And the B.B.C., tapping a quaint and bumpkin source in its search for novel features, worked havoc the extent of which no man can foresee before putting back all its usual features on the air. Even the Postmistress at Delaye had not been safe from Broadcasting House, and with a prepared sheet of typewritten cues and answers in her shaking hand, revealed in a chirp of refined terror to the citizens of London, and with a solicitous midwife in attendance in the shape of a handsome young announcer: ‘Yes, it is true, I am the Postmistress, though you would not think it looks very much like one. Our post-office is housed in a cottage.
(‘And, do you have much trade, Miss Tybonnet? What about telegrams, now?’)
Cue: Telegrams now. ‘Well . . . we do have wires, and a great stir they make in our village, but they are always punctually delivered however long the distance.’
(‘Perhaps you will explain how?’)
‘Oh, they are sent up on bicycles; we keep one boy for urgent messages, and when he is in school there is usually some body willing to oblige.’
(‘So you have a boy on a bicycle . . . that sounds very exciting. Suppose we ask him to speak to us himself! . . . now, what’s your name?’) Faint chirrup. ‘Martin Sheppherd.’ (‘Well, come along, Martin.’)
Martin: (in an obedient and rapid drone) ‘It’s my jawb out’ve schule to take tallygrams hither and thither. Often I haster cycled a matter’ve tan miles.’
(‘Ten miles? That’s a big distance in all weathers, Martin. How do you get on?’)
‘Well . . . I haster get off and lift cycle over stiles, sometime, and ar’ve got perdew come snow lies thick an’ the evenings drawin’ in.’
(‘Thanks very much, Martin. That’s been very interesting. Now I’m going to ask Miss Tybonnet to come back to the microphone and tell us about that word “perdew”’). And, to the interpolated ministrations of the genial midwife, carefully extra-polite before the preposterous nature of her surname, Miss Tybonnet explained the word perdew, which was, it appeared, a local relic of Norman-French origin for ‘lost’, upon which, delivered of her contents by the midwife, Miss Tybonnet was thanked, faded out, and the hamlet of Rohan put upon the map.
But the principal public house at Delaye had been the leading attraction. Here, it was felt by the B.B.C., was if not the heart, at least the stomach of rural England: here, if there were any still extant, were Hey Nonnies and Rumbledumdays and those choruses prefixed traditionally by ‘With a’ and ‘Oh, it’s’ and ‘Oi be’. The tendency of townsmen to regard the provinces and Shires of England as exclusively Somerset was, apparently, ineradicable, and knowing but one exception, Lancashire, which had leapt into being with the rise of Gracie Fields.
The broadcast from The Coach and Horses, Delaye, was a peak feature and had involved but one rehearsal, during which, from his improvised enclosure in the jug and bottle department, the controller of sound had unwittingly recorded smacking lips which, had the actual broadcast been started, would have penetrated like thunderclaps to the Hebrides, and that caused his own hasty emergence.
‘Oliver! What are we doing?’
‘These gentlemen,’ Oliver with careful respect for the yokels indicated a handful of villagers at once grinning, bashful and mentally vitriolic, ‘are all enjoying a pint of the best.’
‘Oh. It sounded like Niagara.’ The young man retired, only to put his head once again round the door. ‘Or the Victoria Falls. I’ve heard they’re larger.’
The yokels had been goodnatured but disconcerting, and when asked by Oliver to give him a favourite chorus ‘that the towns might hear what they were singing in the country’, burst obligingly into a ragged but insuperably recognizable roar of ‘Sally’ and ‘The Miner’s Dream of Home’, which Oliver, still genial, was unable to pass, Delaye not being a mining district but more, as he put it, on the agricultural side.
2
It was at Rohan, that minute village against which civilization and what gets called progress still beat themselves in vain, that Oliver and his colleagues found something to work with and justify some six gallons of petrol. For, called to the microphone, the farrier, with the minimum of fuss, opened his mouth and sang. . . .
It is an unhappy fact that the recording on paper of any song conveys next to nothing of its quality: in print, the ballad, even be it by Schubert himself, becomes flat, pedestrian, stripped of the haunting transfiguration of its music, whether florid, or as in this case, of the purity and simplicity of the winding stream, moving by many a calm loop, by sudden roulade of water and small cascade to its appointed goal.
And helped by nothing but a fiddler, who was also the cow-herd, they sang and played together in an accord which was a instinctive as it was untrained.
In spring and in spring
When weather falls warm
The coney in burrow
Shall come to no harm.
The fox in his lair,
The hare in his form,
The rook in the furrow
Shall come to no harm.
For in spring and in spring
No crossbow of yeoman,
No arrow from bowman
Doth fright or alarm:
And the fox in his lair,
The rook in the furrow
The coney in burrow
Shall come to no harm.
For in spring and in spring
The Great Ones forswear us
Our living do spare us
And let us to calm;
And the Small Ones in lair,
And the Small Ones in burrow
And the Small Ones in furrow
Shall come to no harm.
