by H. E. Bates
When the story was finished we found that the cows had wandered far along the road and that it was dinnertime. As we caught up with the cows again the boy
asked me my name.
I told him. ‘What's yours?’ I said.
‘Dodfish,’ he said. He spoke as though it were the finest name in the world.
I dreamed of that name, and on the following day I drove the cows westward again, meeting him driving old Strawn's red skeleton of a cow, her teats looking leaner and her gait more crippled than ever.
‘Tame work,’ he greeted me again.
I agreed with him quickly, and soon we had turned the cows about and were driving them eastward and he was telling me the finest stories in the world again, heaping lie upon lie, while I listened, as it were, with the very soles of my boots, never doubting him, the magic of his voice and the colour of his tales acting on me like hypnotism and wine together. After that we met every day for weeks, the old cow growing leaner and more halting as Dodfish grew more boastful and lying and his tales more wonderful.
Suddenly he ceased coming, and the summer passed, and finally I gave up hope of him, drifting back into the life I had always known, a life that seemed grey and humdrum after Dodfish and Jamaica.
It was twenty years before I saw him again. I had never forgotten him, and though as I grew up I discovered that he had left Jamaica when only six months old and had never returned, and though I knew he had fooled me every minute of those summer mornings, and that the chance of his tales being true was less even than the chance of his uncle's crippled old cow having a calf in her belly, I had never ceased to believe in him, and his tales were still vivid with life in my mind.
It was at a dance that I saw him; and I recognised him immediately. He had grown into a tall, well-made fellow with fine shoulders and sleek black hair shining with oil, but his face had about it all the old nonchalant, supercilious, captivating air, his eyes as enchanting and bored as when I had first met him on that summer morning.
As we danced I passed close to him and looked into his face, but he did not recognise me. He was dancing with a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, with fine fair hair and large, adoring eyes, dressed in a bright blue dress that reminded me of the kingfisher I had seen flash under the bridge that June morning with him. He danced proudly and beautifully, and as I passed him someone knocked against him clumsily and made him stumble.
I saw him glare with all the supercilious and offended pride of his nature, and I heard him mutter to the girl:
‘In Jamaica I'd have shot that fellow.' ·
And as he spoke I saw the girl raise her face and gaze at him with an expression of rapturous belief, not doubting a word, just as I must have looked at him, too, in the days when we kept cows together.
A Note on the Author
H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.
Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.
H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.
Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HEBates.
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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
First published in Great Britain in 1935 by Jonathan Cape Ltd
‘The Tree’ first published in Great Britain in 1930 in Blue Moon Booklets
‘The Man from Jamaica’ first published in Great Britain in 1932 in John O’London’s Weekly
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader
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eISBN: 9781448214945
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