by H. E. Bates
Pop went on to urge on Mr Charlton to use his loaf and take proper advantage of what he called ‘the National Elf lark’, a service which, after all, Mr Charlton paid for. Pop was certain Mr Charlton had already paid out millions to this swindle in weekly contributions. It must have cost him a fortune in stamps. With warmth he urged Mr Charlton not to be a mug about it. It was, after all, the State that had started this lark – why not go sick, he urged, and have a bit of fun?
Mr Charlton might have resisted these arguments if it hadn’t been that, just before midnight, Mariette pinned him up against the newel post of the dark stairs, kissed him again, and said his hands were hot. Like white spots on the cheekbones, hot hands were a bad sign. Mr Charlton tried to protest that his hands were invariably hot, especially at that time of year, but Mariette kissed him again, pressing her warm plum-like mouth for a long time against his lips, leaving him in another terrible turmoil of divided emotions about the buttercup field, the nightingales, and the affair of the goose-neck entwining his leg.
‘You could stay a week, lovey,’ she said. She had begun to call him lovey in the buttercup field. ‘And then all next weekend.’
Mr Charlton tried to explain that he had a vast and frightful number of papers on his desk at the office that had to be attended to and how there would be an awful stink if he didn’t get back.
‘Think if you broke your leg,’ she said.
Mr Charlton said he didn’t want to think of breaking his leg. He was talking about loyalty, duty, pangs of conscience, and that sort of thing.
‘Sounds silly,’ Mariette said and Mr Charlton, trembling on the dark stairs, under the influence of the pressing, plum-like lips, was bound to admit that it did.
The result was that he got up next morning to a massive breakfast of two fried eggs, several slices of liver and bacon, much fried bread, and enormous cups of black sugary tea.
Pop was already breakfasting when he arrived at table. Poised heartily above a sea of tomato ketchup, under which whatever he was having for breakfast was completely submerged, he praised for some moments the utter beauty of the first young strawberry morning. It was going to be a perfick day, he said. The cuckoo had been calling since four o’clock.
The only thing that troubled Mr Charlton as he ate his breakfast was that he felt there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He could honestly complain of neither sickness nor exhaustion. He had never felt better. ‘I don’t know what to tell the office,’ he said. ‘Honestly there’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Then you must make summat up,’ Pop said, ‘mustn’t you? Like lumbago.’
Mr Charlton protested that he had never had lumbago in his life, and was not likely to have.
‘Oh! yes you are,’ Pop said and laughed in hearty, ringing fashion. ‘You’ll have it chronic tonight. After the first day in the strawberry field.’
At eight o’clock Mr Charlton found himself sitting in the back of the gentian-blue, home-painted truck, together with Mariette, the twins, Montgomery, Victoria, and Primrose. Ma and Pop sat in the cab in front and Ma, who was in great spirits and was dressed in enormous khaki denim slacks with an overall top, laughed and said it was a pity they couldn’t all go in the Rolls, just to shake everybody. Mariette was in slacks too, bright salvia red ones, with a soft blue shirt and a spotted red-and-white kerchief over her hair. Over the khaki overalls Ma was wearing the salmon jumper, just because the ride might be cool in the morning air, and a great pudding-bag of an orange scarf on her head.
‘Everybody all right in the back there?’ Pop yelled and got his customary handsome ribbon of voices in answer. ‘Hang on by your toenails you kids!’
The truck had hardly rolled out of the yard before everyone began singing. It was Pop who started the song, which was We Ain’t Got a Barrel o’ Money, and everyone took it up in shrill voices. Mr Charlton was embarrassed. He had never ridden in the back of a truck before. Still less had he ever sung in a truck on a public highway.
He wondered what on earth would happen if he was seen by someone who knew him, someone perhaps from the office. It would be terrible to be seen by any of the chaps.
Half a mile down the road the truck drew up with a sharp whistle of brakes and everyone stopped singing and started shrieking loudly instead. Mr Charlton looked over the side-over board of the truck to see what the trouble was and saw Pop on the road, lifting up in his arms the tiniest woman Mr Charlton had, outside a circus, ever seen.
