Portrait of Elmbury

by John Moore

  He was a fisherman (like almost everybody else in Elmbury) and a great liar. The fish he caught always weighed about three times as much as anybody else’s; we thought they must be filled with lead. “Caught a chub this evening,” he’d say, “and he’s four pound and three ounces by the kitchen scales; I’ll go t’ell if ’e ’ent.” That was his favourite oath with which he concluded every sentence: “ ’Tis true; I’ll go t’ell if it ’ent.” We thought Mr. Sparrow would go to hell anyhow. He caught roach weighing two pounds and pike weighing fifteen, and if we doubted he assured us it was true, he’d go to hell if it wasn’t, he’d weighed the fish. We couldn’t argue with the kitchen scales.

  One day his wife had a baby, and the District Nurse, having left her spring-balance behind, used the kitchen-scales to weigh it. It was certainly a fine fat baby. It was just a shade less than twenty-two pounds.

  “More to be Feared than a Thousand Bayonets”

  Mr. Rendcombe, the editor of the Intelligencer, besides being the local historian of the Swan company was also the one who had the longest memory; it was to him that people would refer to settle arguments about such questions as whether the great frost was in 1894 or 1895, or who was Mayor in the year of the Queen’s Jubilee. He was a dapper little man of more than seventy whose paper maintained on a parochial scale the traditions of freedom, integrity, and independence upheld by the great Manchester Guardian itself. Woe betide the person, party, or sect that attempted to challenge that independence. The Intelligencer was a dangerous animal which when attacked defended itself; and Mr. Rendcombe, in his day, had put Mayors in their places and even dared to write a critical leading article about the Justices of the Peace. Indeed, the Council so greatly feared his lively comment—and, even more, his too-accurate reporting—that they had lately taken to transacting most of their business in Committee, to which the press was not admitted. The Intelligencer was swiftly roused by this threat to its freedom; and its leading article thundered with the authentic thunder of which from time to time we still hear a faint rumbling in the leaders of Old Auntie Times.

  One Councillor, a remarkably illiterate man, complained to Mr. Rendcombe (who politely paraphrased his speeches) that he was being unfairly reported. Mr. Rendcombe promised to put the matter right; and next week he did.

  “Mr. Goodacre rose and said, ’ What I means to say Mr. Mayor and what I means is I have riz to take up your valuable time to say as how I feels, and there’s many in this chamber and out as feels with me, as how I feels that the Council if you sees what I means is wasting of a lot of valuable time by argifying about this matter about which I feels, and there be others as feels it too, ’tis not worth the argifying about, being something about which you feels just how you feels and nothing what anybody else can say will alter what you feels nor make you feel any different about a matter which I thinks should never be allowed to take up the valuable time of this ’ere Chamber and of you Mister Mayor and my fellow members who feels, I’ll venture to say, very much the same about it as I feel. …”

  Mr. Goodacre didn’t complain again.

  The Journalist

  Within the limits of his splendid integrity, Mr. Rendcombe managed to make his paper much livelier, it always seemed to me, than many a consciously-bright London news-sheet. Even his reporting of the most trivial cases in the Magistrates’ Court was vivid and readable. If a vagrant was fined for being drunk and incapable, Mr. Rendcombe was not content with the bare statement:

  “Alexander MacDougall, of no fixed abode, was fined ten shillings,” etc. …

  He began his report in a way which compelled you to read it:

  “A sinister, uncouth-looking man, calling himself Alexander MacDougall …”

  Laudator Temporis Acti

  But Mr. Rendcombe could talk as well as he could write; and he was at his best in the Swan bar on a winter’s night when Miss Benedict had warmed the beer and spiced it with rosemary to set his tongue wagging. He would talk, as a rule, about old times; and in particular about the weather and about local politics, both of which it seemed had been far more spectacular in the old days than they were to-day. He would say, in reply to the Colonel, who was prognosticating a hard frost:

  “No doubt, Colonel, we shall have a frost, but I doubt if it will be a hard one. We don’t get the weather we used to. Now take the frost of 1895. It started freezing about Christmas and continued until well into March. That was a frost if you like! I remember Mr. Jeffs—not the present Mr. Jeffs, but the old gentleman, who died in 1914—I remember him driving his pony and trap all the way from Elmbury to Dykeham along the middle of the river.”

