Portrait of Elmbury

by John Moore

  Geese were the ruling passion of his life. He would suffer any hardship, endure the utmost privation, for the chance of a shot at the grey-lags, white-fronts, and pink-feet which came to our meadows in great flocks during the late winter. When he had located a flock he would sit down and seriously plan a campaign against it. “You’ve got to put yourself in their place,” he would say. “You’ve got to think like a goose.” Then, because I was silent he would look up and see my smile; his face would crumble away into that marvellous grin, and he’d say: “Well, perhaps I do, perhaps I do.”

  If there was snow on the ground he would wear his sister’s nightdress for camouflage, covering his hat with a white handkerchief. Out of the whiteness his red face glowed and burned like a sun rising through the mist on the river.

  He was—even at sixty-five—the best shot I have ever seen, the best stalker, the best naturalist, and incomparably the best fisherman. Yet his fishing tackle was almost as primitive as a schoolboy’s. His greenheart fly-rod, which must have been as old as himself, had a kink in the middle joint and two kinks in the top joint; it was nearly as crooked as an apple-bough, or its owner’s legs. But in his hands it was a magic wand with which he would conjure up fishes when nobody else could catch anything. In the little brook which ran through his farm, a mere runnel overgrown with reeds, bushes, and willows, he discovered a few trout where lesser men would have found only bull-heads, gudgeons and eels. He caught two or three every season in the mayfly time, using only the top joint of his rod and dabbling a fly between the branches. The biggest was two and a half pounds, and he got it out from between the roots of a great willow. I swear that no other man could have landed it in such circumstances.

  The Colonel didn’t mind what he fished for so long as it swam, what he hunted so long as it ran, nor what he shot so long as it could fly. There were eels in his brook as well as trout and it was his custom to fish for them on Sunday afternoons, an otherwise barren time when there was no hunting and no shooting and the pub was shut. His method of fishing was original (for the Colonel was nothing if not experimental in his approach to every kind of sport). He used no less than six cheap cane rods, which he distributed at intervals along the bank. His lines were baited with lobworms. To each rod-point he fixed a small bell, such as might hang round the neck of a cat. He sat down in the middle of the line of rods, smoked his pipe, and took an occasional swig out of his flask of whisky. Whenever the tinkle-tinkle of a bell called him from his pleasant occupation, he strolled leisurely to the appropriate rod and landed his eel. He said that the bells, besides being useful, made the sport more exciting. The tinkling sound, now coming from one rod, now from another, now from two or three at once, gave to the pastime a sense of urgency which eel-fishing generally lacked.

  Having caught his basketful of eels, and eaten them for supper, the Colonel nailed up their skins on his barn door and when they were thoroughly cured he oiled them and cut them into narrow strips and used them for bootlaces. I still possess a pair; and they are stronger and more supple than any other laces I have ever seen.

  “A Rat! A Rat! Dead for a Ducat, Dead!”

  The Colonel loathed and detested rats. For all other animals, birds, and fish he had the queer sort of paradoxical friendly feeling that men have for the creatures they persecute. But rats he abominated. He used to sit for hours with his .22 rifle, stern and purposeful, waiting for the chance of a snapshot at a rat in the dusk. He rigged up in the rat-runs the most ingenious little springes of bent willow twigs with nooses lightly pegged to the ground; and again he would sit for hours in the hope of actually seeing a rat run into one. This, on the rare occasions when it occurred, gave him the most exquisite delight: to see the rat flicked high by the straightening twig, wriggling and kicking and swinging in the wind, like a highwayman upon the gibbet.

  In his very last days rats obsessed him; and he wrote to me a short time before he died a post card in which occurred the phrase, twice underlined: Rats are getting at my walnuts. But whether these were real rats or creatures of his phantasy I do not know.

  Big Game

  He, who with infinite care and wonderful cunning would set his springes for “rats and mice and such small deer” had once been a famous hunter of big game. Habits engendered by long days on shikari never left him; he always noticed footprints, for example, and he was more than a match for any of our local and amateurish poachers. I have been walking with him on his land when he has picked up and pocketed an unfamiliar cartridge-case. “That belongs to our friend Mr. Sparrow.” That night in the Swan he handed it back to the wretched Sparrow. “I think, Sir, that you left this in my ten-acre meadow last Saturday.” Sparrow never poached the Colonel’s land again.

