CONSTABLE AROUND THE GREEN a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain's best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 12)

by Nicholas Rhea

  Fortunately, as I tasted the first mouthful, she went outside to see why the dog was barking and I managed to pour my mugful into a pot of stew which was bubbling over the fire. I had no idea how long the base contents of her stew had been in her terrible pot, but ever afterwards, whenever I called at her farm, I refused her offers of a cup of tea by saying I’d just had a cup elsewhere.

  I do not know whether she thought she was saving money or whether tea was supposed to be made in this manner.

  Whether Betty was mean is open to argument, but we did get tight-fisted characters within the police force. I knew a superintendent who would never buy a newspaper; he would send the cadet out to the newsagents to fetch a Northern Echo and would read it in his office, then send it back to the newsagents with a message saying it was not the edition he wanted. The same fellow once invited a friend and his wife to make up a foursome for a day out in his car; he proposed they toured the countryside in the Yorkshire Dales and so they did, having a most enjoyable time — until the superintendent sent his friend a bill for half the cost of the petrol. And I knew another who calculated the cost of the week’s groceries and then gave his wife that precise amount, even down to halfpennies, thus for one week’s housekeeping she’d be given £8, 15s, 24d and next week, for example, she received £8, 12s, 6d. The same fellow sold his wife the vegetables, which he grew in his own garden — and they were for their own consumption!

  A lady of similar mentality was Mrs Angelica Hastings-Waugh, the wife of Lt Col Pemberton Hastings-Waugh (ret.). They lived in a splendid house with splendid gardens and splendid views, and had lots of splendid friends. The splendid Mrs Hastings-Waugh liked to use the word splendid.

  She drove around in a splendid old Rover motor car, visiting friends for coffee or to play bridge, and she was a member of all the important groups in Aidensfield, such as the Parochial Church Council, the Hunt Committee and the splendid Ashfordly Ladies Luncheon Club, of which she had been chairman several times. She was never short of money and accordingly, was never short of splendid friends, so she did enjoy a busy and rather splendid social life. She was often asked to open things too, like garden fetes, village produce shows, pet shows and a range of similarly splendid events.

  There is little doubt that Mrs Hastings-Waugh regarded herself as a very splendid person, the sort that no self-respecting village should be without, and she always dressed immaculately, even when popping into the shop to buy a jar of jam — the finest and most splendid, of course, the sort one would normally purchase from Harrods. The shop had secured a supply especially for her, such was her splendid taste. And, of course, the lesser ladies bought the same jam, simply because Mrs Hastings-Waugh preferred it. In matters of such grave importance and as an arbiter of good taste, Mrs Hastings-Waugh set the standards which the others tried to emulate.

  In the village, we knew this as the Hastings-Waugh Effect, a mental condition, which was very like the Alexandra Limp. For those not aware of the latter trend in highly regarded social behaviour, this is the story. In the 1860s, Queen Alexandra, who was then the Princess of Wales, developed a slight limp following a minor accident. In a desire to emulate the Princess, the fashionable ladies of the time all developed a similar slight limp; it was considered very fashionable indeed to limp in an identical manner and so the court ladies, and the fashionable creatures of the time, all began to copy the royal limp. It must have been a strange sight, but this oddity became known as the Alexandra Limp.

  In Aidensfield, therefore, the splendid Hastings-Waugh Effect was remarkably similar, being slavishly copied by certain village ladies. The more commercial-minded residents cultivated and nurtured the Effect because, knowing how silly some women can be, they realized they could make money from their behaviour.

  For example, the shopkeepers in places like Ashfordly, Eltering and Strensford were all acutely aware of the Hastings-Waugh Effect; they knew that whenever she bought anything, her disciples would do likewise and so the stores ensured they always had sufficient stocks to supply her ardent followers. Everything from shoes to washing-up powder by way of hats, glossy magazines or lampshades, was kept for those splendid ladies who suffered from the Hastings-Waugh Effect.