‘Room for a little ’un?’ Pop said and threw the little lady up onto the truck. She shrieked like a laughing doll as she landed between the twins and Mr Charlton. ‘That Little Twopenn’orth’, Pop explained, ‘is Aunt Fan’.
Aunt Fan to whom? Mr Charlton wondered but never discovered. His immediate impression was that The Little Twopenn’orth had a face like a small brown shellfish of the winkle sort. It was all round and crinkled and twisted up. She too was wearing slacks, tiny dark maroon-red ones, and a man’s grey tweed cap on her head, fixed there by two large pearl hatpins. Her ginger-brown eyes shone like shoe-buttons and her chest was flat.
‘Everybody all right in the truck there? Hang on, Aunt Fan!’
Once again everybody, including The Little Twopenn’orth, started singing. By this time the sun was well above the miles of surrounding orchards, chestnut copses, and fields of rising oats and barley, and as it shone down on the truck and on the laughing, singing faces, Mr Charlton saw a tiny creature popping in and out of Aunt Fan’s mouth, exactly like a pink mollusc emerging from its shell. This was The Little Twopenn’orth’s tongue and it helped to work the shrillest voice he had ever heard. It was a voice like a wild train-whistle shrieking to be heard on a far mountain top.
‘Don’t you sing, mister?’ she said.
Mr Charlton, grinning feebly, did not know what to say. His hair was flying about in all directions. The truck was wildly bumping over a hard clay track, jolting Aunt Fan and the children to new laughter. Mr Charlton did sing. He flattered himself, excusably, that he sang rather well. His voice, belying his bony, very average physique, was a deep, soft baritone. But now his mouth and throat felt like pumice stone and he was not sure, with the wild bouncing of the truck, quite where his breakfast was.
‘You’re new, ainyer?’ The Little Twopenn’orth said.
Mr Charlton confessed that he was new.
‘Thought you was. On ’oliday?’
‘Sort of,’ Mr Charlton said.
Another mile of this, he thought, and he wouldn’t need an excuse for the National Health lark. His breakfast would be up.
To his great relief the truck came to a halt, two minutes later, between a copse of tall chestnut saplings and a big open strawberry field. A sudden sensation of dizziness found Mr Charlton unready as he jumped from the truck. He groped at the air and was suddenly surprised to see The Little Twopenn’orth flying down from the back of the truck, straight into his arms.
He clasped at the toylike body instinctively, as at a ball. The Little Twopenn’orth landed straight on his chest, winding him temporarily. Everyone began laughing and The Little Twopenn’orth shrieked with delight. Ma started shaking like a jelly and Pop warned Mr Charlton that he’d better watch out or else. Aunt Fan would have him on the floor in no time.
‘Just what I’d like on a nice warm day,’ The Little Two-penn’orth said. ‘Just what I bin waiting for.’
Mr Charlton did his best to focus the shimmering strawberry field. He was now convinced that a terrible day lay in front of him. The sun was clear and hot under the shelter of the barrier of woodland; by noon it would be blistering down. Yesterday had been the hottest thirtieth of May, so the papers all said, for forty years. Today would be hotter even than that.
‘You can eat all the strawberries you like,’ Mariette said. ‘But you’ll soon get tired of that.’
Mr Charlton did not feel at all like eating strawberries. He longed to be able to sit down, if possible to lie down, in some cool quiet place under the chestnut sapl
ings.
‘Keep near me,’ Mariette said and gave him a dark low stare which he was too sick to appreciate or return.
He followed her, the rest of the family, and The Little Twopenn’orth into the strawberry field. Already, along the yellow alleys of straw, twenty or thirty girls and women, with an odd man or two, were picking. Flagwise a strange assortment of shirts and blouses, yellow and red and green and brown and even violet, was strung about the field. A green canvas tent, towards which Mr Charlton looked with pitiful desperation, as at an oasis, stood in the centre of the field, piled about with fresh white chip baskets.
Bending down, Mr Charlton started to pick strawberries, deciding at the same time that he would never again eat pig’s liver and bacon for breakfast. The hot summery distances were full of calling cuckoos. The field trembled like a zither with chattering women’s voices. A man decided to strip his shirt off and the sudden sight of his pure naked torso set every female voice laughing, catcalling, or simply whistling in admiring wonder.