  One day I was driving with him in his rackety old car—which he drove with fierce and murderous recklessness—when we came across three enormous turds on the road. They were simply mountainous: they were super cowpats. I was astonished and filled with wonder; but the Colonel, swerving to avoid them, was scarcely moved. “Hm … elephant,” he said; and sure enough just round the bend of the road we came upon a travelling circus.

  I’d Give a Hundred Pounds

  He was eccentric, pugnacious, and often rude; but everybody liked him, and I loved him as if he were my father. I have never met anybody like him, and I don’t suppose I ever shall. Mr. Benjamin, who was a great fancier of spaniels, expressed what we all felt when he said to me, long after the Colonel’s death: “It’s like this, John; it’s the same with men and dogs. You can look back upon your life and even if you’ve known hundreds there’s one stands out. There’s one which makes all the others seem not to matter. I’ve had one dog like that, it was a black cocker called Sweep, and I’d give twenty pounds just for one Sunday afternoon walk with Sweep at my heels. And I’ve known one man like that, out of all the thousands I’ve met, and I’d give a hundred pounds just to buy him a drink again and see him sitting there in his old chair!”

  It would be worth it: to see him come hobbling through the door into the Swan bar promptly at six on a winter’s night, dripping wet, kelpie-like, amorphous, a couple of mallard bulging out his “poacher’s pockets,” deerstalker over his eyes. … He peels off his waders with grunts and curses, damning his stiff joints. He says, “It’s going to freeze sharpish,” and you know that it will freeze sharpish, because he is never wrong about the weather, he feels it in his bones, he sniffs it with his nostrils, he is one with the wind and the rain and the frost and the sun, he is Protean. “It’s sleeting tapioca already,” he says; for he has his own vivid phrase for everything, he doesn’t talk in clichés as the rest of us do, he is something of a poet, he sees things more sharply than we do and matches his words to what he sees. He sits down in his familiar chair and takes a long drink and stretches his legs; and you can hear his knee-joints crackling. You can see him wince; but however sharp the pain he will not confess it, he is indomitable, and he finds something funny even in his own infirmity. He makes an almost Elizabethan joke about being stiff in the wrong places. His wonderful old face disintegrates into the merriest grin that man ever saw; and everybody in the room looks up, smiles, feels his heart grow warmer and the sour world turn merry, at the sound of his Ionian laughter.

  Part Five

  The Chimes at Midnight

  (1935-189?)

  Rosemary for Remembrance—Those were the Days—Mr. Benjamin —The Jew of Elmbury—Mr. Sparrow—“More to be feared than a thousand bayonets”—The Journalist—Laudator Temporis Acti— Market Ordinary—Mop Fair—Bribery without Corruption—Clem and Fred—The Moral Story of Clem—The Mysterious Story of Fred —The Fatal Train— The Chimes at Midnight—Once More Farewell

  Rosemary for Remembrance

  On winter nights when the frost bit keen, Miss Benedict fetched out an iron “shoe”—a utensil made by the blacksmith for this especial purpose—and heated it in the fire. She placed in it some brown ginger and some spice and a sprig of rosemary, and kept it filled with beer. It w
as a drink to warm the cockles of your heart. It loosened the old men’s tongues, and perhaps the rosemary loosened their memories. At any rate on these occasions there was always good talk in the Swan. …

  Those Were the Days

  “Rosemary,” said Wilfrid Jakes the old gardener, “I minds the time when there was a bush of rosemary in every cottage garden, and d’you know why? Almost every cottage had its own pig in them days, yes, and killed its own pig and cured it, and lived half the year on good bacon. Better nor this Danish stuff they sells us now in the shops. Well, the- rosemary was used to flavour the lard, see? Wonderful stuff—I can taste it now—was lard flavoured with rosemary.”

