. But now, with a decade’s intensive stock-breeding resulting in huge new animal populations in every village, there is moral confusion.
The vet lives in a large attractive house with tennis courts, an aviary, a double garage and cedars of Lebanon spaced out around it. He is married with two sons and two daughters. The gardens and paddocks are full of convalescents, a donkey, a Betty-cat whose life has to be saved at all cost, a parakeet, a peacock hanging gaudily from the ash tree and moody dogs. The atmosphere is that of a Victorian pet-loving rectory.
* * *
Only twenty years ago, when I first came to Akenfield, every farmer had so much corn, so much stock. The stock was small and “knowable,” as you might say—twenty cows, each with a name, each milked by hand, more often than not; five or six sows with their litters and their funny old wa
ys. The farmer would milk, feed and then go off to the field until dinner-time, and then about four he’d milk and feed again. After tea he went to the barn to grind the feed for the next day. His wife kept the chickens and maybe a few turkeys. She’d most likely buy 100 turkey poults and lose about forty of them. This would be acceptable. If she’d still got fifty come Christmas-time, she thought she’d done well. To have reared seventy-five out of 100 was excellent. This was her pin money. She’d pinch food for her fowls from the barn and also give them kitchen scraps. Her other animal was a pet pig.
All around, the country was as it always was—nice old parks, oak trees, rabbits, a few stags to make things look grand, sheep by the lake’s edge, cattle up to their udders in the pond. That is how it was when I came here—England as it used to be. But it will never be a Constable again. Most of the farm-workers had a sow in the backyard. Then wages went up and the price of pigs dropped, and the sows disappeared from the cottage gardens. The parents of these farm-workers had lived on bread and fat bacon—the farmer supplied the pig, either very cheaply or for nothing, and it was fed on house scraps and mumble which the children collected along the hedgerows. The cottage people grew their own potatoes—great stretches of them to keep them through the winter—and they got skimmed milk from the farm. The meat they ate had as much as four inches of fat on it. A pig was fattened to forty score—now it is fattened to eighteen score. It was a world of great pigs. The villagers needed all this fat to make their lard, which was often eaten on bread instead of butter. They had to eat all the fat they could to keep them warm. They had such poor clothes and often nothing to change into after having been out in all sorts of weather. Many’s the time I’ve seen them, men dressed in rain-hardened boards and little capes of sacking hanging down from their heads. The Suffolk women won’t buy fat now—perhaps it reminds them of these shivering men in the lea of the wind, eating their bait and chopping at pure white hunks of the stuff. The fattest pig-meat from Suffolk now goes to Yorkshire—the miners still like it very much.
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