The Innocent Moon

by Henry Williamson

  “I suppose ‘Tanberry’ is a variation of ‘Cranberry’,” replied Phillip, with a straight face. “I did read somewhere that the Tanberry was used on one of the Knights’ shields in the War of the Roses.”

  “That’s right, dear boy. That was where my ancestor was made an earl, as a matter of fact, for saving the king’s life. Only we don’t talk about it in the family, y’ know. Bad form and all that.”

  Porky’s remarkable hospitality in the pubs stopped abruptly. One morning, hearing what had happened from Mrs. Crang, Phillip went down to Porky’s cottage in Esperance Cove. There were rumours of scenes in the Anchor Inn, of beer having been thrown in Porky’s face by the landlord’s wife. The constable was seen to call at the cottage. The servant girl had given notice.

  A grey and shaky Porky sat in his chair smoking dried tea-leaves and reading Home Notes. The cottage was acrid with smoke, his pregnant wife’s eyes red with weeping. They had a boy with them, child of a former wife, and a little blue-eyed girl who sucked her thumb and stared at Phillip. He realized that the family had no food, no milk for the little girl, so he returned for all the money he had, seven pounds, and gave it to Brenda Tanberry. “Don’t tell Porky,” he said. “It’s for the children, and you.”

  “I hardly know how to thank you, Phillip——”

  “It’s a present, Brenda, so don’t tell anyone, will you?”

  He left after a few minutes, and on going outside to the lane found both the tyres of his motor-bicycle flat, cut by a knife. He pushed the Norton home, belt off for ease.

  That evening when he went to the Ring of Bells for a pint of mild, hoping to read over his chapter quietly, Porky arrived. The bar was soon half-full, for word had gone round. The coal strike crisis was on. Porky let it be known that his order for the new motor-car from Queensbridge had been cancelled, owing to “those damned miners”, and he was buying a horse and trap instead; though what was the connexion between a motor-car and miners in Porky’s mind was not clear.

  Soon Porky was calling Phillip a “damned miner” because he did not agree with Porky’s remedy for the crisis, which was to “shoot every dam’ miner and then send the rest back to work”. Porky grew furious as he declaimed against Cook, the miners’ leader; he would “tear his intestines out, wind them round his neck, stamp on them, and grind them into the dust.”

  “Wouldn’t you explore every avenue before shooting them? With your hand to the ploughshare? Steering a middle course? And leave no stone unturned?” asked Julian, derisively.

  “Grrr!” replied Porky. “Grrr! Don’t you dare to talk to me, you damned no-good fellow!” Rapidly he repointed the waxed goat-horns of his moustache. “Grrr!”

  “By God, your insolence is intolerable!” retorted Julian. “And to think that it was to preserve your type of highly uncivilised trash that we fought the Germans!”

  “Grrr!” cried Porky, waving his walking stick in the air. “Who cares about your tinpot little war? You’re only a boy, a mere boy, a damned boy, get on with it, gooloryes, ans’ lemon every time! I saw real fighting, yes I did, at Rorke’s Drift, dear boy!” he said to Phillip.

  “Rorke’s Drift?” retorted Julian. “Are you sure it wasn’t Chu Chin Chow?”

  “Here, Phillip, dear boy, forget that no-good fellow!” spluttered Porky. “Drink up, everytime! Have another pint! Landlord, a quart for my friend! Drinks all round! Empty the damned barrel, gooloryes!”

  Phillip made an excuse and left. For two days he avoided Porky’s cottage, he could do nothing, having no more money to give; then one morning, riding into Queensbridge, he saw Porky in new hat, overcoat and gloves sitting resplendently with his family in a hired Ford car. Porky waved the cheeriest greetings; he was once again the family man, the sober Porky Phillip liked: the kind and tender-hearted father, giving a warmth which made him happy. The car was packed with furniture, food, coal, and gramophone records. The driver, a local lad, grinned at Phillip.

  That evening Porky was once more in the Ring of Bells, with pocketfuls of money, standing drinks all round and reiterating his favourite quotation from Ella Wheeler Wilcox and solving all problems with a lemon. He had called on the parson to return a hundredweight of coal, driving a ramshackle vehicle drawn by a white horse.