  If Mrs Hastings-Waugh purchased a bottle of Fairy Liquid instead of some other ordinary washing-up fluid, then twenty other ladies would do likewise; if she bought a Madeira cake instead of a plain fruit cake or jam sponge, then twenty ladies would want Madeira cakes; if she bought a purple dress with white spots on, so would twenty other ladies, even if they never dared to wear their latest fashion in public.

  But Mrs Hastings-Waugh, sometimes nicknamed Wastings-Hore by the less savoury of local society, had a curious quirk to her own character, one about which few people knew.

  She hoarded freebies. If she went into a restaurant, for example, she would fill her handbag with sugar-lumps because they were free. She would stuff cocktail sticks into her handbag along with paper napkins and uneaten nibbles. She would collect bars of soap from hotel bedrooms, sheets of toilet-paper from the loos, and shoe-cleaning tissues from the polishing place in smart hotels. When, in later years, hotels and restaurants adopted the practice of making use of sachets of sauce, mustard, sugar, salt and pepper, she would collect those, filling her handbag with dozens of them, and later she began to add those small thimble-sized cartons of milk or cream that are given away at motorway service areas with coffee or tea. She took books of paper matches and free samples of anything given away at promotional events, such as new soups, perfumes or soft drinks.

  She practised this mania for years; from time to time long after I left Aidensfield, I would be attending an event at which she and her husband were present, and I always watched her, waiting the time her hands speedily and surreptitiously whipped the freebie from the table and into her handbag with the speed of light. She was an expert at operating unseen, a truly gifted craftsperson, an agile operator with fingers and hands whose movements were rapid enough to qualify as sleight of hand. She could have become a noted card manipulator and I formed the view that she could have been a very successful magician or pick-pocket. For this reason, I found some strange fascination in watching for the moment she struck; it was rather like a viper striking at its prey or trying to see how a conjurer performs a complicated card trick.

  I learned of her passion during an event at Aidensfield. For most ladies, the occurrence would have been a social disaster but it did not appear to embarrass Mrs Hastings-Waugh.

  Aidensfield Women’s Institute had organized a garden fete which was held in the splendidly spacious grounds of Causey House, the home of the Hastings-Waughs. With splendid and expansive views towards the Roman road and the surrounding moorland, the house was magnificently built of local stone with splendid mullioned windows, and it was more like a manorial hall than a mere country house. Its grounds, well kept by two permanent gardeners, offered a splendid setting for the fete.

  And, of course, who should be asked to open it but the splendid Mrs Angelica Hastings-Waugh herself?

  Scheduled to begin at 2 p.m., a serious problem arose because Mrs Hastings-Waugh had a long-standing and very important appointment which could not be broken. It was an appointment with her hairdresser; she had arranged to have her hair restyled at Eltering at 2 p.m. that very day, and so, to accommodate her, the WI altered the time of the opening ceremony to 1:30 p.m. As a consequence, Mrs Hastings-Waugh could perform the necessary ritual with a few well-chosen words and still be in time to honour the hairdresser with her presence. I was at the fete too. I was on duty and patrolling the village to prevent cars blocking the roads; I had to ensure there was room for passage of the emergency services should something dramatic occur, something the public often forgets about when parking.

  As the excited crowd assembled before the elevated stage to await words of wisdom from their goddess, Mr Hastings-Waugh brought her car to the gate, ready for a flying start upon her very important journey and I stood in front of it to prevent an
yone blocking her in. One has to get one’s priorities right in such splendid circumstances.

  Mrs Hastings-Waugh, superbly adorned in her splendid salmon-pink outfit with a broad-brimmed hat, white blouse, matching shoes and large handbag, was fit to grace a royal occasion and, after giving a simply splendid opening address, swept away towards her car.

