The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Might think we were a lot o’ bees,’ Quincey said, ‘a-being smoked out of hive.’

  During the sermon Quincey, Foghorn and Silas sat listening as if they were made of butter and wondering all the time how soon they could escape and, as Silas said, ‘nip over to The Dragon and git the taint on it outa we mouths.’ My Uncle Silas had never dreamed of such popery. The puritan in him was inflamed as if by heresies. ‘Thought they wur never gooin’ to be done a-sciencing round in night-shirts,’ he said, ‘and cock-eyed hats and I don’ know what. Never see sich bowin’ and scrapin’ and groanin’ and fartin’ about in all me days.’

  But after the sermon came an announcement that caused my Uncle Silas to put his elbow in Quincey’s ribs and made Foghorn begin to draw meditative hands slowly down his moustaches.

  ‘On the occasion of the celebration of the Jubilee of our dear Queen.’ There followed a good deal about homage and prayer, services and singing, solemn thanks and the ringing of bells. And then: ‘Of course we shall indulge in secular celebration too. There is to be a tea-fight and a torch-light procession and, of course, a bonfire.’

  ‘You ought to ha’ seen old Foghorn’s eyes light up,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘It wur wuth bein’ smoked out for.’

  After the service the young parson came to shake hands with the converts to righteousness.

  ‘It has done my heart good. I cannot tell you how it has warmed me.’

  ‘Well, we’ll try t’ warm you a bit more yit,’ Silas said. ‘We’re learnt a lot today. Ain’t we, Foghorn?’

  ‘Too true,’ Foghorn said. ‘Too true.’

  On the night of the Jubilee they lit the bonfire in the middle of the market square about eight o’clock. The square was packed with people and that, as my Uncle Silas said, ‘helped us a lot. In a crowd like that you hardly knowed t’other from which. Half on ’em a bit merry too.’

  ‘Course,’ he said, ‘I ain’t saying me an’ Foghorn and Quincey hadn’t had a drop o’ neck-oil—but then, arter all, it wur the Jubilee. The old gal ’d bin on the throne five minutes and it wur the proper time for a bit of a warm up.’

  But the most excited man on the square that night was not my Uncle Silas, or Foghorn Freeman, or Quincey. It was the young parson, carried away on waves of excessive and loyal zeal not merely for his gracious Sovereign the Queen but for that roaring tower of spark and flame lighting up the square and all the streets about the square.

  ‘Keep her going, Narrow,’ he kept shouting. ‘Don’t let her die down, you fellows! Keep the pot boiling. Splendid, Foghorn! That’s a magnificent pile of faggots you have there. Pitch in!’

  ‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘we pitched in an’ all good and proper. He kept ravin’ for us to bring more wood for the fire and we kept a-bringin’ on it. I reckon he must have had two wagon loads o’ faggots in the rectory garden. Well, arter we’d got rid o’ them and a couple old hen-places and a half a pig-sty——’

  ‘Pile on the agony!’ the young parson kept shouting. ‘Pitch it on, you fellows, pitch it on!’

  About eleven o’clock they started bringing out the furniture. ‘Just a few old chairs and things. Nothing much. A couple of old couches and a table,’ Silas said. ‘Me and Quincey kept bringin’ it out while Foghorn looked arter the parson’s maid in one o’ the bedrooms.’

  That, it always seemed to me, was something much more in my Uncle Silas’s line; but he, it appears, had something else to do.

  Soon he and Quincey were in another bedroom, rigging up the effigy. ‘Fust we got a coupla bolsters orf the bed and then we dressed it up, nightshirt and every mite o’ ’umbuggin’ palaver you could think on. I should think we put half a hundredweight o’ bibs an’ cassocks an’ nightshirts an’ fol-di-dols on that thing. In the finish they wadn’t another mite o’ popery left we could lay hands on.’

  In the other bedroom Foghorn was all this time very successful in keeping the maid quiet and the maid, it seemed, did not mind at all.

  ‘And then Quincey dropped it,’ Silas said. ‘The pot I mean. We had it on the parson’s head and Quincey dropped it. Jist as we was gittin’ him down the stairs.’

  The pot was china; and up in the bedroom the maid, hearing it crash downstairs, started screaming there were thieves about, but Foghorn—who was a good soldier of the Queen, my Uncle Silas said, with experience both at home and abroad—kept her quiet by telling her it was a cat with a milk-jug.

