The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Indeed?’ she said. ‘You must have had a full and varied life.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She smiled thinly, for the first time. ‘I am sorry I spoke as I did. It upset me to think of anyone drinking in this place.’

  ‘That’s all right, ma’am,’ Silas said. ‘That’s all right. I ain’t touched a drop for years. Used to, ma’am. Bin a regular sinner.’

  Old Silas reached up to her with the bottle and said, ‘Have some more, ma’am,’ and she held down the cup and filled it up again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She looked quite pleasant now, softened by the tea and the smell of cowslips and the sun on her bare head. The bloomer-leg had disappeared and somehow she stopped looking like a female and became a woman.

  ‘But you’ve reformed now?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Silas said, with a slight shake of his head, as though he were a man in genuine sorrow. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ve reformed.’

  ‘It was a long fight?’

  ‘A long fight, ma’am? I should say it was, ma’am. A devil of a long fight.’ He raised his panama hat a little. ‘Beg pardon, ma’am. That’s another thing I’m fighting against. The language.’

  ‘And the drink,’ she said, ‘how far back does that go?’

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ Silas said, settling back in the grave, where he had been sitting all that time, ‘I was born in the hungry forties. Bad times, ma’am, very bad times. We was fed on barley pap, ma’am, if you ever heard talk of barley pap. And the water was bad, too, ma’am. Very bad. Outbreaks of smallpox and typhoid and all that. So we had beer, ma’am. Everybody had beer. The babies had beer. So you see, ma’am,’ Silas said, ‘I’ve been fighting against it for eighty years and more. All my puff.’

  ‘And now you’ve conquered it?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said my Uncle Silas, who had drunk more in eighty years than would keep a water-mill turning, ‘I’ve conquered it.’ He held up the beer-bottle. ‘Nothing but cold tea. You’ll have some more cold tea, ma’am, won’t you?’

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said.

  So Silas poured out another cup of the cold tea and she sat on the graveside and sipped it in the sunshine, becoming all the time more and more human.

  ‘And no wonder,’ as Silas would say to me afterwards, ‘seeing it was still the winter ration we were drinking. You see, I had a summer ration with only a nip of whisky in it, and then I had a winter ration wi’ pretty nigh a mugful in it. The weather had been cold up to that day and I hadn’t bothered to knock the winter ration off.’

  They sat there for about another half an hour, drinking the cold tea, and during that time there was nothing she did not hear about my Uncle Silas’s life: not only how he had reformed on the beer and was trying to reform on the language but how he had long since reformed on the ladies and the horses and the doubtful stories and the lying and everything else that a man can reform on.

  Indeed, as he finally climbed up out of the grave to shake hands with her and say good afternoon, she must have got the impression that he was a kind of ascetic lay brother.

  Except that her face was very flushed, she walked away with much the same dignity as she had come. There was only one thing that spoiled it. The amazing bloomer-leg had come down again, and Silas could not resist it.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he called after her, ‘but you’re liable to lose your knickerbockers.’

  She turned and gave a dignified smile and then a quick, saucy kind of hitch to her skirt, and the bloomer-leg went up, as Silas himself said, as sharp as a blind in a shop-window.

  That was the last he ever saw of her. But that afternoon, on the 2.45 up-train out of Solbrook, there was a woman with a large umbrella in one hand and a bunch of cowslips in the other. In the warm, crowded carriage there was a smell of something stronger than cold tea, and it was clear to everyone that one of her garments was not in its proper place. She appeared to be a little excited, and to everybody’s embarrassment she talked a great deal.

  Her subject was someone she had met that afternoon.

  ‘A good man,’ she told them. ‘A good man.’

  A Happy Man

  There were many sides to the character of my Uncle Silas which were very doubtful; but there was nothing doubtful about his friendship with Walter Hawthorn.

  Walter and Silas had been friends for fifty or sixty or perhaps even seventy years, though for more than half that time they had never seen each other. Walter had been a soldier: long periods of service on the North-West Frontier, the Sudan, garrison at Singapore.