‘Why don’t you do that, lovey?’ Mariette said. ‘You’d be all that much cooler. In time you’d get marvellously brown.’
‘I think I’ll try and get acclimatized first,’ Mr Charlton said.
The process of getting acclimatized took him through a sickening forty minutes of sweat. His spectacles misted over. The Little Twopenn’orth’s voice, piercing as a drill, cut the hot air about him, as it seemed, every several seconds. Broad belts of Ma’s quivering laughter slapped across the field.
Lying on their fresh beds of straw, the squarish fat crimson strawberries shone in the sun with a too-perfect beauty exactly, as Pop said, as if painted, and now and then Mr Charlton looked up to see the lips of Mariette parted half in laughter, half in the act of biting into some glistening arc of lovely dark ripe flesh.
‘Heavens, I’m getting hungry,’ she told him several times. ‘I hope Ma brought the rest of the cold roast goose for dinner.’
He was very slow, he presently discovered, at the picking. Mariette could fill, with swift deft ease, three punnet-baskets to his one.
‘You’re not very fast, are you?’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel very well?’
Mr Charlton confessed with a small wry smile that he was not quite a top note.
‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘It’s just what we were telling you yesterday. You need some sick leave. Come on – let’s go along to the tent and get the baskets weighed. You have to get them weighed and checked there.’
It turned out that this, the tent, was Mr Charlton’s salvation. Pop, who was also at the tent getting his first baskets checked, introduced him to the foreman, a youngish energetic man in khaki shirt and slacks, as ‘Charley boy. Friend of ours, Mr Jennings. Office feller from the tax-lark.’
Mr Jennings appraised Mr Charlton, of the tax-lark, with interested swiftness. You didn’t often get office fellers in the strawberry field.
‘Chap I’m looking for,’ he told Mr Charlton. ‘What about sitting here and doing my job? All you do is weigh and book the baskets. How about it? I got a million things to do besides sit here and check these ruddy women.’
‘There y’are, Charley boy,’ Pop said, clapping him on the shoulder and laughing in ringing fashion. ‘Got you promoted already.’
Mr Charlton felt intensely relieved. To his astonishment Pop shook his hand.
‘Well: got to run along now, Charley boy. Got to see a man about some scrap iron. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. See you all about five.’
Pop departed across the field to the truck and Mr Charlton, sitting down at the table in the green shade of the tent, at once felt much more himself, much more at home. With a chair under his bottom it was almost like being back in the office again.
‘It’s pretty simple,’ Mr Jennings said, and went on to explain what he said was the easy, straightforward procedure of checking, weighing, and recording the baskets. Mr Charlton thought it was simple too. ‘Nothing to it,’ Mr Jennings said. ‘You just got to keep a record in the book here, with the names, that’s all, so we can pay out at the end of the day.’
Mr Jennings departed too after saying that he’d come back in an hour or so to see how Mr Charlton was getting on, though he didn’t think, on the whole, he’d have any trouble at all.
‘One or two of the old faggots might try a bit of cheek on you,’ he said, ‘but if they do, be firm. Don’t let ’em spit in your eye.’
Mr Charlton said he thought he had it taped all right and sat back and cleaned his glasses and combed his hair. Across the field he could see all kinds of women, fat ones, scrawny ones, pretty ones, old ones, very young ones, together with children, bending and laughing in the long strawberry rows, their blouses and slacks stringing out flagwise, in brilliant colours, under a hot cloudless sky. It was a very pleasant, peaceful, pastoral scene, he thought, and there was a delicious fragrance of ripe strawberries in the air.
‘Forgotten me?’
He was startled. He had utterly forgotten Mariette, who had been standing behind him all the time.
‘Afraid I had. So absorbed in the new job and all that –’
‘Well, don’t,’ she said, ‘or I’ll be miserable.’ She kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Feeling better now?’
‘Absolutely all right.’
‘You see, I told you,’ she said. ‘All you want is rest and fresh air and good food and you’ll be as right as rain.’
