The first thing you noticed about Uncle Eddie was that he was tremendously tall and thin. He hadn’t much hair. When Georgie asked him about it one day, he said he’d been behind the door when hair was given out, and had to make do with the leavings; a puzzling reply, later understood to be not quite serious. What hair he had lay in lank fair streaks across the top of his head from left to right, with the scalp showing whitish in between. He had a long, humorous, comedian’s face, pale but for a spot of pink in the middle of each hollow cheek, with hardly any eyebrows above big grey eyes, loose-lidded like those of a large friendly lizard. He had a long nose, with a sort of drooping blob at the end. His mouth was wide, irregular, and seldom still. He had a long, scraggy neck with a prodigious Adam’s apple, which bobbed up and down like one of the celluloid balls over a jet of water at a fairground shooting range. His arms and legs were so long, and so loosely fitted to his body, that they seemed to lack co-ordination. When he made to get up from a chair he appeared to need two or three seconds to get his joints under control and persuade his limbs to move in the same direction.
When at last he was on his feet, his walk was a shamble, fast and purposeful but accompanied by other sympathetic disturbances, the wild swinging of one arm or of both, and the vehement cracking and snapping of his finger joints and galvanic twitches of his shoulders. When, as often happened out of doors, his arms were so full that such extra movement was impossible, he made up for it by various jerks of his head, Sometimes even seeming to describe a circle with it; a gesture made easier by the fact that he wore a collar several sizes larger than his neck, allowing great freedom of movement inside.
These eccentricities, the outermost manifestations of an independent and most likeable nature, added to Eddie’s popularity in the neighbourhood. Always cheerful, never at a loss for an absurd or amiable rejoinder, he kept folk amused, had a ready ear for tales of trouble, did small kindnesses without number, and, though laughed at and regarded as wilfully eccentric by the orthodox, had nowhere any enemy.
Admiring, lost in gazing at his hero, Georgie suddenly realized that Uncle Eddie was speaking about him.
“Lovely.” He took a gulp of cordial, and his Adam’s apple leaped like a trout. “Before we know where we are, Georgie will be taking his drop.”
Aunt Butters opened her eyes so wide that for an instant one could see what colour they were.
“I hope not,” she rejoined.
“Hope not? Hope not? Why, ‘tis a perfect drink. Beneficial. ‘Ealth-giving. You know that.”
“Well—not for many a long day yet.”
“See what you got to look forward to.” With an appalling grimace, meant to represent ecstasy, Uncle Eddie emptied the glass. “Aaah. Oooh. Lovely.”
“A drop more?”
“No. No. No more. ‘Tis potent, like.”
Aunt Butters did not press him. She took his glass, and put it on a tray. There was a short silence. Georgie held his breath. Now. Now. Oh please.
“And now,” Aunt Butters said mildly, “I expect Georgie will want to show you the garden.”
Georgie could hardly accept this formula, for Uncle Eddie not only knew far more about gardens than he did, but more about this particular garden, which was laid out largely on his advice. But he saw it as part of their plan to make him feel big and independent, and therefore made no protest: especially as Uncle Eddie at once played up.
“Good notion, eh? Fresh us up a bit.”
“Your coat and cap, Georgie. And your muffler.”
“He doesn’t want no muffler, my coadjutor don’t.”
Oh. This was dangerously near giving away the sacred, secret list of names. But coadjutor was allowable—just—because there was the pretence that Georgie helped in the garden. In the summer, he did weed a bit, and trim a border, and hunt for snails.
“They sent him out with it. And he has had a cold.”
“Ah. Ten to one that came of wearing it. Ten to one. Go on, he won’t hurt, Susan. ‘Tis a balmy day.”
“I’ll put it on, loose.”
“There’s a good boy,” Aunt Butters said: and, to Eddie, “You don’t want to go undermining authority.”
“Undermining? Me?” Eddie rolled his eyes, and was delivered of another wink, so shattering that Georgie stepped back from its impact. “Come on. Let’s go and undermine some of these here weeds. Eh, Georgie?”
“You won’t find any weeds,” Aunt Butters told him primly. “Charlick came on Friday.”
