The Centre of the Green

by John Bowen

  The Centre of the Green

  by

  JOHN BOWEN

  For

  HOWARD

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 The People Concerned

  2 Going Home

  3 Town and Country

  4 More Conversation than Pictures

  5 A Wet Week-End

  6 A Holiday Abroad

  7 Home and Out

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  The People Concerned

  The Colonel

  Colonel Baker, taking his usual solitary afternoon walk, was caught in a summer cloudburst. He was on the open moor; there were no trees nearby for shelter. But the Colonel did not mindtherain. He pulled his plastic mac from the baggy pocket of his old tweed jacket, unfolded it, and put it on. He pulled his old tweed hat further down on his head, planted his stick more firmly on the ground, and strode on through the heavy rain. The water poured from the brim of his hat onto the shoulders of his plastic mac. As he walked, tiny individual drops were thrown back into the air from his moustache. Colonel Baker always went for a walk on the moors by himself in the afternoon. He covered ten miles or so in a circular tour, and was home by tea-time.

  On the high ground of the moor, the raindrops came together into trickles that filled every declivity of the rock and brown earth. These trickles ran downwards until they found some trench or gulley or gutter in the earth, when they would combine again, running together along this new path, spilling out for a while when the gulley came to an end, then back to some new combination in the waters of a small and temporary stream, and so on until eventually they joined the course of one of the three rivers which rose in the moor. Colonel Baker, reaching the stepping-stones which were set across one of these rivers, found that the water had covered them, and had to take shelter after all until the water subsided and he could cross. The cloudburst lasted for about twenty minutes. Then the rain stopped, the trickles ran dry again or turned to puddles, the level of the water in the river fell, and Colonel Baker crossed the stepping-stones to the other side.

  The ground was wet and shining after the rain. The Colonel noticed the clarity of the colours around him, and smelled the wet earth. What he had once taken for granted was now, in these years of his retirement, something to be noticed, appreciated, and noted down in his Nature Diary. He left the river bank, and cut up the side of a steep field. Reaching the top, he climbed over a wooden gate set in the hedge, and saw the village below him. Thatch and slate roofs were scattered about a church. That was the village as it used to be, and to it was added the new brick of council houses and the corrugated roof of a garage. Perhaps a mile from the church was a group of three cottages, one deserted, one the week-end retreat of a celebrated novelist, the third his own. Even at this distance he could distinguish his television aerial. It was the only one in the village.

  *

  At the outbreak of the 1939–45 war, Colonel Baker had been in command of a battalion of infantry. Like many other forthright people, he had been shamed by Britain’s part in the Munich agreement, alarmed and disgusted at the stories which came out of Nazi Germany. The Colonel did not share the anti-Semitism of some of his colleagues, and, as an unthinking humanist, he had guided his life on the principle that most human beings were fundamentally decent chaps. All that he heard of the German dictatorship outraged him, and he went through the preliminary stages of training and equipping with a sense of mission. Then, when embarkation orders for his battalion had actually been received, his superiors decided that Justin Baker was too old for an active command. He was promoted from Lieutenant-Colonel to full Colonel, kept semi-employed for a while in a number of administrative jobs, and then sent to India in 1941 as the Commandant of an Officers’ Training Camp. He remained there until the end of the war, and was shortly afterwards retired. He returned to his home and to the years of retirement that stretched in front of him, to find that his three sons had grown up, his wife had grown away, and that there was as little place for him in his own family as there had been in his regiment, once the fighting began.

  At first, he had attempted to resume the intimacies of marriage. He noticed that his wife was more flaccid than he remembered, and that nowadays she neglected to shave under her arms. He made all at once the discoveries that usually come gradually during a marriage and are swallowed up by habit, not only the physical differences between husband and Wife, but all the little irritating tricks of speech and behaviour. The Colonel noticed these things, but he put them out of his mind, prepared to let habit take over again. But the noticing was not all on one side, and his wife was more prepared to hurt his feelings than he was to hurt hers. “Your flatulence is disgusting, Justin,” she said. “Besides it keeps me awake at night.” So, after the first week of his return, Mrs. Baker slept in the double bed alone, and the Colonel had a cot in his own room.

