The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

by Glenn Patterson

His egg rolled half a yard and stopped. The Duke of Wellington meanwhile had raced ahead of the chicken. Bright and I followed after them, whooping our encouragement. His conundrum was brought to a halt, if not a resolution, by a clump of docken leaves. My own egg carried on a few feet more then veered left into a gorse bush. I should just have let it lie, but, no, nothing would do me but that I would retrieve it. The hard-boiled Duke had won! I practically skipped. And then while I was still some two or three yards off I lost my footing entirely and slid forward on the seat of my trousers. I raised my hands to protect my face, but I seemed to pass right through the bush and out the other side, into a free-fall. I let out a scream – I had no idea how far the drop was – and my arms shot up above my head, with the result that when I did hit the ground, no more than a second later, I was almost upright. My right foot took the full weight and buckled beneath me. The second after that the egg too came out and struck me on the head. Ferris and Bright arrived on either side of the gorse just in time to see it. Their faces, which had been all alarm, broke into companion grins.

  “‘The trundler shall be disqualified,’” Ferris read from an imaginary rule-book, “‘if he shall reach the end of the course before his egg.’”

  I made a lunge for the object in question and would have brained him with it, but the sudden movement caused the pain to flare along my ankle so that I cried out, worse than before, and the concern returned to their faces.

  Bright instructed me not to attempt to move: there was a track leading down from the gorse to my level; he would be with me presently. Ferris meanwhile was calling to the young women we had been so keen to impress – the young women who, despite their petticoats and dainty shoes, had succeeded in reaching here, staying here, without mishap – asking that they go and find “a couple of strong-looking fellows” willing to help.

  Their skirts made a greater sound in their departing than did their voices.

  Ferris joined Bright in standing over me: talking over me. “We could knot together two coats,” said one to the other. “Yes,” returned the other to the one, “and tie them somehow to branches, with creepers, perhaps – I have my knife with me.”

  “It is only my leg that is hurt,” I called up at them. “My understanding is not impaired.”

  The young women returned within minutes – the same rustle of skirts, the same barely audible whispers – accompanied by a pair of brothers whose family farmed at nearby Glengormley and who had, they said, “poked their heads over the hill this morning to see was there any sport”. They poked their heads now over the gorse. After listening for some moments while Ferris and Bright outlined their plan for effecting a stretcher, the older of the brothers lifted me, without ceremony, but with a good deal of delicacy, on to his back and – four great strides – up the track. It was how they carried the lame sheep off the hillsides, his younger brother explained.

  The last things I saw before we descended into the woods again were the young women, standing so close together on their patch of lawn that their bonnets resembled three blossoms on the one slender stem, gently nodding.

  The brothers – their name was Kelly – told Ferris and Bright that there was an inn at the Lough end of the Buttermilk Loney where I could rest until a carriage could be got to take me back to town. Once we were on a gentler incline I insisted on trying to walk. After two or three excruciating steps, however, I admitted defeat. Bright said, without much conviction, despite his attendance at the gymnasium, that he and Ferris between them could carry me the rest of the way, but the older Kelly, “Dan”, would hear none of it. Sure, the day was young yet, and was not this a bit of sport in itself? And so down the Buttermilk Loney to the inn I was carried, like a lame Glengormley sheep.

  It was Bright who commented, when we had arrived at our destination, on the sign, which I would otherwise have passed under oblivious.

  “Ha!” he cried. “What better place!”

  I lifted my head from Dan Kelly’s back to see depicted on the wooden board a procession of stooped individuals approaching a hopper, from the bottom of which a troop of youth danced gaily away; and above it all the legend “The Mill for Grinding Old People Young”.

  It might have been a page torn from that book I used to look at in Hodgson’s, The World Turned Upside Down, with its strange news of dogs that played flutes and rats that built houses and geese that cooked cooks.

  “Let us hope that the mill can perform its miracles on the crippled as well as the decrepit,” said Bright.