  “You never stop talking about the Good Old Times,” said Anderson the cobbler, who was always ready for a sociological argument. “But my father started work as a ploughboy at three bob a week, working from six in the morning till six at night. When he was a grown youth he often stayed in all day on Sunday while his mother washed and mended his only shirt. If those were your Good Old Times you can keep ’em!”

  “But every cottage had its pig,” said Wilfred obstinately, “and I’d rather have three bob a week and a full belly than thirty bob a week and be half starved, which a lot of lads is to-day. When I was a boy I used to work for Mister Jeffs’ father at the threshing. Five bob a week we got, and thought we was lucky to get it. It was hard work in threshing time, too; we’d work till seven or eight in the evening, and no overtime. But I’ll tell you this, Mister Anderson: I never went hungry; and I never knew any honest workman as did. We all sat down in the big kitchen at the farm. And first we’d have an apple-pie: ’twas as big across as a cartwheel and there was more where that one come from. You had your helping of apple-pie and you could have a second helping if you liked; but there was thirty pounds of beef on the table. And you could cut and come again at that too: only you had to have the apple-pie first, see, to fill you up a bit. And each man had a quart of cider, to help him along with the work a bit. And I’ve known old Mr. Jeffs, on a cold day at the sprout-picking, pour a bottle of rum into the cider-barrel before the cider was handed out. I can’t see many farmers doing that to-day!”

  The cobbler shook his head.

  “You was dependent on charity, that’s the truth of it. Of course there was good employers, just as there was bad ones. But it doesn’t alter the fact that they was getting your labour for five bob a week.”

  Badger Brown the farmer butted in. He was known as Badger Brown by reason of his extraordinary addiction to badger-digging. I could never see any fun myself in this cruel and tedious sport. You went to a badger-earth at about nine o’clock in the morning and if you had reason to think that the badger was at home you put in your terriers and listened. You lay uncomfortably in the mud with your ear to the ground until you heard various thumps, grunts and yelps which suggested that your terrier had got hold of the badger or, more likely, that the badger had got hold of your terrier and was chewing its face off. You then began to dig. You dug all day like a navvy but without being paid for it, and towards evening, having shifted several tons of earth, you recovered from the bottom of the chasm your bleeding and moribund terriers and a live and angry badger, which you pointlessly slaughtered. Quite possibly it bit you before it died.

  Badger Brown, however, was devoted to this pastime, and was equally proud of his scarred and blinded terriers and his own scarred and mangled hands, which had already lost one finger. He spent more time digging for badgers on other people’s farms than in cultivating his own; but apart from his mania for persecuting this harmless and attractive animal, he was a decent enough fellow, the last of a long line of yeomen and little squires. He said now:

  “In many cases the farmers got their labour for nothing. My grandfather farmed two hundred and fifty acres and kept forty milking cows; but he never employed a man.”

  “How did he manage that?” we asked.

  “No, he never employed a man nor a woman either. He had twenty-one children. Two died, so he had nineteen left to do the labour: eleven girls and eight boys. The girls did the housework, the dairy, and the milking, looked after the poultry and fed the pigs; the boys did the work in the fields; while my grandfather lived like a lord.”

  “What about your grandmother?” we asked. “She seems to have done a bit of work too!”

  “She died with her twenty-first.”

  “There you are,” said the cobbler. “There are your Good Old Times. Ask any woman to-day whether she’d like to go back to them.”

  “Grandfather,” said Badger Brown, “had peculiar views about women. He used ’em rough and he brought ’em up hard. You talk about your modern girls knowing everything about everything—the Bishops are always preaching that they know too much; and you talk about the Victorian maidens fainting at the sight of a mouse. But my aunts, bless their hearts, used to regard it as one of their ordinary feminine duties to take the cows to the bull. And I suppose the girls to-day, who know all the Facts of Life, would think that pretty shocking!”

  The Colonel nodded his old grizzled head. “Reminds me of a story,” he said. “A prim old lady walking down a lane meets a little girl leading a cow. ‘Good-morning, little girl,’ she says, ‘you’re very small to be leading such a big moo-cow. Where are you taking her?’ ‘To the bull, Ma’am,’ says the little girl. ‘Dear, dear,’ says the old lady, very shocked indeed. ‘Dear, dear, how dreadful. Couldn’t your father do that?’ ‘No, ma’am,’ said the little girl politely. ‘It has to be a bull.’”