  Of their three sons, Henry (sixteen years old in 1939) had already grown up, married and made a home of his own. Henry was now in a bank in Bombay, whence his wife wrote a blue air-letter once a week to Mrs. Baker, a real family letter about how the children were growing. Julian, the second son, had been at Oxford when the Colonel returned, while Charles, the third, was a conscript doing his National Service. Julian now worked in an advertising agency, Charles for a small trade paper with offices in Holborn. Julian was married, and lived in Putney; Charles had a room in Holland Park. Neither came back very often to their parents’ cottage in Devonshire; it was too far away for a casual visit.

  Left alone together, the Colonel and Mrs. Baker had settled into a routine. At seven-thirty every morning, the Colonel would get out of bed, go downstairs, boil a kettle, and make tea. While he was waiting for the kettle to boil, he would smoke a cigarette. He would set a tray, put the woollen cosy on the teapot, take two biscuits from the tin and place one on each saucer. When the tea was made, he would carry the tray upstairs to his wife’s room. He would put it down on her bedside table, kiss her quickly on the cheek, say, “Good morning, old girl” or “Good morning, my dear” or “Good morning, Teresa”, and go over to the window to draw back the curtains. Mrs. Baker would sit up in bed, and pour out two cups of tea, milk first. Then the Colonel would sit on the bed for twenty minutes or so, and they would both drink their tea, usually, after a remark about the weather, in silence. Then the Colonel would dress, and (in winter) rake out the ashes of the living-room fire and lay a new one, while Mrs. Baker prepared the breakfast, which was eaten in the kitchen.

  From breakfast to lunch time, Colonel Baker worked in the garden while Mrs. Baker worked in the house, or went into the village to shop. All in their season the Colonel dug and planted, mowed the lawn, raked the gravel, clipped the hedges, made bonfires, pruned, transplanted, staked. In the summer he wore his old tweed hat against the sun, and the sweat ran down the back of his neck, and dripped off his nose. In winter the hat was damp with rain, and he plodded about in rubber boots, corduroy trousers and an old jacket patched with leather. When the weather would not allow him to work in the garden, or there happened to be nothing to do (but this was seldom), he fretted about the house trying to settle to the newspaper. Lunch marked the end of the morning. After lunch he went for his usual afternoon walk, and Mrs. Baker retired upstairs for her usual afternoon nap. In the evenings, she watched television while he read a book, tinkered with the household accounts, or made entries in the Nature Diary he had been keeping for the past five years. Sometimes whole evenings would pass without their needing to speak to one another.

  The Bakers did not own a car, so they could not often go out in the evenings. Mrs. Baker went to church on Sundays; Colonel B
aker attended the infrequent meetings of the district Conservative Association. Usually on these occasions they were called for. They could have afforded a small car, but they would have had to buy it out of capital, and both of them were frightened by the idea of “dipping into capital”. The cottage, although freehold and on a very low rate, was expensive to maintain. Their living costs were kept down by the produce of the garden and the chicken-house, but the Colonel’s pension was sometimes stretched thin. A prolonged visit by one of the boys, the Nursing Home expenses when Teresa needed to have most of her teeth extracted, rethatching—all these eventualities were likely to prove a bit of a strain on the old housekeeping. Of course the Colonel’s life was insured, and the payments made regularly through Grindlay’s. Teresa would be perfectly all right on her own when he kicked the bucket.

  Now the sun was out again, and the earth steamed after the rain. The end of the Colonel’s afternoon walk had been spoiled by flies and sweat. Punctually by four-thirty he had reached his own garden gate again.

