by S. T. Haymon
Ma gerto o ca!
I came to St Awdry’s by appointment, in the afternoon, with permission to stay the night. Waiting outside Chicken’s cottage was a Ford truck, open at the back, a real old tin lizzy. One side of the bonnet was folded back and Chicken was bending over the engine fiddling with something inside. When he saw me prop my bike against the wall under Mrs Fenner’s front window he came over to me, wiping his hands on an oily rag and moving with that balletic grace which always lifted my spirits. He put one of his hands on my shoulder, leaving an oily mark, of which I was glad. It was the equivalent of going through Customs and getting a stamp on one’s luggage.
I lifted my pyjamas and my toothbrush and toothpaste out of the bicycle basket and took them into the Fenners’ cottage, together with some jam and biscuits my mother had sent as a present. Only Ellie was in, her mother, she said, being off to cut osiers over Horsford way.
Poor Mrs Fenner! This intimation of her hard labour tempered my joyous anticipation of the afternoon ahead. Only once had I gone with her to cut osiers because there was little a child could do in the osier plantations other than bundle the whippy willow shoots up in twenty-fives, tied round with a strand of raffia, as the trade required. The osiers were cut with very sharp knives which invariably, however practised the cutters were, cut more than willow. The time I accompanied Mrs Fenner a woman had cut off the entire top joint of her thumb. The foreman had poured iodine over the stump, told the woman to wrap it round with her handkerchief, and sent her off, unaccompanied, to walk the two miles to the bus stop, to catch the bus into Norwich and the Norfolk and Norwich Casualty.
My joy was further tempered by the sight of Ellie who was, for once, dressed up, which could only mean she was coming with us. She wore a straw hat trimmed with poppies and a clean cotton dress of which little was visible below her long brown cardigan that, buttoned from neck to hem, made explicit without mercy her large breasts and the rolls of flesh which padded her stomach and thighs. She had on white ankle socks under white sandals that had actually been gone over with Blanco, and she so obviously thought she was the cat’s whiskers that, almost, she was. For the first time I understood how her family could think her beautiful.
If I was sorry to have Ellie along, it was obviously as nothing to the way she felt about being lumbered with my company. It was her idea that I ride outside in the back of the truck, not the cab, and when Chicken tossed the suggestion aside as daft, she went into one of her sulks, hunching herself up on the lorry bench as close to the door as possible, so as to get away from me, the pig in the middle.
Chicken appeared to notice nothing of this lack of goodwill between his passengers. He drove out of Salham St Awdry singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as lustily as even PC Utting could have wished, even if his catalogue of things made by the good Lord differed in several particulars from the list provided in the English Hymnal. His good humour was irresistible. Ellie began to giggle, which was of itself so remarkable that I even began to like her, for the time being at least.
The day had arranged itself to complement our mood. The sun shone, mellow September. Most of the corn was reaped and standing in stooks. In some fields the ploughmen and their horses were already hard at it, their shadows lengthening in the westering light. Sheep had been turned on to some of the stubbles, to tread the straw and their dung into the ground, readying it for another harvest. The hedges were bright with rose hips and shiny with blackberries, the horse chestnuts yellowing; their fingered leaves, the first to come and the first to go, hung up like bananas that in another day or so would be ripe for eating.
We drove east, our backs to the sun, out of the safe country of St Awdry’s into the marshlands, north of those I had crossed with May Bowden on our trip to Yarmouth. We turned off the main road into an area of dykes and rivers and roads that grew steadily narrower, petering out at last in an unmetalled track with a rib of green along its centre. The flatness of the land was astonishing – not because it was flat, but because it was not flatter, not caved in altogether beneath the weight of the enormous sky. The drainage mills which stood about the vast green expanse looked heroic but doomed for daring to be vertical in such a landscape. By the time we reached our destination and got down from the truck on to a small concrete standing heaped with poke nets and sacks, it seemed an impertinence not to go on all fours.
We had come to visit Grig, an eel-catcher who, as Chicken told us, was an old friend from back when. Years later I learned that Grig was no more a real name than was Chicken. It was the name of a young eel.
