Helen wrinkled her nose in the way I find so attractive. ‘Finest brew in all my tea-drinking years,’ I assured her.
This particular year – the late forties as I say – we’d experienced an Indian summer, warm enough for us to sprawl in a rough circle on the small lawn outside the cottage. Charlie Dowse’s younger brother, Saul, had joined the group. The six-year-old had only just started at the big school and, much to our disgust, had trailed along behind us at break-times throughout the week, demanding to be included in all games and discussion. Now, they trudged together down the pathway, Charlie sheepishly dragging Saul, red-eyed and tearful, by the hand. The child was ordered to sit still and say nothing whilst his elders got on with that day’s business which, I seem to remember, involved the conversion of poles into furlongs, pecks into bushels, or one of the computations set out on the back cover of our exercise books. Jimmy was sympathetic but, problems such as these being beyond his forté, turned his attention to the youngest member of our group. Surely he wasn’t old enough to be set homework? He was? Well, anything would be of more interest than all this agricultural nonsense. Could the rest of us have a look? Saul removed his thumb from his mouth, almost ripping his satchel apart in his eagerness to comply. The rest of us hooted with derision as Jimmy stooped to take the copybook from him, and fate took a hand.
Set out down the page were a series of sentences printed in the most elegant and flowing of copperplate script with gaps between them for the pupils’ own efforts. These would have been culled from any of the thousand or so uplifting works considered to be part of our literary heritage, with teachers encouraged to use them according to the occasion or season of the year. It was typical of Miss Quintock to have neglected such advice, although – looking back – it might well have been our earliest intimation that all was not right with her. Jimmy’s reactions could also be seen as predictive but, as he himself often remarked, hindsight makes prophets of us all. Be this as it may, had our teacher not set especially irksome arithmetic homework for that evening, had not those particular lines by that particular poet been chosen, had not Jimmy been particularly susceptible to them…
He stooped, picked up the book, and read:
Oh to be in England
now that April’s there.
Quite entranced, he disappeared indoors and reappeared with one of the Browning volumes from his bookcase. Taking up a dramatic posture yet without consulting it, he dumbfounded us by declaiming:
Whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on orchard bough
In England – now!
And entered into an enthusiastic and impromptu appreciation of the poem.
He explained its title, Home Thoughts from Abroad, who wrote it and how this came about, dwelling in some detail – as only Jimmy could – on the plight of this exile some hundreds of miles away, in the baking heat at siesta time under cloudless Mediterranean skies. How had he come to be there? Was he a traveller? Had he been banished from the kingdom? Perhaps this was a holiday? A business trip? A long-term incarceration? Whatever the case, this man (or was it a woman?) recalls the sights and sounds of an English springtime, and here Jimmy drew heavily upon imagery from the rest of the poem, instructing us to ‘read it for yourselves later’. In his mind’s eye our wayfarer sees not the gaudy melon-flowers which surround him now, but the pear-tree blossom of home tumbling onto morning dew, wild flowers among the hedgerows, fields of golden buttercups. Once more he hears the birdsong of England: chaffinches (‘chucks, your grandparents would have called them’), whitethroats (‘furzechicks’), swallows (‘they must have had a name for them, too’) and the thrush, who:
– sings each song twice over,
Lest you think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture.
Helen seemed less pleased. ‘Exile my hat! Written on one of his expeditions to Italy. All the man had to do was to pack his bags and catch the next boat home!’ Browning could do no good in her book.
More to the point, regardless of what she, Murgo, ‘GL’, or any of the experts might say, this incident marked the true beginning of the Saintley saga – its epiphany if you like…
‘He might even have been thinking of Bereden,’ said Jimmy. ‘A little bindweed, that’s all it needs.’ He retrieved the workbook from young Saul, rummaged through one of the drawers and, before anyone could stop him, had produced the stub of a pencil, licked the end, and began sketching the tendrils spreading across the lower part of the page. With a few deft strokes they reached out for the bottom line of text, caught hold of the letter ‘A’, and swarmed to its apex before searching round for further purchase.
‘The bindweed. Over at Frogspawn Shallows. Remember?’ he repeated, admiring his handiwork at arm’s length but puzzled by the less than enthusiastic reception it was receiving. We remembered right enough. We also recalled Miss Quintock’s strictures regarding the copybooks. There were hardly enough of these to go round, so each was clearly inscribed with the recipient’s name, on the front cover, alongside the Ministry of Education crest. The property of ‘HM Government’, she’d told us, along with dire warnings as to the consequences should any one of them be lost, damaged or defaced. And, fair minded though she was, our teacher was not a person with whom one trifled. She might just about have accepted an inexplicable loss (‘Must have slipped out of me satchel, Miss’), damage even (‘Door must have been left open and Rover not on his lead’), but there was no possible excuse for defacement. The word in itself held a grim foreboding, and the copybook had definitely, and quite deliberately, been defaced. Nor could there be any query concerning ownership; Miss Quintock’s own hand proclaimed it to be the property of one Saul Dowse.