  “There was a fairish frost in 1917,” said Anderson the cobbler. “I minds them roasting an ox on the river in that year.”

  Mr. Rendcombe, to whom anything which had happened in the twentieth century was recent history and scarcely worth talking about, dismissed the frost of 1917 with a gesture. “Your memory plays you false, Mr. Anderson! There was a frost in that year; but it was nothing to that of 1895. And you may be sure they didn’t roast an ox in 1917, for it was during the war, rationing was in force, and such a thing would never have been permitted. No: the ox-roasting was in 1895. The beast was given by Mr. Trewin’s father and slices were sold at twopence each in aid of the Elmbury poor. And very good they were, too. I well remember it. The roasting was arranged by Mr. Nixon, who was at that time the proprietor of the Shakespeare. And the heat from the fire melted the ice, but ’twas freezing as fast as it melted. We also erected a printing-press on the river.”

  “What on earth did you do that for?” interrupted the cobbler.

  “We printed, in the form of a single sheet, a special souvenir number of the Intelligencer. I have a copy in my office now; and you are welcome to see it, Mr. Anderson, if you like. It is a very unique and curious thing: a copy of the Intelligencer printed on the river, right in the middle of the river, right in mid-stream!”

  Market Ordinary

  According to Mr. Rendcombe, almost everything had deteriorated both in quality and quantity since the beginning of the twentieth century. Everybody agreed about beer and whisky; but even food wasn’t what it was.

  “You ought to have known the Market Ordinaries in the old days,” he would say. “In this very hotel, or in the Shakespeare when Mr. Nixon had it. Calves’ heads; roast beef; mutton and caper sauce; and that wasn’t what they call a choice, mind you, a man could have the lot—and did, if he called himself a man. And in their season there’d be elvers, or salmon, or eels. People despise eels nowadays; but we Elmbury folks used to think of them very highly, very highly indeed. It was always the head of the house who cooked the first dish of eels in the autumn; and a very elaborate business it was, I can tell you, nine different sorts of herbs and spices, and first the frying, and then the stewing: it took two days to prepare ’em! And by then you were so hungry having smelt the delectable smell of ’em hanging about for so long, that you filled your belly so that you never wanted to see another eel, not till next autumn came round. Yes, we did ourselves well, we knew how to eat, in those days.”

  Mop Fair

  It was rather depressing, talking to Mr. Rendcombe, for it made one realise how much, apparently, one had missed. Our annual Mop1 Fair, for instance, which always seemed to me sufficiently rough and riotous, was nowadays in Mr. Rendcombe’s view more like a Mother’s Meeting than a real Mop. “Have I been to the Fair?” he’d say. “Yes, I have taken a walk down the street; but I don’t call it a Fair. What did I see? I saw a few stalls selling brandysnaps—but they don’t taste like the brandysnaps used to—and a few young men who looked like nancy-boys lobbing balls at coconuts. If you hit a coconut when I was a boy you were expected to smash it; for it’d never fall off its stand unless it were smashed What else? A few giggling wenches on the swings. (We’d have given ’em something to giggle about!) A few mangy animals in cages; and a couple of booths which promise you all kinds of sights to tickle up your appetite, only when you get ins
ide it’s nothing but a couple of girls in tights. Our appetites didn’t need that sort of stimulus.” And Mr. Rendcombe would sadly shake his head.