Grig was not young: short, with bandy legs and great breadth of shoulder, so that at first sight he looked frighteningly simian, until you took in the weatherbeaten face, severe but benign, lit by eyes the colour of moleskin and topped by a thatch of yellow-white hair.
He lived in a tar-papered shack adjacent to a drainage mill which had fallen into ruin but still retained its skeletal sails, its air of defying the fates. When Chicken introduced Ellie and me he nodded pleasantly enough, but said nothing. Even to his old friend Chicken he spoke only a sentence or two: and Chicken, respecting his silence, or perhaps the silence of the place, himself became, for once, a man of few words.
We were clearly expected. The table in the one room of the shack was set with crockery for four. Besides bread and jam there was a fruit cake on a white paper doily and a basin filled with jellied eels. Except for the bed in one corner, the room, so far as furnishings were concerned, had a lot in common with Opposite the Cross Keys save that it smelled of fish instead of the Fenner pot-pourri, and was shining clean.
We sat down to tea at once, and ate our meal in amicable quiet broken only by the sound of chewing and supping and by an explosion of outraged surprise from Grig when I refused a helping of eels. I had never been offered them before, and nothing then – or since, for that matter – could convince me they were edible.
‘Wha’s up wi’ the bloody gal?’ Grig demanded of Chicken.
‘Barmy,’ was the soothing explanation. ‘Lives on love an’ moonshine. Don’t mind her!’
Grig, unappeased, eyed me sternly.
‘Eighty-seven year,’ he declared, striking his chest. ‘Eighty-seven last Whit Monday. You want to live eighty-seven year, gal?’
It seemed a long time to which to commit oneself offhand. I faltered that I hadn’t actually thought about it.
‘Then think about it now, an’ sup your eels! What else you think’s kept me goin’ all that time?’
I took another look at the grey chunks suspended in mucus and made up my mind.
‘I don’t think I really want to live as long as that, thank you.’
The eel catcher turned away in disgust.
‘Barmy’s right,’ he agreed with Chicken, before reassuming his mantle of silence. ‘Barmy as a barn door.’
After that inauspicious episode it seemed strange to find myself in a boat with Grig, just the two of us, moving in perfect companionship along the dyke, en route to a rendezvous with some tench who – the eel catcher had it on the authority of his long experience – would, at that very moment, between dusk and dark, be spawning. Our quarry was not that dreary fish itself, but the eels who also had their sources of information and would be forgathering to feed on the spawn.
‘Watch out fer bubbles,’ Grig commanded.
Anxious not to disturb our new accord, I strained my eyes to pierce the skim of mist which hung over the water like dust on old mahogany. The reason I was back in the eel catcher’s good graces was the ball of wool which, upon Chicken’s mysterious insistence, I had brought with me from Norwich in my blazer pocket.
When, thus prompted, I had asked Maud for some wool, she had countered with the sniff which was her usual response to all such requests.
‘I know you! Knit two, purl two, drop two, an’ then you can’t be bothered.’
‘Not for me,’ I came back with guile. ‘For Chicken.’
That, naturally, was different; and upon
my assurance that Chicken had said any old wool would do provided it was strong enough, I was handed a pair of my father’s old socks to unravel. Maud, in her so-called idle moments, was never without a tube of worsted divided between four thin steel needles upon which she knitted sturdy if inelegant socks for my father and her own, for Tom and Charlie and her latest love, who did not always last out until the heel was turned, in which case the socks went elsewhere. Only Alfred, who liked silk socks with fancy designs, refused Maud’s knitted offerings. It gave me a funny feeling to undo those old socks, the crinkled yarn unwinding round by round, so many hours of Maud’s life, the needles clicking. It was as if I were unravelling time itself.
Grig had been delighted with his gift. He had tossed the ball gently from one calloused hand to the other.
‘That’ll make a good old number o’ bobs,’ he said. I was too shy to ask what he meant.