  Ferris had gone ahead to rouse the master of the place, or as it turned out the mistress, a small woman of sixty or so in a widow’s black tulle cap, who directed us towards a snug on the left of the door, where I was laid out on a bench with Ferris’s haversack for a pillow.

  I asked Bright to look in my pockets for my purse, but the Kellys would accept no payment for their trouble: a drink to set them up for the journey back up the hill was all that they asked. The mistress led them off towards the tap-room, promising to send someone directly to attend to my ankle. When next the door opened, therefore, it was to admit a pale, serious-looking creature with the blackest of hair, hanging in two long curls either side of her eyes, which were unexpectedly blue, I noticed, then for the second time that day glanced away so as not to be thought to be looking too closely. She had brought with her a tray bearing three tumblers half full of brandy, of which Ferris straight away relieved her.

  Bright asked her name and she told him, “Maria.”

  He asked her had no one taught her to curtsy. She seemed to think a moment before bobbing. Bright waved his hands to stop her. “No, no, no, I was only having a little fun,” he said. Ferris followed with some fun of his own. Had Maria, he wondered, as she set about rolling my trouser leg, much experience of men’s ankles? The girl, two ankles among eight, made no reply, but concentrated on removing my shoe and the stocking beneath – no easy task, as it proved. Now that I was able to see the ankle properly I was alarmed by the degree of swelling, which had spread almost to my toes. The girl probed it with her fingertips, stopping when I winced, despite myself, before probing again, more gently. I winced again. She made a noise through her nose, turned and left the room.

  Ferris and Bright laughed so hard as the door closed that they had to hold on to one another’s shoulders to keep from falling over: that expression . . . that snort just now! They stopped when Maria returned with her mistress a minute later: two naughty schoolboys with buttoned lips and brandy tumblers behind their backs.

  “Maria is going to put on an ointment,” the mistress said, and handed the girl an earthenware pot. “It has been in my family for generations.”

  Bright’s eyes suggested that he had a further smart comment, but his lips remained tight shut.

  I lay back against the haversack and closed my eyes, feeling the flat of Maria’s hand now as well as her fingers: first the ointment (which did in truth smell more than a little mouldy) then a bandage. I tried to think of something I could say to her, but nothing came.

  Ferris all the while was telling the mistress the whole story: my first Easter Monday on the Cave Hill, our choice of spot beneath the summit, our picnic; our egg race . . .

  I heard a snigger and opened my eyes. Maria’s hair had fallen across her face, but I was sure I could see a smile through its veil.

  “You are tying that too tight,” I said, more sharply than I had intended.

  “It is too tight,” Bright repeated.

  Maria made as though to adjust the knot. “It will do,” I said, brisk now rather than sharp. Still, her face when she stepped back towards the door – a final curtsy for Bright’s benefit, or for mine – was flushed with anger.

  The mistress was apparently oblivious to all of this. She told us that a boy had gone on horseback to Whiteabbey to order a carriage. She hoped that I would be comfortable in the mean time; and if I wished for more brandy I was only to say the word. Ferris said the word for me, for the three of us, but it was not Maria w
ho answered the summons on this occasion. Indeed, though we ordered another tumbler after that, the carriage arrived before I saw her again, before I could make good my fault.

  The Kellys, hearing I was to depart, came out to the front of the inn, with the look on them now of men who might after all tarry a while before attempting Glengormley again. Ferris and Bright supervised the footmen transferring me to the vehicle. They ordered the driver to take it gently and keep the shocks to a minimum.

  “Do you know this road at all, sirs?” the driver asked. “The potholes are the major part of it.”

  Already revellers were beginning to trickle back to town from the Cave Hill, the very young, the very old and the prematurely very drunk. At sunset, and hazardous though it sounded, a blind harpist would lead those who had stayed the course down from the summit. My friends’ eyes as they looked out of the carriage window were wistful: all those pretty bonnets left unplucked. Bright patted Ferris’s thigh. The duck trousers were a sorry sight. “There is always the summer and the Maze Races to look forward to,” he said, stoically.

