Where Nothing Sleeps

by Denton Welch

  I kept as near to the river as possible, walking for most of the time through rich fields. Once I had to leave the path, for I came out near a house and a woman appeared, saying, ‘You can’t come by here, this is a gentleman’s residence.’

  ‘Isn’t there a footpath?’ I asked as pleasantly as possible.

  ‘No, there is not.’ She didn’t smile back; she seemed outraged that I should think of appearing in the grounds of a gentleman’s residence. Was she the cook, or the housekeeper, or perhaps even the gentleman’s wife? I shall never know.

  I reached the river again on the other side of the house; and here it looked enticing, so wonderfully clear that I could see every stone and weed on its bed. I could resist it no longer. I sat down in the deep grass and pulled my shirt and trousers off; then I crawled to the crumbling bank and let myself down into the crystal water. It was too shallow to swim; I just sat on the bottom and held my arms out. The gentle current swayed me about like a weed. I felt myself lifted and then set down again gently on the pebbles.

  I kept so still that large prune-velvet fish sailed in the water near me. They only moved their fins now and then, to keep their dead straight position; otherwise they made no progress forwards or backwards, but only worked their gills and looked disillusioned.

  When the water began to chill me through, I crawled out and lay in the grass with the sun beating down on me. My eyes were closed, so I did not see the little boy until he stood over me. His nose was dribbling, making a little channel through the dirt on his face, and he wore braces over his ragged shirt. His eyes had gone round with surprise.

  ‘You been bathing?’ he asked. I nodded my head.

  ‘Coo, you’ll cop it, you’ll cop it,’ he crowed with delight, ‘nobody can’t bathe in that river, it’s private and kept for the fish. You’ll cop it, you’ll cop it.’ He danced round me waving the stick he’d been peeling.

  I sat up and started to pull on my shirt. I saw the little boy staring at me and realised that he was curious about my grown-up body. I remembered, when I’d first gone to see my father in his bath, how surprised I was. At home, I thought, this little boy has never seen his father or his elder brothers naked; they probably just wash their chests and arms and bundle into bed at night.

  I had now pulled on my trousers, and stood up. If the little boy was right, and I saw that he was, I must not stay to be caught by some officious person. The thing I hate most is to be insulted by some repulsive stranger.

  ‘Don’t you ever bathe here?’ I asked. ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘Nevoow!’ he made the short word into a long one. ‘I tell you, it’s private for the fish. They’ll lock you up if they catch you.’

  And again, at the prospect of my being taken to prison, he danced and jumped about, bending his stick until he broke it.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said, walking away.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he brought out with a jerk. He was still staring at me and scowling, trying to make me out.

  I left the river banks and walked towards Old Alresford.

  Passing through the wide, silent main street I came to a red Georgian house and watercress beds lying below it on the other side of the road. I looked down on to the stone-green plants growing in their accurate, terraced squares. The jagged shapes of water, seen between the dark leaves, glistened like silver oil on a road at night.

  Further on I came to a ruined petrol pump outside a wooden hut. A huge yellow enamel hoarding for motor tyres straddled a ditch to one side. The boys and men had flung stones at it; it was pock-marked all over with rusty splintered stars.

  I seemed to be coming to a forgotten part; the bare fields stretched away on either side of me and there was only one cottage in view. As I passed, I pictured it as housing several small orphans and illegitimates. I saw them in egg-and-dribble-dirty bibs playing with the refuse at the back of the house. And I saw the huge-bosomed baby-farmer, her chapped red hands glowing against her grease-stiff apron.

  I so believed in my own story that now, when I look back, I see a notice outside the cottage to say that it is a branch of a certain orphanage where young children are sent ‘to have the country air’. An indescribable threat seems to lie, for me, in those last five words.

  I left the grim cottage behind, but still took with me imaginings of beatings in the lamplight. I saw the baby-farmer’s husband coming in from work at night, tired and filthy. He unbuckles his thick belt and strips it off in exasperation. Then all the air is filled with screaming as he beats the boy’s tender flesh till it is broken. I hear all the other children crying with the boy and see rods in the corner of the kitchen sticky with blood.