The reason there were only two of us in the narrow, flat-bottomed boat which Grig, using a quant – a kind of punt pole, only shorter and with a thick cap at the end to stop it getting stuck in the mud – propelled along the dyke with the secrecy of a Red Indian paddling his canoe through the Everglades, was that Ellie had flatly refused to take part in the expedition and Chicken, obviously against his inclination, had volunteered to stay behind and keep her company. Ellie, in an unaccustomed burst of eloquence, had let it be known that she didn’t hold with water (something I had long suspected). Water drowned you dead. If God had meant people to go on water he’d have made them so’s they could walk on it, like Jesus.
Chicken winked at me and said, ‘Hear that, gal Sylvie? Tha’s one less we won’t have to make room for, when my boat’s launched.’
My heart leapt at his words, and I went off happily with Grig, a prospect I might otherwise have found daunting; eager to demonstrate that, so far as I was concerned, water was my natural element.
The mist had thickened. We sat, in the boat, up to our waists in it. When it reaches the top of our heads, I thought, we shan’t be here at all: only the mist and the water, the tench spawning, the eels eating.
I summoned up courage to ask Grig if he had known Chicken long.
‘A fair old time.’
Pressing on: ‘Then you must know his real name.’
The astonished look on the eel catcher’s face was without artifice.
‘His name’s Chicken!’ Then he held up a thick finger for silence. We had come to the bubbles.
Grig fished under the seat and brought out a rust-pocked tin which had once contained Pat-a-Cake biscuits. Enough of the label – an obese infant having its hands clapped together by a besotted mum – was left for me to recognize it. The tin’s contents, however, were not what I might have expected.
The eel catcher prised off the lid and took out a couple of eel-bobs: worms by the dozen, pink and orange and brown, pierced through and threaded on to thick wool, crinkly like my ball, except that this was grey and mine a heather mixture. Working deftly despite his misshapen hands, Grig weighted the ghoulish contraptions and attached them to short lines. Then he offered one to me. When I flinched away from the hideous object he pressed it gently nearer, until I had to take it for fear of the worms touching my face.
‘It won’t bite, gal!’ he urged in a hoarse whisper, so as not to alert the fish. ‘Do as I do an’ you’ll see something! Jest don’t let go, now, no matter what.’
Taking a firm hold on the line, the worms wriggling fruitlessly among the coiled wool, he dropped his bob over the side. It was barely in the water before the eels, who could not have thought all that much of tench spawn, began biting. They threshed the surface in a convulsion of greed.
Catching their excitement, I too let down my line. Almost instantly it became heavy with the weight of eels. As they bit into the worms their hateful, hacksaw teeth became tangled up in the wool. No wonder Chicken had stipulated it had to be strong! What an end for my father’s socks!
‘Pull the line in quick,’ came Grig’s calm injunction. ‘They’ll saw themselves free afore you can get ’em.’ Following his own advice he jerked his line out of the water, the bob a tangle of coils, grey and dirty yellow.
In the middle of the boat was a sturdy box with a hinged lid, propped open, half-full of water. Grig lowered his bob over this container and, with a strong twist of the line, dislodged several of the eels so that they fell into the receptacle provided for them, some going to their doom with the ends of worms hanging down from the sides of their mouths. He produced a pair of nail scissors, something out of a ladies’ manicure set, and with meticulous care, avoiding the questing teeth, cut free the eels that wouldn’t let go of the bob. They slithered down into the box looking even more revolting than the ones which had preceded them, with strands of grey wool hanging down on either side mandarin-fashion, and slitty, evil eyes like something out of Victorian melodrama.
‘What yer waitin’ for, gal?’
I raised the bob out of the water, full of wriggling serpents. I felt at once nauseated, frightened and excited: powerful beyond measure. There was no sport in the pastime. The eels positively struggled to be caught. One might have fancied them eager to make an end of the slime of life if it hadn’t been for their equal frenzy, once they were in the boat, to get back to it.
We kept at our deadly game until we had used up all the bobs in the Pat-a-Cake tin, and until the wooden chest was full to overflowing. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain just above my sandal strap. One of the overflow, writhing on the floorboards, had taken a piece out of my ankle.
