Portrait of Elmbury

by John Moore

  The Victorians who saved Elmbury from the railway-junction which they thought would blacken the countryside and destroy their quietude must now have turned in their graves; for Elmbury, where three roads met, had become a junction indeed and the traffic which came together at its Cross was far noisier, far more destructive of amenities, and incidentally far more dangerous to life and limb than the railway would have been.

  On Saturdays and Sundays, and especially on Bank Holidays, it was practically impossible for any but the most agile to cross the High Street. The noise was so great that gossipers had to shout to make themselves heard; and even at night during holiday-time the flow of cars and charabancs did not pause and the noise would have kept us all awake had we not developed some sort of defensive mechanism so that we ceased to hear it; as men who live beside a waterfall become oblivious of its roaring and would only hear the silence, a terrible roaring silence, if the waterfall should suddenly dry up.

  However much we might regret our lost quietude, there was no remedy; and even if there had been I daresay the majority of Elmbury people would have put up with the traffic for the sake of the trade which came with it. By no means all the charabancs passed through; you could see a score of the green or red monsters drawn up in the town’s new car park almost any afternoon —and probably fifty or a hundred cars. The streets, the shops, and the pubs were always full, the tradesmen prospered, and the long queue of unemployed shrank to a few dozen unemployables.

  Mr. Parfitt, during these halcyon days, should have made a small fortune; for it was he who had first taught Elmbury how to pick the well-lined pockets of tourists and holiday-makers. But somehow or other he seemed to have lost his touch. He did well enough with postcards and models of the Abbey in Festival time; but for the most part the new generation of holiday-makers merely glanced at his dusty shop window and passed by. Perhaps he had gone out of fashion; for even the Long Man had ceased to be popular and a dozen of the figures littered the dark corners of his shop, unwanted, neglected, and covered with dust. It was a sign of the times, he told me, as he picked up and mournfully dusted one of these masterpieces which looked particularly woebegone by reason of its having been broken at its most vital joint. “People to-day,” said Mr. Parfitt sadly, “would be downright frightened to have one of these things in their bedroom. What they want is something with the opposite significance. They don’t want to have children; and more’s the pity, say I.”

  But Mr. Parfitt’s genius had deserted him. Puzzle his old head as hard as he might, he could not think of a charm against child-bearing.

  I’d Best Go Willing

  The autumn, of course, brought the international crisis which we had already learned to associate with August and September. It blew over and life in Elmbury went merrily on. There were less trippers, for these were summer migrants, but in consequence of the crisis work was speeded up on the aircraft factories. There was employment and good money for every one; indeed, there was a local shortage of labour and about a hundred Irishmen came to the town to make it good. The pleasant, unfamiliar brogue of County Cork introduced a new gaiety into our streets; its owners brought to Elmbury also the filth, the fights, and the squalor which accompany Irishmen wherever they go upon the face of the earth.

  The crisis had one other consequence. The Elmbury company of Territorials, which at that time I commanded, received a sudden unexpected influx of recruits. During the early thirties it had dwindled to a mere handful; one August I had marched shamefacedly to camp at the head of seventeen men. Now, with the new recruits, I had nearly seventy. This was not due to a sudden access of patriotism; the lads of Elmbury were not at all anxious to go to war. But they had suddenly realised that if there was war there would certainly be conscription. They hated the idea of “being fetched.” I asked one sullen-looking and unmartial youth why he had joined up. “If there be a war,” said he, “they’ll come and fetch I. I’d best go willing.”

  Elmbury men were known in the battalion for their tireless marching and their good night-fighting (which was not surprising for almost all were poachers) but also, I regret to say, for their obstinacy. They were easy to lead, but hard to drive. Even in khaki they kept their sturdy independence. Sometimes they sang a song they had learned from their fathers: “We won’t be buggered about, we won’t,” and they meant it. They made first-class soldiers; but if they were badly handled they quickly came near to mutiny.

  I now handed over the command of these stout-hearted and turbulent citizens in uniform to a lad of nineteen who was, like them, an incorrigible poacher, who could stalk, shoot, fish and ride, and who being anarchic himself could understand their particular brand of anarchy. For my part, I had determined that when war came—we no longer thought of it as “if”—I should fight it in the air; for I had just learned to fly a Moth, had discovered a brave new world of cirrus and cumulus, and was bemused by the strange beauty of the sky’s snowy regions, its unearthly continents of cloud.