  But surely that is rather a worn-out picture of a baby-farm, I told myself, to clear away the image. The telegraph wires hummed and moaned; there were no more houses, only fields of poor-looking grass bending down under the wind.

  At last I saw a farm track slanting across a field and leading to some buildings. I saw the little sign at the gate, Y.H.A., and turned in thankfully.

  As I drew nearer I saw that the building nearest to me was of stone and that it had lancet windows; behind it stood the brick farmhouse. My excitement grew, I wanted to know about the ancient part. I wondered if I should sleep in it.

  A woman met me at the wicket gate, close to the round duck-pond. She wore a brown wool dress and her eyes seemed out of focus. ‘Good evening,’ she said, smiling at me vaguely. ‘You coming to the hostel?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘and can you tell me what this part is which looks so like a chapel.’

  ‘That is the hostel, but it used to be, centuries ago, a chapel and a place of rest for travellers which the Knights Hospitaller set up. A priest lived there, sleeping in the upstairs room. Downstairs is a kitchen eating room and the chapel, which is now turned into the common-room. Come in and see it.’

  She led me through a low Gothic door into what had been the chapel. It had perfect lancet windows on each side, but the east window had been blocked and an ugly inglenook fireplace built against it.

  ‘Did the Hostel Association do that?’ I asked, pointing at the fireplace.

  ‘Yes, they built the chimney, but the window had been blocked for years. You can see outside a few fragments of tracery built into the wall. It must have been done long, long ago, the stone is all the same colour and covered with lichen.’ She called it ‘litchen’.

  ‘You see, this chapel and whole building has been used as a barn and storing place by the farm until last year when I let the Y.H.A. convert it. That’s why it’s so untouched I think, because, ever since the Knights Hospitaller left, it’s only been used as an outhouse.’

  She took me into the kitchen part. It was a low small room with a spiral stone staircase leading from it. The whole scene seemed to smell of a medieval hermit to me. I was halfway up the stairs before she’d begun to climb them.

  ‘You’re in a hurry,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I want to see everything; I’ve never before come across a little medieval house like this. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted for myself. Why, it’s got everything! Kitchen, chapel, living-room, bedroom …’

  ‘And privy!’ she added to my list with a naughty twinkle.

  ‘Where? Where’s the Gothic privy?’ I asked, looking round me. I was all agog to see the Gothic privy.

  ‘There,’ she said, pointing to a little door at the entrance of the bedroom.

  I opened it and there was a little closet with shaped stone seat and a shaft cutting right down in the wall of the building and then deep into the ground.

  ‘Didn’t they construct them beautifully!’ I said, looking at the carved seat and the tiny trefoil window which gave one so charming a view of the pond and the fields. And suddenly, as I looked at the shaft, I realised what the ‘garderobe’ had been in the Priory at Repton.

  In one corner of the upstairs landing had been a little nook labelled, ‘Prior’s garderobe’; there was a small trap door on the new oak floor and when one o
pened it a stone shaft, very like this one, was discovered. Because the stone seat above had disappeared I had never understood this hole. I remembered one afternoon investigating the hole and asking other people what they thought it could be. We all decided that the nook was where the Prior kept his clothes, ‘garderobe’ reminding us of wardrobe, but the shaft we could not understand.

  Now I knew. I turned to the woman and saw her looking at me anxiously.

  ‘It’s never to be used, you know,’ she said firmly, ‘the proper lavatory is over at the farm.’

  ‘But of course not!’ I agreed. ‘One can’t use a medieval privy; such a relic is almost sacred. Besides, we have no sand and spices and sweet smells to throw down afterwards. I’m sure they did all that, aren’t you? We’ve no idea of their refinements, because we don’t think on the same lines. We make all these arrangements practical and rather sordid; whereas they tried to spiritualise them a little. It’s the same with food; we don’t like spices and herbs, but they did because they gave the ordinary meat a sort of glamour.’