Jimmy, always sensitive to what was taking place around him, was immediately sympathetic but, as usual, less attuned to the long-term results of his actions. Explain as we might, he would not be persuaded as to the seriousness of the situation. We felt torn between conflicting loyalties. Somehow, in a way we could not put into words, we had betrayed a trust placed in us. Yet, at the same time, we wished desperately to protect Jimmy from the nemesis of ‘HM Government’: a looming presence, having neither shape nor form, yet spoken of by our teachers with bated breath as holding all their futures in thrall. For Saul there was the added terror of Miss Quintock. He did not know her as we did; had accepted without question the exaggerations and half-truths ritualistically extended to new pupils. Words could not express his despair, but a pungent stream trickled down his leg to form a pool on the lino. And, by the time we had cleared this up, tried to comfort him, assured Jimmy that all would be well, the clock had cuckooed nine, meaning it was now six o’clock and time to rush home.
As we rushed, our resolve failed. Next morning it had dwindled still further and, by the time our homework was due, it had all but failed. Too late now to retract the untruths we had told about our teacher, the child would only think we were trying to comfort him; nor did we have the nerve to approach Jimmy, so proud of his artwork, rewarded by Saul in such an embarrassing fashion (‘the lad will grow up to be a critic, just see if he don’t’). After much debate we had agreed that confession was the best policy and that this should be done together as a group. The only chance we had, though, was at the end of the day but were terrified lest Miss Quintock, HMG, or both of them together might launch a pre-emptive strike.
Meanwhile, word of the misdemeanour had spread throughout the school and speculation was rife as to what the consequences might be. We half expected PC Granger (the ‘Lone Granger’, we called him), to appear in the playground on his bicycle (‘Wild Silver’), remove his cycle clips, lumber up onto the stage during morning assembly and call upon the culprits to come clean, just as he’d done afte
r the apples were filched from Sir Desmond’s orchard. Or would Miss Quintock sweep down from the platform to harangue all of us indiscriminately at close quarters, which was her invariable response to infringements of school rules? But hymn, prayer and announcements passed off without incident, as did the longest day any of us could remember. Till, finally, with Saul mentally rehearsing and re-rehearsing his confession, we filed out of our classrooms.
Miss Quintock’s ‘office’ was no more than a cupboard really, partitioned off from one side of the classroom. Hardly room for the six of us as, with eyes averted and much shuffling of feet, we listened to Luke’s proffering of the defiled homework, his tearful apologia. She took it from him, studied the offending artwork for a time, contemplated us over the top of her glasses – and laughed:
‘Quite the best use of a copybook I’ve ever seen!’
‘But don’t you dare tell anyone I said so,’ she added, holding it up to the light for closer examination.
‘So delicate and lifelike.’ She seemed to be speaking to herself. ‘The plant might almost be growing there, taken root on the page. Carefully observed, yet completely uninhibited. And this took him just a few minutes, did you say?’
We affirmed that this was the case, Miss Quintock drawing the whole story out of us, her current levity in the matter a mystery to us all.
‘Just leave HMG to me,’ she told us. ‘He’s not really the ogre you imagine him to be. You’ll find that out soon enough, and I’m sure he’d approve of the additions that Third Class friend of yours has made to the book, every bit as much as Mr Browning would.’
Could the poet be one of HMG’s spies, we wondered? And the reference to Jimmy’s cottage astounded us; teachers were not supposed to have access to any such information. Nevertheless we were eager now to be away; to bring him the good news. But Miss Quintock was not done with us yet.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘there’s a penalty to be paid. You can’t tamper with official copybooks and get away with it completely. Tell the woodland hermit that the price HMG exacts for his wrongdoing is to finish what he’s begun. There was a thrush in the poem, if I remember, and an orchard? Don’t you think they deserve a place on the page? And what about the whitethroat? Tell that arboreal artist to put them in, together with anything else he sees fit, and report back to us all when it’s done. Then, and only then, he might just be fully forgiven.’
Relieved of the penalty that had been hanging over us all day, we were out of the room in an instant, rushing down into the forest, banging at the yellow door, interrupting one another in our eagerness to pass on the good news. Jimmy feigned indifference, but we could tell he was flattered by her message, making a number of excuses – that he did not have the expertise or the equipment, he was busy, could not see the point of it – before agreeing to one, at least, of her requests.
‘Alright,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose it could just about be managed if all of us put our heads together. As for public presentations, best leave that to the experts!’
‘And that,’ I told Helen, ‘was how Chunky, Charlie, Tim, Andrew, myself – and Saul, of course – became co-creators of the first of the “Saintleys”.’
Chapter Five
The Quintock Factor
Jimmy always maintained that Home Thoughts was a joint effort, and I suppose it was – to begin with especially.