  Her husband had the engine ticking over, I held the gate open as she swept onward like a galleon in full sail, but just as she reached the car, a little girl appeared from nowhere to present her with a bouquet of flowers. Mrs Hastings-Waugh had rushed off the podium without giving the child her own moment of glory, but the child had had the wit to chase after her and had caught her prey just as she was leaving. Mrs Hastings-Waugh, touched by the gesture, placed her handbag on the roof of the car to leave both hands free as she accepted the flowers; she kissed the child, thanked her profusely and handed the flowers to her husband, saying, “These are absolutely splendid, Henry; do make sure they are placed in water immediately,” and then she settled behind the steering-wheel. I waved her out of the drive and on to the road as the faithful gathering of fete attenders formed behind to cheer loudly as they waved her off — but as she drew away, I realized she’d left her handbag on the roof of the car. She accelerated rapidly along the road as I shouted for her to stop, but I was too late.

  As she drove away, her handbag fell into the village street and burst open to roll along the road. It was a large bag — and from it cascaded hundreds of free packets of sauce and salt, sugar-lumps, books of paper matches, cocktail sticks and bars of hotel soap . . . in seconds, there was a long and somewhat embarrassing trail of her assorted trophies.

  She did stop, however; the shouting of her fans had attracted her attention and she halted the car, climbed out and retrieved her handbag, ignoring the spilt contents. With never a comment nor even a show of embarrassment, she resumed her drive as her followers rushed out to gather up the freebies.

  I thought the moment would have embarrassed her, but apparently it did not. Her devoted followers all rushed out to buy equally commodious handbags and they began to emulate her, filling them with all manner of free gifts — taken from absolutely the right places, of course, all very splendid and the perfect place for ladies of quality to frequent. The Hastings-Waugh Effect was very strong in Aidensfield but for the life of me, I do not know what prompts some women to slavishly copy those whom they regard as leaders.

  The new mass hobby of collecting freebies must have cost the local tradesmen, hoteliers and restaurateurs a fortune in handouts although, on reflection, the Hastings-Waugh adherents must have had to spend money in a wide range of very splendid establishments in order to obtain their splendid freebies.

  Looking back upon the incident, I reckon that, hidden within the depths of the businessmen’s attitude to the Hastings-Waugh Effect, there are distant flashes of rather splendid Yorkshire fiscal wisdom.

  * * *

  Another aspect of meanness manifests itself in certain avid collectors. They will strive to make their collection the finest in the universe even if it is considered trivia by many.

  Such is their ardour, that they will never part with any item of their collection, unless it is to replace it with something of greater rarity or interest. Some collections of what seems trivia, however, do become extremely valuable — collectors of comics, magazines, autographs, photographs, toy cars, bottles, inkwells, beer mats, the work of obscure artists, old books, advertisements and other assorted objects and ephemera can provide fine examples of this. But in Aidensfield, we had a lady whose lifelong passion was her collection of photographs which, over the years, became the object of desire by many local residents and others with commercial leanings. She had collected hundreds of photographs of the Elsinby Flood.

  The Elsinby Flood occurred in July 1893. On the moors behind the village, there was a cloudburst of unbelievably intense ferocity after which a deluge of water rushed from the heights towards Elsinby in the dale below. Along the route, it gathered more water until it was a roaring torrent which became channelled into a gully, ripping trees from the hillsides, moving boulders and carrying before it struggling livestock such as sheep and cattle which had been too late to avoid it. This huge wall of water, more than seven feet deep, hit the village like a tidal wave.

  It demolished several cottages and barns in its path before spreading across the floor of the dale, and soon it was more than five feet deep across almost the entire ground upon which Elsinby stood. The little valley had become a lake of muddy water. Almost the entire village had been made awash beneath five feet of fluid slime; trees, shrubs, mud, boulders and dead livestock filled the village street and most of the houses had floodwater up to chest height.

  This flash flood rivalled the famous floods of Langtoft in the Yorkshire Wolds but the astonishing thing was that no one was killed. A colossal amount of water had accumulated within a matter of minutes but recovery from the devastation took months — it was several days before the water subsided to leave behind a terrible wasteland of thick, stinking mud and debris. Every house in Elsinby suffered the effects; furniture was destroyed, the foundations of houses damaged and farms were mined. One of the few places left untouched was the village school because it was perched on a piece of rising ground and so it escaped the waters. It became a place of refuge for the children until the flood subsided.