  Death of the Colonel

  But when the crisis was over, we bundled away the thought of war for another year, accepting the respite but knowing it was only a respite, and, heedless once more, polished our hunting-boots and wiped the oil off our gun barrels. Winter came early, in a swirl and scurry of November snow and we listened for the honk of the first geese on the north wind. I did a reconnaissance of the flooded, frozen, river-meadows with Michael, the boy who had taken over my Territorials; we promised the Colonel to let him know as soon as the grey flocks arrived.

  But they were tardy, and when they came at last it was too late. Just before Christmas I met the Colonel out partridge-shooting. It was rough, hard walking, and by mid-morning I realised he was in a bad way. Our host didn’t know it, and set a good pace for the guns as they walked in line over the wet, feggy fields. The Colonel couldn’t keep up, so I dropped back and walked at his side. He put his hand up to his heart. “It gets me here,” he said. But he wouldn’t give up. Slowly and painfully he dragged himself along.

  We came to a tall fence. I got over first and took his gun. He climbed up somehow or other on to the top of the fence and put his hand on my shoulder. He must have been in agony, for his face was quite grey. He had angina, though I didn’t know it at the time. There was an awkward ditch on my side of the fence. “Sod it,” he grunted, “I shall have to jump.” I stood ready to catch him. I loved him very much, and it was awful to see the sweat running down his grey haggard face which twitched with pain. But he was indomitable. I saw his face suddenly crumple into a grin. The thousand creases, the little crows’ feet around his eyes, appeared as if by magic and for a moment he was his old self again, gnomish and naughty, mischievous as a boy.

  “By God,” he said. “I wish I had a good fat woman to fall on.” He jumped down and I caught him; he was as light as a child. We walked on for a little way, but the ground was squelchy and soft. He had to give up at last, and I took him home in my car. On the way he said: “John, I shan’t shoot again.” I tried to cheer him up. “Nonsense,” I lied, “you’ll be better in a day or two,” but he had felt that invisible dagger in his chest and he knew, I think, that its wound was mortal. He slowly shook his grand old badger-grizzled head.

  I saw him once again, about a week later, when I called to ask how he was. He had just finished planting an oak-tree, but even that little task was too much for him, and I had to help him into the house. He had always been a great one for planting trees; his farm was dotted all over with saplings in various stages of growth. I think his choice of an oak to plant on that last morning, a tree so slow-growing and so long-living, was a sort of gesture of defiance to the blind Fury with the abhorréd shears. It would stand there with luck, beside the little pool in his Home Field, for hundreds of years after he had gone. His great-grandchildren might know the summer shade of it. There was a sort of continuity, a sort of comfort, in that.

  Late that night he died.

  Good-bye to the Swan

  His death marked the end of a
phase in the life of Elmbury; for almost at once that queer little company who had sat night after night in the Swan began to break up, the oddly-assorted fellowship ended, as if it had been only he who had held it together. For a long time his chair in the corner remained empty; nobody liked to sit in it; and gradually the “regulars” ceased to be regular. Badger Brown stayed in his own village, Johnnie Johnson joined a club where he could play billiards, Mr. Benjamin paid more frequent visits to his little business in Birmingham, Wilfrid Jakes the old gardener fell ill with lumbago and kept to his house. Soon Miss Benedict herself left; for the bar was altering its character, her new customers demanded new drinks with strange names which she had never heard of, motorists were more frequent and they scandalised her by bringing their womenfolk into the bar, “commercials” refused to be frightened away, one Saturday evening there was an invasion of paper-hatted women, part of an outing, who demanded fourteen Guinnesses and look snappy, miss, or the charry will leave us behind. Miss Benedict looked snappy all right; the thought that the charry might indeed leave them behind made her serve the Guinnesses with frantic haste, although they were frothy and difficult to pour out. But that night she gave in her notice; and Mr. Rendcombe, the only one of her old customers who remained faithful to her, saw her burst into tears. When the last “commercial” had taken his leave, our little Miss Prunes-and-Prisms caught the old man’s arm and suddenly broke down. Perhaps he was the only man who had ever seen her cry; the only man who had ever looked behind her stern and schoolmistressy façade. We may be sure he patted her on the shoulder and said: “There, there, my dear. … Times change. We get old, and things aren’t what they were. Thinning us out, we old ones … thinning us out.”

