by H. E. Bates
There was always a moment in my Uncle Silas’s stories when something or other seemed too good to be true, and this, it seemed to me, was such a moment.
Uncle Silas must have seen the doubt rising in my eyes, for a moment later he went on:
‘Boy, didn’t I tell you I was a little man, but I had a big head? Well, I didn’t tell you that for nothing!’ He cocked his bloodshot eye at me with swift, diabolical wickedness. ‘The fight was down on Vine Hills,’ he went on, ‘you know—under the wood, just before you get to that big slope.’
‘Near the river?’ I said.
‘Near the river,’ he said, and then he went on to tell me how it had happened: how all he did was to clutch the gorilla by the waist and bunt his head into a stomach tired and weak already from beer and purges and cucumbers, and how at first it was a kind of standstill bunting, then a run and a bunt, and then a charge and a bunt, every bunt producing a low, agonised, sour sort of groan.
Finally, I got a picture of my Uncle Silas standing halfway across the field, and Porky being held up by the thick excited crowd, and my Uncle Silas bearing down on him with a sort of charge of the Light Brigade, Porky being driven inexorably farther and farther down the slope until at last, with a triumphant and masterful bunt, my Uncle Silas put him with a sort of inverted belly-flopper into the river.
At the end of it my Uncle Silas would gaze airily about him with extreme modesty. ‘Yes, that’s how,’ he would say, ‘I knocked Porky Sanders into Kingdom Come.’
‘Is it?’ a voice would say.
And we would turn to see, as always at the conclusion of some riper, more racy tale, my Uncle Silas’s housekeeper in the room; tart, irascible, iron-eyed, disgusted. ‘Well, if it is,’ she would say, ‘I’d be ashamed. I’d be ashamed I would. Telling the boy such downright nonsense and such tales about things that never happened.’
For a minute my Uncle Silas, sardonic and unruffled, would retain a kind of apostolic composure.
Then he would speak. ‘Tales?’ he would say. ‘I don’t see no difference in telling a tale like that and telling a tale about a woman turning into a pillar o’ salt, or a man who was alive for three days in a fish’s belly.’
And now that I come to think of it, nor do I.
A Silas Idyll
‘The world,’ my Uncle Silas used to say, ‘looks different from the top of a ladder.’ It was a remark based on years of experience, for in the sixties and seventies my Uncle Silas had been a thatcher.
It was a good trade, with plenty to do, and as time went on my Uncle Silas bought himself a little beer-coloured nag and a little flat two-wheeled cart, and drove himself for twenty or thirty miles out and about the countryside, thatching barns and houses, stacks and lych-gates.
He could cling to the side of a house in a March wind like a monkey, and there was no one like him for combing out the thatch until it was as smooth as a girl’s hair or trimming a rippled eave to the line of a scallop-shell.
In an age of thatchers he was a master, and, like all masters, he signed his work. His signature was a cockerel. With a comb like a newt and a tail like a fan of barley and looking altogether flamboyant and triumphant about something, this cockerel was twisted out of straw and fixed to gable and stack-top and barn-roof wherever my Uncle Silas went.
It was a sign that became in time as well known as a barber’s pole, and in time, too, it gave rise to a sort of proverb. ‘When the cockerel’s about,’ they said, ‘let the hens look out.’
One day my Uncle Silas was thatching a shop-roof down in Bedford. On the lower floor of the shop you could buy ribbons and calico, dress materials and hats; on the upper floor there were twenty little dressmakers working under a supervisor, who looked, as my Uncle Silas said, as if her bosom was made of mangel-wurzels and her heart of crab apples. She was very fair, solid, and suspicious.
Every time he went up the ladder with a load of straw or pegs she clucked like an old hen with chickens. Every time he came down again she would be standing at the window, spread out, hiding the chickens behind her. All the time, my Uncle Silas said, she looked as red as if she was going to lay an egg.
A mourning order had come in; everyone was working against time. The girls were pretending to be very serious, as if damped down by death, and they had not time to look at him.
All except one. She was a little brown creature sitting near the window, and every time Silas went up or down the ladder she lifted her head and grinned at him. Her hair was a brownish-red shade, and it crinkled and fluffed like hens’ feathers.
Once when he came up the ladder the window was open enough for him to speak to her. ‘Nice day,’ he said.