  ‘Any rate, I found another,’ Silas said. ‘A beauty. With roses on it. And we put it on the parson’s head and took him out into the square. We musta looked jis’ like one o’ them ’umbuggin’ fancy church processions.’

  In the square there was so much shouting and singing, so much spark and fire, so much excitement and jollity in celebration for England, the Jubilee and the Queen that the guy with its load of vestments was on the fire and in full flame before the young parson, all merriment suddenly extinguished, saw himself burning away in mockery.

  ‘Burned beautiful too,’ my Uncle Silas used to say, in the dreamy regretful way he kept for these occasions. ‘Burned beautiful. Pot an’ all.’

  It was, I used to say to my Uncle Silas in due course, a very successful evening for everybody, not counting the parson, but on the whole, perhaps, a little drastic.

  His answer to this was quite pained.

  ‘They wur drastic days,’ he said, ‘dammit, man! if you never liked somebody you ’umbuggin’ well said so. You let ’em know. Bless me heart an’ life everybody’s gittin’ too soft be half nowadays.’

  But burning furniture, I used to say, burning a man’s clothing, the very cloth and emblems of his calling, with a pot on his head. Not that I minded the pot so much; but the going was altogether a little rough, I thought, a little rough and rude.

  To answer which my Uncle Silas used to turn on me his one good eye, the other closed and bloodshot, and say with that bland mock innocence, combined with a certain crooked sternness of his mouth, that he always kept for the finish of some taller tale:

  ‘We enjoyed we-selves, didn’t we? Dammit, man, what’s wrong wi’ enjoying we-selves? I enjoyed it. Foghorn enjoyed it. Quincey enjoyed it. The maid enjoyed it—I know she did, onaccountable well an’ all, because Foghorn told me so. Everybody enjoyed it——’

  ‘All except the parson.’

  ‘Oh! yis, well, I know,’ Silas said. ‘But dammit, it wur only a few bushes and old kitchen chairs and rags we burnt. Don’t forgit it ain’t bin so long since they’d a’ burnt him too. You ain’t goin’ to deny that now, are you?’

  No, I said, I wasn’t going to deny that. But still, burning people out of house and home—that was a bit much, I thought, perhaps a bit too much.

  ‘Dammit, man,’ he said, ‘you’re gittin’ as bad as all the rest on ’em. I don’t know what the ’nation’s coming over everybody nowadays. Everybody’s stopped enjoyin’ theirselves. Everybody’s gittin’ too ’umbuggin’ soft by half.’

  He fixed me with a stare of solemn tartness and disapproval from which for the life of me I could not tell whether he were serious or not, until suddenly he dropped a wicked lid.

  ‘It’s about time you had a mouthful o’ wine,’ he said. ‘Git the bottle down.’

  Loss of Pride

  My uncle Silas, all his life, was very fond of a baked potato. Whenever I walked over to see him on cold midwinter nights, when roadsides were crisp and white with hoarfrost and you could hear cold owl-cry haunting the woods, his first words were almost always: ‘You git the taters, boy, while I git the wine.’

  He was always very particular, I noticed, about how the potatoes were cooked. ‘Course they’re better in a twitch fire,’ he often said, ‘when it’s died down a bit and you can poke ’em into that hot ash. You git that burnt taste in ’em then and it teks a bit o’ beatin.’

  But in the absence of twitch fires he did the next best thing. At the side of his kitchen fireplace there used to be one of those big baking ovens, large enough to hold a si
de of mutton, where in the old days faggots were lit for baking bread. When the fired faggots had died down the big pink-and-white kidney potatoes, pricked all over with a fork, went into the bed of ash and soon the little kitchen was sweet and warm with the smell of their cooking.

  ‘Ever tell you about Pouchy Reeves and the baked taters? Bin a minute—very like I never did. The smell on ’em allus brings it back.’

  In winter time we almost always drank elderberry wine, sometimes slightly mulled if the nights were very cold, and it was generally at about the third or fourth glass that some reminiscence, far out of the past, began.

  I said I didn’t think he had; nor, I thought, had I ever heard of Pouchy.

  ‘Shoemekker. Hand-craft. Bit of a dab hand, I’ll grant him that. But knowed it—bit of a toff in a way, what shoemekkers used to call notch-above-a-tapper. Very cocky. Fancy westkits and walking sticks and big button-holes of a Sunday. Too high and mighty for the rest of us chaps.’

