by Tim Pears
“Windows let in the light. We’d still be in darkness without them,” he told me. “And we looks through them out at the world. Think about it, maid, you won’t get it straightaway.”
He pressed a plug of tobacco into his pipe with his thumb. “They tried to tax windows once; we bloodied their noses then, all right. They won’t try again in a hurry, even this lot.”
§
Grandfather had begun by making a pair of wooden panniers that sat astride his horse, to which he strapped sheets of glass, coils of cord and strips of beading. He put some of his father’s tools in a canvas bag, and went around the larger houses in the villages of the Valley replacing broken glass and perished sash-cord, refilling cracked putty, gluing split parting bead, planing wood swollen by the rain, adjusting joints warped in the sun, and renovating rotten sills, until he was a proficient enough carpenter to set up a workshop in one of the outbuildings, where he could construct complete window-frames in the quiet winter months. He’d gradually collected all the tools he needed, and summer evenings after tea, in his workshop that always smelled sweet and enticing, he used to show me what each of them was for: a gauge with two pins for making mortise and tenon joints; wooden planes of the type first brought to Devon by Joseph of Arimathea; a set of chisels grandfather inherited from his own grandfather; a line of small nuts strung together to lead sash-cord down the box, which was called a mouse; and a cabinet scraper ‘for a finish smooth as yer skin, Alison’.
His carpenter’s tools were grandfather’s most precious possessions, and he treated them with the carelessness of a toddler its toys. One wall of his workshop was covered with nails to hang the tools on, their shapes outlined in felt-tip pen so that he could put each one straight back in its proper place without having to think about it; yet that wall was almost always empty. Instead the workbench was invariably cluttered with hammers and handsaws and boxes of nails, screwdrivers and files were scattered higgledy-piggledy on shelves or on the floor, and if grandfather couldn’t find a wooden mallet it was because it was more likely to be lost in the pile of shavings by his electric saw than hung in front of its black outline on the whitewashed wall.
The only exception to this strangely careless behaviour was the fastidiousness with which grandfather looked after his set of chisels and gouges, which sat in a rack within arm’s reach of the workbench. He sharpened them for an hour on Saturday afternoons, even if he hadn’t used them all week and had no plans to. Ian and Tom knew they could borrow any of grandfather’s other tools without asking, but he wouldn’t let anyone use his chisels, and to prove this was not out of meanness he bought each of them their own set on their sixteenth birthdays.
“When you uses a chisel proper,” he told them, “it should look like an extension of your own arm.”
§
You could make out all the lines and creases in grandfather’s hands because minute particles of the earth he’d tended for a lifetime had collected in them. He liked to pick up a handful and inspect it, rubbing it between his fingers. That summer he watched it turn into dust and blow off his palm.
However long his day he was always the first to bed, and would wait there for grandmother to join him before falling asleep with his rough, flat hand enveloping hers, and it was then that he made up for his reticence during his waking hours, because as soon as he dropped off, lying on his back as always, he was transformed into a monster beside her.
She couldn’t believe it was only breath entering and leaving his mouth that rumbled and resonated from him. She would dream of being at the railway station with the steam train bearing down upon her and wake up as it was about to hurtle into their bedroom, only to realize it was just her husband snoring his monstrous snore beside her.
When their children were young she was sure it would wake them, because in the silence of three AM her shy husband’s thunderous snores rattled the bed and shook the rafters and reverberated along the corridor. She pinched his nose, clamped his mouth shut and told him to “Stop snoring!”, which he obediently did without waking up. But then instead of going back to sleep herself she was unable to do anything other than lie there, perfectly still, mesmerized, waiting for the inevitable trombone of his windpipe to start up again; and she would curse herself as much as she did him.
It never once occurred to grandmother to seek refuge in another part of the house. She just buried her head under the pillow and tried to count cows until she finally fell asleep, exhausted. In the morning, however, grandmother always awoke from her sporadic rest with a smile on her face, while grandfather, despite his eight hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep, would greet the day in a foul mood.
To the end of his days grandfather carried a stick of chalk in his pocket. Pottering around the house, he’d stop and run windows up and down as if to fan the room, and if they snagged or squeaked he’d rub chalk into the runnels.
Grandfather possessed a number of habits of an earlier generation: at breakfast, while we all sat around the same table on which as a boy he’d had his tonsils removed by the local doctor, grandfather chose to eat his porridge standing up, the better to encourage its digestion. He consumed a large bowl of porridge every morning of the year, even at the height of summer when no one else could stomach even the thought of it, and he washed it down with mugfuls of sweet tea.
He also chewed the inside of his cheeks. I used to think he was grinding bits of oatmeal left over from breakfast, stuck between his teeth, but grandmother would say: “Look at ‘im, he’s chewing the cud again,” and she was right. It was a habit he’d acquired from cows. In the same way that grown-ups unsure of themselves grow to resemble their more powerful wives or husbands, so grandfather had assumed something of the character of cattle, and would quietly ruminate when his mind was preoccupied. Later, though, as he saw his herd dwindle in the heat, he would become increasingly agitated, and chewed the inside of his mouth to pieces.