  A church bell tolled the hour as we rattled into the town: one, two, three, four. Given all that had happened since I left home that morning I would not have been surprised to hear four strikes more.

  I was brought into Donegall Place amid great fuss, most of it of Ferris and Bright’s making, and was carried again, by footmen and driver combined, up to my room. (Bright: “Look, a proper ‘sky parlour’!”) My grandfather was still out on his visits, Easter Monday not being explicitly referred to in the Scriptures, but was soon found, at an extemporised prayer meeting in Hudson’s Entry, and persuaded home. He sent at once for Dr McDonnell, whose house stood a short distance down the street, towards the White Linen Hall, and who although retired now from day-to-day practice could nevertheless be depended upon to attend on a neighbour in an emergency. Just as dependable were the knee breeches and white stockings that, almost alone of the men in Belfast, he persisted in wearing. He arrived within the quarter hour with his man Mick, as constant a companion as Nisbet was to my grandfather, and like his master an opponent of the full-length trouser leg.

  “So!” the doctor said and rubbed his hands together. He was reputed to have begun his education in a cave in the Glens of Antrim, Dr McDonnell, which might be where his voice had acquired its permanent echo. “So.”

  My grandfather’s nose and brow wrinkled at the scent of the ointment as the doctor rolled back the trouser leg. McDonnell too drew in a sharp breath before complimenting whoever had applied the bandage. Bright told him that I feared it had been tied too tightly. “No, just right,” said the doctor and began to unravel it. “Just right.”

  The examination lasted barely a minute, making up in brevity for what it lacked in lightness of touch. (Oh, the contrast with the last fingers to have lingered there!) There was, he assured me at the end of it, no breakage, or even tearing of the ligament, but the ankle had been very badly sprained. He would wait twenty-four hours to see if the swelling went down before making any further diagnosis. In the meantime I was not on any account to stir from my bed, and was to have as little excitement as possible while I remained there – this with a glance towards Ferris and Bright, who straight away began to gather their belongings, and with many elaborate bows – not reciprocated – and wishes for my speedy recovery, departed.

  The pain was tolerable for the first part of the night, but gradually grew more severe as the laudanum wore off that Dr McDonnell had given me before he left. I lay in a state between sleep and true wakefulness, fancying one minute I could hear a harp being played below on the Flags and the next that there was a tapping at my window, that the circus act I had seen that morning at the Deer Park had found me out and the man’s hand become monstrously extended; except it was not the little waxwork creature who was offered up on his palm, but my nurse from the Mill for Grinding Old People Young; it was Maria. She clasped a knife in one hand, a book in the other. “To hear of a Frenchman eating a frog is no news,” she read aloud, “but to see a butcher stuck by a hog is strange indeed.”

  By morning, however, the pain, like the imaginings, had faded to almost nothing. Molly, the housekeeper, whom I had rarely before seen this high up in the house, came in person with my breakfast, or at least held the door for the girl – utterly unknown to me – who did the actual carrying.

  “Where is Agnes?” I asked, trying to sit up. The bed sagged beneath me. The struts would need a turn or two.

  “A nunnery,” said Molly and pulled back the right-hand curtain. I knew by the force of the light it was something after ten o’clock.

  “A nunnery?”

  “She might be for all I care.” Molly gave the other curtain a sharp tug, lest it should think for a moment of displeasing her too. “This is Hannah.”

  Hannah set the tray on the bedside table, with evident relief: no mishaps. Molly stood by the door and watched the girl withdraw, holding up her dress – or Agnes’s dress, as it most likely was – as she went, so as not to tread on the hem.

  Molly sighed.

  I decided I would wait a while before asking her to tighten the bed struts.

  Dr McDonnell and Mick, their knee breeches and stockings, returned as promised in the late afternoon. “So” – Mick, I noticed, rubbed his hands in time with his master’s – “so, how have we been?”

  “Bearing up,” I said, and Mick gripped my shoulder, as though the leg had been in danger of falling off.