  Here he licked a drop of wine from his lips with what I thought was no innocent relish and I proceeded to remark that it wouldn’t have surprised me at all to hear that Pouchy, with such a splendid array of attractions and accomplishments, was also a great one with women.

  ‘Never ’eerd nothing else. Wimmin mornin’, noon and night. He wur a-gittin’ on ’em into hayfields and stackyards and straw-barns and stables and I don’t know wheer so fast you’d a thought he never had a minute fer shoemekking left. Young and old. Let ’em all come. Used to reckon he had two sisters in the same bed one turn over at the old mill-house at Shelton Cross.’

  I at once remarked that this seemed to be a matter of very serious rivalry and in return he gave me a look, over the top of his wine-glass, that was almost pious in the bland severity of its rebuke.

  ‘Now, hold hard. I’ve had a few gals in me time, one way an’ another, but like I allus tell you—I wur never arter them, they wur allus arter me.’

  ‘A very subtle difference.’

  He said never mind about a very subtle difference, but when you got a man boasting he had two gals in bed at the same time and another up in the church belfry while the Sunday evening service was on and another in one corner of a wheatfield while her husband was mowing and bonding in another then you started to wonder.

  ‘Another thing. Like I say, I’ve had a gal or two in me time and some fair samples among ’em too but I never done no poachin’. But Pouchy—he wur different. He liked nickin’ on ’em from other chaps. It wur more fun.’

  He then went on to ask me if I knew The Swan with Two Necks at Nenweald and the two old tits who kept it? When I said I did he said:

  ‘Never think they was sisters, would you? Nell, she’s like a damn great bean-pole and arms like a man. Lucy looks like a bit dropped off her, a real dillin. Course they’re gittin’ on a bit now but in my day Nell’d chook a man outa the bar as easy as spit in your eye. I seed her chook a man named Butch Waters out once, big labourin’ man, fists like legs o’ mutton. He never ony bounced once but it wur enough. He wur out cold as a gravestone fer a night and a day.’

  After what was really an uncommonly long speech for him he took a good long draught of elderberry, refilled the glasses, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and then opened the oven door to see how the baked potatoes were coming on. A hot delicious fragrance floated through the open oven door and he gave a great smacking sniff at it and then pressed first one potato and then another with his thumb.

  ‘Give ’em another ten minutes. Git the butter and the salt, boy, then we’ll be ready for ’em. Plenty o’ butter.’

  And what, I now wanted to know, having found the salt cellar and a big brown crock of butter, had the old tits to do with Pouchy?

  ‘Well, they wad’n old then. I’m talkin’ abut fifty year back. Very like more. In them days Lucy wur an uncommon good-lookin’ gal, but freckly, like a thrush’s egg.’

  I here murmured that I supposed in consequence Pouchy was after her but he merely gave me another look of rather sharp reproof and said:

  ‘I’m comin’ to that if you’ll let me breathe. You will git so fur ahead on me. No, she wur a-courtin’ at the time.’

  He laughed briefly, his old voice cracking, and took another sharp swig of wine.

  ‘Well, you could call it courtin’, in a way. This goodly chap Will Croome was arter ’er. Well, I say arter ’er. All he done wur to sit all night in the bar and just stare at ’er over ’is beer. Nice enough chap, but onaccountable shy. Bit on the deaf side, too.’

  It was about this time, he went on, that Nell slipped on a patch of ice in the pub-yard and fell and broke her leg. It was mighty cold that winter: ten weeks of frost. You could put your skates on in the house and skate all the way through the frozen streets to the river. That was frozen solid too.

  ‘Well, about that time there wur allus me and Tupman Sanders and Olly Sharman and Ponto Pack and Gunner Jarvis in the Swan of a night and o’ course this goodly Will Croome staring at Lucy.’

  And then, no sooner had Nell been taken off to hospital, than Pouchy began to come in.

  ‘Taters ready yit? Me belly’s rollin’ round. Give ’em another five minutes. I like ’em a bit black outside. Yis, Pouchy started to come in. Belch-guts. Mister High-and-Mighty. Notch above a tapper.’

  ‘After the girl?’