  He was a big man, with huge sun-dark hands, massive shoulders as stiff and square as iron brackets. He had been wounded twice on the Frontier and once in the Sudan, but he never talked about it. They had given him medals for conspicuous gallantry in a tribal ambush in Afghanistan and others for long service and distinguished service, and he had a row of ribbons that was like a section out of a rainbow. But he never wore the medals or the ribbons and when folks tried to get him to talk about his campaigns and his bravery he would just say, ‘Yes, that was in ’79. It was bad,’ or ‘Yes, that was in ’84. That was the day.’

  He was a man who had seen things and done things and had helped to make history, but it was as though he had done nothing at all. There are men who go round the world and see all there is to be seen and who come back and say, ‘It was very nice indeed.’

  Walt Hawthorn was one of these men. Except that when he came home, after more than forty years of service, he didn’t even say that. He said nothing at all, and settled down to grow flowers.

  It was not the fact that he grew flowers that was in any way remarkable: it was the kind of flowers he grew. My Uncle Silas also grew flowers. He had always been an ugly little man, and it was as though the littleness and ugliness in him demanded to be expressed in something huge and wonderful.

  His dahlias were like grand velvet cushions of salmon and scarlet, his asters like ostrich plumes of pink and mauve. He gloried in sprays of monster golden lilies that were like the brasses in an orchestra. He liked roses into which he could bury his face.

  But Walt Hawthorn was fond of little flowers. His garden was at the other end of the lane from my Uncle Silas, and the two gardens were like the plus and minus of things. Where my Uncle Silas’s flowers flaunted and flared over the hedge in the sun, Walt Hawthorn had scarcely a flower that could look over the fence.

  In spring he grew things like forget-me-nots and violets and narcissi and Dresden daisies; in summer he had virginia stock and snapdragons and pinks and button asters. When he went to my Uncle Silas’s garden my Uncle Silas would take a yardstick to the dahlias, but when Silas went to see Walt Hawthorn, Walt would take him to see a rose no bigger than a thimble or his six-inch fuchsia, in a pot, with flowers no bigger than a pendant ear-ring.

  They went on like this for years. It seemed to consolidate their friendship. With other men my Uncle Silas boasted of his flowers as he boasted of his women, or he lied of one as easily as he lied of the other. But he never boasted to Walt Hawthorn, and, except for one simple occasion, he never lied.

  Walt Hawthorn and my Uncle Silas, though they differed in almost every other way, were alike in one thing. They liked a drink about midday. And every day, just before twelve o’clock, they walked down to The Swan with Two Nicks and, without fail, they drank the same thing: a pint of draught ale.

  One day when my Uncle Silas shouted: ‘Ready, Walt?’ over the fence it was three or four minutes before Walt Hawthorn appeared. It was a blinding hot day in July, the crest of a heat wave that had been rising for almost a week, and when Walt appeared my Uncle Silas noticed a curious, unusual thing about him. He was wearing a bunch of flowers in his buttonhole.

  Normally, beside my Uncle Silas, Walt Hawthorn looked like a man on stilts; but that day, as they walked down the road in the blazing sunshine, it seemed to Silas that Walt had shrunk a little. The brackets of his shoulders seemed to have bent down a little. His feet kept scraping
the ground.

  My Uncle Silas looked at the flowers in his buttonhole. ‘Toffed up a bit?’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ Walter said. His eyes were fixed on the distance. ‘Got me medals on.’

  Silas did not take much notice of that remark. He took it for a kind of joke. He did not take much notice of the next remark either.

  ‘Don’t walk so fast, general,’ Walt said.

  The reason Silas did not take much notice of this remark was because there were odd times when Walt Hawthorn did call him ‘general’. What he noticed was that Walt was walking very slowly.

  Silas noticed this all the way to the pub and all the way back, and he noticed it even more the following day. It was hotter than ever that day, and Walt had a bigger bunch of flowers in his buttonhole.

  ‘Got your medals on again?’ Silas said.

  ‘Yes,’ Walt said, and suddenly he took one of the flowers, a pansy, and put it in Silas’s buttonhole.

  Silas did not say anything. There was nothing very odd after all in putting a flower in the buttonhole of a friend. But when they reached the pub something else happened.