  On completing this second examination, as briskly and efficiently as the first, as briskly and efficiently as one who had once been used to seeing forty or fifty patients a day, Dr McDonnell was pleased to tell me that his prognosis had been correct: a sprain rather than a tearing of the ligament. There would be no need for “surgical stabilisation”. Rest was all that was required now.

  In the end I remained a week confined to the house. I suffered no recurrence of the first night’s frightful dreams, but still Maria’s face came to me, day as well as night. In truth, although I went through the motions of reading books or playing patience, I found as the days progressed I was able to think of little else: the hair as black as black, the unexpected blue of her eyes, the touch of her fingertips . . . the flush of anger on her cheeks as she left the snug in which she had ministered to me.

  Ferris and Bright visited in the middle of the week, bringing along with the anticipated tittle-tattle from the Ballast Office and Environs a less expected piece of news, gleaned from the minutes of the previous evening’s Board meeting. Mr Walker’s surveys and explorations, in which I had played such a small part, had already fared better than the majority of their predecessors. In short, they had given rise to a plan for the creation of a straight channel between the town and Garmoyle by means of staged cuts across the bends of the river. The harbour was to be maintained at a minimum of twelve feet as far as the Long Bridge, with the present quays built over and extended further into the river, while the material dredged up in the creation of the channel was to be formed into an “island”, which might be put afterwards to any number of uses. A sub-committee of the Board had already been to London to procure a Parliamentary Bill whose passage into law, it was held, no right-thinking person with the town’s best interests at heart could possibly obstruct.

  So who should be obstructing it but our own Lord Belfast?

  Bright, on his feet, said we must have Reform, with the same passion with which he would normally have said we must all have some new stuff he had seen in the window of John Johnson and Son for waistcoats. It was intolerable that the town’s progress should depend on a man elected by twelve voters, all of whom he had, in one way or another, in his pocket.

  “Can we expect then to hear of you at future Reform Society meetings?” Ferris asked him.

  Bright sat again, and crossed his legs. “I would go, except that the Society meets on the night that I attend my gymnasium.”

  A second elapsed of utter silence before Ferris guffawed, and Bright
not far behind him.

  My grandfather, when I related all this that evening at dinner, said, yes, yes, let every man have the franchise, although much good it would do them. The votes would continue to be bought; only the currency would change, become still baser. Perceval had it right: before we reformed the system we should reform the morals of all classes.

  “Perceval” was the one prime minister – the one politician of any rank – of whom my grandfather spoke with unqualified regard, being the one prime minister openly to have espoused a “vital” religion while in office. We might already have been living in a truly reformed land had not John Bellingham, a disgruntled businessman, brought Perceval’s premiership, his life indeed, to an untimely end, the year before my birth, stepping up to him in the lobby of the House of Commons and opening fire at point-blank range.

  I had come across an engraving once of Perceval’s assassination in a much-perused copy of the Newgate Calendar on a stall in Smithfield Market. I had a vivid recollection of the victim’s arching back, his assailant’s right arm extended to within inches of its target, and, between the two, the door standing open into the Commons, although in my mind it had become confused with the door into Death itself: unrelieved black. The text below laid out the whole case, from Bellingham’s imprisonment in Russia over an unpaid debt, through his many petitions, on his release, to the prime minister himself for compensation, to his crazed resolution to act when those petitions were ignored.

  He had wanted to hand a serious lesson to the upper ranks, was what he said: that they could not do wrong with impunity. After firing the fatal shot he had sat down calmly on a bench in the House of Commons lobby to await arrest, preferring to appeal to the sense of fair play of any twelve of his fellow Englishmen than to flee.

  His fellow Englishmen voted twelve to nil in favour of hanging him.

  Back at the table, I tried to draw my grandfather out further on the Reform question, but he blocked me with a request for the salt, which he applied copiously to his mutton, so copiously in the end that he was unable to manage a mouthful more and gave the plate to Hannah with instructions to fry it up for him for breakfast. (From her expression he might have entrusted her with the formula for eternal life.) “Every last crumb,” he said unhappily, wasting not.