She stood at the door of the tent, so prettily framed against the clear sky beyond that Mr Charlton wished he were back with her in the buttercup field.
‘See you soon,’ she said. ‘And mind what you’re up to. Don’t get mixed up with other women.’
Mr Charlton, who had no intention whatsoever of getting mixed up with other women, started to apply himself earnestly to the task of checking and weighing the baskets of fruit as they came in. It seemed that he got on very well for a time. All the women seemed very polite and some actually called him ‘Duckie’. They spelt their names out carefully when he wasn’t quite sure of them. They said how hot it was and one of them, a big sloppy woman named Poll Sanders, with gold-filled teeth and small gold earrings, laughed in a voice like a street trader selling mackerel and said:
‘Sweat – I can feel it running down my back. Goes on like this we’ll have to strip out again – like we did that ’ot year afore. Remember that, Lil?’
Lil remembered. ‘And that wasn’t as ’ot as this though.’ Lil was tall, yellow, and hollow-faced. She too had small gold earrings. She was much thinner than Poll but this made no difference. She sweated as much as Poll did. ‘Runs orf yer like water.’
Mr Charlton wrote in the book that Poll Sanders had brought in two dozen baskets and then, looking up, saw that Lil had gone. He realized suddenly that he had forgotten exactly how many baskets Lil had brought in. He dropped his rubber-tipped pencil on the table and ran after her, catching her up twenty yards across the field.
He said he was frightfully sorry but he had forgotten the number of baskets.
She gave him a look as hard as flint and her mouth opened and shut like a spring trap.
‘Two dozen,’ she said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said and she gave him another look, harder than the first, and he left it at that.
‘You want to get your arithmetic working,’ she said.
His arithmetic wasn’t working very well with Poll Sanders either. When he got back to the tent and sat down to write Lil’s figures he discovered he had pencilled down three for Poll Sanders instead of two. Poll had disappeared.
He was so sure the figure was two that he ran after her too.
‘Three,’ she said. She too gave him that same flat, unflinching look he had seen on the face of Lil. ‘I was standing there when you write it down, wasn’t I? Use your loaf, man.’
He decided he’d better use his loaf as much as possible, but he was soon over-busy and it was very stifling in the little tent. He had to keep a sharper, keener eye
on the figures as the women came in, bringing scores of baskets. Once The Little Twopenn’orth came in, bent double by two dozen baskets in boxes almost as large as herself, so that they hung from her little hands like overladen panniers from the sides of a tiny grey donkey. The entire Larkin family also came in, all of them eating potato crisps and big orange lollipops on sticks, except the twins, who were eating peanuts, strawberries, and bread-and-jam.
Ma offered Mr Charlton an orange lollipop on a stick and seemed surprised, even pained, when he said no thanks, he didn’t think so.
‘You’ll be glad of it,’ she said. ‘You ain’t had nothing since breakfast.’ Mr Charlton still had moments when he found it impossible to remember breakfast with anything but pain. ‘Anyway I’ll leave it here on the table. You might be glad of it later.’
‘Toodle-oo,’ the twins said, ‘if you don’t want it we’ll eat it next time we come,’ and ran after Ma, begging for ice-creams.
Mr Charlton looked up, sometime later, to see a pretty, fairhaired, well-made girl standing in the tent. She was wearing tight black jeans and an even tighter thin black woollen sweater. The outlines of her breasts under the sweater were as pronounced as if carved. Her hair was tied up in a long shining horse-tail, the fluffy sun-whitened ends of it brushing her bare shoulders.
‘Pauline Jackson,’ she said, ‘two dozen.’
Her eyes were big and blue. Her very smooth skin was deep brown from working in the fields. Her forearms were covered with tender, downy golden hairs. Her tongue played on her straight white teeth when she had finished speaking.
While Mr Charlton was writing in the book she said:
‘New here, aren’t you? Never seen you here before.’
‘Sort of on holiday,’ Mr Charlton explained.
‘Nice to be some people.’
She had a slow, drowsy way of talking. It somehow matched the way her tongue remained playing on her lips and the way her hair fell on her shoulders.
‘Mind if I ask you something?’ she said.