  ‘Well, at fust it wad’n so much that. It wur the way he kept on a-tauntin’ and a-teasin’ Will. Never give ’im no peace. Allus on at ’im. Nasty bits outa the side of ’is mouth. You know—“I see we got Will the Lady Killer in again tonight. Fast worker, Will. Moves like a whippet. Brought your salt with you tonight, Will boy? That’s how you catch birds, Will—puttin’ salt on their tails.” It made it wuss because most o’ the time Will couldn’t hear.’

  It would never have happened, he went on to say, if Nell had been there. You wouldn’t have got away with that lark if Nell had been behind the bar. She’d have had you by the scruff of your neck and breeches and you’d have been out on your arse in one bounce if you tried that kind of caper.

  ‘Better git the taters out, boy. Afore me belly drops out.’

  While I was getting the potatoes out of the oven and finding plates for them and putting the salt and butter handy on the kitchen table he reminded me that all this was in the days before the Swan burnt down. It was the old Swan then, stone and thatched, and along one side of it was the big covered way for coaches. Every Saturday night, in winter, a man named Sprivvy Litchfield came and stood in there with his old hot potato oven, with a paraffin flare on top.

  ‘We’d nip out and git half a dozen and eat ’em with the beer. Very good too, they wur. No better’s these tonight, though.’

  The potatoes, scalding hot and floury and drenched in butter, were too much for my tongue but Silas simply forked them into his ripe old mouth with never a cooling breath and as if they were nothing but luke-warm custard. He crackled at the dark burnt skin too and it struck me that it was just like the skin of his own gnarled earth-brown hands.

  ‘Well, it got wusser and wusser, this ’ere teasin’ an’ tauntin’. I could see Lucy, poor gal, gooin’ off her napper. Then one night I caught her wipin’ her eyes and havin’ a bit of a tune in the passage and she said it wur more’n flesh and blood could bear. Tupman and Olly and Gunner and Ponto wur all fer bouncing Pouchy out but I said——’

  At this point my Uncle Silas suddenly broke off, looking uncommonly crafty, his bloodshot eye half-shut, the other reflectively contemplating a lump of well-burnt potato skin.

  ‘Allus teks me back, whenever I git a-holt of a hot tater.’ He laughed very softly, shaking his head. ‘Never fergit it. See it now.’

  My potato was cooler now and I sat eating the buttery salty flesh with relish too, waiting to hear what happened.

  ‘I recollected seeing a chap once in a pub over at Swineshead. He wasn’t quite all ninepence and two fellers put rum in his beer. Knock-out. Fast asleep in five minutes, just like a baby.’

&n
bsp; Here I said that if this was all they did to Pouchy it sounded pleasant rather than otherwise and anyway harmless enough.

  ‘Well, it ain’t quite all,’ Silas said and once again he laughed very softly, his lips shining red with wine, ‘it ain’t quite all. Fust we treated him to a beer wi’ one rum in it, then one wi’ two in it, then one wi’ three in it. Lucy wur slippin’ on ’em in and we wur a-keepin’ Pouchy talking. He wur very happy and in about half hour or so he went out like a light.’

  ‘And then?’

  Before answering my Uncle Silas took a long swig of wine and laughed with all his old fruity wickedness.

  ‘I went out and got a good big hot tater.’

  And what, I begged him to tell me, did they do with the hot potato?

  ‘Dropped it into his breeches.’

  ‘Front or back?’

  ‘Well, he wur a-sittin’ down at the time, so we couldn’t very well git it down the back.’

  He laughed again, really loudly this time, and said he wisht I’d bin there. Had I ever heard a pig being killed? It sounded just like that.

  ‘Injury permanent?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. But it wur a good big tater and we got it well down there.’

  Now I noticed that he had finished his first potato and I opened the oven door and took out another. As he pressed it with his thumb even he recoiled a bit and said blandly:

  ‘Sting a tidy bit when they’re hot, boy.’

  As I sat watching him break the skin of the potato with his crusty fingers, I begged to know what happened to Pouchy after that.

  ‘Well, it wur a funny thing. He sort of went downhill. Took to the beer very bad. Went to the dogs. Never boasted about women no more. And in the end he wur half a cripple.’

  This, I said, didn’t at all surprise me.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. Slowly he picked up the bottle of elderberry, filled up the two glasses, held his own up to me and gave me one of those long solemn blood-shot winks of his. ‘Lost his pride. Onaccountable bad. Pass us the butter.’