  “I’ve bought that white horse, dear boy,” he told Phillip. “It will follow me anywhere. When I die I’ll shoot it and have it buried in my grave, gooloryes, every time!”

  The white horse was tied to the iron ring by the door. Porky declared that Phillip must be the godfather of his forthcoming child. He would listen to no modest disclaimer that he, Phillip, would be a poor godparent.

  “Rot, my dear boy, get on with the goo’ work, like blazes!” At eight o’clock he insisted on taking Julian and Phillip to his cottage for supper. “Roast duck and green peas, dear boys! Come on, in you get, I won’t take no for an answer!”

  Down the narrow lane they rattled. The moon was bright.

  “Get on with the goo’ work; get on with it, dammit!” cried Porky, standing up in the cart and wielding a whip. The white horse, which appeared never to have felt curry comb or grooming brush, bolted. Round the corners the dung-butt whirled. Phillip began laughing.

  “Laugh and the wheels whirl with you,” he shouted in Julian’s ear. “There’s a big bend in front!”

  Behind them a boy on a bicycle was yelling something. Porky managed to pull up before the bend in the lane. The boy’s bicycle had no brakes, he hit the tailboard, pitched into the cart, picked himself up, gasped out that if they weren’t careful they would have an accident with feyther’s ’oss and butt, retrieved his bicycle and followed slowly, rising and falling and twanging on a damaged front wheel.

  “Get on wi’ it, get on with the goo’ work, go-r-r-r-n”—to the horse—“go like blazes, my dear girl, get on with it!”

  “To hell with this as transport! Laugh and the wheels whirl with you, certainly; but whip, and you whip alone! I’m getting out!” roared Julian, grabbing the reins. The horse promptly stopped, flinging them down together.

  “Goddammit, dear boy! Show white feather, goolorno! Grrr! Why, bless my soul, Extinguished Service Order, dammit, and you’re frightened of a trotting mare! Laugh, dear boy, laugh—answer’s a lemon every time—grrr!” He whipped the mare across the hip.

  They rattled forward, and soon were in a canter. Phillip hung on, ready to jump as they serpentined down the lane. The dung-butt was first on one wheel, then on the other. Somehow they arrived at Esperance. Phillip’s legs were shaky. Chief Petty Officer Bessure, landlord of the Anchor Inn, was smiling. His cheque returned to him marked R.D. had been “put right”. Porky had exchanged it for another cheque, with a fiver added on for luck.

  The landlord’s wife was haughty with Phillip as she showed him this new cheque for £110.

  “Mr. Tanberry has always been as proper a gentleman in this house as ever pulled at a pint,” she remarked, adding significantly, “Whatever his fair-weather friends may choose to say about Mr. Tanberry behind that gentleman’s back!”

  During the tea-smoking crisis Phillip had suggested to Mrs. Bessure that it might be wise to discourage Mr. Tanberry’s excessive generosity by giving him drinks on a cash basis only.

  “Yes,” she went on, fat hands on the bar as she stared at him. “Some people as pretends to be his friends and drinks with him don’t spend in a year in this house what this real gentleman spends in half an hour!”

  Phillip was beginning to experience a dark feeling in the village, similar to that described by John Crowe, the Cornish novelist-lecturer at the Parnassus Club, as ‘ingrowing toe-nails of the soul’. He wondered again who could have cut the tyres of the Norton left in the lane outside? As for Julian, he was known in the district as ‘the German’ by certain young farmers who had dodged the war and made fortunes from the high prices of food, such as eggs 4/– a dozen, a wild trapped rabbit 5/–, and cream at 5/– the lb.

  “Drinks all round, get on with it, dear bo
ys, drink up and have another!”

  “Proper gentleman, Mr. Tanberry, a real gentleman the way he spends money!” crooned Mrs. Bessure.

  Others present agreed. “Ah, he’s got it! That’s right! Proper gen’l’m’n!”

  Phillip tried to make his pint last, but he was swept away in the spate of comradeship. There were twelve other men in the bar. One hundred and eight pints of free beer—the landlord’s new 36-gallon barrel was more than one third down already. Proper gen’l’m’n! Proper! Aye Aye!!

  In the midst of the party Porky’s son, who had told Phillip he had gone to seven schools in the past four years, arrived to say that supper was cooked and on the table. Porky ordered a ginger beer for the boy, who drank it in the doorway, just off licensed premises.