“Done you a favour, I reckon,” Uncle Eddie retorted, and stepped briskly out of the room before Aunt Butters had got beyond the series of rapid blinks which heralded a sharp reply.
“Charlick!” Uncle Eddie exclaimed, as they went down the passage. Georgie, as always, even in his joy could not forbear a glance at the entry to the shop. “Charlick!” he repeated. “I’d give him Charlick!”
The person referred to was a so-called gardener, who came one day a week and occupied himself in Aunt Butters’ garden. He was an unlovely, grizzled old man with a meaningless face, as broad as he was long, his real shape a matter of conjecture, as he wore a series of dirty old wool jerseys and pullovers, the outermost two or three descending almost to his knees. Most of his time was spent in hawking and spitting, varied by loud impersonal laments about his bodily state, and, very occasionally, a rumble of tuneless song, so subhuman and inscrutable that Georgie had run indoors the first time he heard it and reported to his Aunt that Charlick was dying.
Between this old man and Uncle Eddie a lively feud raged. Uncle Eddie was a skilled gardener, skilled, that is, at his own special kind of gardening. He grew most of the herbs for his shop in a large allotment a mile away from it. He also gave professional advice about gardens, and prescribed treatment for the soil, or for special plants. He had a lucky touch with plants, even those outside his own special range, and was so successful that the head gardeners of some of the grandest houses in the neighbourhood did not think it below their dignity to consult him in difficult cases. These different ploys enabled Uncle Eddie to maintain himself as a freelance, bidden by no man, and drawing a competence from congenial jobs none of which could support him by itself.
As they walked up the short walk, between the tufted low box hedges, Uncle Eddie’s glance darted from side to side, his head shooting out on his long neck like some great eager bird’s. Suddenly he paused, and with a cry of triumph stretched a long arm downwards and outwards, reaching to the very centre of a bed: swooped and pounced: then straightened up, a thin, rooted weed dangling from between his finger and thumb.
“Charlick!” he cried, glaring at Georgie in ferocious triumph. He dropped the weed, and ground it with his heel. Then, Charlick and his infamies dismissed, he gave his full attention to Georgie.
“Well, Georgie, partner. Well, me old companion. ‘Ow goes it, pal o’ me ‘eart? ‘Ow be?”
“All right, thank you, Uncle Eddie.”
It seemed a very staid reply, but, by tradition, all the excesses were on Uncle Eddie’s side. Georgie would have felt awkward if he had been required to say them, and, anyway, it wouldn’t have been respectful. He would have been dreadfully awkward if they had been said in front of anyone else. But he loved to be called them by Uncle Eddie when they were alone: partners together, as Uncle Eddie said.
“What’s all this about having a cold, eh?”
“Matron kept me in bed.” A smile began to dawn at the corners of his mouth, and he gave Uncle Eddie a happy glance under his eyelashes. “I did have earache one day.”
Uncle Eddie’s eye gleamed. “Eggony?” he enquired, shooting his head out eagerly. “Enguish?”
Georgie nodded in solemn joy.
“It did hurt, rather.”
“But ‘tis all gone now?”
Georgie nodded, too full of happiness to speak. This was one of their greatest private jokes. It had started when Georgie was six. He fell down one day in the garden, and hurt his knee. Uncle Eddie at once picked him up, laid
his huge hand over the place, and turned his eyes up to the sky.
“Oo, the eggony!” he howled. “Oo, the enguish!”
Georgie’s imminent tears had laughed themselves away, and, since then, all hurts and pains had lost their sting when greeted with this curious lament. It called for such effort, such rounding of the lips, such turning up of the eyes, and such desperate woebegone constriction of the vocal cords, that one had neither energy or attention left for the pain; and, by the time one broke off, exhausted, this had really sunk to manageable proportions.
Obviously, it worked better for sudden injuries, such as pinched fingers, hacks at football, and bumps on the head, than for sustained aches and pains. The earache which Georgie was reporting had tried it high. But its substantial virtue was to lift the whole thing to a comic plane, and remind one immediately of Uncle Eddie, his whole face and body convulsed in lugubrious outcry, his forehead a corrugated roof of wrinkles above the arching brows: and, as a variant from “ooo,” one could, after the word “enguish,” utter a sustained version of the usual West-Country “uy,” the routine cry of pain, like “ow” elsewhere. The result, especially if one caught sight of oneself in the glass, was to make oneself grin, and the pain seem better.