We’d gather at Third Class Cottage each evening after school, steaming mugs of tea set to one side as we pored over the Complete Works of Browning, opened at the appropriate page. Saul was given the honour of reading the poem, which he did in his best ‘morning assembly’ voice, Jimmy instructing us to stop him each time the poet mentioned particular flora or fauna by name. One point would be awarded for each correct interruption, one deducted for any error, with bonus marks added for accurate descriptions of each of the items selected. We did well in the naming of the various birds, were less successful over those of the plants, with generic terms – ‘orchard’, ‘spray’, ‘dower’, ‘brushwood’, ‘dewdrops’, etc. – leading to especially fierce controversy. One of us would be appointed as scribe, charged with keeping a record of proceedings so that, after a number of such preliminary sessions, the chief components of Jimmy’s picture had been decided upon.
Throughout this dialogue he was lightly penciling in the detail we supplied, continuously modifying earlier images, eliminating them altogether, or shifting them, like chess pieces, from one position to another. This must have continued for the best part of a week, after which he brought the consultative part of the process to an end, thanked us for our assistance and sent us home with strict instructions to leave him ‘alone with his genius’.
None of us knew just how long it would take him to complete Home Thoughts, nor did we have much notion as to what the outcome would be. Each of us had our own ideas and, as the days went by and Third Class Cottage remained a no-go area, the tension mounted. Arguments broke out in the playground; even Miss Quintock seemed unusually irritable, and the most loyal among us began to wonder whether Jimmy would fail to deliver. Then, one morning just after the milk break, we caught sight of him, making his nervous way across the school playground, a large brown paper parcel tucked under his arm. Tim, who was nearest the window, nudged his neighbour, who leant across the desk to get a better view, attracting the attention of those directly behind him and bringing Miss Quintock bustling down the aisle. By now Jimmy was making his exit having deposited his parcel in the porch but, with a swift flanking movement, she cut off his retreat, took him by the arm and manhandled him into her office.
The silence of thirty straining ears fell over the classroom whilst Andy climbed up onto his desk to peer into the window set high in the partition dividing it from the main part of the school, from where he provided a running commentary:
He’d given her the parcel… She was unwrapping it… Carefully untying knots in the string which held it together… Rolling this into a ball… Folding up the paper for future use… Yes, it was our picture… She was holding it at arm’s length… And smiling… Pointing towards the classroom… Jimmy edging out of the door, trying to make his escape… She was giving him a ‘talking to’… he was shaking his head… She’d taken him by the arm, and…
Andy scrambled down from the desk and all of us studiously resumed our reading, as Miss Quintock hauled a reluctant Jimmy into the classroom with all the finesse of a warder dragging his prisoner into the dock.
‘We have an important and long overdue visitor, who’s brought us a present,’ she announced. ‘All stand!’
The ‘present’ was indeed Home Thoughts, but there was something strange about it. Something that from where the five of us sat at the back of the class we couldn’t quite make out. It seemed so much larger than we remembered, the lettering that much bolder and more exact. Then it dawned on us. What we were looking at was far more than random copy-book decorations.
Oh to be in England
now that April’s there…
…had been the starting point right enough, but Jimmy had taken our suggestions, weaving them into the text itself so that words and images had come together to form a single unified composition. This was dominated by the poet’s pear tree, which now formed a decorative framework for the ‘picture’ as a whole. Its trunk had been placed over to the left, with gnarled roots running lengthways across the bottom, between brushwood and buttercups beaded with hoary dew, as the poet had put it. The upper branches, interwoven here and there into the actual letters of the text, curved down to sprinkle blossom, creating a lacy backdrop, the first rays of sunlight slanting through the initial ‘O’. Meanwhile, there was the thrush, singing his heart out at the top of the letter ‘A’ of April, whilst the whitethroat had just snatched a tiny leaf from Browning’s elm tree’s bole to reinforce her nest, snug in the hollow of the letter ‘b’ (be). Unidentified birds – chaffinches presumably – had chos
en other letters as their perch; sleek swallows swept in and out between the lines. And there, stretched out at the bottom of the picture, leaning up against the tree, knees drawn up before him, slept the unmistakable figure of Jimmy himself. Grasped in one of his hands was a large brush. This rested on his chest, large dollops of paint dripping from it onto his shirt. The other was carelessly flung out, overturning the pot and spilling its contents onto the grass beside him.
An unwilling Jimmy was sat down on the dais at the front of the class and invited to tell us – cross-examined rather – about his picture: its composition, the kind of pens and pencils he’d used, where the charcoal came from, how long it had taken him, etc., etc. Jimmy’s answers were monosyllabic, punctuated with the occasional grunt of assent, an embarrassed nodding or shaking of his head. Gradually, though, he regained something like his old composure. It was then that Miss Quintock remarked on the similarity between Home Thoughts and other artists who’d worked in this style; reminded us of the illustrated manuscripts of medieval times; how we’d learnt about the Bayeux Tapestry in our history lessons, suddenly cutting across his mumbled self-deprecation to recall the work of Blake.
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