  “Come on everyone, drink up! Landlord, fill ’em up, ans’ a lemon, what?”

  The revellers stayed until closing time, when Porky led the way out into the moonlight, and missing his step fell into the stream, to be dragged out amidst cheers, his teeth chattering, face peaky and large nose bruised on a stone. “Gettin’ on wi’ the good work, boys!” he gibbered, making light of the fall. By this act he became, by tradition, mayor of Esperance, an office which would be held until some other tanglilegs toppled into the stream.

  Mrs. Tanberry was crying when they went into the cottage. The duck on the table, put there and taken back to the oven half a dozen times, had been seized by one of the dogs, which had been chased by the rest of Porky’s pack up the hill in the direction of Turnstone.

  Julian and Porky quarrelled, and Julian left, leaving Phillip alone with the boy, who looked resigned; and picking up a comic paper, soon became absorbed in its lurid pages, while Porky, with many excuses, tried to soothe his wife. At last Brenda was smiling, and going to the larder, returned with cheese, bread, and a large jar of Piccaninny pickles, which Porky proceeded to dollop on to all the plates.

  “None for me, thanks all the same,” said Phillip, who was feeling the room shifting its proportion, a sign that he knew well of old. He managed to get outside, and after the inevitable reaction, lay down beside the stream until he felt well enough to return to the cottage.

  “You look cold, Phillip,” said Brenda. “Let me heat you up a cup of hot milk.” When this was ready, he could not drink it; meanwhile the boys’ bedroom was being got ready for him. He went up the stairs, and saw with relief that there was a window he could open if necessary.

  The next thing he remembered was Porky coming into the room with an open Bible, and reading into his ear something about blowing hot and then cold … “Lo! I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

  This lecture he connected with what Mrs. Bessure had said to him: afterwards he thought it rather funny in the circumstances, as he made for the window and opened it. And in the morning his tyres, the old cuts of which had been vulcanised in Queensbridge, were again pierced by a knife. When he got back to his cottage and told this to Mrs. Crang she said that they were a low lot in Esperance.

  “Also they do say that Mrs. Tanberry’s baby, what be comin’, be yours, don’t ee zee, that’s why you gived ’er all that money.”

  Chapter 9

  A HOME OF ONE’S OWN

  April 18. My writing is held up. Julian exhausts me. Two days ago he went to the market town, and coming back in the miller’s cart, quarrelled with him. The miller is about fifty, deaf, and, of course, did not reply to Julian’s questions, but appeared to ignore them. There was a row of sorts; fists were used. Porky, too, is difficult: so I keep as much alone as possible. Nowhere do I meet anyone who has plain sight. Normal talk is impossible with most of the villagers; they simply don’t understand a word I say. Julian tells me that I am an introvert, puritan, unnatural—and taunts me with my t.b. lung. But when alone I am generally happy; the sun and the elements make me buoyant again.

  I am making white ale, locally called whit ale. Everyone in this district is making it. You put sugar in water in a glass jar in sunshine, add eggs and malt and then the ‘bees’, a sort of yeasty fungus which anyone will give you. They work, rising with bubbles and sinking again: the liquid, after fermentation, is poured into earthenware jars, and corked up, with perhaps raisins or ginger. One glass makes a man tanglilegs, two glasses make him lose his false teeth, his handsaw, and his wood-stack. This is what happened to the ‘put thee dooks up if thee’t a man’ octogenarian. His teeth fell out, he mislaid his rusty saw, and someone pinched his wood.

  I called in to see a retired shepherd, to ask about the falcons, and saw the whit ale making on his window-sill. He gave me some of the bees. He lives in a stone-floored cottage overlooking a green valley, with flaky lime-washed low ceiling, and woodwork painted blue, dulled by age. Photographs on the wall and chimney shelf of big-moustached, staring sons, and daughters with coiffures elaborately prepared for the event. A muzzle-loader, with its owner’s best hat, is laid on two nails in the ceiling beam.