  There was the front garden, and the cottage beyond it. The lawn was neat, and free from weeds. No plantains flourished there, no dandelions, no moss. It was a model lawn, grown from seed not sod. Every year, regular in their seasons, the flowers appeared. This was not just a Spring garden, not a Summer garden, not an Autumn garden, but a garden for all the flowering year. After the snowdrop came the crocus, the daffodil, the narcissus, the dwarf hyacinth, the tulip, the gladiolus, all from bulbs planted to plan. The garden was sweet with lavender and roses, with honeysuckle and stock. Sweet-pea, pinks and carnations, dahlias, marigolds, nasturtiums, red-hot poker and at last the heavy-headed bronze chrysanthemums—all flourished. Behind the house in the vegetable garden potatoes grew and onions, french beans, runner beans, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts and broccoli, peas, radishes, parsley, chives, mint and rhubarb. There was one veteran apple tree and six youngsters, brought in a truck from Topsham. There was a plum tree and a pear, and an almond, and close to the far hedge an old mulberry tree flourished and dropped its fruit. Tomatoes under glass, raspberry canes, sweet corn, black and red currant bushes, the new climbing strawberries, the vine against the sunny wall, they were a tribute to his skill and patience, and why on earth did he bother? Why bother? He looked across the lawn to the thatched roof and white-washed walls of the cottage, to the upstairs, the downstairs, the outside privy, the toolshed and to his lady’s chamber. Why bother? All was in order, all right and tight and weatherproof, reclaimed from wilderness and dry rot, from rats in the well and warped joists and the wilderness of scrub and weed that used to be the garden. And now here it was, the value of the property much increased, all trim and cared for, with hot and cold running water and the electric, and what on earth was the point of it all? He held the freehold, but who would inherit? For whom did he labour? None of his sons would live here after him. When he was dead, and Teresa was dead, or had moved to Knightsbridge or Bournemouth, none of their blood would succeed them. All this work—it did not make anything that survived; it was work for work’s sake, useless. He would do better to let the whole place go to seed again; at least the poor sod who took it over would have something to do, a way of passing the time.

  It was time for tea. And then at six o’clock, Mrs. Baker switched on the television set. They were just within the range of the I.T.A., and the set had been adapted to receive both channels. The evening wore on. A variety programme ended, and Somebody’s Half Hour began; this meant that one group of people singing popular songs and telling jokes was succeeded by a different group of people with the same songs and the same jokes. Harpic! Harpic! the television set sang, The sign of a clean, clean home! On one channel there was a twenty-five minute American film about the F.B.I., to be followed by another twenty-five minute American film about cowboys. On the other there was a play about a rather nice middle-class family living in the country. Except that they seemed to have a great deal more money, and a number of servants, and the children stayed at home, they were a family like the Bakers. The play had been a great success when it was first produced in 1928, and Mrs. Baker remembered it. She saw it again. At nine the Bakers had a light supper; the dishes would be washed up next morning. By ten thirty, Mrs. Baker had turned over to the commercial channel again. Sleep sweeter; Bourn-Vita! it said. Colonel Baker took the hint, and went up to bed. About an hour later television broadcasting was over for the night, and Mrs. Baker went to bed also.

