Will

by Christopher Rush

  ‘Keeps life lively.’

  Stratford was also women: milchers, churners, gardeners, cooks, nurses, midwives, makers of candles and fires, spreaders of beds and floors, tellers of stories and household accounts, spinsters, weavers, butchers, bakers, brewers and hewers and drawers of water, they grew herbs and stuffed rabbits and jugged hares, they ploughed and sowed, reaped and mowed, dressed salads and corpses, served men on their feet and knees by day and on their backs by night. Beasts of burden in the social scheme and brood mares in the old eye of heaven, they lay down for us from the very beginning and stood up straight when we were prostrated by love, illness or death. White brides, black widows, and wearers of all colours and callings in between, they were the mainstay and mystery of our lives. And that too was my Stratford.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Stratford was a twenty-minute walk encircling two hundred houses and fifteen hundred folk. Seven hundred of them poor folk, if you want to see it with a social squint, some of them lacking parents, spouses, jobs, legs, arms, eyes. Roger Asplyn had four motherless children who along with their father were all whipped for begging, including fourteen-year-old Cycely who was blind but had been driven out by the corporation. A blind and motherless child. That was Stratford.

  ‘A nice picture.’

  Or Stratford was ten hamlets making up a parish. Stratford if you care to play on the word, was streets. And a river. Chapel Lane, Sheep Street, Bridge Street, all coming up from the water, a half right turn at the top of Bridge Street taking you up Henley Street, on the north side of which I was born, with the fields sweeping in like the sea to my feet, along the Guild Pits and into our back gardens. Green fields like a green bible. And Stratford was houses. In the poorer ones the strewn rushes went untouched for years, woven with shit and spit, fishbones and puke, the leakages of dogs and the siftings of the human epidermis. Otherwise it was cracked flagged floors, Wilmcote limestone and limewashed thatches, houses like timbered ships drifting effortlessly through time, built to last the tug of centuries and tides of change. Old black beams with the curves of the forest in them, passing like waves along the white plastered walls, and penthouses pulled like hats over the beetle brows, shading the petty paces and ferret eyes of the sad little traders underneath, the ones who kept their souls in their pockets and would bring them out for a bargain.

  Whereas, for those who wore their souls proudly like plumed hats and swords, Stratford was its church. And for the desperado legging it up that long avenue of limes, the heart of Stratford was the all-precious sanctuary knocker, one touch of which, before the arm of the law could reach him, meant despised life for another thirty-seven days at least, if sanctuary was to be observed. It wasn’t always respected. The scene on the Guild Chapel walls, where Thomas à Becket’s once unstoppable blood ran down, had reminded everybody before I was born that even a churchman in a church could be hacked down like a pig if the breath of kings dictated. But we were all Beckets, all liable for the chop, and the Puritans had stopped his blood with bucket and brush. On another of the Chapel walls, lurking under the whitewash, a devil shook an axe at a bunch of terrified sinners, hustled into hell for their eternity of pain. They were starting day one of a stretch that knew no end of days. ‘They didn’t look like thieves and murderers,’ muttered old Henry, ‘some of them were even children’ – and that was the frightening thing for me. And that again was Stratford, as were the duckings of shrews to make them dulcet-tongued –

  ‘A lovely thing in woman.’

  The pillory, the stocks, the nailed ears, slit noses and the bloody backs of whipped whores, fucked by their whippers the night before. And your dulcet woman quickly develops a tongue with a tang.

  ‘Nothing changes.’

  It was fires and floods, spittle and stew on the rushes, beer stains and bones, the screeching of women and pigs, blood on the Rothermarket block, blood in the childbed and the deathbed, dripping nipples, and white stiff bundles of stillborn joy, hurried out of the house and under the daisy-decked bedcovers of the churchyard, safe away from limbo, with worms for chambermaids, and owls for wise uncles and the Avon crooning its cradle songs in their deaf ears, while the whole earth, a crib and a coffin, rocked imperceptibly among the stars.

  ‘It’s taking shape – unlike your will.’

