Ulverton

by Adam Thorpe

  No doubt we were microscopic in the great order of things: the soil changed colour on the day the Germans violated Belgian neutrality. It was a sign, apparently, that something, perhaps wooden, had rotted there. The Squire stood and wiped his pince-nez on a bright red ’kerchief, and cautioned us to proceed carefully. He replaced the spectacles on his nose with a great sigh of satisfaction, looking up at the cloudless August sky as if something had been answered from that quarter.

  Then a moment of absolute peace ensued, a pause in which everyone present settled into stillness, our trowels and spades motionless, our heads bowed. Over the scarps and vales came the tinkle of sheep-bells, the far shouts of thistle-pulling labourers, the delirious trill of a high lark. The Cabbage Whites and Common Blues fluttered about our heads so close we could almost hear their papery wings. Even Dart, slow, blunt Dart, wiping his nose, appeared aware of the moment’s portentousness. Only the odd creak of a leather boot and young Tom Sedgwick’s wheezes served to remind us of our corporeal reality.

  That evening the Vicar came round (the Rectory dwarfs my cottage) and over a glass of sherry stressed the teleological nature of ‘this Slav business’, looking upon it as some kind of cod-liver oil for the moral order. He bestowed himself in my old rocking-chair, squeaking it frightfully as he consumed at least a quarter of my sherry, and all but flung himself to the floor at the peak of his oration. It was only on the following morning, joining the others on the barrow, that I heard the inevitable – we started earlier than the newspaper boy, and in those days before the wireless Ulverton was still a refuge from the world of affairs. It was said jovially that a certain old shepherd by the name of Flower, living in a far-flung hut to the north of the village, and only coming in once a week for his provisions, was the last man in England to know we were at war. I felt envious of the fellow.

  That morning, then, there was a curious mixture of the subdued and the excited amongst us. It seemed only fitting that this was the day of the first find. ‘Marlers’ Trevick suddenly yelped just before dusk in a manner that set the rooks off cawing in the nearby clump of elms. The Squire scrambled down (we had by now a fairly impressive depression) and bent over the spot at which Marlers was jabbing a thick forefinger. A small edge of something glinted in the sun.

  Within minutes the Squire had lifted up a small bronze pot in which, as we swiftly discovered, huddled the burnt remains of an ancient Briton. We whooped with delight, and my blisters were forgotten. Ernest made elaborate notes while the rest of us uncorked our water-bottles and drank a rather tepid toast. Allun was despatched to fetch champagne, and when he returned the Squire opened the two bottles without pause, an action which sent frothy jets of Heidsieck’s Special Reserve over our sweaty countenances, and only just missed soaking our Bronze-Age friend. As I supped from the bottle, I felt the headiness of victory, and grew momentarily confused as to which great event we were celebrating: the uncovering of the ancient, or the call to arms.

  Percy Cullurne was the Manor’s under-gardener at the time – between bouts of ploughing and so forth. He had downright refused to take part in the excavation; a mutinous decision which had exercised the Squire’s fury. But the man wasn’t to be budged, and was too loyal and hard-working a fellow to be dismissed for wishing to tend the estate rather than indulge his master’s latest whim.

  One afternoon at the end of June, a month before the whim took body, I discovered the reason for this forthright stance. I was walking around the back of the estate, down the path known as the Pightle Way, switching at the defiant yellow splashes of ragwort with my walking stick, and thinking of nothing in particular (which is why, indeed, I walk), when I felt human eyes upon me, and on looking up saw Percy Cullurne staring hard over the barbed-wire fence that, alas, was strung in the stead of a hedge for that stretch of the little meadow.