  Walter began to take all the flowers out of his own coat and put them into Silas’s buttonholes—not only the buttonholes of his coat but the buttonholes of his waistcoat and then the buttonholes of his trousers. The large sun-browned hands moved very gently. They handled the little virginia stocks and pansies and pinks, limp now from sun, with crazy affection. My Uncle Silas did not say anything, but as he sat there, letting the flowers be threaded foolishly and lovingly into his garments, he felt that he saw a big man growing little before his eyes.

  He saw the eyes of a big man who had seen the world and had helped to hammer out its history becoming the eyes of a child who has seen nothing and wants to do nothing better than play with a handful of flowers.

  Gradually Silas got Walter Hawthorn out into the sun again and began to lead him home. For a time they walked very slowly. Suddenly Walter leapt into the air and slid down into the ditch by the roadside, pulling Silas with him, and began to fire at rebel tribesmen on the North-West Frontier.

  It was then that my Uncle Silas began to tell lies to Walter Hawthorn. He told him lies about everything: the dead, the living, the way the fight was going. After the skirmish was over he got Walter back to his house and then told more lies. Yes, there was plenty of ammunition. Yes, the general was here. Then Walter began to point to the flowers in the garden, raving. ‘See ’em?’ he yelled. ‘See ’em? See ’em, general?’ and Silas got ready to lie about them, too, thinking that perhaps Walter saw them as soldiers. But Walter leapt up in crazy terror. ‘It’s a mirage!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a bloody mirage.’

  Soon after that he became quieter. He sat in the kitchen, in the cool, out of the sun, and Silas gave him a little whisky and water. Then Silas got him to lie down on the sofa, and after that he went home.

  It was less than two hours when Silas went back to him. When he went into the garden, in the dead still heat of the afternoon, he was dumbfounded. The flowers had been pulled up everywhere; they were strewn over the paths and the grass and the steps of the house and in the house itself. They had been clawed up by the desperate savagery of a man who sees a mirage and wants to grasp it before it vanishes, and Walter himself was lying down among them, exhausted, like a man who had fought all his campaigns in a single afternoon.

  Later that evening they fetched him in an old-fashioned limousine with black bobbed curtains that could be drawn over the windows. He was quite quiet and gentle and Silas helped to lead him out of the house. In his huge feeble hands he held large bunches of little flowers.

  ‘Well, general,’ he said to Silas, ‘where are we bound for this time? India?’

  ‘India it is,’ Silas said.

  He stood in the road and watched the limousine depart. As it went down the road he saw one of Walter Hawthorn’s huge hands come out of the window. The hand flung flowers on to the road, and in that moment it seemed to my Uncle Silas that Walter Hawthorn was a happy man.

  Silas and Goliath

  When I was a little boy my Uncle Silas used to tell me about a man named Porky Sanders, and how he knocked him into Kingdom Come.

  ‘Porky the Gorilla they used to call him,’ he would say, ‘and he was champion o’ the world.’

  ‘A boxer?’

  ‘A boxer?’ my Uncle Silas would say with great derision. ‘Boxing wasn’t heard on. I’m talking about the days o’ prize fights. I’m talking about the days when you chewed a man’s ear off if you didn’t like his whiskers.’

  ‘Did you ever chew a man’s ear off?’ I would say.

  ‘Boy,’ he would say to me with great solemnity, ‘I was the champion ear-chewer of the county.’

  Then he would go on to tell me that it was about the year 1870. ‘The year the horned wheat stood nearly ten feet high in Deanes’ forty acre, at the bottom of the lane. I ain’t kiddin’ you. Everything was bigger in them days.’

  ‘Take a man,’ he would say, ‘like Porky. At the time I’m tellin’ y’ about, Porky stood six foot six and weighed about twenty stone. He could hold six beer-glasses in the palm of his hand. Yes, boy. And two men could stand in one leg of his trousers. Yes!’ he would say, ‘all the best men were big men in them days.’

  ‘But you were a little man,’ I would say.

  My Uncle Silas would look at me with a deadly serious cock of one eye, with the bland, sly darkness that he always kept for awkward moments and awkward questions.

