Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  My father promised that he would.

  Meanwhile, I crouched in my mother in labour in Wookey Hole. The ground shivered and the earthquake came making little spider cracks along the banks of the race which roars from Wookey down to Glastonbury. By the hole’s entrance is the image of a man in stone, called the Porter. The fancy of the place is this: You have to knock and ask the Porter for permission to go in. My father used to swear that when he asked him, the Porter’s head nodded twice and then fell off. Perhaps it was the earthquake.

  Inside Wookey Hole, my father made his way to my mother with a sheaf of reed sedge burning in his hand. Those underground caverns are as big as Westminster Hall. My mother, as I have explained, was crouched beside the place they call the holy well – which is in the chamber known as the Parlour, perfectly round, about twenty paces across. No one knows how deep that water is. It was cold enough to bring me on.

  ‘Mary,’ my father called, his voice everywhere through the caves. ‘Mary, Mary, my love, love, love.’

  ‘About time too,’ said my mother. And at that moment, being three o’clock exactly, I was born.

  I can vouch for the time because the earth tremor which ran from Wookey Hole with my final birth pang stopped the clock which was then not long started up in Wells Cathedral a half a mile away. The shiver of the earthquake of my coming ran through the rocks and up across the floor of the baptistry and – ping – checked the clock hands on the hour and the three. They buckled. Simultaneously a white flood of water flowed in spate down the race to the mere at Glastonbury. There are seven mills in use on that race, and as the flood went through them their wheels spun round with a roar so that the millers thought the mills would all fall down. One hundred fish were pumped out of Glastonbury Mere – trout, loaches, miller’s thumbs, flukes, pickerel, crawfish, dewdows. These fish landed gasping on the cropped lawn of Mr Thomas Beckington the bishop, who dropped his breviary in the turkey soup upon the instant.

  ‘It’s a boy!’ shouted my father.

  Boy, abboy, ABBOY, abboy, a BOY, echoed through the cave.

  ‘What else did you expect?’ my mother asked quietly. ‘What with that giant’s thing!’

  My father’s laughter cracked a stalactite. He snipped the birth-cord with his sword and danced about the cavern with me in his arms.

  ‘Has he cried?’ called my mother.

  ‘Not a tear,’ my father said proudly.

  ‘Then make him cry,’ said my mother. ‘If he doesn’t start now, he’ll have more than his share later.’

  So my father started slapping me and shaking me, and holding me up by the heels and chucking me from hand to hand. But I kept quiet.

  ‘The rogue won’t cry,’ my father said.

  ‘Then make him laugh,’ advised my mother.

  Whether my father achieved this by pulling a funny face at me in the light of his reed sedge taper, or I had something else to laugh about, I soon started to make the noise they wanted. The echo must have helped augment the laughter. Yet my mother used to say that with or without the echo my original laugh was enough to set them both laughing too.

  Ha, yes, wait. The earthquake that ran down from Wookey also shattered seven wine pots and seven bottles in the hostelry at Wells.

  This was my birth.

  My father took shawls and swaddles from his satchel, and my mother wrapped me tight in them. You’ll not remember these superstitions, but a babe in the century that is gone was treated like a miniature Egyptian mummy, it being believed that if he waved or waggled his limbs about he might break one of them.

  As for the white head and the round belly – I have sometimes heard wives say, when they look at a new-born child of a certain aspect, ‘That one’s been here before.’ My white head, which I had from the moment of my coming forth in Wookey Hole, might be thought to betoken some benevolent maturity or other inheritance of experience. My round belly I had of my father, and my father’s father. Fastolfs have had round bellies since eggs have joined in the middle. A Fastolf without a round belly would be like a ship without a sail.

  My father and my mother now emerged with me from Wookey Hole. The earthquake subsided – the oaks no longer shaking in their sockets – and they went down quietly to the hostelry where my father had consumed his seven breakfasts.

  ‘Take the child in by the fire, madam,’ the innkeeper said, meeting us in the yard. ‘Sir, now is your chance to pay for your meal.’

