Portrait of Elmbury

by John Moore

  The Wind Blows Cold

  Partly as a result of this epidemic, partly through national and world causes which we knew nothing of, a cold wind of economic depression began to blow through the vale; Elmbury felt it too, the townspeople as well as the country-folk turned up their collars, put their hands in their pockets—and found nothing there. Elmbury had no independent industries; it was simply a market or clearing-house for the produce of the farmers on the one hand and the goods of the industrial cities on the other. It bought corn, cattle, sheep, pigs, eggs, butter and garden produce, consumed them, or distributed them to the big towns; it sold in return agricultural machinery, cars, lorries, cattle-cake and the various domestic goods which its tradesmen obtained from the manufacturers. But eighty per cent of these goods were bought by the farmers and others who got their living from the soil; theirs was the only real purchasing power, because they were the only real producers. In fact Elmbury was a perfect example of a “country-town”; because without the country it would have perished.

  As we have seen, it had no industries that were not directly connected (e.g. flour-milling) with agriculture; it had no considerable population of rentiers, for it was not a residential town, and the retired colonels and rich widows preferred to live in more fashionable places; and it had not yet discovered its one valuable and “invisible” asset, the traffic in tourists, nor was it self-conscious enough, in 1924, to exploit it.

  So when the farmers lacked ready money, there was scarcely a man or woman in Elmbury whose livelihood was not affected. The doctors, the dentists, the vet found that their bills were not being paid; the publicans sold less beer; the ironmonger’s premises remained overstocked with tools and implements which he could not sell; the draper was the poorer because farmers’ wives bought fewer new clothes; grocer, tobacconist, butcher, took less money and had less to spend in their turn; and Mr. Tempest the bank manager received anxious letters from his head office inquiring why so many of his clients’ accounts showed balances in red.

  ’Twas all the fault of the Foot-and-Mouth, people said; and blamed, as usual, the Ministry of Agriculture. We did not know, then, that there were other and more profound causes of the trade depression, connected with sterling and the gold standard and international markets; we did not know that the wind of which we felt the sharp edge already was a mere zephyr compared with the blast which would soon wither us. We were blissfully unaware of the storm that was brewing in London and New York and Amsterdam; so we put all our troubles down to the autumn epidemic of Foot-and-Mouth, and looked hopefully to the spring.

  The Idle Apprentices

  Though my uncle and his partners went about with grave faces, and shook their heads over their December balance-sheet, we clerks were nothing loth to be idle, and spent the time very pleasantly sowing a winter crop of wild oats.

  There were two other youths articled to my uncle, tough and happy-go-lucky fellows who mistrusted me at first because it had been reported to them that I had been to a public school, was probably lahdidah and sissy, didn’t drink beer, and wore plus fours instead of the conventional breeches and gaiters. Sure enough I arrived in the hateful plus fours; and it was also true that at the age of seventeen I wasn’t very familiar with pubs. Both matters were soon put right. I bought some breeches which were even yellower, and some gaiters which were even shinier, than theirs; and to match both breeches and gaiters a horse (eight pound ten from a friendly dealer) which although spavined and gone in the wind was possessed of a flashy and exhibitionist nature, and bucked me through the plate-glass window of Mr. Tanner the greengrocer the first time I rode it.

  As for pubs, by Christmas time there were very few in Elmbury or in the neighbouring villages which I didn’t know. On Boxing Day we drank our way from the office to a dance at Brensham Village Hall which involved stops at the George, the Shakespeare, the Black Bear, the White Bear, the Trumpet, the Cross Keys, the Fox and Hounds, the Royal Oak and the Railway.