  ‘Yes, boy. Yes, I was a little man,’ he would say. ‘But I always had a big head.’

  After that my Uncle Silas would go on to describe not only how big Porky Sanders was and how famous he was, but what a smashing, hell-fire, holy terror he was. It was not simply that he was a man who fought: it was not only that he was a man who bit off other men’s ears. It seemed that he was a kind of dictator who walked about crushing other men under his foot like beetles.

  He walked into public-houses and bounced beer-barrels; and if the landlord didn’t like it, he would, my Uncle Silas said, bounce the landlord. If he fancied an apple, he clawed branches of apples from over a garden wall as he passed; if he wanted a leg of mutton, he walked into the butcher’s shop and grabbed the meat with one hand and belted the butcher with the other, and then walked out of the shop gnawing the raw meat like a toffee-apple.

  If he fancied a girl he picked her up and walked away with her under his arm, more or less, like a prize puppy. He drank a gallon of beer at a time, and when he walked down the street the women went indoors and the men all got together in a bunch for safety.

  Did I know a man named Sip Turner, my Uncle Silas said, a man with a nose that looked like a corkscrew? Well, that was some of Porky Sanders’s work. Porky had picked up the man by the nose and spun him round like a Catherine wheel, one day in ’69, because he wouldn’t call him ‘sir’. That’s the kind of man he was, Silas said, the biggest belching blustering blackguard in the county. A real gorilla.

  ‘And why,’ I would want to know, ‘did they call him a gorilla?’

  My Uncle Silas had an answer for everything. ‘Been a sailor,’ he said. ‘Been a sailor and got marooned for eighteen months on an island off the coast of Africa, and all that time never ate nothing but gorilla meat. Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘That’s what made him so strong.’

  And so gradually I got fixed in my mind the awful, bloodthirsty, terrifying picture of the flesh-eating, ear-chewing, woman-grabbing Porky Sanders. The only thing that began to trouble me was how my Uncle Silas had knocked him into Kingdom Come.

  ‘I am coming to that,’ he would say. ‘I am coming to that. You see, it was like this. There was a lady. A great friend of mine. Vicky her name was. And one day Porky picked her up.’

  Here my Uncle Silas would pause with great significance, as though this had been one of the fundamental moments in history. ‘And that,’ he would say, ‘is where he made a very great mistake.’

  ‘I be
t you challenged him?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ my Uncle Silas would say. ‘Yes, boy, I challenged him. Raw fists. Any time. Any place. Every knock-down a round. Fight to go on until one man couldn’t get up no more. Yes, I challenged him—and he laughed at it. Laughed fit to bust himself.’

  I asked what happened then.

  ‘I just let him laugh, boy,’ he said, ‘and then got to work. You see, Vicky didn’t like being picked up by that gorilla any more than any other girl. She hated it like poison, but she couldn’t do nothing. So I got on to her first. “Vicky,” I says to her, “play on his pride.”’

  And then he would go on to tell me how the girl had played on his pride, asking him if he was afraid of a little bit of a winkle like Silas, telling him how people were saying he was afraid, and urging him to cut Silas up, once and for all, into sausage meat. She kept at him for days, and at last it worked. ‘Then,’ Silas said, ‘I got her to feed him on cucumbers. You see, it was hot weather. And she’d say to him, “Porky dear, you got to keep your blood cool. Porky dear, the best thing in the world you can eat is cucumbers.” And she got round him on that, too, and somehow she kept him on nothing but cucumbers for a fortnight.

  ‘Cucumbers and beer,’ he said, and then went on to tell me how he worked with the landlord at the pub, too: how the beer would be free for Porky every night, and not only how it would be free, but how every pint had been specially jiggered behind the bar: a spoonful of salts in it, a pill or two, a packet of something from the chemist’s, things that turned his stomach to fire and water.

  ‘So that in the end,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘what with the bellyache from the beer and the bellyache from the cucumbers, Porky turned up for the fight looking as green as a boiled frog.’

  ‘And all you had to do,’ I said, ‘was lick him with one hand.’

  ‘Better than that,’ my Uncle Silas said, with great modesty. ‘Better than that. I licked him with no hands at all.’