  I now began to look round the bedroom. On one side of the arched stone fireplace was a squint-hole. I went up to it and looked down into the chapel.

  ‘That’s so that the priest could keep an eye on the pilgrims and travellers,’ the farmer said, for she herself was the farmer, as I learnt afterwards.

  There was only one lancet window; the opening broadened out, as it cut through the thickness of the wall, in the way that delighted me so when, as a child, I was taken to see castles.

  All round the walls were double-decker iron beds with red blankets.

  ‘Do you think I’ll sleep here all alone tonight?’ I asked the woman, with an exaggerated shudder. ‘I expect so, unless anyone turns up late, which is unlikely.’ And at once she began with relish to tell me of a figure which had been seen limping round the old Knights Hospitallers’ chapel.

  ‘We think it must be the ghost of one of the old priests in charge, for we found a skeleton buried outside the east end, just under the window. It had a deformed leg-bone. ‘I know,’ she said severely, ‘because I am a trained nurse. Anyone with a bone like that in his leg would have most certainly limped.’

  She said all this with a far-away smile, as if she were thinking more of the effect her words would produce than the truth. I felt that she was romancing and elaborating but wanted to hear more.

  ‘What did you do with the bones after you’d dug them up?’ I asked, wanting to see this deformed bone.

  ‘We buried them again, of course,’ she said, repressively and piously.

  ‘Have you seen the lame priest yourself?’ I insisted.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, unless I once caught a glimpse of him, just turning the corner of the spiral staircase.’

  Now I knew that she was fabricating, but I did not mind; she seemed a lively person, still wanting to amuse herself with life.

  ‘Come into the house and sign the book,’ she said, leading me across the yard. ‘But I must warn you that I have a patient with me who is recovering from a nervous breakdown. Although I’ve owned this farm now for sixteen years I still have convalescent cases sent to me by my old patients and colleagues in hospital.’

  She took me into the farm dining-room, and although it was a large room it seemed difficult to move in it because of the huge Victorian walnut sideboard and table. The furniture designer must have been inspired by the Jacobean, I think, for all the legs were twisted into spirals, and large heraldic beasts held up virgin shields on the crests of the chairs and above the sideboard. Frothy ferns and large pieces of plate decorated the tops of the furniture.

  Through all this I saw a pale man with a rug across his shoulders sitting by the empty grate. He got up, when we came in, and looked about him anxiously. He seemed almost about to throw himself out of the window into the garden.

  The farmer introduced me to him as ‘one of our young walkers come to spend the night in the Chapel of Ease.’

  After this announcement the man became so nervous that he held his thin hand out to me, then withdrew it, thrust it out again, and, after giving me one desperate look, flung out of the room, shutting the door behind him with surprising stealthy quietness.

  ‘Oh, he puts it all on,’ the farmer said exasperatedly. ‘I know nervous cases, I’ve nursed hundreds of them. He should be perfectly all right by now. He just wants everyone to know how ill he’s been. Now he’ll go wandering about all over the fields and I’ll have to fetch him in when it gets dark. He’s all right with me. I can always soothe him down.’

  She held out the book to me and showed me where to sign. As I was bending over it, one of her daughters came in. I looked up and saw a plump girl staring at me. She was a year or two younger than I was and she wore a very sleek, self-satisfied air.

  ‘This is Myrna,’ her mother said, putting an arm round her waist. The girl put the arm away from her as if it had been a log of wood, bobbed her head to me in a perfunctory little nod and went out again without saying anything.

  ‘You wouldn’t think she’s shy, but she is,’ her mother said.

  I went out through the kitchen, and in the porch at the back door I saw a cat teaching her kittens to play with a mouse. The mouse was not yet dead and a thrill of horror ran through me as I saw it squirm under the paw of one of the little fluffy kittens. They did not bite it or even let their claws out to it; they just stared at it with their large blue eyes and patted it every now and then playfully as they would a ball of wool. The mother sat upright, watching, taking no part unless the mouse tried to escape; then she would reach out her long paw and cuff it viciously until it seemed to lie dead.