  Goodness knows what the Mop must have been like in his youth; for it was pretty orgiastic even in 1930. It shocked the parsons even then, and caused astonishment to visitors from the cities who didn’t understand Elmbury. We were a pretty highly civilised community really; and we were homogeneous. We could be trusted with a degree of liberty, even of licence, which would have turned the heads of a younger and more mixed people. At least, I think that was the explanation of the fact that our Mop, which happened every year on October 10th, never did us much harm, although it was the occasion for more drinking, fighting, and love-making than you’d see elsewhere in a month of Saturday nights. Such an affair as Elmbury Mop could not, I think, have taken place anywhere but in an English country town; it would have been ugly in Wales and it would have been murderous in Scotland. (In the former they daren’t even hold village dances for fear of the devil which broods over their savage hills; in the latter they have to shut the pubs on every possible occasion lest the whole population drink itself into homicidal frenzy.) But Elmbury was grown-up. We’d been doing this sort of thing since the fifteenth century. We were old enough to be trusted with fire; and the Mop was a veritable bonfire of morals at which once a year we warmed, but did not burn, our hands.

  Bribery without Corruption

  Local politics, it seemed, had lost, like the Mop and the weather, the rough turbulence and hardihood they once had. Politics to-day, according to Mr. Rendcombe, were wishy-washy. There were too many doubters on both sides; men lacked the fierce and flaming convictions they used to possess, which would lead them to bash one another on the nose for what they believed to be right. Council elections in the 1890’s were rough-and-tumble affairs; and there were always a few black eyes next day and sometimes a few broken scalps. Political colours meant something in those times; a Liberal’s red rosette was, to a Tory, literally a red rag to a bull. Men played practical jokes on their opponents, jokes carried out on a huge and majestic scale, as when the houses of all the prominent Liberals were painted bright blue in a night by dozens of painters employed by the Conservatives.

  “Your uncle played a part in that prank,” said Mr. Rendcombe, looking at me. I couldn’t imagine my gentle and courteous old uncle doing anything of the kind; but if Mr. Rendcombe said so it must be true. He went on:

  “Yes, that was the first year he got into the Council, in 1892. I well remember old Fred Pullin—he was young Fred Pullin then—going into the Anchor with a bagful of half-crowns and jingling them while he called out as bold as brass: “Who’s going to vote for Mr. Moore?”

  “Tory graft!” grunted the cobbler.

  I was scandalised.

  “But do you mean,” I said, “that my uncle had given him the half-crowns?”

  “Lord bless you, yes. They all did it, in those days: the Radicals and the Conservatives. It was the accepted thing. Your uncle is an upright and honest man and always was; but he gave the half-crowns because it was the proper and traditional thing to do. ’Twas all fair and above board. The candidates would go into the bank quite openly the day before the election and draw out ten pounds, all in half-crowns. I’ve seen some of the older ones nearly bent double carrying it away.”

  The cobbler groaned. “And they call it Democracy.” Mr. Rendcombe fixed him with a stern eye.

  “And so it was democracy,” he said. “Do you think that a man who was capable of voting against his own convictions for half a crown would be content with one half-crown? He’d take half-crowns from everybody, see; and then he’d vote according to his conscience, though most likely he’d be so drunk that he’d forget to vote at all. But the stalwart fellows who were already determined to vote for Mr. Moore, well, they took his half-crown just to drink his health and wish him luck. And a very good practice it was, to my mind. It made many a poor man merry on Election Day.”

  He laughed, and added for my benefit:

  “You can look shocked, all of you; but if Mr. Moore is bold enough to ask his uncle one day, he’ll be able to tell you I’m speaking the truth. I’ll tell you another thing. Have you ever heard of the Booth Vote?”

  We said we hadn’t.

  “I don’t mean a voting booth,” said Mr. Rendcombe, “if you’ll pardon the pun. I mean the voting power of the Booth family, which used to be, and probably still is, about 200 strong. There are Booths, as you know, in every alley in Elmbury; they breed like rabbits. They’re a very clannish family and they all vote the same way; it’s said that they leave the decision to the head of the family, whoever he is, the patriarch Booth, and vote for whoever he tells ’em to. Now the Booth vote is pretty important; I think I’m right in saying, Mr. Mayor, that it can swing an election?”