  It was a useful apprenticeship which I served with these two merry ruffians; for I am sure it is a good thing to learn about drinking when you are young. At seventeen you are an experimentalist; and your methods are empirical. You learn by trial and error, you make yourself sick, you make yourself sozzled, but you’re very unlikely to make yourself a drunkard. Not so the man who has remained a teetotaller until he is thirty. He has been brought up in the belief that drink is an evil, and that it is only tolerable if taken “as a medicine” or “in strict moderation.” So at some time when the winds of the world blow unkindly about him, chilling his thin teetotaller’s blood, he takes a drop “as medicine” and perhaps he takes two or three drops because after all that is “strict moderation”; but—mark this carefully—he is too old and too set in his ways to undertake empirical experiments, he hasn’t the guts to get roaring drunk to see what happens. Instead he applies reason to the matter, and takes each day just as much as he thinks will “do him good” (biologically the right amount to do him the maximum harm). He’s afraid of the stuff; and the man who is afraid of it is already halfway to a toper’s grave. He discovers that it takes a little more “to do him good” every month or every week; and down he goes to his dreary end, without even having had his money’s worth of fun.

  So I thank the good god Dionysus for the company of Stan and Geoff, those rip-roaring sons of yeomen who taught me the rights of the matter when I was seventeen. The worst consequence that happened was a spill off the back of a motor-bike when we skidded at forty round a sharp corner slick with frost. I was thrown slap into some milk-churns which were standing on the grass verge; and I daresay I should have hurt myself if I had been sober.

  Come Lassies and Lads

  Village dances were minor Bacchanalia, and would probably have shocked the Bright Young Things of Mayfair who at that time were very much in the news. It is a fallacy that country boys and girl dance the polka and sing folk songs; the favourite dance of the 1924 season was the Charleston, and Ern, the leader of the band, who also played centre forward in the football team, sang hot jazz. As for drink, there was the pub next door; and our village virgins weren’t too finicky to enter its little bar nor too unsophisticated to drink gin and Italian.

  My memory of the affairs is made up of noise, kisses, and warm sticky hands. But they weren’t just village hops; a dance was an occasion, and the farmers’ sons wore tails and white waistcoats, the girls wore their best and most exiguous frocks. It was the accepted custom towards the end of the evening to lead your heart’s fancy outside, snow or fine, and to walk with her down the dark lane where you might or might not find a car to sit in. (For most of the young men came on motor-bikes, nor was it very unconventional to ride to the dance on horseback, as I did before I’d saved up enough money to buy an old Triumph). The astonishing thing, remembered in tranquillity, is the fortitude of those village maidens, who would face frost and blizzard in a thin scrap of a dress all for the sake of a little inept and rough-and-tumble love-making.

  Satellite Villages

  The dozen or so little villages that lay in a circle about Elmbury were as planets to her sun. Economically, they were sub-markets, smaller distributing centres for goods, smaller receiving centres for produce; but each was a social entity nevertheless, each had built around its church, pub, shop, and village hall a local tradition. All shared the common tradition of Elmbury; each possessed its own individuality and character, as the different sons of one mother.

  Thus Brensham was the cricket-village. As long as men could remember its village green had been rolled and mown till it looked every summer like a billiard cloth. If you passed through Brensham after work in the spring you’d scarcely fail to see old Briggs the blacksmith rolling the pitch, and some of the village boys loosening up their bowling-arms or knocking a ball about the nets. Each Brensham generation gave one or two professionals to the county team; and often you would see a Harlequin cap on the village green, as Mr. Chorlton, standing behind the net, taught the yokels how to slam a
loose ball round to leg.

  Yet the neighbouring village, Kinderton, had no cricket team and was noted for darts and drunkenness, which it practised simultaneously. The Men of Overfield had a tradition of poaching; there was a permanent gipsy camp on their common, and a gipsy admixture in their blood—dark and sombre men, they were, who would never tell you whither they were going nor whence they had come. Dykeham folk were fishermen and liars, to a man; they had a stuffed pike in their village pub which they said weighed twenty pounds and had been caught on a minnow; yet it was common knowledge, outside Dykeham, that the creature had weighed just twelve and a half pounds and had been picked up dead after the draining of Dykeham Pond thirty years ago.