  He nodded, and I stopped. He was holding a scythe and was in the process of sharpening it on a wooden strickle greased with mutton fat. In those days this was a commoner sight, but I was still new enough to the English rural scene that these simple actions held a fascination for me. Although he was then a young man, the ease with which he swept the strickle along the huge curving blade betokened a lifetime of custom. It was, in fact, because of the way even boys looked as if their working skills had been sunk deep into them that I felt a sense of humility before these humble folk. Many of them were (and still are, in this year of 1928) barely literate, yet they could read things other than words – which are paltry specimens before the rich and complex pages of our ancient country. As our roads are tarmacadamed, and the hills littered with our hideous suburban boxes, one can feel this other knowledge wither as a leaf in frost. Ulverton slumbers on (despite the stinking motor-bus and motor-car), huddled about its white dusty roads; for no one has thought it worthwhile, as yet, to lay a smooth black ribbon through here, for the comfort of the pneumatic tyre, and the discomfort of those who wish to dwell in peace.

  To return to the scene: after the usual pleasantries between the even rasps of the strickle, I told him that it was a pity he had decided to keep out of the ‘treasure hunt’. He stopped and straightened up. I had used the term in jest (the Squire had insisted on the academic nature of his interest, which explained the presence of Ernest and his notepad), but Cullurne took it literally.

  ‘There be the trouble, sir. En’t right, disturbin’ the dead for silver.’

  I smiled.

  ‘We hope for more than silver. We hope for gold.’

  ‘There. En’t right.’

  ‘But my dear man,’ I said, a little more seriously, ‘our object isn’t to plunder. We hope to gain knowledge, and a glimpse of the artistic achievements of our forebears. Necklaces, carved artefacts, or whatever. And what’s more, the sight of someone who lived and breathed thousands of years ago on this very soil.’

  His features barely altered.

  ‘An’ passed away,’ he said.

  I smiled again. There was no doubting it: the man was as superstitious as they come, and this provoked in me a certain pleasure that such deeply-rooted instincts still held on in a scientific age.

  ‘Well,’ I replied, making ready to go, ‘if I see the remotest hint of a haunting, I’ll be the first to run blubbering into your cottage. But as it is I am convinced that nothing remains there but the breeze and the grass. I’m in need of the exercise and the change.’

  ‘Aye,’ he nodded, ‘the master tawld I. It be a gurt loss to you, sir, I ’spect.’

  I thanked him for his reflections – the mention of my late wife had cast a pall on the erstwhile subject of our conversation – and continued on down the path until the hiss of the scythe had been obliterated by the summer afternoon’s attendant din: bees hummed over the dog-rose that clung to the ancient brick wall of the estate, and a flock of starlings was already raiding what fruit was spared by the frosts in the resplendent orchard that lay half-hidden behind (about which orchard, and its dark future role in this history, more later).

  I paused by the dog-rose, remembering how my wife had looked forward to the gentle scent of this loveliest of English flowers. She had never liked India. Her life consisted of boredom and the anticipation of ‘coming back’ in equal measure. Alas, that the greedy sub-continent had claimed her just a month before I was due to retire! Nature’s laws are importunate and harsh. How she would have loathed it, had she known her final resting-place would be the vast cemetery at Chittagong, under the rattling palms – and not in a green and secluded English churchyard.

  I wept a little beside the dog-rose, and felt foolish.

  I met the Squire the next day. I was on foot, he was in his latest motor-car, whose breeding appeared impeccable – but I confess that I cannot recall the exact stable. It was large and red and curving, with an impressive brass horn which Allun would apply without fail at every corner, serving much the same purpose as the trumpets sounded before the royal train in days of yore. It had a canvas top which, this being a fine day, was fully lowered; w
e talked, therefore, without impediment, though I have to say that my eyes were uncomfortably full of the dust that the motor-car had churned up in her wake, and which now gently blew down the high street towards us. I had not wanted to talk with the Chief, but my passing had coincided with Allun applying the brakes very hard to avoid a grocer’s dray at the corner by the church, and the Squire had hailed me from his temporarily stalled position.