So Georgie stood, in the middle of the garden path, looking up with love at Uncle Eddie, and Uncle Eddie smiled rapturously down. Perfect understanding bloomed between them. Each was delighted with the other. Georgie was by nature a happy child, despite the anxieties that so often rose and shortened his breathing: but it seemed to him that only with Uncle Eddie did he know what happiness was. When he was with Uncle Eddie, nothing at all could go wrong. It hardly occurred to him to wonder why he was not with Uncle Eddie oftener. Docile and fatalistic, he accepted his routine as an unchangeable law of the universe. If he was starved of affection, he did not know it. Never having enjoyed home and parents, and living with children similarly placed, he had no standard by which to measure his lot. Life was like this. He did not question it.
Uncle Eddie raised his head, sniffed the air, and moved slowly up the garden, looking keenly about him. He began to mutter, and broke into objurgations. Georgie did not pay any great attention, for Uncle Eddie’s mind was now wholly on the garden, and, until he had satisfied himself, and finished anathematizing Charlick, Georgie knew he could not count on his attention. He asked only to be in the presence of his hero.
But when the reconnaissance was over, and Uncle Eddie had prescribed for Charlick torments so drastic and ingenious that he finally made himself laugh, and Georgie with him, then his face creased in affectionate solicitude, and he began to ask what Georgie had been doing.
“And how’s the work, mate? How’s me partner doin’?”
“I was second in ‘rithmetic. But Woolger, who was first, is two years older than me.”
Uncle Eddie considered this, staring at him intently. He had a wonderful power, not only of giving one his full attention, but giving it dramatically.
“You done well, partner,” he announced after a couple of seconds. “You done splendid.”
“I wasn’t so good in Geography. I was only eighth.”
“Pooh!” Uncle Eddie snapped his fingers over his shoulder, flinging Geography to the winds. “Geography don’t signify. You want to know where a place is, stands to reason you looks it up in a map. What d’you want to burden your intellects with a lot of old names for, when all you got to do is fetch the atlas?”
“It might be important to know where things come from. Durrah and dates, for instance.”
“Pooh. If you buy a box of dates, and they taste good, what do it signify where they comes from? Only one thing you want to know about dates: don’t swally the stone.”
Georgie could not help feeling this cavalier treatment of the subject would be sharply contested by Mr Roberts, and that the authority of Mr Entiknapp would also be ranged against Uncle Eddie. This opposition, which he had met before and which had at one time gravely worried him, was no longer a source of conflict. He had seen that Uncle Eddie, marvellous as he was in all ways that mattered outside the Orphanage, was not infallible on life inside it. He was too apt to take Georgie’s part. This was dear and lovable, but not always a help, especially on occasions when Georgie’s sense of fair-mindedness led him to blame himself.
But it didn’t do to argue, so he went on gently detailing his progress in the various subjects, passing from the classroom to gym, and football, and ending up in the carpenter’s shed. This last especially interested Uncle Eddie. Like many self-taught people who had been taken away from school at the earliest possible moment and set to earn, he was highly suspicious of orthodox book-learning and inclined to be noisily scornful of teachers. Georgie had come to realize these small imperfections in Uncle Eddie, and to feel tender and protective towards them. But the carpenter’s shop was safe ground.
“There now then, that!” Uncle Eddie exclaimed, “that’s sense. That’s practical. That fits you for life, Georgie boy. When my partner comes out into the world, he’ll be a proper, fitty partner for me.”
Uncle Eddie approved all the more because he knew the carpentry instructor, Sergeant Meadows, a steady-going, methodical man full of wise sayings. Sergeant Meadows was a great advocate of caution and taking a good look before you put your hand to a thing. He had once attended a concert and been deeply incensed to hear a dressed-up lady sing a song called “Dashing away with a smoothing iron.”