SEVEN
Winter
When I was a little girl in the valley of fallen leaves, every winter snow hypnotized us. We dragged our toboggans up the road through Haldon Forest and then careered across a vast field sloping down from the Folly, until the year that the owner of the field, an Ashton farmer, appeared with a bus conductor’s ticket-machine and started charging, because word had spread and whole carloads were coming out from Exeter.
And we skated on the frozen surface of the quarry pool. I found grandmother’s old pair of skates in the bottom of a cupboard: Ian oiled their rusty buckles and perished leather and brought them back to life.
Grandmother had used them when she was a girl, racing with her brothers along frozen leats, built by the engineer Sir Francis Drake to bring water down off the high moor. By the time my feet were big enough to fit them grandmother was too crippled to walk through the village to the beech tree, and anyway too blinded by her cataracts to have made sense of the blurry movement below. But when I was small she used to come. She’d bring a blanket and flask and sit herself up by the tree while we slithered down the bed of the stream into the Valley. Completing a daring slide or jump I’d glance up for the gratification of her audience and glimpse her there like a statue, patiently engrossed in the recurring choreography of children scoring patterns across the ice, while her nose turned blue and she warmed her hands around a plastic cup of tea.
§
That previous winter, though, was the coldest of all.
A terrible frost had seized with numbing severity on the village. People were unable, through stiffened lips, to enunciate words properly, uttering sentences that sounded as if they were back to front. Tom’s cider in the pantry solidified, the bottles that held it cracking into shards which fell away. Even thoughts iced up in the mind. Trees split asunder at night. The quarry pool was covered with impenetrable ice, far too thick for poachers’ holes, and rooks fell to the ground frozen in their flight.
People stopped going to church, impatient with benumbed fingers fumbling with the pages of their hymn books, dise
nchanted by the sight of their prayers turning into steam before their very eyes. The Rector plundered parish funds to buy a portable gas heater but it was inadequate to sustain the congregation, which dwindled to half a dozen of the toughest old men and women, who sat dotted around the church in their customary pews, shivering, rather than come together for warmth. Grandmother gave up the struggle to kneel before the altar at which she’d worshipped every week since her wedding. She declined grandfather’s offer to drive her up the hill and pick her up again afterwards, and instead accepted the Rector’s, that of bringing communion to her in her own home.
Mother, too, stayed at home, claiming that it was no good for anyone freezing for their faith, that what God wanted was upright honest believers, not hypothermic martyrs. She said she’d start going again as soon as God saw fit to bring us spring, though in fact she never did. She was glad of the excuse to give up a weekly ritual she’d continued only out of duty: she took it as a mother’s obligation to shepherd her children to church in the same way as she packed us off to school. One institution instilled values, the other knowledge, and she assured us often of their importance. Yet she showed little interest in the content of those values, or that knowledge. Her own domain was not the mind but the body: she clothed and fed us, kept us warm and healthy.
Neither did mother consider it necessary to continue going to church herself in order to validate its relevance. Ian, Pamela and Tom had each dropped away after their confirmations, just as they’d all left school as soon as they could; in Ian’s case mother almost wept with frustration as she argued with him to stay on at Newton Abbot Grammar and gain the grades that would enable him to escape. But she knew that he would bow instead to the persuasion of his grandfather and uncles, and take Daddy’s place on the farm.
I had a test in school that winter, and I knew I’d do badly. Half of it consisted of written sums, the other half mathematical problems we had to answer in class. I confided in grandmother, and she said: “Go find me some ladybirds, Alison, to go with your breakfast. In’t nothing better for the memory.”
“Yuk,” I said, “I wouldn’t eat them poor little things. Anyway, there aren’t any, Gran, ‘tis the middle of winter.”
“So ‘tis,” she replied, disconcerted.
I was still fearful, and when it was time to leave I said to mother: “Why should I have to go to school? I don’t want to.”
I wasn’t being serious even as I said it, it was just a last-minute moan before the inevitable, but mother spun round from the sink, soap suds flying from her hands and floating around her as she cried: “Cos if you don’t, maid, you’ll get the belt.”
§
So I was surprised when mother said to me, one frozen Sunday morning: “You don’t have to go to church neither, Alison,” and I was even more surprised when I heard myself reply: “But I wants to, mother.”
Granny Sims brought blankets to church and handed them round for people to spread across their knees. There was a tab on the corner of each one that said ‘Virgin Wool’, and I thought they’d been darned specially for church services. I shared one with Maria, and she let me snuggle up against her to keep warm. She smelled of starch and cats and the mints which she sucked through the Rector’s sermons, whose words she couldn’t understand.
When Maria had first moved into the village, before I was born, a couple from some place further along the Valley used to give her a lift to the Catholic church in Chudleigh. Then they moved away, and for a time she walked there every Sunday along the back lanes, until the Rector managed to convince her that she was welcome in our church, where we worshipped the same God, after all, and so she started taking communion from an Anglican priest. It was in church that she uttered the only English anyone heard from her lips, because she learned to repeat the meaningless syllables of the sung responses.