  ‘Won’t you kill it, or take it away?’ I asked the woman urgently.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ she smiled, ‘they’re learning to be good mousers. How do you think she can teach them if we interfere?’

  I hurried away, not being able to watch any longer, and started to make my evening meal. The farmer had sold me eggs and I had tomatoes.

  The pink mess in the saucepan was too liquid, but I ate it with a spoon and it was good.

  After exploring the building again I sat down in the chapel, wondering what to do. I looked up at the three remaining curved beams in the roof; they made the newer straight ones look thin and cheap. I fell to thinking of the chapel as I would restore it. I saw the east window opened once again, the ugly inglenook taken away, the roof restored so that all the beams should be like the three heavy shaped ones.

  I was woken from these imaginings by the opening of the heavy Gothic door; a large man and a small woman stepped down into the room. Both wore rucksacks which they slipped off their shoulders with signs of relief.

  ‘We’ve got here at last!’ the girl said. ‘We thought we’d never find it.’

  ‘Have you come far?’ I asked, getting up.

  ‘All through the most marvellous woods,’ the man answered. ‘You’ve no idea. What a day we’ve had! This is the country for me.’

  The girl was looking at him anxiously, holding one of his fingers and twining hers round and round it.

  ‘Ducky,’ she almost whined, ‘we must get our supper on. Will you go and ask the lady for eggs and milk?’

  As soon as he left she said to me, ‘This looks a very interesting old place. After we’ve got a bit of something inside us, we’ll want to go exploring.’ She gave a genteel little laugh and started to unpack the rucksacks. Dark curls fell over her face, and her hands darted about rapidly. I saw that she was a very efficient little woman.

  He came back holding several eggs in one of his large hands. From the other dangled a bottle of milk, against the deep blue of his rugger shorts. The shorts, cut on the curve, almost with wings, looked strange and exotic in the chapel; but I could tell, when I looked at him more closely, that he was just the person to play that game well. He had a little head, a little moustache, very broad shoulders, and a soft pink mouth never quite shut.

  ‘Here you are, darling,’ he said, h
olding the eggs and milk out to her.

  ‘Oh, Dan, do be careful or you’ll break the eggs in your clumsy way! Take them into the kitchen; I’m just screwing up the frying-pan handle.’

  She finished tightening the collapsible handle. I saw that they had a very neat little nest of travelling utensils.

  ‘There are some cooking pots in there,’ I said, ‘but perhaps you like to use your own. They look very nice ones.’

  ‘Well, yes, we do, then you can be certain they’re clean, can’t you!’ She gave me a vivacious smile and bustled into the kitchen carrying the rest of their provisions.

  I heard her giving directions, and once or twice scolding him for clumsiness or laziness. I imagined him passing her wooden spoons, or cutting bread and becoming rather dazed by her quickness.

  They came back into the chapel, bearing plates of fried tomatoes and eggs, and great mugs of steaming tea. The girl had fried golden door-steps of bread to go under the eggs and tomatoes.

  ‘That’s what I had too,’ I said, ‘only mine didn’t look nearly so professional. I just mixed my eggs and tomatoes in a saucepan until I had a pink mess.’

  They both laughed. The man said, ‘Pink stuff, stink puff,’ and transported me to St Michael’s when I was eleven years old, and all the other boys said, ‘Pink stuff, stink puff,’ all day long.

  The couple ate hungrily and almost in silence. The girl turned to him once and said, ‘Do you like it, dear?’

  He nodded, with his mouth full, then got out, ‘Darling, it’s first rate.’

  When the meal was over the man pushed his plate away and leant down to reach the pipe stuck in the top of his sock. As he knocked it out in the open fireplace an idea seemed to come to him.

  ‘I say, shall we light the fire?’ he suggested, turning to his girl and me.

  ‘Oh, do you think we ought to?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Why not? The branches are already laid there, and it’s chilly now the sun’s gone down.’