  Add the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, cold palsies, lethargies, gravel in the back, dirt-rotten livers, raw eyes, wheezing lungs, bladders with abscesses, sciaticas, lime-kilns in the palm, insufferable bone-ache, itches and vomitings and general leprosy. Add that and you almost have Stratford.

  ‘I think we’re there.’

  No, wait, there’s worse. Include the cures – the webs of spiders and fried mice, the viper’s flesh, poultice of swallows’ nests, dung and all, boiled in oil of chemomel and lilies, beaten with white dogs’ turds, water of frog-spawn, powder of earthworms, shavings of ivory, fume of horse hoofs, and the white of old henshit stirred up in white wine.

  ‘And that’s just the tasty ones?’

  Try hedgehog’s testicles, powdered, for pissing the bed. Or if you’re pissing brimstone, powdered crabs’ eyes and the bone in a carp’s head. Or if you can’t piss at all, some choice big lice, introduced into the innermost hole of your prick.

  ‘You’re making me want to piss again.’

  I’m sorry, Francis. Be an asthmatic instead – the lungs of a fox washed in herbs, liquorice and wine. Do you have the quinsy? Try powdered burnt swallow, feathers and all, or some of your own dung, also burnt, with a little honey, and a dry white wine.

  ‘Always the wine. How else could you stomach it?’

  As for the procedures – enforced vomitings, wild bleedings, sudden shittings and pints of heated wine hosed heartily up the arse to cure wind and colic, if you weren’t bleeding or spewing before the cures you’d be spouting torrents afterwards from one end or the other and from orifices you didn’t even know you had. Ill health was hell from the inside: torn-out teeth, pissing red-hot blades, vicious chatterings, bloody fluxes, wastings, and, for victims of violent accident, amputations, with spurting red stumps thrust into hot pitch, enough to cauterise the very soul from the body and stop the heart with shock. As it sometimes did.

  ‘I’ve heard enough.’

  You’re too young to have heard a tithe of it. There was childbed fever, babies strangled before birth with the cords around their necks, swinging in the gallows-womb, babies strangled after birth, ditch-delivered by a drab – and bony young virgins with the greensickness paling daily into memories of themselves, fading out into nothing more than white anonymous daisies scattered on the green earth – remembered voices, soft on the low sad winds.

  ‘Eternal rest grant them, O Lord.’

  On it went. And the best way forward was simply to pray that neither the grim reaper nor the zealous doctor ever crossed your threshold; to keep out damps, draughts and evil company; to say your prayers, and to keep eating salt fish, salt meat, salt sweat for sauce, milk frozen in February and curdled in June. And cheeses – cheese as white as snow is, as endowed with eyes as Argus was, as old as Methusalem might have been, as rough as hairy Esau and as full of whey and weeping as Mary Magdalene and of scabs as spotted Lazarus. Banbury cheeses were best if you deigned to eat white meat, but the old Stratford folk wouldn’t, not if they could eat beef or mutton and veal instead.

  ‘Veal!’

  Or even hares – that nourished melancholy and whose amputated ears brought the trout to the hook by country magic if you had the cunning and the skill. And if you wanted desperately to swim against the cold stream of death and keep your special child alive, you fed him with apricots and dewberries, with purple grapes, green figs and mulberries – unless of course you overfed him and he’d go down with the summer complaint and shit his way quickly into eternity.

  ‘Death by shitting – sweet Jesus!’

  As you say, requiem aeternam. That was the fruity end of the Stratford experience. Whic
h also had its good side. Strawberries swimming in the cream was Stratford in summer, and schoolboys playing in the stream. But it was burnt bacon on black bread in winter, and if all was well some raisins in hot milk for supper.

  ‘This bacon’s the best – and to hell with raisins!’

  Stratford, if you were a man of some substance, meant pewter on the table, a chimney for the fire and a fair skin for females – or it was skin cured like ham for all the family if you could afford only a hole in the roof and food picked from the board with filthy fingers. Stratford was either a bolster or pillow, or it was a good round log for the head that had sore need of sleep and resting – and dreams with hard shutters that banged shut in the morning. It was soft flock, feathers of down, or it was a sack of chaff, a pallet of pricking straw. As in any other place a Stratford sleep was a green sea flecked by the bright white horses of sweet dreams – or it heaved with nightmares, and sharks roamed the blanket of the dark as the brain lay trapped in the wallowing corpse.