  My father saw that the fellow was bargaining with a bandylegged Welsh merchant, who had a load of butter in barrels on his cart. The innkeeper climbed up and kicked one of the barrels. ‘How much for this little tub?’ he demanded.

  ‘That,’ said the merchant, ‘is a standard size barrel.’

  ‘Keg, then,’ the innkeeper conceded. ‘How much?’

  ‘That is not a keg or a tub or any other inferior condition,’ the merchant hissed. ‘It is a barrel – a standard size barrel full of best Welsh standard butter.’

  The innkeeper took a measure from his hat. ‘Standard size for Wales,’ he said. ‘Average for your leek-land, maybe. But in Somerset a man could get through the lot in one go.’

  The merchant was a nationalist, of course. He jumped up and down on the dung in the yard. ‘Show me the man who can eat one of my barrels of butter in one go,’ he said, ‘and I will give you two of them for nothing.’

  ‘Let’s make it your cartload to my cellar full of cider,’ said the innkeeper.

  ‘A bet!’

  ‘A bet!’

  My father threw back his white hood and rolled up his sleeves and sat down there and then in the courtyard of the inn and won this wager for his host without so much as a hiccup. When he had polished off the barrel of butter, in ten minutes or so, he rubbed salt into the Welshman’s wound by begging for one or two halfpenny rolls to scrape the staves clean.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the merchant.

  ‘Don’t boast,’ my father advised him. ‘It’s a decent butter, but not unique.’

  My father was a man of appetite. I never knew him overmastered by a meal, save on one occasion with a basket of raw eels, and that day he had diahorrhea.

  Arrived back at Caister, I was baptised three times. My mother, you see, was persuaded to wet the baby’s head at Bath and Devizes and Oxford and Banbury Cross, and when she got home, stepping towards the house, she tripped and dropped me in the ditch. I wasn’t hurt, but I came out covered with mud like a coal-black imp. Taking me in, they washed me in warm water, then the priest baptised me. So I was baptised in mud, in hot water, and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  For my christening feast they had musclade of minnows, baked herrings in sugar, gurnards, lamphreys, and a whole porpoise roasted on coals. For the second course I am told there were dates in comfit, red and white jellies, congers, salmon, dories in syrup, brett, turbot, carp, bass, mullet, and chevins. For the third they had spiced minced chicken doused in cream of almond milk, fresh young sturgeon, perch in jelly, and whelks. There was a fourth course of fruit: hot apples and pears with sugar candy, and ginger columbine.

  I was too young to enjoy any of this, but my mother having put me to a wet nurse I supped well enough. My wet nurse was a young girl of Clippesby whose own suckling had just died. If there is anything in the belief that the quality of milk affects the character of the child then I can credit that the warm, clear tit I had of her has done me no harm. I cannot say how long this suckling went on, but it seems to me to have been for a marvellously long time, for I can remember the pleasure of lying at her pricked pink nipple, that sweetest of thorns, with her swelling breast kneaded urgently in my little hot fist, and the good milk squirting between my lips.

  Want more, Worcester? Hey diddle diddle! More about the wet nurse?

  Her name was Jaquenetta. Her hair was jet-black and her skin white. Young breasts like fresh boiled eggs with their shells just off. Nipples like cherries. I used to nibble them with my cunning littl
e gums, and she would moan, and then I would nibble them some more, and the milk would gush quick and quicker down my throat as she gasped above me with the shock of it.

  All I can remember of that time generally is how rich and right it seemed to lead a life without thought. My young heart was set only on milk and Jaquenetta’s nipples.

  I can recall also the pleasure of having my wet nurse wash the part of me which pleased her most. Sometimes she would rub it while I lay sucking at her breast.

  I was born with an unsatisfiable thirst.

  Chapter Four

  About the games of Sir John Fastolf when he was young

  St Richard’s Day

  When I was a boy I plucked geese. It was like plucking the sky – a snow of snapt feathers everywhere. I played truant as well. Of course. Lord God! Who didn’t? Who doesn’t? And I whipped top. So hard and fast they must be still spinning – furious little rainbows in the corner of the granary. Nor did I escape being whipped myself. I liked dances and robins and candles and carols, and to hear minstrels tune their violas de gamba while the snow was falling outside from a night sky pricked with stars.