  The Mayor nodded.

  “Well, you can imagine that old grandfather Booth, who could bring 200 votes along with him, was worth more than half a crown. He certainly thought so. He stuck out for ten bob; and regularly every year on the first of November he got his ten bob from each of the candidates. In a good year it totted up to at least a fiver; and you ought to have seen old Booth that evening. Drunk? I should say so! Most years they took him to the police-station; but once or twice he had to go to the hospital.”

  “And did the Booths vote as he told them?” I asked.

  “To a man. A very well-disciplined family; they’ve got gipsy blood in them, and they live according to the patriarchal idea. They fear neither God nor devil but they fear the head of the family very much. They vote in a solid block, all for the same candidate. I think they vote for you, Mr. Mayor, each time you come up for election?”

  “I’m told so,” said the Mayor cautiously.

  “Of course,” added Mr. Rendcombe mischievously, “I’m not suggesting that the—er—practice I have described still goes on.”

  The Mayor looked uncomfortable and Mr. Rendcombe hastened to add: “Times have changed, of course; and we are inclined to think that bribery and corruption are very wicked now. All the same I’d rather see the traditional half-crowns handed out in the pubs on Election Day on behalf of honest men who want to get on the Council with the idea of serving their town than hear the plausible lying vote-catching speeches which some of our candidates make to-day. If I were a poor man I’d rather take half a crown for my vote than a promise which the candidate knows he’ll break as soon as he gets elected. And I’d rather see the kind of graft going on which means a few pints of beer to whet a poor man’s throat, than the kind which consists of sly understandings over ten thousand pound contracts and generally results in the poor man losing his shirt. And that’s flat,” said Mr. Rendcombe, glaring fiercely round the company; for there had been a scandal in the council about housing contracts and the Weekly Intelligencer was on the warpath. Mr. Rendcombe’s leader last week had been deliberately libellous. He could print things which The Times would not have dared to print; for he knew that nobody would have the courage to bring an action against him. His defence would have been to repeat the libel in court and produce the evidence. He was the Man Who Knew Too Much.

  Clem and Fred

  A lot of secrets would be buried for ever when Mr. Rendcombe went to his grave; for he knew a great deal more than he could print, courageous though he was. It was from him, one night in the Swan, that I heard the full story of my two cousins, Clem and Fred—although cousins they were born twenty years before me —who had vanished out of my ken when I was an inquisitive little boy spending my days in the window seat of the Tudor House nursery. “Railways trains,” you will remember, were somehow connected with their disappearance—or rather their disappearances, for the two events had happened at different times; and my family was obviously ashamed of the whole business, for I could discover nothing more by asking questions than this vague sinister hint of “railway trains.” As I grew up, of course, I picked up fragments of the two stories; but it wasn’t until I sat late on
e night with Mr. Rendcombe and with Johnnie Johnson the fat lawyer that I learned all. At least I learned as much as anybody knows; because nobody knows the end of Fred’s story, and it is unlikely that anybody ever will.

  Thr Moral Story of Clem

  Clem’s story comes first, chronologically; and it belongs especially to the Swan bar because most of it happened in the Swan bar.

  Clem, you may recollect, was the clever member of our family. He was indeed the only clever one; and he was brilliant. While he was still very young he made a name for himself as a barrister, practising in a provincial city, but travelling to and fro every day by train. He had great charm, wit, and an acute and restless mind: he was to the rest of the family as champagne is to madeira. A wonderful future was prophesied for him: a K.C. then politics or the Bench. Our part of the world, people said, would soon be too small to hold him. He’d have to go to London. …

  One morning Clem missed his train.

  Now thanks to that purblind generation of Elmburians who thought that the railway would interfere with their amenities, the journey to our county town was extremely complicated. As the crow flies, the distance was fifteen miles; as the train crawled, it was about thirty. You had to change twice; and the connections were bad. So if you missed the morning train, it was hardly worth while going at all. It would be time to start back as soon as you got there.