  I admired his steed, and so on, but soon enough we were conversing on the approaching enterprise. I had expressed a doubt the previous week about my physical prowess, being a gangly fellow the far side of sixty. I returned to this theme by the church but the Squire once again dismissed my trepidations and stated that my exact mind and quiet presence would fully make up for any muscular defects. He slapped the side of the car with great vigour and brought up the subject of Cullurne. I tip-toed about it, but the Squire’s bristly, pale, slightly swollen visage thrust itself towards me; although the dray had clip-clopped off, the road was not yet clear in the Squire’s head. There existed a peculiar dependancy in the mind of our village Chief which thralled both us and him; the lowliest member of the community could exert a hold over the Squire by the merest hint of disapproval. This was the burr that snagged him. If the employees of the Manor did not support his various schemes to the hilt, they were the subject of furious enquiry. Four maids were dismissed for making faces at his steam-powered dining-room trolley. It was thrown out soon after – almost certainly because their ridicule had not, nay, could not be assuaged. This is the reason he preferred furious cajolery on his part to outright rejection: knowing this, the village preferred to let him be, and wore two faces.

  ‘Impudence, Fergusson! Damned impudence!’

  I replied that, having talked to the guilty party the previous day, there were feelings involved which amounted to a kind of religious dread.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he thundered out, causing Allun in front to wipe the windscreen carefully with a rag, ‘the man’s not only impudent but craven! A lot of bunkum, Fergusson. The man’s about as religious as my left ****!’

  Knowing the Squire’s unfortunate capacity for ‘saucy’ talk, and feeling this was a prelude to such, I steered away from further considerations of the theological content of his anatomy, and pointed out that his exacavating ‘team’ was quite sufficient in number, given the size of the barrow. But the Squire’s concern was not with practicalities, but the deeper realms of our soul, those murky darknesses that others’ actions swirl into and slap and clap against: voicing our earliest fears; sounding our pro-foundest terrors.

  ‘Treasure-hunt!’ came the spittle-spumed response. ‘That’s what they call it, Fergusson. Treasure-hunt! Now where d’you think they got that from, eh? The Vicar and his cronies. Eh? What? Treasure-hunt!’

  A great thump on the door of the motor-car, a bark at Allun, and the road swirled once more into clouds, from which tiny chips of granite were expelled towards me – a most suitable afterword. An old man on a bench outside the Green Man inn, by the name of Harry Dimmick, added to the general contamination by expectorating in the direction of what the village termed ‘that bloody stink-pot’ (showing as little sense of differentiation between the various models as I), and cackling in a manner I found alarming.

  A few days after the first of our finds, or a few days after the declaration of war – on whichever hook the reader would prefer to hang that 4th of August – the sound of hammering resounded around the square in Ulverton, small children with hoops (as much in fashion then as now, I seem to recall) gathered in knots about the personage hammering, and some of them shouted out, as best they could, the words RECRUITMENT and MEETING. This meaning nothing to them, they ran to the fields to tell their parents or elder siblings, who – being waist-deep in docks and thistles, et cetera – told them to be gone (if in less delicate and probably unprintable terms), thus returning the children posthaste to the elusive source, whose polysyllabic mysteries were stared at on the basis of the same principle that had the unlettered Charlemagne sleeping with the Bible beneath his pillow: knowledge may be yielded up by sheer proximity.

  Thus it was that, returning from the excavation somewhat earlier than usual, owing to a mild attack of heat-stroke, I was accosted by piping voices, and explained as best I could to the gathered throng of dirty knees and faces and dirtier skirts (the recent habit of dressing little boys in boys’ garments was not yet taken up in 1914) the meaning of RECRUITMENT; while the elders of the village, some of whom must have been familiar with the King’s shilling, looked on with their customary suspicion at the newcomer’s lofty cognisance of things beyond the Fogbourne vale.

  Suffice to say that explaining to those little scruffy beings the principles of our conduct of war, which necessitates the calling forth of suicidal impulses, and the separation of husband from wife, son from mother, brother from sister, but most especially alarming in their eyes, father from child, was not the easiest task allotted to me, and quite surpassed the stickiest situation ever encountered in India. One charming little fellow, by the name of Stephen Bunce, hand in hand with his minuscule sister, stared up at me with such a profound look of innocence on his wee face that tears all but sprang to my eyes as I talked. That this onerous task was given to me at all is still to be regretted, for ever since (I feel) those same children have looked upon me as some kings in ancient plays look upon the Messenger: as somehow culpable of the havoc he brings news of. Though they are now (even the innocent little Stephen) all large and lusty and grown-up, it is not just my outsider complex that causes me to feel a chill, a little shiver of hatred and blame, as one of them passes me in the lane. Now imagine that sense increased tenfold, twentyfold, in the friable mind of the Squire – but the reader will perceive I am jumping ahead.