  I made a paper boat with sails. My coat and shirt got soaking wet in the brook. My hat drifted away. For two miles I chased it. But it went into the sea.

  I made a feather fly down the wind. I stuck another feather in my belt, like a lawyer’s quill. I set more feathers in a ring about my cap, making a crown. I was the emperor of grey-goose-feather country.

  When I went to bed at night I pulled up patchwork covers to my chin and lay and listened to the stars falling into the water-butt in our yard.

  I rode on my father’s boot.

  I played at King Arthur and St George and the dragon and Gog and Albion and Robin Hood and all the English games. I played at marbles and Heads and Tails and Pinch Me and Follow the Leader.

  I had a swing that my father made for me in the old barn, and I would swing and swing higher in the oaty air of summer, until the edge of Norfolk tilted and was gone, and I was over the thin line of green and out out out into the blue.

  I was more like a monkey than a boy.

  I used to silt mud from the Hundred River with a sieve. I was looking for gold.

  And I had these many-coloured shells, conch shells, cowries, periwinkle shells, brought to me inland by a sailor travelling home from Yarmouth, and I’d listen to the talk of the seven seas in them. The seas spoke of treasure, and of dead men’s bones.

  I remember a day spent teaching grasses in my thumbs to hoot like an owl when I blew through them.

  One hot afternoon I hid in an empty beehive to be cool. Thieves came and took the heaviest beehive they could find, thinking to have the most honey. But their honey was me. I came out buzzing and they jumped the gate.

  When I caught butterflies, I tied threads to them. Then, with the threads on my fingers, I would run through the meadows with a cloud of my butterflies fluttering behind me.

  I had a little oven of four tiles where I baked mud pies. And I liked to plunge my hand in sand: making tunnels. And I told the time by a dandelion clock.

  I flew a kite from a hill above the sea. It was like holding a plug plugged into the sky. The sky was trying to get away but my kite string held it.

  I had a stick which I dressed with a scarlet trailing coat and it was my horse and I called him Roan Barbary.

  My cap was my helmet when it was not my crown. Sometimes, when the girls from Runham came to the barn, I would take off my shirt and fight with the other boys, and we would hit each other with our caps, because the girls looked on. We played at Hide and Seek. I remember when I found little Margaret in the linen basket and climbed in with her in the dark.

  And when the girls were not there, we boys played at Piss Against the Wall, seeing who could make his piss go highest behind the dairy. I won, and Peter Pounce lost his temper and couldn’t piss at all. It must have been winter. I remember the steam off our piss and the rusty mark it made in the snow, and my cousin said we’d be pissing icicles if it got any colder.

  My mother gave me a chalk pipe, and a bowl of suds, and I sat blowing bubbles in the summer afternoon: one, two, three, four, bursting in the sun, five.

  I started to learn Latin later, and not to pick my nose at table. Before I ate breakfast I would cross my mouth. Because my mother said my soul would be the better for it. Not to speak of my digestion. ‘Don’t scratch yourself at table, boy,’ my father used to say. ‘Only jackdaws scratch themselves at their meals.’

  I remember the day my father caught a cockerel by the leg and tied it and set it up on the roof. It was red in the sun. We shot at it with bows and arrows until he knocked it into the water-butt.

  Margaret in the linen basket: what a little gigglelot she was! She wore a girdle with bells and a gown of green silk.

  I played cherry-stones when I should have been at confession.

  Once the Hundred River froze, and the swamp round by Stokesby, and my father made me a sledge of a hunk of ice like a diamond, and my cousins formed themselves into a chain and ran along pulling me, young Fastolf, enthroned on his diamond ice-sledge. I had a horn which I held to my lips and blew like a hunter as we skimmed over the powdery fallen snow. I can still hear the hissss of that fine ice sledge of mine, diamond cut diamond, and see the track I made on the frozen lake. Though we all fell in the midden at the end of it.