It was when Oliver replaced the performers at the microphone and had reached that peroration, ‘ — and I’m sure we all thank Mr. Ronsell and Mr. Norman very much indeed for letting us hear such a — a delightful and typical song of the old country-side — ’, that, happening to glance round, he suddenly found that all the villagers, noiselessly and as though by preconcerted signal, had got up and left.
Shy, probably. But O.K. for sound.
3
In a semi-detached villa at Pinner a wife was saying with the maximum of resentment and ungracious embarrassment at her own susceptibility to a tune, ‘Life’s too short to keep up this row, Arthur. I’m sorry if you are’.
In a house in Great Portland Street a well-known conductor hurried from his pedestal radio, clashed back the lid of his Bechstein, and sat, humming, reconstructing chords and transcribing until six o’clock in the morning. He played through the manuscript sheets for half an hour more, would get the actual words later, send his secretary to do the rounds of the music publishers, and if that failed, to rummaging in the British Museum, and if that was no go pack him off straight to Rohan. Or the B.B.C. might have a copy?
But at six-thirty, a.m., he regretfully tore up his night’s output. ‘It’s no use. I’m not a countryman and that sort of music is only safe in the hands of peasants. I’ve made the usual mistake: over-orchestrated it, made it sophisticated and cityfied and so confoundedly pretty that it’ll go the way of the Londonderry Air. All I’m fit for is to conduct Act Three of Aïda.’
In a bed-sitting-room in Hamburg an elderly teacher of the violin with a tragic amount of time on his hands these days walked the narrow limits of his shelter playing the Rohan melody. The landlord — incredibly kind to one who could no longer be meticulous about rent — had allowed Hans Schaeffer to come in and listen to his wireless on the previous night.
In spring and in spring
softly played Herr Schaeffer. And now he would never see England at all, except in his mind, nor the people he felt so drawn to, and the heaven-kind atmosphere of a country with a will to peace . . . Even in that medieval song the sportsmanship of the English was as alive to-day, giving to the humblest victim of rifle and snare a close-time from treachery and destruction that the dear Fatherland had somehow abandoned even towards humanity.
And let us to calm . . .
No,
he’d got that wrong. It was in that phrase that, unlike the preceding verses, the penultimate word took an insolent turn from the sharp to the natural, a typical twist of Early English music . . . that, too, was probably like the English themselves, whose characters he sensed; if they wanted a minor or a major or a natural they took it, daringly, illegitimately, but with the minimum of uproar and threat, and great, unconscious effectiveness . . . he could see those little bouncing hares, the glossy rook pecking his diet in a richly upturned furrow under a shrill blue sky.
Too late, now. It wasn’t only the fare that must be hoarded, pfennig by pfennig, but this business of passports and permits.
No. You didn’t leave your country on debts and promises. The little foxes. He had heard that they were red, and stank, poor babes, so that the dogs could trail them the easier.
But he would write to his only English acquaintances: two pupils he had once had, of a colossal intelligence but no musical feeling at all. Their touch! Oh God, Thou Almighty one! Of all instruments, the violin (oh word most lovely in itself, shapely and slender) demanded the best. He would write at once, remembering himself and expressing his delight in the village song, his unreasonable nostalgia for a land he had never seen.
It was about fifteen months later that the Gestapo arrested Hans Schaeffer on the ground of his pro-English sympathies. Only they called them ‘Anti-Nazi’.
When they had shot him, they ransacked his room for what it might yield of plunder, to find that his pro-English sympathies, his violin and a picture-postcard of some unknown hamlet were about the sum of his possessions.
CHAPTER IX
1
EVELYN ROUNDELAY had found that of all the villages within walking or bicycling distance Rohan was her ewe lamb.
At first, armed with any excuse that occurred to her, and later as the inhabitants came to know her, with nothing but herself and her shy and open enjoyment of their company, she seldom let a week go by without a glimpse of it.
Rohan’s population was one hundred and ninety-five souls, and dwindling every year. The majority of the villagers were, like Nursie, of an incredible age, and there was a sprinkling of the middle-aged of a generation too set in its ways to desire change or advancement to the towns, and of these the farrier and cowman were typical examples. Their hamlet, Lady Roundelay was to discover, they called Roon, just as she was to find that it took years of practice to understand their speech which is a mixture of the Shire dialect and of anglicized Norman-French.
She met it first while admiring a border of love-in-a-mist at the blacksmith’s, and he had agreed, saying ‘It is a gentle flower’. Charmed with the adjective she brought it back to Delaye, and Edmund Roundelay had explained that ‘gentle’ was no graceful whimsy of tribute but a bastard version of gentille, which charmed her the more. If a thing pleased the people of Rohan they said they were ‘well content’: if alluding to their homes, they said ‘my toat’, which (her husband again translating) signified toit, the roof-tree. A favourite expression of surprise was ‘Cordew!’ and the womenfolk referred to their husbands as ‘the mary’. Women suspected of too great a liking for the tankard were ‘sullards’, local wits were ‘spiritual’ (confusing as an adjective when allied to a broadly comic song), those known to be gossips were ‘onditts’ whereas a ‘gossip’ could also signify a godmother.