  The Tirley people were famous boatmen; as indeed they must needs be, for their low-lying village was half-flooded for three months of the year; they were Rough Islanders indeed. At Tredington, which was river-rounded too, the people grew osiers and were handy at making baskets and wickerware. The village of Warren was noted for fair women and also for promiscuity; its illegitimate birth-rate was the highest in the county, a fact of which it was proud and boastful. Flensham was well known for its footballers; Marsham by reason of the fact that every cottager possessed a pig; Oxton for wheelwrights; Lower Hampton for woodmen; and Adam’s Norton for singing— everybody sang in Adam’s Norton, its church choir often came to Elmbury and sang in the Abbey, while in the Salutation Inn (which was the curious name of the Adam’s Norton pub) you could hardly hear yourself speak for the hollering of old songs and new songs and particularly of bawdy songs, which the wicked old men of the village had invented and matched to hymn-tunes and handed down to their sons.

  There was only one of the satellite villages which seemed to have no individuality or character of its own. This was Partingdon, which possessed a rich and generous squire. He ran the cricket club, the football, the village whist drives and had built the cricket pavilion and the village hall. His wife organised the Women’s Institute and the Mothers’ Union. His gardeners mowed the cricket field.

  In Partingdon every well-behaved person was certain of employment; because the Squire employed everybody on his estate. He also housed them, arranged their recreation, and pensioned them when they were old.

  There were no ill-behaved persons in Partingdon.

  Yet this ideal village, where nobody ever got drunk or had illegitimate babies or sang bawdy sons or made revolutionary statements in the pub, seemed somehow unnatural and we always felt vaguely uncomfortable if we went there to play cricket or darts. It was the same kind of uncomfortable feeling which one has when one visits a hospital; Partingdon was a sterilised sort of place. “ ’Twould give a man the willies to live in Partingdon,” was the kind of remark one heard afterwards. The well-meaning paternalism had somehow emasculated it; and to go from thence to Adam’s Norton just three miles away was like passing from a prim chintzy drawing-room tea party into the company of merry men at a good pub.

  Songs at the Salutation

  The landlord of the Salutation Inn at Adam’s Norton was a small merry man who reminded you sometimes of a towselled fox-terrier and sometimes, in his less decorous moments, of a minor and mischievous imp. His pub was noted not only for singing but for huge fires, which on winter nights he stoked continually so that people remarked that he was getting into practice. His reply was always the same: “I believes in being comfortable. You’re here to-day and to-morrow you’re bloody dyud!”

  He had a moronic cousin who helped him in the bar, a good-natured oaf with a tremendous body and a tremendous voice for singing. This oaf was called Herb; and the landlord tells how once he went off to a Licensed Victuallers’ Dinner at Elmbury and foolishly left Herb in sole charge. When he got back he asked him how he’d got on. “Fine,” said Herb, with a great grin. “They were all drunk by closing-time.” It began to be apparent to the landlord that Herb also was drunk. “How much money did you take?” he asked. Herb went to the till and counted it out laboriously. “Three and tuppence.”

  Herb, though his voice was so powerful, knew only one song, which was called Dumbledumdollakin. It was a wonderful thing to watch Herb’s enormous chest working like a blacksmith’s bellows as he roared the chorus:

  “Dumbledumdollakin,

  Dumbledumderry!”

  and I often thought it was the only cheerful song they sang at Adam’s Norton. All the rest were either sad, sardonic, mystical or obscure. They delighted most in those in which bawdiness and irony were mixed in equal proportion with a mournful nihilism, or in those which were mystical and almost meaningless like “Green Grow the Rashes O!”

  “Two and two for the lilywhite boys,

  Clothe them all in green-O!

  This they sang exquisitely and with a sort of reverential air, as if they knew it was strong magic, which indeed it is.