  The Shakespeare

  Mr. Chorlton and I, when we met for a drink, now went to the Shakespeare, which was a warm and cheerful pub peopled by no ghosts and with no empty chairs in the corner. Effie and Millie still reigned there as co-equals, dividing their long bar by means of the beer-engine in the middle, so that Effie held sway over the territory north of it while Millie was queen of the south. The darts board still hung in the same place, and it was the same dart board, with the worn patches near the treble twenty and the treble nineteen. The picture of the landlord as a Royal and Ancient Buffalo still hung over the fireplace, flanked by notices about forthcoming meetings of the Cricket Club, the Football Club, the Conservative Association, the Labour Party, and the Flying Club (which flew not aeroplanes but racing pigeons).

  If the Swan, in its heyday, was representative of one aspect of Elmbury, the Shakespeare was typical of another. It was a kind of club too, but less esoteric than the Swan. I could never quite define, or even decide in my own mind, what held the Swan fellowship together; unless it were a conglomerate consisting of weather-lore, interest in civil affairs, guns and fishing-rods, recollections of hearing the chimes at midnight, plus something else which was quite undefinable. But it is easy enough to say what common interests were shared by the customers of the Shakespeare: horses, cricket, football, motor-bikes, and girls. It was the meeting-place of the young limbs from the country round Elmbury; in some respects it was more a country pub than a town pub. The farmers’ sons filled it on market-days, on Friday mornings when they came to draw the wages from the bank, and in the evenings before a dance or after a cricket-match. Mr. Sparrow, as perky, as cheeky and as prospective as the bird his namesake, used to call there every day on behalf of Mr. Benjamin for betting-slips. Before he entered, and when he came out, his little head would waggle from side to side on his long thin neck as he looked about him anxiously for the patrolling policeman.

  The cricket club held its annual meetings at the Shakespeare; and every year the notice over the fireplace was in similar terms: There will be a meeting next Friday at eight o’clock to discuss plans for cricket next season and ways of raising money to wipe out the club’s debt of £29 4s. 11d. We were always confronted with this dreadful deficit in the accounts and Mr. Jeffs, who owned our cricket field, always forgave us the. rent, grumbling nevertheless, “Them as wants cricket ought to pay for it.” Usually we decided to make somebody else pay for it; and so we arranged a Rummage Sale or a dance. But the mysterious deficit always appeared again next year, and Mr. Jeffs, still grumbling, had to guarantee our overdraft at the bank.

  The Shakespeare was also the headquarters of the Darts League. Darts playing would have been unthinkable at the Swan; it was customary, it was traditional, in the Shakespeare, where Millie could get you a double top with one dart out of three almost any time, and Effie had been known more than once to put three darts running in the treble nineteen.

  And there was another thing you could do at the Shakespeare which you would never dream of doing at the Swan. You could sing. There was a piano in the corner, and both girls were capable of strumming out, perhaps a bit clumsily, almost any tune you asked for from Mademoiselle from Armentieres to Billy Boy. Indeed, such was the Shakespeare’s renown for singing that men from Adam’s Norton (where, as you will remember, the people sang like crickets all day long) would often visit it when they were in Elmbury. In particular there was a merry and chirruping fellow called Tommy Dove, whose curious trade was that of a gelder: he travelled about the countryside castrating horses, cattle, sheep and pigs. He brought from Adam’s Norton a good tenor voice and a wonderful assortment of old songs, some of them so old and traditional that they were almost unintelligible. His favourite was the strangest song of all, which belonged to Adam’s Norton and was sung to the best of my belief nowhere else in the kingdom. I never knew what it was about; but its chorus went like this:

  “The prickolye bush,

  The prickolye bush,

  The prickolye bush so sore.

  If ever I get out of the prickolye bush

  I’ll never get in it no more.”

  Certainly the Shakespeare was very different from the Swan! But it was a pleasant little pub and it was not unimportant in the life of Elmbury.

  Silence at Adam’s Norton

  It was about this time that a little tragedy occurred at Adam’s Norton; and the story is worth telling as an example of the enormous difference in outlook between the city and the countryside.