  The old housewife, with shining face, cuddles her elbows by the stove, on whose jet-black iron, saucepans are gently steaming. Two small casements let in the light, and on the window ledge seven jars of cloudy white ale are bubbling. At a shadowed table sat a woman of about thirty, with deep lustrous eyes and black hair, sewing. Her mouth was large but not heavy-lipped, mobile and weak (sensitive; her gaze at me, the visitor, was intense and just a little frightening). On the chair near the door sat a ruddy-faced labourer, clad in great boots and khaki trousers ruddled from the sandstone quarry wherein he worked. He smoked a foul pipe which only partially obliterated his personal stink. Near him sat the shepherd, thin, grey-haired, the husband of the elbow-cuddling housewife and father of the staring woman.

  By the fire sat a thin little girl, shuffling and laying cards, and sometimes telling her granmer in a low, soft voice that she has got “two jacks out together,’’ or some lucky combination in her game of Patience. Her mouth was wider than her mother’s, her eyes even larger, brown and untaught. She was illegitimate. Her mother obviously disliked her, and seldom missed an opportunity of saying a cutting thing to her. The little girl smiled to herself; a smile that belied the unwisdom of her lovely eyes. In the village she was said to be a ‘bitch’. Although only thirteen years old, ‘boys’ of eighteen or nineteen were, according to my neighbour, said to have had dealings with her. Granfer and granmer were supposedly ignorant of this.

  Sometimes when I call in to sit and talk with the old man, she smiles at me, a sidelong smile—which is it, I wonder—of feminine lure so early, or shy unknowing liking, hesitant lest repulse be met in my glance?

  On the subject of early sexual-intercourse (what a phrase!) Julian said they had a saying in the Southern States of America, When you’re old enough you’re big enough, and when you’re big enough you’re old enough. That seemed natural; that was natural; and yet something within me is mortified at the thought of this child. The delayed-action repressions of upbringing? I had no such feelings when I was young: I looked upon the grown-up condemnation of such things as part of the ordinary normal thing called life, to be escaped by what was called, also by grown-ups, cunning and deception. I wanted to live my own self, in other words, and not their selves. Yet realising all this, why does the fact of a child of thirteen going with young men in the village make me slightly unhappy? Is it memory of war-time drunken harlots in Piccadilly, late at night? Surely not. Why, then?

  Was it that it hurt me to think that such lovely eyes, brown, gentle, and tender, may become bewildered, then hard? Otherwise she is ugly, thin, starved-looking. Is it because Spica’s eyes are also the eyes of this child?

  April 20. I have bought a horse-skin for my bedroom floor. A day or two after Porky had “bought” the white horse it dropped down dead. Porky accused the farmer of selling it, knowing it was no good. Farmer threatened to sue Porky for not paying for it. In the end Porky gave him £2 on condition that the farmer buried it and put a stone over the grave. Farmer accepted the cash, skinned the horse unknown to Porky, sold its carcase to
the Queensbridge Hunt kennels and the skin, which is now at the tannery in town, to me. A stone now marks the place where the body isn’t.

  He called at the farm of Dora’s father to buy eggs. Each of the two pockets of his service tunic held a dozen, which arrived at the cottage unbroken. The auction of lots of wood from the wrecking was held in one of the fields by the farm. Six out-of-work men were partners in buying, breaking up, and selling the wood. He bought two posts of teak about seven feet long and a foot square for £1. This was more than others had paid; but he was too diffident to bid during the auction, and accepted the price afterwards for this unsold lot without bargaining.

  “You was had, I reckon,” said Mrs. Crang next door.

  “Anyway the chaps who broke up the wreck are out of work. Good luck to them.”

  “Still, you didn’t ought to waste good money, you know!”

  An amount of wood for which others had paid about six shillings was his for twenty. He paid another five shillings to have it carted to the cottage and tipped into the garden beside the scraggy currant bushes and patch of rising nettles.

  “You paid too much for that wood, you know,” said Dora indignantly when he went for more eggs. “You look out for yourself, Mr. Maddison! No one else will, you know, if you don’t!”

  Their eyes met; their eyes fell. Faint colour came in Dora’s cheeks. He thought that she looked sweet in her simple clothes, sitting by the open hearth of the farmhouse; her slender legs with big muddy boots, her hands, already rough with work, folded as though with resignation on her apron. Dora was like her mother, who was not very strong, a sensitive, quiet, soft-voiced woman with brown eyes. In the kitchen was a long table where the blue-eyed farmer and his blue-eyed sons, and their hired man, sat down to eat. The date 1625 was above the chimney piece.