  ‘Only if you were a poet.’

  But Stratford was also the relief of morning, with the river a glittering track through fields of light. It was fairs and fairies and festivals, pancakes and simnel cakes and maypoles. It was Shrovetides and Whitsuns and boars’ heads at Christmas. More than anything it was a patchwork of sounds and scents and shapes: the shape of the poor dead hedgehog after the school bullies, those base football players, had finished their game; the shapes of strange crocodiles haunting the long slavering skylines, pretending to be clouds; the shapes of murderers hunched unforgiven in their graves, unsettling the turfs; or murderers still alive, lurking clumsily in the clouds when the west yet glimmered with some streaks of day. Stratford was water and wind in the trees, willow and ash and elm, it was bright birdsong by day, birds brave, unlimed and free, and owls from Athens in night-barns and branches, when the thatch came creepily alive over your head and your ears twitched with the nearness of talon and claw. And Stratford smelled to heaven. There was not rain enough in the sweet heaven to wash it white as snow. It had the primal eldest curse upon it, a rank offence to God, who’d put the carrion birds there, the hawks and kites and buzzards, to prey on garbage and be the cleaners of the world. And always, like antidotes to terror, the swans sailed the river, beautiful silver barges bearing death away.

  ‘I’m all for birds that bear death away. Like your little Alison, for example.’

  She’s a darling. It kept on coming back, though – death – because Stratford was also God.

  ‘Jesus, you say right.’

  And God was a god of death, still invisibly strolling in the cool of the Reformation day, along the narrow corridors of the queen’s compromise. All the same Stratford was obedience, it was having your name taken if you took mass, it was being on a list. It was attendance at the Church of England, fines of twelve pence a week for recusants, rising to a ruinous twenty pounds a month as the Catholic clouds came over the edge of the world and out of the sea, filling the sky – the Paris Massacre, Mary of Scots. And missionary priests that slipped into the country from Douai – the secret soldiers of the devil. An invisible army trained by foreign sovereigns to infiltrate the realm, to corrupt men’s souls to Catholicism and overthrow the Bastard Queen, the Whore of Babylon. She could be killed on the streets by her subjects and the Pope would bless the bloody business. He had absolved them of all allegiance to her and dangled daggers and pardons before their eyes. Pardons in advance. Murder in this case would be a ticket to the Paradiso. And if you asked any of the queen’s ministers for the definition of a Catholic, the answer you’d likely get would be: a traitor.

  ‘Yet she refused to go on the witch-hunt, Will.’

  Even after the scheming schismatics, who attended the accepted services but were known to be church papists, wolves in the fold, flaunting their white fleece. As for those who came out of the closet, proclaiming the dogmas of Rome like braying asses and refusing the Oath of Supremacy – well, even the liberal Elizabeth couldn’t save them. It was impossible – and understandable. Jesuits were underneath your floorboards and behind your walls, quite literally, rats ordained to carry the spiritual plague. And the queen’s rat-catchers went about their work with their hands tied by the very sovereign they were trying to protect. The truth of the matter was that she had some family sympathy for the Catholics, in spite of the frightful record of her dead sister Mary, the fanatic of the flame – and the rumour ran round even in sleepy Stratford that Elizabeth took Mass herself in secret. She was a chip off the old block, Rome ran in her blood, and on the back stairs one virgin whispered to the other, from earth to heaven. Anything’s possible. The flies on the wall would know.

  ‘And where did Stratford stand?’

  Stratford for now was a place of compromise and commonsense, while remaining in the jaundiced eye of government a somewhat ungodly town, on the blind side of the bishop’s diocese. I was put through all the proper motions: learning my Catechism before Evensong on Sundays and Holy Days; attending Matins and Evensong and Holy Communion three times a year; hearing and reading the word of God in the Old and New Testaments from cover to cover, Revelation excepted; singing the Psalms; accepting the exhortations of the Homilies; praying for my Queen against rebellion, civil war, foreign invasion, and all traitors who dared to threaten her and the God-ordained order of all things. Order was what really mattered, knowing your place, not breaking ranks, not stepping out of line. Do that if you dare, take but degree away, untune that string – and hark! What discord follows.