  My uncle Hugh the admiral came that Christmas. He made me skates from the thigh-bones of a hare. I strapped them to my feet, and pushed myself down the hill behind the house with long stakes tipped with iron. And once I did this jousting with my cousin – we dashed at each other across the frozen lake, striking at the ice with our iron-tipped sticks, from far apart, flying like birds or darts from a sling, crashing into each other at top speed in the driving hail. The sun was going down into the marsh like a great gooseberry. He skinned my nose but he was more bruised than I was.

  I remember there was the black bear called Charlemagne, brought up from London for the Michaelmas fair, which killed all the dogs we set upon it. We starved the dogs for days to make them mad. Charlemagne shrugged them off, though he lost an eye. He escaped in Bury St Edmunds and tore up his chains and ran amuck in the cathedral.

  At Easter on the Hundred River we had naval battles. A shield was fixed to the middle of a tree, and a small boat, dashed along by hard rowing and the river’s current, used to have me on its high stern, holding a lance, jousting at the shield. If I struck my lance square against the shield, so as to break it, and kept my footing on the boat meanwhile, then well and good, and everyone cheered. But the art was tricky. If you struck too hard, and your lance didn’t break, you were thrown into the river, and the boat would shoot past the mark without you. Behind the shield, though, there would be two boats at anchor, with my father and my cousins in them to pull me from the water by my hair.

  I love this flat Caister country. Miles and miles and miles of bugger all.

  My tutor was a chaplain from our Lady’s shrine at Walsingham. He taught me to say Our Father and Hail Mary, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and to read. He was a scholar and a man of the pen. Ink had to be made up for him before lessons, and quill-pens cut from those grey goose feathers which I have already mentioned as possessing so much enchantment for me when floated down the breeze. I recall him teaching me the lamentations of a soul in purgatory and a terrible poem called Morte Arthure, which seemed even longer than the lamentations of the soul in purgatory and which disappointed me because as I have said my earliest games had to do with King Arthur, and I expected the verses to unveil a mystery; but they didn’t. My tutor, whose name was Ravenstone, and who went later to be master of St Paul’s song school in London, used to have me construe Latin into French – with a result that I like our English tongue, and can sit here jotting down tolerable sentences of it now, the 3rd day of April, 1459, the Feast of St Richard de la Wich, whose intercession brought the salt back to the spring at Droitwich, my secretary Worcester
away today to Castle Combe, and my other men Bussard, Hanson, and Nanton, also, as it happens, away about my business and out of earshot.

  Chapter Five

  About the tutor Ravenstone & the whip

  4th April

  The mice are away. The cat can play.

  My tutor Ravenstone was a great man for the birch. His interest in the subject was both theoretical and practical. Theory and practice have aroused my interest also, over a long life in which I have not been without opportunities for instruction. The English vice, they call it in France, where some affect to believe that no Englishman can come to a stand without the benefit of the whip across his buttocks. As I shall make clear, however, when I come to that part of my life which was spent in France, where I mixed with not a few of the lowest as well as all the highest persons of that country – the passions and persuasions inspired by the rod are not unknown in foreign places. Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden by an angel with a flaming sword.

  I have something to say on this subject, but I shall not say it all in one breath today. Let no firm-buttocked virgin flinch from my report. I have been a soldier by trade and I have seen and done many things which you will not see done in an English country garden. (Although what I have seen and done in English country gardens would make white roses turn red and red roses go very pale indeed.) It is my intention in writing these memorials to set down everything. If that diet of experience proves too rich or strange a meal for some stomachs, then, Eat elsewhere, is my advice, and wish you better appetites. There is your Mr Gower for shy ladies, with his talk of Courtly Love – which most of those same ladies find so boring, if they would only admit it. (No Courtly Lover ever put out the fire between a lady’s legs with one of his rhyming sighs, and most of the Courtly Lovers I have known preferred their own sex when it came to bedtime.) Those who have relished the verses of Mr Chaucer may not so spurn the cunterbury tales of a plain soldier. I did not start these tellings in order to hold my tongue. I have never held my tongue in my life – it is too hot! – and I am too old now to learn how. Besides, ladies shy and hearty can have comfort of the fact that one who has been a servant of Mars has also served Venus faithfully all his days.