‘Very.’
That was all she said. But it almost made my Uncle Silas swoon off the ladder. It had a tender, intoxicating sound that turned his legs to water. When he came down again he said:
‘When does old turnip-face go home for dinner?’
‘Doesn’t go. Has dinner here.’
‘When do you go?’ he said.
‘Don’t go. Have my dinner here, too.’
As he went down the ladder he heard the old turnip’s voice snap out: ‘Less looking out of the window, Elizabeth, and more concentration on your work. I’ve to take these dresses to be fitted at two o’clock.’
At five minutes to two my Uncle Silas saw the old turnip-faced supervisor come out of the shop with a large brown-paper parcel under her arm; at two o’clock precisely he was up the ladder, giving a sort of cockadoodledoo to the girls through the window; at ten minutes past two he had climbed through the window and was properly playing the cockerel in the henroost.
The girls fluttered and twittered, and it wasn’t long before he was plaiting a love-knot with some odd strands of straw for the little brown-haired creature who had been sitting near the window.
She was so sweet and attractive that he forgot all about the thatching, and the girls, it seems, forgot all about the supervisor. My Uncle Silas was just beginning to plait love-knots for each of the twenty dressmakers on a sort of barter system, no kiss, no love-knot, when one of the girls, who had been downstairs to fetch a length of velvet, rushed excitedly into the room, slammed the door and said the supervisor was coming back upstairs.
Even as she spoke they could hear the clump of her feet on the stairs and in the ten clear seconds that followed there was nothing for it but to clap my Uncle Silas, like Falstaff, into the nearest linen basket.
And from there, looking through the wickerwork, he saw the supervisor come in. She flounced in, put down the parcel in a great hurry and proceeded to tell twenty innocent-looking girls, half of them hiding love-knots to their bosoms, why she was back so soon.
It was the age of tight-lacing, fainting-fits, and general feminine hysteria in the face of catastrophe, and it seemed that the mother and daughter for whom the mourning dresses had been made were in a state of prostrate hysterics and could not be fitted.
‘Which is why,’ the supervisor said, ‘I had to come back. The mother is about my size and the daughter is about the size of one of you. We’ll have to fit them as best we can. Fanny, unpack the parcel. Lucy, help me off with my dress.’
Well, as my Uncle Silas said, the world looks different from up a ladder, but it’s nothing to how different it looks through the cracks in a linen-basket.
‘I always thought the Rock of Gibraltar was well fortified,’ he would say. ‘But it was nothing to the fortifications old turnip-face had on. She’d got more whale-bone than a whale. Talk about the Siege of Ladysmith. It was nothing. She could have held out for a century. Even her legs were in sandbags.’
‘Elizabeth,’ the supervisor said, ‘slip off your dress and just try the other one on.’
As she spoke, a sort of tittering rustle of feathers went through the twenty dressmakers; my Uncle Silas stuffed bits of dress material into his mouth to keep from having hysterics himself, and a moment later he was looking at the nicest array of pale pink petticoats he had ever set
eyes on.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘pink petticoats. And fifty years ago that meant something.’
And then he would go on to tell me how he had remained a prisoner in the linen basket all that afternoon, taking his alternate review of, as he said, fortifications and fancy-work, until his body was cramped and stiff and even his heart had pins-and-needles.
And it was his heart, it seems, that went on having pins-and-needles for a long time afterwards, for when he finally got out of the basket late that evening, after the shop was closed and the girls had gone, he climbed down the ladder and almost fell into the arms of the little brown-featured creature waiting for him at the bottom with a straw love-knot pinned at her neck.
‘And what happened?’ I said. ‘What did you do?’
‘Boy,’ he said, ‘I did the only thing you could do in them days when you’d seen a lady in her petticoats.’
‘And what was that?’
‘I married her,’ he said. ‘She’d have been your aunt if she’d lived.’
And as he spoke there would come into my Uncle Silas’s eye an expression not often seen there. It was soft, distant, regretful, and indescribably tender. It transfixed him for one moment and then he became his old sardonic self again.
‘Yes,’ he would say, ‘they say when the cat’s away the mice’ll play. But it’s nothing to what the hens’ll do when the cockerel pops in the roost.’
The Race
Goffy Windsor was a tall, streaky fellow with a horse-face and legs like ostrich’s, who boasted he could run a mile in five minutes.