  Market-Day

  In the early spring the epidemic of Foot-and-Mouth Disease gradually died out and the stock markets were reopened at last. Like flood water when a dam bursts the stock poured down the vale and off the neighbouring hills to the weekly Fair at Elmbury. The sheep indeed were like a flood flowing down Elmbury High Street, up Station Street, and into the market, where their dammed stream widened and flooded into a great pool as the separate floods, white woolled, dirty-grey woolled, ochreous and chrome yellow (for some had been recently dipped), joined together in one flock a thousand strong and belonging to fifty different owners. Their owners, their shepherds and their yelping collies added to the confusion as each tried to sort out his own. We clerks were called in to help; we rolled up our sleeves and plunged into the bleating flood, tackling, heaving, pulling this way and that, until our arms were greasy with lanoline off the fleeces and our breeches were covered with muck from the backsides of the nervous ewes. My uncle, seeing me at work, patted me on the shoulder and said: “That’s the way, my boy: I believe in young men starting at the bottom”; and never realised that he had made a joke.

  On market-days we always had about three jobs to do at once. We stood beside the auctioneer and took down the prices and the purchaser’s name as each lot was sold; then dashed across to the little office at the market entrance and made out the purchaser’s bills, took their money, gave them their receipts and strove to keep our books accurately; a job that would have taxed the arithmetic of a bookmaker’s clerk.

  It is a great wonder to me that we ever succeeded in balancing the books when market was over. The record of a multitude of transactions, involving two or three thousand pounds, was scribbled in pencil on a greasy or rain-soaked sheet smeared probably with marking-paint or sheep-raddle. Sums as difficult as “69 tegs at 56/6” had to be done “in our heads” among all the distractions of the crowded market: squealing pigs, cursing drovers, dealers shouting their bids, cows running amok, greetings and badinage flying hither and thither. The little “market office” where the purchasers paid their bills was always filled with an assortment of noisy, angry, disputatious or drunken people. There were always half a dozen arguments going on which we had to settle. An old woman had lost the hamper in which she had brought her ducks to market. Somebody else had taken the wrong lot of pigs. A drunken dealer angrily denied that he had bought 12 heifers at £17 10s. Two farmers were having a political argument. A man in a hurry to catch a train emphasised his urgency by banging with a stick upon the rickety table.

  Conversation Piece

  “‘A didn’ ’ave no call to take th’ ’amper as well …”

  “Walked off with they under my very nose, ’e did, twelve little weaners, an’ there was one screwey one amongst ’em, an’ I said to our Alfie, I said, Mark ’em on the arse with blue crosses, and so ’e did, and I’ll ’ave the law on ’im as took what ’e’d got no right to. …”

  “Never looked at the auctioneer, never so much as blinked me eyelid. As a matter of fack when they was knocked down I was ’avin’ a pint at the Red Lion. …”

  “Wot I thinks is this, there be three pestses us has to contend
with, rooks and wireworms and Ministers of Agriculture. …”

  “Nah then, nah then, bloody fine clurk you are, bin waitin’ ten minutes, got to ketch me trine to Bairmigum…”

  Market-Peartness and Illiteracy

  We learned the virtue of patience in a hard school; for everything had to be explained very slowly and carefully to people who were partially illiterate or partially drunk or both. We have a term in Elmbury which is used mainly by wives to describe the state in which their menfolk return from the fair: the term is “market-peart.” “Peart” signifies sharp, like rough cider or an unkind word. The man who is market-peart is raw and ultra-sensitive; his women know that they must feed him and let him be, and avoid the provocative word.

  This was our maxim too. We must humour them. Dealers who could appraise the exact value of a bunch of heifers or a close-packed penful of ewes were incapable of doing the simplest sum of addition or subtraction. They scarcely ever wrote out their own cheques. They would sign them (usually with a blunt indelible pencil, which they first sucked, so that the signature was a blue smudge) and then they tossed us the cheque so that we could fill in the amount they owed. Once, when I was very hard-pressed, I lost my temper and snapped “For God’s sake write it out yourself—can’t you see I’m busy?” There was no answer. I threw the cheque back. Still no answer. I looked up, surprised that I had got no angry reply. Instead of the red-faced infuriated bully I expected to see, a man with gentle and timid eyes glanced furtively over his shoulder at the impatient crowd behind him, then swiftly leaned down towards me and whispered: “Scribble it out for me, Mister, please, it won’t take a minute. I never had no schooling. Except to sign my name I can’t manage writing.”