Grig broke into the loudest noise I had ever heard from him, and slapped his thigh. ‘Now you’re a real eel catcher, gal!’
When we got back to the little staithe, Grig bolted down the lid of the wooden chest, hauled it out of the boat and fastened it with ropes to two poles driven into the dyke bank. He adjusted the ropes until the chest hung just below the surface. I saw that it had holes in the sides, too small for the eels to escape through, large enough to let the water flow in and out again. Once a week, the eel catcher told me, a bloke from Yarmouth came along with his boat to collect the catch.
‘We didn’t do too bad. Reckon I’ll owe you a bit, gal.’
I protested that he owed me nothing, that it had been great fun. At my choice of noun his friendliness drained away.
‘Fun!’ he snorted.
Chicken and Ellie were sitting at the table exactly as we had left them. They had lit the lamp, a lantern really, the kind used to warn of road-works ahead. It possessed none of the lovely glow of the lamp at Opposite the Cross Keys. The two looked fed up, I thought. Probably bored stiff with waiting for us. I was ashamed for them to see that none of the tea things had been cleared away. Ellie with her hat on, all ready to go, looked sloppy. The buttons on her cardigan were buttoned up wrongly.
Grig got out some ointment and smeared it on my eel bite. The ointment smelled of fish but was wonderfully soothing. Then he picked up a bulging sack out of a corner, handed Chicken an empty bucket, and the two of them went outside, the contents of the sack clanking. They returned presently, empty-handed.
Chicken said to Grig in his mocking way, ‘You better tell this bloody mauther what’s in the sack or she’ll be dropping off at the first police station to report we bin thieving.’
Grig was kinder. ‘She’d never do that – would you now?’ And when I shook my head dumbly: ‘There, then! Tin’t nothin’, anyways, but some ole brass bits an’ pieces I picked up here an’ there, nobody wanted, an’ Chicken reckoned’d do fer his boat. Bin glad to find somebody take it off my hands.’
Chicken supplemented, ‘That and some o’ them eels you caught. Ma Fenner ’ll make a lovely stew. You can tell her you bin in the Garden of Eden today and brought her back the ruddy serpent.’
‘Mrs Fenner!’ I corrected him, automatically: but a smile followed immediately after, because what he said was true. I had been in the Garden of Eden that day. If that meant you had to bring Satan back home with you, it was a
small price to pay.
Chapter Twenty-one
It was a sweet, long-drawn-out autumn that year. Nothing in a hurry, not even winter. The leaves fell off the trees slowly, one by one. As the days shortened, I was less and less in St Awdry’s. Although my bike now possessed a fine battery lamp in place of the old carbide one, I wasn’t allowed to ride out after dark, not along unlit roads anyway. I would sit in St Giles, doing my homework in the kitchen where it was warm and fortifying snacks were at hand, wondering how Chicken was managing in the poor light.
So far as the boat’s progress was concerned, my absence or presence at Opposite the Cross Keys made not the slightest difference. My delight in its building was purely aesthetic: I was not allowed to have anything to do with its making. I didn’t feel angry over this, because the Fenners weren’t allowed either. It was as if Chicken, who in every other field of endeavour manipulated us all like puppets made to dance to his tune, in this, the supreme effort of his life, had made a vow that the boat was to be the exclusive product of his own labour, his own cleverness, his own dream.
I sat in the kitchen, my exercise books spread out in front of me, whilst, across the table, Maud knitted socks for her latest love – a widower who handed out tracts on the Market Place telling you to repent while there was still time – and pondered aloud the pros and cons of a winter or a spring wedding. Of all her so-called suitors, the widower alarmed me, both because he seemed to have a say in who went to heaven and who to hell, and because, as he was so religious, I was afraid he couldn’t be wooing Maud just for the Woodbines and the Dairy Milk, like all the others.
Raising my head from my long division, I asked, ‘Would you really rather live with Mr Roberts than go on living here with us?’