My Uncle Silas, who had legs that wouldn’t have stopped a pig in an entry and who never, of course, boasted about anything, used to tell how he challenged Goffy to a five-mile race, and beat him to a frazzle.
There are many men like Goffy Windsor. When they are young men they win bets for drinking a quart straight off; they hit cricket balls for six; they floor the board at skittles five times running; they run a mile in five minutes.
No one has much to say about this. But gradually, as they grow older, they begin to recall how they drank a gallon straight off for ten nights running, how they hit a cricket ball over a church steeple and killed a chicken stone dead on the other side; how they used to be able to floor the skittle board six times out of six, blind-folded, left-handed, upside down, and throwing between their legs; and finally, how they nicked five seconds off the mile-time for the world’s record in 1889, easy as shelling peas, only it was never official.
It was like this with Goffy Windsor. Whenever there was a crowd of strangers in The Swan with Two Nicks on a Saturday night, Goffy would begin to demonstrate the kidney punch he used for knocking out the welter-weight of Great Britain and Ireland in 1891—‘Of course the kidney punch is barred now,’ he’d say—or the under-arm break that made a ball come in two feet six and bowl Georgie Colson, the county man, in 1894—‘only, of course, they bowl over-arm nowadays’—or the famous occasion when he did the mile in 4 minutes 59.3 secs. on a practice run—‘and old Charley Taylor would tell you it was right, too,’ he’d say, ‘only Charley’s dead.’
One night Goffy was telling a young man in a fancy pullover how he once raced against all-comers at the Crystal Palace and left them standing, when my Uncle Silas interrupted.
‘Goffy,’ he said, ‘you were a ’nation good miler. But anything over a mile and you were poor stuff. Why, I’d lick you myself.’
‘Don’t talk wet,’ Goffy said.
‘I ain’t talking wet,’ Silas said, ‘I’m challenging you. If this gentleman here likes to put up a bit of a side-stake I’ll race you for five miles any day. When and where you like.’
‘That’s fine,’ the young man said. ‘I’ll put up a couple o’ quid stake. Go on.’
So they settled it there and then that Goffy and Silas should run a race in three weeks’ time, on a Sunday morning, between Carlton and Solbrook, on the top road above the river.
‘I don’t want to be hard on you, Silas,’ Goffy said. ‘So I’ll give you a mile start.’
‘No,’ Silas said. ‘But I’ll tell you what. You can give me five minutes’ start. All right?’
‘Anything you like,’ Goffy said.
‘And everybody off the track. No bikes. Nobody. That all right?’
‘Anything you like,’ Goffy said.
They shook hands on it and the young man in the pullover put down his money with the landlord, and the next day Goffy went into training. He put on a sweater and rubber shoes and trotted through the village every morning. In the evenings, at the pub, he drank ginger ale and slapped his chest and let allcomers feel how his legs were coming on.
All the time my Uncle Silas did not do anything. He did not go into training and he could see no sense in drinking ginger ale. He did not boast at all, but three days later he gave out that he couldn’t sleep at nights for sciatica.
‘Sciatica?’ they said. ‘That ain’t much good for running, is it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. And I get cramp too. Chronic.’
By that time everybody was talking about the race and there was already a lot of money on it, too. When the word went round that my Uncle Silas wasn’t training and that he was suffering from cramp and sciatica the odds against him lengthened to 10 to 1.
That night he talked it over with Walter Hawthorn, and the next day Walter gave it out that Silas was suffering from a strained groin and rheumatics in the knee joint, and one or two other minor ailments, like gum-boils.
Altogether everybody thought that Silas was in a very poor way indeed, and that day Walter Hawthorn got a lot of money on him at 20 to 1. The night before the race Uncle Silas threw a fit, so next morning the starting price was 33 to 1.
The race was due to start at ten o’clock from The King’s Head in Carlton. Goffy turned up looking like an ostrich in white drawers, and did a lot of fancy exercises, loosening-up, in front of the pub. My Uncle Silas was in just his shirt and trousers and a pair of rubber shoes, and had an ash-bough in his hand to keep the flies away.
At ten o’clock my Uncle Silas went trotting off, looking just like a squat little pig that can’t and won’t be hurried.