  The Colonel threw back his head and laughed his delightful laugh. But Miss Benedict’s disapproving eye was upon us; and we knew that it was high time to change the subject.

  Mr. Benjamin

  Mr. Benjamin, I suppose, was the person you’d least have expected to find among the Swan fellowship. At times he looked utterly incongruous. These were the occasions when he was going to Birmingham or had just come back. “Got a little business in Brum,” he would say; and we accepted the formula, knowing perfectly well that his little business was a red-headed widow (for Sparrow, his henchman, had told us so). In his Birmingham clothes, his cheap city suit, light-grey homburg, diamond tiepin and all; Mr. Benjamin looked flashy and cheap: completely alien to the Swan and to Elmbury. And yet somehow or other he belonged, he was part of the pattern of Elmbury’s life. I sometimes thought he had a chameleon quality. When he went to Birmingham he became a Brummagen Jew; back in Elmbury, in workaday clothes, with his spaniel at heel and a gun under his arm, he seemed to change—not his race, he could never change that—but at any rate his whole attitude to life. He became one of us.

  He was fond of all kinds of sport, especially shooting, and he didn’t mind getting wet, which was rather remarkable in a Jew; for they are a people who like to keep their feet on dry land. Everybody liked him, for we knew of certain great kindnesses he had done to foolish gamesters who had betted themselves nearly into bankruptcy. There was a story that Jerry, in his madcap youth, had owed Mr. Benjamin both his horse and his motor-bike, these being the only possessions he could offer in settlement of a debt of nearly two hundred pounds. Mr. Benjamin kept them long enough to teach him his lesson, then sent them back with a note:

  “I am too fat to ride your horse and I should break my neck on your motor-bike. It will save me a lot of doctor’s bills if you will allow me to call it all square.”

  Yet as soon as he got on to a racecourse Mr. Benjamin was metamorphosed back into the quick-witted cheapjack Jew who made his living by his wits and his slick patter.

  The Jew of Elmbury

  You don’t as a rule find people of Mr. Benjamin’s race in small country towns. They are happier in urban communities. But our local historian, Mr. Rendcombe, discovered in an old chronicle a curious anecdote about a Jew who lived in Elmbury in 1259.

  “A Jew at Elmburie fell into a privie upon the Saturdaie, and would not for reverence of his Sabboth bee plucked out, wherefore Richard de Clare Earl of Gloucester kept him there till M
onday, at which time he was dead.”

  This story delighted Mr. Benjamin, who maintained that it was evidence of our ancient and deep-rooted anti-Semitism which, said he with a wink, made it practically impossible for him to earn a living among us. But we thought it showed that our sense of humour hadn’t changed much in seven centuries and we were secretly rather proud of it; feeling that we should do the same thing to-day if we got the chance, not because the man was a Jew, but because he was such an awful prig; and prigs we abominate.

  I think Mr. Benjamin rather liked being teased about his unfortunate predecessor. He had learned this much about us: that we only teased people we liked.

  “Take care,” we would warn him on Saturday, “take particular care not to fall down the privy to-day!”

  “Down the plug-’ole,” Mr. Benjamin would say. “That’s me. Poor old me. Ho! ho! ho! Down the plug-’ole. Poor old me!”

  Mr. Sparrow

  Of Sparrow, who served Mr. Benjamin with dog-like devotion and seemed almost to follow him at heel like another spaniel, it is more difficult to find good things to say. He was an unmitigated rascal, entirely without shame; indeed perhaps it was because of his very shamelessness that we tolerated him. He was said to have stolen a puppy one Saturday afternoon from a rich old lady called Mrs. Fothergill and to have sold it back to her for five guineas on Sunday morning, calling at her house and saying how sorry he was to hear of her loss, “but as it so happens, ma’am, by a lucky chance I’ve got a pup that’s the very spit-image of the one you lost.” The story goes that he got away with it and even boasted afterwards that he took the risk out of sheer kindness of heart. “I thought the poor old leddy would be lonesome-like without her pup.” It may be true; he was impudent enough for anything.