  ‘Hark indeed. And did you?’

  I’d no choice but to hearken, Sunday after homiletic Sunday. I breathed in that philosophy like air, accepted the ideas like stones and stars, that were simply there, put in place by God. Actually a somewhat dull dog in the end, the Lord God, who took his predictable Sunday constitutional, strolling sternly as ever in the easy afternoon, while the children skulked in the bushes, playing doctors and nurses, stealing apples, ignoring order. Don’t touch that cursèd fruit! Do – and there’ll be hell to pay. Literally. Follow my meaning? Follow the line, young Will – and don’t go too near the river. Yes, master.

  ‘Did you some good, though.’

  You’re left with an obsession for order, there’s no escaping that. But you nurture something else as well – a wild admiration for those who break the rules. Who rattle the chain of being and cause chaos among statesmen and stars. These fellows have some soul – so your Satanic instincts whisper in your ear. What, after all, is a life impeccably and merely correct?

  ‘So you cheered on the wicked.’

  Adam and Cain and their kind, who stirred up trouble in the schoolroom, made life more interesting, provoked thought, passed the time, the apple and the axe, and provided the populace with play.

  ‘Which God did not much like.’

  Because God, as you know quite well by now, was also a Stratford schoolmaster, and a Catholic one at that, three in a row, Hunt and Jenkins and Cottam, all Romish, causing great government concern over the daily Catholic corruption sown by such teachers in the minds and souls of Elizabeth’s little innocents.

  9

  ‘Talking of schools, Will –’

  Aha!

  ‘My pen is poised.’

  I wish mine were.

  ‘Leaving anything, by any chance, to the establishment that set you up so solidly?’

  I won’t dignify that question with an answer.

  ‘I thought I’d ask. The King’s School, after all. A scholarship? A deserving child?’

  Not a penny.

  ‘Not well paid, the school master.’

  A corrupter of Protestants, wilfully hired by a Catholic corporation, held sway at the King’s School behind the Guild Chapel, where I started Petty School at five years old, getting up at five in the morning to prepare for the five-minute walk to Church Street. It was a two-minute trot, but even for a snail an eternity wouldn’t have been long enough to postpone the evil hour. I came in under the eagle eye
of the usher, Higges, to learn my alphabet and the penitential psalms, to be initiated into the mysteries of reading and writing from the Primer and Catechism, and to learn how to count. My hornbook was looped about my neck – the cord was too loose and it banged my cold knees all the way. In summer the schoolroom was cool enough, blotting out the sun – and in the winters it was freezing cold.

  ‘Jesu, I remember too.’

  Blowing on our fingers, we hugged our empty stomachs for five frosty hours. Fifteen minutes allowed for mid-morning breakfast – which took fifteen seconds to swallow, after which there was another long wait for the awful meat and coarse black bread that we washed down with sour ale.

  ‘Takes me back.’

  We also swallowed mountains of intellectual grist. Scriptum est: non in solo pane vivit homo – ranted Higges. We’d gladly have lived on less knowledge and more bread – and just a little heat. Talk of hell and I think not of a lake of fire but of that King’s School classroom, heated only by the bodies of small boys and the brief vapour of their breaths.

  ‘Not brief enough for me.’

  To begin with I sat between the master and his assistant, afraid to move the fishmonger slabs that were my feet.

  ‘Keep them still, you useless little shuffler, it is vain for thee to kick against the pricks!’ So Higges would say. Jesus, I couldn’t have kicked if I’d tried, couldn’t even feel my feet after the first hour, and in any case it was the pricks that did the kicking at King’s. After lessons I used to run up and down the town for half an hour just to get a heat on my feet and save my toes from atrophy. I studied many disciplines in Church Street but mostly I studied endurance. By the age of ten I was already an antique Roman.