My Uncle Silas trotted on for five minutes and then calmly lay down in the middle of the road. He lay there for a few minutes, fairly comfortable, resting, getting his wind back, and then Goffy came ostriching out of the distance, wheezing like a harmonium.
Goffy hadn’t then got his second wind, and he was trying to go very hard when he saw Silas lying flat in the road as if he were dead.
He bent over my Uncle Silas. ‘Silas,’ he said, ‘are you all right? Y’ain’t done for?’
My Uncle Silas, who was lying on his back, gave a groan somewhere between a bellyache and the sound of a priest intoning for a lost soul.
‘Can I do anythink, Silas?’ Goffy said. ‘Can I do anythink?’
‘In my hip-pocket,’ Silas whispered. ‘There’s a bottle in me hip-pocket.’
Goffy lifted Silas upright, and then found the bottle and put it to Silas’s lips. ‘What is it, Silas?’ he said.
‘Whisky,’ Silas said in a slobbing sort of voice. ‘Have a drop.’
By this time Goffy was feeling badly about things. He kept thinking about Silas’s sciatica and rheumatics and the fit he had thrown, and he took a long, sudden drink of whisky to steady himself.
‘Goffy,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘it might be the last time I shall see you. If it is, I want you know you ain’t to blame.’
Goffy, who had eaten nothing since six o’clock that morning, and had drunk nothing stronger than ginger ale for a fortnight, took another smack at the whisky.
‘You think you can carry me to the house back there?’ Silas said. ‘Carry me if you can, Goffy.’
Goffy looked up and saw a house about half a mile back along the road. His heart sank. ‘It’s too far,’ he said. ‘But I’ll run back. I’ll run back as quick as I can and get somebody.’ Then he took another swig at the whisky and pelted
back along the road.
My Uncle Silas let him get safely round the first bend in the road and then he got up and trotted steadily on. He knew that he had almost a mile start and he knew something that Goffy didn’t know. The whisky was a mixture of whisky, brandy, and rum in equal parts.
A mile farther on, as he passed a house, a man named Arthur Watkins rushed out, yelling:
‘Hey, where’s Goffy?’
‘Miles back,’ Silas said. ‘In a bad way. You ought to give him a drink of summat when he comes by.’
Fifteen minutes later, when Goffy came by feeling as if he were running upstairs and his head knocking on the ceiling, Arthur Watkins rushed out with a tumbler of elderberry wine.
Goffy took hold of the elderberry wine and killed it in one smack, and then went on with his eyes bulging out of his head like boss-marbles. He was mad with Silas and mad with himself. He couldn’t see straight, and half a mile farther on a man rushed out of a row of cottages with a glass of parsnip wine eight years old. Goffy drank it in one blow and then rushed off again, feeling as if he were on a roundabout.
‘Hey! Not that way,’ the man said. ‘You’re going back.’
By the time Goffy got as far as the bridge at Filmersham, and was lying down on the river bank, bathing his head in the water, my Uncle Silas was sitting in The Swan with Two Nicks having a pint of draught ale with bread and cheese and a bunch of spring onions.
Everybody was very mad with Goffy, because the odds were extremely painful, and for many years Goffy was very mad with my Uncle Silas. Indeed, from that time onwards he never talked about races at all.
Races, on the other hand, appeared to interest my Uncle Silas more than ever.
‘Goffy,’ he would say, ‘I know you ain’t a reading man. But some day you ought to read about a race between the tortoise and the hare.’
The Death of Uncle Silas
When I heard that my Great-uncle Silas was dying, I did not believe it. He was so old that it had always been hard for me to realise that he had ever been born. It had always seemed to me that he had simply turned up, very old and imperishable, with his crimson neckerchief and his bloodshot eye as bright as the neckerchief, his earth-coloured breeches, his winey breath, and that huskily devilish voice that had told me so many stories and had left as many tantalizingly half-told. Yet I remember how he would often tell me that he could recollect—the word was his own—standing on a corn-sheaf, in his frocks, and sucking at the breast his mother slipped out of her dress and held down for him in the harvest-field. ‘They had the titty, them days, till they were damn near big enough to reap and tie.’ Though he might very well have made it up. ‘I was allus tidy thirsty,’ he would say at the end of that story, or in fact at the end of any story. ‘Mouthful o’ wine?’ he would say. It was his favourite phrase.