  In the days before the meeting, only one urn and a small food vessel were uncovered from the newly-exposed layers of the barrow, but anticipation, and the hypnotic rhythm of the trowels, somehow made talk of the war superfluous. The last was a general blur of excitement and dread; this was a carefully delineated reality. Indeed, I would sleep at night with the same patch of chalky earth revolving before my eyes in vivid proximity and detail, with the mournful calls of peewits still sounding in my ears. It was at least an improvement on shakily bobbing fans and the bloated corpses of dogs.

  The meeting, taking place just before harvest, was attended by the whole village. In those days, as now, long evenings in cramped cottages (or on its back-door step in the summer) were eagerly broken. The piano’s wrong notes grow increasingly intrusive, the gramophone loses its appeal with its frozen repertoire, and the crystal set had not yet appeared to while away useless hours upon, fiddling with a cat’s whisker! The same greasy cards snap dully on the same dark tables, the same brass ring swoops to clink against the same worn horn, while the clay-pipes and the gallon jugs have to be filled in the proverbial sweat of hay-prickled brows – and the songs and recitations cannot always be paying. Come the end of the summer months the whole village (though now there are rumours of electrification) crouches in a paraffin-flickering tedium – for books have not yet dispensed their eternal treasures in the majority of our homes. Staring into the fire links us, surely, with our primitive ancestors, for no other occupation was then, or is now, so heavily resorted to.

  A small podium had been erected in the middle of the square, with a bleached Union Jack (our Women’s Institute has it now) draped across the front. Three chairs and a table occupied most of the dais, and when the Squire, the Vicar, and a militarily uniformed gentleman stepped up together, there was a brief toppling of furniture. The local photographer was hopping about attempting to keep a space in front of him clear of the crowd, and the local constable was ingratiating himself with a second uniformed gentleman. Three rows of chairs were positioned at one side for the higher echelons of the village, rather like boxes in the theatre, and perceiving myself to be one of this division I sat down. Children were tugging at skirts, hoops were clattering, a group of m
en in smocks were guffawing, and the church bell proceeded to join in with the quarter. The elders were gathered on benches before the New Inn, and they nodded and talked all the way through the booming nonsense of the first uniformed gentleman; while the crowd, I am sorry to say, gawped most impressively.

  Feeling a thirst come on in the warm dusk, I glanced towards the inn as if a mere glance would appease, and saw, with an unwarranted jolt of the soul, the Manor’s under-gardener leaning against the oak that grows outside that establishment, and shelters it, with a jug in one hand and a tankard in the other. Something about him puzzled me, and when the Vicar rose in turn and declaimed his own piping version of nonsense, I realised what it was: Percy Cullurne was watching, not the contents of the podium, but something above and beyond it. Turning surreptitiously about in my chair, I saw what it was: a house-martin busy in its nest in the eaves of the Post Office, flashing that tell-tale white patch as it swooped and scurried. I fancied I saw a smile upon the face of Percy Cullurne, but he was just too far the other side of the square for me to be absolutely certain.

  When the Vicar had sat down to desultory applause, the Squire stood up and I forced myself to listen. I was keen to know how the Chief would handle his mission. During the week or so of the excavation, I had grown quite fond of him. One cannot help but grow fond of men with whom one is in physical concord, with whom a simple labour is being undertaken, an end met, and with whom few words serve. This is the other side of that useless and ghastly custom called War: companionship forged harder than iron in the heat of battle, in the slow fire of wounds and deprivation. I fancy, too, that those old men outside the ale-house, in almost permanent agonies from various rheumatic complaints brought on by their lifelong exposure to cold and wet, some crippled by the sheer weight of the work they had endured and mastered, had an unspoken bond amongst themselves, that thrilled more to silence than words, and might be recalled next time the reader enters an ale-house in the country, and thinks himself in the company of dumb idiots.