Hers was the loveliest voice in the village, even if age had thinned it, and the newcomer families would stop what they were doing and listen to her singing Portuguese lullabies to herself when she came to collect their ironing, just as the other servants in the big house across the Valley used to pause outside the library as she dusted books to the rhythm of folk-songs her mother had once sung.
Here in our church Maria imitated as best she could words whose meanings she preferred to ignore, singing with her eyes closed.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer.
I sometimes took Daddy to church with me, but something kept him apart, and he chose to sit at the back, trembling with cold. I rejoined him after the service, and together we watched Corporal Alcock blow out the candles, and his breath turn to flame.
§
The real reason I kept going to church was because I could see that the Rector needed me. Even Joseph Howard, who was Granny Sims’ fellow churchwarden, opted to spend Sunday mornings by his open log fire, so there was no one to take the collection or distribute the hymn and prayer books: such menial tasks were beneath Granny Sims’ dignity, for she saw herself not as a humble functionary of the church but as its conscience, scrutineer of the suspect ideas of yet another nonconformist parson.
So I arrived early and placed hymn books not just in the regular attendants’ places but, on the Rector’s insistence, in all the pews, ‘because, Alison, we can never predict when people might turn towards God’. I collected the offerings in a little cloth satchel, a muffled jangle of coins, and brought it up to the altar. The Rector took it from me as if I wasn’t there, and I returned to my place accompanied by the offertory hymn, an uneven contest in which the few frail voices were no match for Corporal Alcock’s furious organ, having to concede defeat and forlornly follow him as best they could, wherever he chose to go.
It was one brittle Sunday morning while I was helping Corporal Alcock light the candles with a long taper, that the Rector popped his head round the vestry door and, pulling his surplice down over his shoulders, said: “Alison! How would you like to be my server?”
After church I ran all the way home, forgetting Daddy dropping further behind me, to tell grandmother.
“Like I always told ‘ee, cherry maid, you’s my cleverest girl of all,” she said, “us’ve never ‘ad one of they in our church before.” Then she furrowed her brow and asked: “By the way, girl, what do it mean?”
I soon learned: it was my job to put the chalice and paten in their little niche, ready for the Rector to consecrate the bread and wine at the altar, and to pass them to him when the communicants knelt at the altar rail; I handed him his hymn book, opened at the appropriate page, when it was time for him to sing, and his leather-bound Bible when he had to read the Epistle; and I exchanged his glasses for the bifocal spectacles he wore to deliver the sermon. Within two or three weeks I’d learned the simple procedure of the service, and the Rector for his part soon relied on my hand being there to take his Prayer Book and fold his stole, as if I’d been assisting him for years.
He told me that when he was an industrial chaplain in Crewe he had a whole phalanx of acolytes, sons of railway workers with ruff-collared surplices, who got in his and each other’s way. They flanked the Rector and his curates in a procession up the aisle during the opening hymn, led by the eldest boy carrying an iron cross that had been forged in the Works foundry, and they had a number of esoteric tasks to perform during the services, waving incense-carriers to please God’s nostrils and tinkling a tiny bell at certain intervals to wake people up. When he came down to Devon the Rector dispensed with those superstitious trappings of idolatry, as he called them, and in all the years of his ministry in our village I was his one and only server.
Mother gladly atoned for her absence from church by sewing me a plain white surplice. While I was trying it on Ian told me: “I looked up what you is in the dictionary. They calls it the celebrant’s assi
stant. You must be mazed, girl.”
When the Underbills had another baby I broke the ice in the font so she could be baptized, and I started helping the Rector home after services, carrying his heavy black cassock and his frayed silk stole.
§
A short way up Church Lane from the phone box, Maria sat in a chair on the patio in front of the old poet’s shack in which she lived, feeding the birds. If it hadn’t been for the thick hedge of shrubs and small trees, she could have looked down upon the village. Jane and I used to wriggle through a gap in the wall around the village hall yard and into her garden.
“She in’t never been with a man,” Jane whispered to me.
“Where?” I asked.
“You know!” she replied.
But we soon shut up and lay there, patiently watching and waiting, because the reason we crawled into the edge of her garden was so we could witness the spectacle of blue tits and chaffinches alighting upon her shoulders.
§
I hung the Rector’s vestments on a coathanger on the back of his study door, while he reheated himself some coffee and lit a cigarette, and after that I might have been invisible. He never invited me to stay or told me to go home: it was clear that I was welcome to do as I wished.
I explored the empty rooms of the rectory like an archaeologist, gathering evidence of past lives: a small red button, from a child’s dress long since discarded; two miniature items of furniture, a chair and a dresser, in the corner of an otherwise empty room upstairs, as if they’d been shrunk by a magic spell; and on the inside of a cupboard I found a black and white cutting of a team of footballers in long shorts and thick shin-pads, looking much older than they do today. Their names were printed underneath, and I memorized the first one or two so as to impress Ian when I got home. But he interrupted me after the first name and reeled off the rest: “Carey, Aston, Anderson, Chilton, Cockburn, Delaney, Morris, Rowley, Pearson, Mitten. There’s some reckon they was the best team of all.” He paused, as if recalling a particular game he could never actually have seen. “Of course,” he continued, “‘tis a load of old rubbish. Their memories is lyin’.”