King George the Sixth was quite simply referred to as ‘Leroy’, which sounded over-familiar until you got used to it, and at first hearing (‘We wish Leroy would visit Roon’) had betrayed Lady Roundelay into the politely vague rejoinder ‘Is he a relation of yours? I shall look forward to meeting him’.
She had returned discouraged and fuming to her husband. ‘I believe they do it on purpose!’ Sir Edmund chuckled. ‘Of course they do. You wouldn’t want them to turn it on like a tap for you as if you were a tripper. Rohan is one of those villages (there’s at least one more in England which says ‘by my halidom’ to this day) which has never changed. It’s a fragment of arrested history, and’, here he gave his wife a faint grin, ‘it has come to my ears that you are spoken of as “a very beldam”.’
His wife’s instinctive shout of protest was quenched as she considered. ‘Oh, I see.’
‘Exactly. A pretty lady and a very handsome tribute, believe me.’
‘But . . . look here . . . what about sullards and children being petty, and men being mary —oh! I see. Mari. But the other things?’
‘Sullard: a sot, from soularde; actually it’s a bit of argot that may have been added to their vocabulary a century or so later. Petty is of course a reference to the smallest of the family in height.’
‘Ohh . . . and is an “onditt” and on dit?’
‘You’re coming along nicely. Rohan itself derives not only from Normandy but from Brittany and owes its existence to your ancestor-by-marriage and his band of retainers.’
‘Cordew!’ exclaimed the latest Lady Rohan de l’Oeux. She had got Rohan quite badly on the brain.
2
She found that it was not really much good to bring presents to favourites, such as the grandmother of her kitchenmaid, Sue Privett, for, whatever she took over to the village, one calendar week would elapse, and then to the great door of the back kitchen of Delaye a Rohan man would present himself, doffing cap and laying at the feet (never giving into the hands) of whomsoever opened the door to him a bunch of flowers, a brace of pheasants in their plumage, a porter cake of a plummy richness indescribable into which half a bottle of stout had been stirred, ‘for the dame of Delaye’. But, Lady Roundelay thought, it was perhaps to the Squire that the greatest plum fell: for the village of Rohan paid unto him annually Petty Serjeantry in the form of one yellow rosebud and a billet of applewood ‘of not less than one eighth of an elle’.
The baker, who knew no book-keeping, kept instead a great wooden bowl of sticks, one for each household, and notched their accounts with a knife, as is done in some villages of Brittany to this day.
Evelyn had discovered long before the B.B.C. did that the farrier had a voice. But she gave him two years before she openly asked him to sing to her. Just while he worked. And although his innate courtesy ruled out such loose unmannerliness before Lady Roundelay, it was from him that she first heard the Rohan melody, ‘Roy Stephen his tree’, ‘Fat Nut-filled Squirrell’ and that artless trifle which begins:
Hart on thy pointed feet
The beechmast tapping
In thy echapping
Hasten for life is sweet.
At Harvest-tide, the village brought in the doll, fashioned from the last gleanings and laid in the church overnight.
On Harvest Monday the Rohan villagers meet in a tithe barn to dance among themselves, steps of which they had forgotten the half and which are indiscriminately spoken of as ‘brannels’.
To these merrymakings the outside world was not invited unless related by blood or marriage.
After the Delaye-Rohan broadcast, a certain newspaper, there being a passing slump in scandals, Crises, bathing belles, murders and film stars stepping off the Queen Mary at Southampton in the very act of declaring that the London policemen were wonderful and our King a Great Guy, sent down a special representative to Rohan, who, seeing a lighted outbuilding and being bored with his Norminster hotel, gladly entered to encourage the yokels. He had a blurred impression of couples, old and middleaged, weaving by lanternlight in some unknown dance, and was (even he of Fleet street) confounded to find himself quite suddenly in total darkness. Flashing his torch, and blinking, he saw that the barn was empty.
Even the Editor was unable to turn that incident to favour or to prettiness, as one forlorn hope of a caption after another flitted through his brain.
MYSTERY IN RURAL BARN
Who Were The Dancers of Rohan?
(No. Sounded like Maria Martin.)
VILLAGE INSULTS THE DAILY WIRE
(No. Too political. The paper, God knew, thanks to Hitler, was already festooned with ultimata and avenues being exp
lored and doors still left open and rays of hope and slight slackening of the tension and pressure being applied and patience being exhausted, varied by appeasement and a stray fait accompli and strong representations to unpronounceable persons with un-spellable names in countries which were small portions of vowel entirely surrounded by consonants.)
WHO ARE THE SECRET DANCERS?
Norman Village Keeps Its Secret.
(No. Can’t have two secrets in head- and cross-line.)
FORBIDDEN DANCERS.
(Too Chinese.)
STRANGE RITE IN NORMAN HAMLET.
What Is It?
(Well — what was it? If The Wire couldn’t tell its readers the column was n.b.g.)
Damn the village.
3
He swung round on his chair. ‘Then you got nothing at all, Eastbourne?’
‘Nothing to work on,’ answered the man who had been sent to cover Rohan.
A Footman for the Peacock Page 10