  Charles Baker

  Some two hours after the cloudburst on the moor, Charles Baker left his office, and was merged in the crowd of people converging on Holborn underground station. All over the City and the West End of London, the day’s work was over, and the people began to come out of the offices and shops, spilling out on to the pavements of the squares and side-streets. But the side-streets and the borders of the squares were like the declivities in the earth of the moor. They acted only as conduits down which the people flowed, first in trickles, then coming together in a flood, into the main thoroughfares of Piccadilly, Oxford St., Regent St., the Charing Cross Road, the Strand, and Kingsway. The people did not combine easily as the water did, but were like insects, some brightly coloured, some cumbered with loot and homework, jostling and jockeying as they flowed first into the tributaries, then into the main streams, where their numbers grew more dense, as they covered the crossings or were penned by shop windows on the one side, by constantly lengthening bus queues on the other. The entrances to the various stations of the London Underground were at this time collecting points for the crowds of people, and there they piled up like jetsam, obstructing the pavements almost altogether. Like jetsam they collected at the mouths of the Underground, like jetsam packed together they moved slowly down to the booking halls, and there, like jetsam at a sudden widening of the stream, they were momentarily dispersed. Some, who held season tickets, had time to breathe a while before joining another clot at the entrance to the escalators. Others stood in line at the ticket office, while still others fumbled for small silver before the ticket-vending machines. At certain special stations little side-streams of knowledgeable persons used the back stairs, running off from the mainstream of those who were borne passively down the escalators, only to join them again on the platforms below. There, eastbound and westbound, northbound and southbound, Piccadilly, Central District, Northern and Bakerloo, they awaited the arrival of trains which were said to run every three minutes.

  There they waited, lining the edges of the platforms, picking out spots where the train, when it arrived, would be least crowded, or where at their journeys’ ends they might expect to find themselves close to the way out, to be first in the fresh rush and jostle towards the air. All the time, the escalators carried more and more of them to the platforms, until the trains arrived to thin them out again. It was a process as regular as the breathing of an animal, but during rush hour on the London Underground the animal is under strain, and its breathing may become irregular. Such a thing happened this evening at Holborn, where Charles Baker waited for a Central Line train to carry him westwards. Such a thing, such a little thing—instead of three minutes between trains, there were six. The crowd on the platform grew denser and denser, and there were many more people than the train, when it arrived, could hold. And then of course it was already full. There had been other crowded platforms at St. Paul’s, Chancery Lane and the Bank, all subjected to the same delay. Then, although there would be another train soon enough—perhaps within only two minutes instead of three—the people on the platform began to push and struggle to get in. Some of those who had arrived in the train wanted to get out; some who wished to leave it at the next station crowded the doors and would not move. “Let them out first, please,” the coloured conductress cried, and, “Pass further down the car,” but nobody heeded her. There were sudden spurts of anger. An old workman, wishing to change to the Piccadilly Line, butted his way through the jostling, surging people. “Mind the doors,” the conductress cried.
The people squeezed and pushed at each other in the heat and sweat. Women found perspiring hands crushed against their breasts. Schoolboys guarded their private parts with satchels of books. The doors of the train closed slowly. Somewhere a man was half in, half out. There was a squeeze, a wriggle, a, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” but his arm was stuck. The train could not start until the doors were properly closed. Slowly the doors opened again. One man was ejected, and four more got in. The train started, still further delayed by the commotion.

  Inside, it was all crush and nervous excitement, with no room to read newspapers or books. Those due to get off at the next station, who had not already found places for themselves near the doors, now tried to push their way up the crowded aisles. “Stop pushing, can’t you? There’ll be plenty of time when we get there.” Two men, trapped face to face, avoided meeting each other’s eyes. Unnoticed in a corner, a timid girl found the elbow of an Irish labourer pressed into her mouth; her embarrassment and his strong body-smell combined to induce in her a sort of paralysis, so that she was carried past her stop. At every fresh station until the residential districts of Lancaster Gate and Queensway, fresh crowds of people tried to board the train, pushing and insinuating their bodies into spaces that seemed already to be entirely filled.

  Charles Baker, his briefcase between his legs, one elbow propped against a partition, suddenly said to himself in simple astonishment, “But why am I hurrying?” For how could it possibly matter to him, who lived in a two-room basement flat in a dingy street between Westbourne Grove and Holland Park Avenue, whether he caught this train, or the next, or the next, or any train at all in an evening that stretched, like so many of his evenings, emptily in front of him? Nobody was expecting Charles back. Nobody would have tea ready for him. Nobody would say, “What shall we do this evening? Shall we go out, or just stay home and read?” Charles lived alone, as so many people do in London, and the leisure hours for him were far more to be dreaded than the easy work-filled days when he had something to do.