  In spite of the trauma, several residents and some incoming sightseers had the foresight to take photographs of the flood, some immediately afterwards and others over the period of drying-out and during the subsequent replenishment of the village and the rehabilitation of its inhabitants.

  The pictures, amateurish, faded and brown in many cases, provided a remarkable record of the disaster, but apart from an article in the local gazette and some features in various magazines, none were published.

  By and large, the photographs were very personal ones and the village people had kept their own photographs as mementoes; some were in home-made frames on cottage walls while others were stored in old bureaux, wardrobes and cupboards. Over the years, as cottages were sold and the occupants moved away or died, so lots of those old photographs were dispersed or sold in auctions. Many got thrown out or handed to relatives who did not particularly treasure them; many were simply misplaced.

  Thanks to the actions of a certain lady, however, many Elsinby photographs did survive. She had the foresight to begin collecting photographs of the flood.

  She was Mrs Beatrice Wintergill of Penwick House, Elsinby, who was born in 1887. She was six when the flood had roared through the village and was one of the children who had witnessed its devastation from the security of the school. She was then called Beatrice Simpson. She had married Arthur Wintergill in 1907 and in 1915, when she was only twenty-eight, Arthur was killed in World War I. The young Mrs Wintergill returned to Elsinby to live with her only child, a son called Thomas who was then five years old. Her husband had left her well provided for and she had no need to earn her own living; money was never a problem.

  Arthur Wintergill had come from a professional and very successful family in Bradford with interests in woollen manufacture, and so, in her new widowhood but with some wealth to her name, she had bought Penwick House. This was a large square house which she remembered as being swamped with water during the flood, and it still stands today, having never since suffered a similar fate.

  Upon her return to live in Elsinby, Beatrice joined in the village life, becoming a parish councillor, a school governor and member of the Parochial Church Council. In addition, she had started to research the flood disaster with the intention of writing an account of it for a local periodical and had to assemble some photographs.

  By 1917, when she was thirty, Beatrice had become an ardent collector of flood photographs, now realizing that if she did not save them, many would be thrown out, lost or destroyed. I did learn that some unknown force compelled her to add to her collection; she seemed to be seeking an elusi
ve picture, but the outcome was that by 1947, she had a most impressive collection, all catalogued and framed. Many of her photographs adorned the walls of her lovely home. She was then sixty but far from retired; her son had gone to Australia to run a sheep farm and she continued to haunt auction rooms, house sales, second-hand shops and other likely places in York, Harrogate, Hull and elsewhere, often locating just one more faded snapshot or photograph of the flood. She never stopped hunting them.

  A comprehensive collection of photographs of the flood had become her life’s work; it had become an obsession in fact, for she scoured the entire country for pictures, having found one in a Brighton antique shop, another in a picture gallery in Birmingham and another in Keswick, tucked into the pages of a guide-book. When I became the village constable at Aidensfield, therefore, Beatrice was approaching her eighties and still hunting Elsinby Flood photographs. In 1967, she reached the age of eighty but was still a sprightly, remarkably fit and very intelligent lady.

  The residents of Elsinby, in recognition of her years of work for the community, decided to honour her with a party in the village hall. The postman, Gilbert Kingston, suggested that the hall also be host to an exhibition of her photographic collection. Hitherto, she had never permitted a public exhibition of her photographs, although she did show them to visitors to her home. They could look, but not touch. She had become a jealous guardian of the collection and had a deep-seated fear that future generations might not care for it in the way that she had. But Gilbert was a persuasive character and even though she said her collection was incomplete, he managed to convince her that the villagers had a right to view these remarkable pictures. And so in July 1967, seventy-four years after the disaster, Elsinby Village Hall Committee staged a party for Beatrice which coincided with an exhibition of her huge collection.