  The landlord of the Adam’s Norton pub—the Salutation Inn, the pub with the crooked chimney—was a kindly old man and a great songster, and he’d been there for twenty-five years. He was in the habit of obliging a few of the Birmingham fishermen with a drink about half-past six on Sunday, which was half an hour before legal opening time. The village policeman knew of this, and shut his eyes to it, being aware that the train to Birmingham left at five past seven and the fishermen wouldn’t get a drink otherwise.

  But one day a policeman from Birmingham, being off duty, came down with the fishermen for a day by the river; and at half-past six they brought him up to the pub. He waited till the first round of drinks had been bought and paid for, slipped out quietly, and called the village policeman, who was having a quiet sit-down by the fire.

  The village policeman protested. “You’ve no call to interfere. You don’t know the village. It’s a decent, quiet, well-conducted pub.” “If I show you my warrant,” said the Birmingham man, “you’ve got to come and you’ve got to make a case of it, or I’ll have you out of your job.” He didn’t even give Constable Roberts time to put on his boots. The poor man came along reluctantly in his carpet slippers, and took everybody’s name, and even carried away a sample of the beer in a bottle; because the Birmingham bobby made him do that too.

  So there was a charge against the landlord of “selling drinks outside permitted hours,” and he lost his licence, and had to leave the pub; although the magistrates were privately sympathetic with him and would have dismissed the case if they had dared. He died six months later, of a broken heart, it’s said; and the new landlord of the crooked little pub didn’t sing and didn’t approve of singing, for fear it would get him into trouble with the police. Adam’s Norton, that had been so merry, became as silent
as the grave. The people there no longer holler the old merry tunes with the absurd, irrelevant, traditional words.

  “They shut their doors in the evening; and they know no songs.”

  But the extraordinary thing about the incident is this: the Birmingham policeman really thought he was being “smart” in making what he’d probably have called “a good cop” when he was off duty; and quite a lot of his Birmingham friends thought he was smart too. They told us that although he wasn’t a very nice fellow they expected he’d go far. But we were shocked; not so much angry as shocked; and we regarded him, not as wicked exactly, but as worse than wicked: as a sort of diseased creature whom we must shun lest he infect us. Because of his wanton, stupid, childish action we can’t ever feel friendly towards the Birmingham fishermen any more; and more than ever we feel that we have nothing in common with the cities, where men think it’s clever to do things like that.

  The Millionaires Come to Elmbury

  The local point-to-point was held in March, and Jerry rode his last race on Demon; the old horse broke a blood-vessel and had to be shot. You can see his picture if ever you go to the Shakespeare; it is on the wall between the Midnight Steeplechase and the Royal and Ancient Buffalo: a faded photograph of a great raw-boned horse with huge shoulders and tremendous haunches, and Jerry, lean and graceful, upon his back sitting as easily as if he were in his armchair before the great fire at Hill Farm.

  With the spring came more trippers, more prosperity and, following the prosperity, more Chain Stores. Elmbury already had two of these; and now two more bought shops in the town. Each one brought ruin to two or three of our little tradesmen who couldn’t compete with the huge organisation, the ingenious advertising, and the ruthless price-cutting of these million-pound concerns, these nation-wide butchers, grocers, fishmongers, haberdashers and whatnot. Mr. Patterson, the fishmonger, who had been trading in Elmbury for thirty years, was compelled to shut up shop in April; for Elmbury being far from a port, he lived precariously at the end of long lines of communication, and he couldn’t compete with the well-organised combine. In May Mr. Brunswick went out of business too; and his opposition, Ye Olde Vyllage Shoppe, celebrated the occasion by a big advertising campaign to get more customers, filling the windows with summer frocks at “half-prices” and cheap slogans such as “Spend the rent and let the landlord wait.” Elmbury, goodness knows, held landlords in no great affection; but this piece of silly slick vulgarity, with its implied invitation to poor people to get themselves into trouble for the sake of a new dress, roused even our slow tempers and provoked Mr. Chorlton, in the Council chamber, to speak of“millionaires without morals who corrupt and cheapen whatever they touch.” The little tradesmen in the Council, who had never loved and often feared him, discovered in him a Daniel come to judgment, recognised him as their champion, and rose in their seats and cheered.