This phrase outraged all Sergeant Meadows’ professional sensibilities.
“Dashing away, indeed! A fine sort of caper that is! If I was to dash away with this here chisel, or that there plane, what do you reckon would occur? You, Bagshawe. Eh?”
“You’d spoil that piece of wood, Sergeant Meadows.”
“Right. Right. The correct answer. Don’t you let me catch any of you lads dashing away with anything. That’s all.”
Georgie certainly did not need the injunction. Its effect was to induce in him even greater agonies of caution than were natural. Still, he was good with his hands, and under Sergeant Meadows’ steady-going instruction he made progress, and was able last Christmas to present Aunt Butters with a box for her dressing table, and Uncle Eddie with a somewhat asymmetrical bowl for his shaving soap: a feat which called for voluble praise from Uncle Eddie.
So, knowing he would be pleased, Georgie told him all he could about the carpentry, and the comments of Sergeant Meadows upon his progress.
“When I’m bigger, Uncle Eddie—perhaps not next Christmas, but anyway the one after—I’ll be able to make you a new cabinet with drawers for your herbs.”
“Will you, partner? What—along of my specifications? All made according?”
“Yes, Uncle Eddie. Because, you see, if I didn’t know just how you wanted it made, it mightn’t be what you required.”
“That’s right! That’s right! A thing like that, you see, it got to be made according to requirements. Won’t that be fine! Oh, Georgie, pal o’ me ‘eart, you’re a real partner, that’s what you are. A real partner, and there’s no denyin’ it.”
Georgie glowed. For a moment he let his mind run forward to the glorious future when he should in fact be Uncle Eddie’s partner. There was great talk of the necessary qualifications. Arithmetic, so as to be able to keep the books; Carpentry, as already suggested; Good Writing, for the letters to patrons and customers; yet, somehow, the child’s clear perceptions detected a note of vagueness about these plans. Once or twice already Uncle Eddie had waxed enthusiastic about a project which never came to birth. Either he forgot—a natural thing, Georgie hastened loyally to tell himself, in a man with so many important duties to see to—or his energy spent itself in planning, and left him incapable of the effort to bring the plan to fact. Georgie had learned already in his short life to guard against disappointment, and so it was only on occasions that he let his mind flow warmly on towards the possibility that one day he and Uncle Eddie might live in the same house, get up and have breakfast together
, and spend the day in sharing the work of Uncle Eddie’s business. He thought of it now, looking forward to a picture which seemed like the end of a fairy tale, when hero and heroine got married and lived happily ever afterwards. For Georgie there was no greater joy imaginable. It would be heaven, entered before one died.
He gave a little shiver, and Uncle Eddie saw.
“A move, partner. Motion. To warm the blood. Can’t have you getting cold.”
They began to walk up and down together, the small solemn boy and the man three times his height, conferring earnestly. Aunt Butters saw them, out of her small scullery window, smiled, and uttered a faint sigh. Every now and then Uncle Eddie’s head would jerk upwards, and he would give a high whinny of laughter. Georgie would smile in response, sometimes after a moment’s perplexity, not seeing that what he had said was funny. Then he looked up, his face responding in joy to Eddie’s laughter, and once or twice he laughed as well. It did her heart good, yet it troubled her; and she sighed agàin. If only…
All too soon the enchanted hour was up. Uncle Eddie pulled out his turnip watch, and clicked his tongue.
“Marching orders, partner. Time to go in.”
Georgie accepted it. Lovely times like this could never last. Only once had he cried when the hour came to go back, and that was a long time ago, when he was very little. Nowadays it did not even hurt very much, or if it did the hurt was a good hurt, the sort that showed how happy you were.
They went in, and according to custom sat for ten minutes by the fire, while Georgie had a drink of sweet lemonade and Uncle Eddie gave Aunt Butters his opinion on the state of the garden, interspersed with remarks about Charlick which made her eyelids flutter, but had ceased to disturb her. Her only worry was that he might come out with something unsuited to Georgie’s ears, Now and then she would faintly murmur a protest, and Georgie, who had heard far worse up the garden, would smile secretly into his lemonade.
Deliverance Page 3