‘Janie and I were just trying to work it out when you came in. Janie doesn’t like it one bit, do you?’
The young mother had moved aside, clasping the baby to her more tightly than before. Her hands were square and blunt-fingered. She shook her head but didn’t say anything. Carol turned to Daniel.
‘You know about legends and ballads. See what you make of it.’
He came over, but more to please her than because he was interested. While he was looking at it, the workshop door crashed open and a man came in like a sudden gust of wind.
‘All right then, where’s this workers’ co-operative?’
I’d seen Harry Hawthorne at various meetings so recognised both him and his method of making an entrance: in a hurry and loudly. He was tall and broad in any case, but had a rough confidence and vitality that made him seem even larger. He carried more superfluous weight than in his days as a docker and prize fighter and his unkempt beard had acquired some grey hairs since I’d last seen him, but he was still straight-backed and quick on his feet. His hair, untidy and not recently washed, came down almost to his shoulders.
At the sight of him Janie clutched her baby even more closely. Daniel sounded pleased to see him.
‘Hello, Harry.’
‘Good afternoon, you bourgeois renegade. Where have you been?’
‘In Wiltshire on the Marlborough Downs, song collecting and so on.’
‘So where’s this workers’ co-operative you told me about?’
Carol gave Daniel a reproachful look. ‘We don’t call ourselves a workers’ co-operative,’ she said. ‘We’re a craftsmen’s federation.’
He paused, sizing her up. On the one hand she was a good-looking woman and Harry was notoriously susceptible to that. On the other she looked and sounded like what she was – a member of the hated middle classes.
‘And you’re one of the toiling masses, are you?’
‘My name’s Carol Venn. I help design things.’
‘Oh, another Venn, is it? His sister?’ He looked at Daniel.
‘My sister-in-law,’ Daniel said. ‘Carol is married to Adam.’
At the mention of that name, Hawthorne’s attitude visibly shifted towards hostility. ‘Making a good profit, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Harry.’ Warningly, from Daniel.
Carol said calmly, ‘At present, we don’t make any kind of profit.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ He looked at Mr Sutton, who was still carving away at his chair leg. ‘You won’t till you get some proper machinery in.’
Harry would know that this was heresy to Carol and people like her in the Arts and Crafts movement. He probably didn’t mean it and was only trying to annoy. She was cool enough not to rise to it. In fact, she seemed quite amused. Hawthorne moved towards a small round ashwood table.
‘So how much do you sell this for?’
‘Yours for six pounds.’
She smiled at him. Hawthorne threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Six pounds! A man’s wage for a month and you charge that for a table. How’s that supposed to help working people?’
‘By giving them a chance to make something beautiful.’
‘The middle classes all over,’ Hawthorne said. ‘They want to rob you and feel virtuous about it.’ He moved over to Mr Sutton and the lathe.
‘That doesn’t look too difficult.’
Mr Sutton smiled, rather nervous.
‘Let him try, then,’ Carol said.
Reluctantly Mr Sutton took out the chair leg he was working on and put in a new cylinder of wood. He explained the working of the lathe, while Hawthorne nodded impatiently as if he knew it already, then surrendered his place to him. But he wouldn’t let Hawthorne use his chisel and fetched another from a row of tools on a table. The treadle started again, its rhythm less regular. Daniel turned his attention back to the chest. Uninterested at first, now he was absorbed in the thing, particularly the panel with the hobgoblin squeezing itself into the house.
‘It’s Long Lankin.’ He started singing. ‘“The doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned, Except one little window where Long Lankin crept in”.’
‘But what is he?’ Carol asked.
‘An outlaw, Old Nick, anybody’s guess. It was probably a Scottish ballad originally but you get versions all over the place. I heard one in Berkshire and another one just now near Ogbourne. The story’s much the same in all of them. Long Lankin gets into the house while the lord’s away. He and the wicked nursemaid prick the baby with a pin to make it yell and when the mother comes down to see what’s wrong, they kill her.’
Janie Sutton’s expression had changed from nervous to horrified and the baby started grizzling. Not noticing, Daniel sang again:
‘Here’s blood in the kitchen. Here’s blood in the hall.
Here’s blood in the parlour where my lady did fall.’
Unexpectedly, a second voice joined in, Hawthorne singing as he tried to operate the lathe, in a loud baritone, word-perfect. The lord comes riding back and hears what has happened to his wife:
‘Long Lankin was hung on a gibbet so high
And the false nurse was burnt in a fire close by.’
Janie was shaking, tears pouring down her cheeks. Her husband moved across and put his arm round her. She burrowed against his chest so that the baby was protected between them. The treadle stopped with a snap of wood. Hawthorne said, ‘Oh dammit.’ Absorbed in singing, he’d gone on gouging with the chisel in the same place so that the chair leg was snapped right through. Carol went over to disentangle things.
‘You see, Mr Hawthorne. It’s not so easy.’ Then to Daniel, ‘I think you’ve solved it at any rate.’ She caught Mr Sutton’s worried look over his wife’s bent head. ‘Don’t cry, Janie. We’ll have this carted up to the studio on Monday and Daniel can help me work out some sketches for the damaged panels.’ She found an old sheet and draped it over the front of the cabinet. ‘There, you don’t have to look at it.’
I said goodbye and thank you and left them there, Hawthorne looking crestfallen, Carol making arrangements with Mr Sutton to have the carter come on Monday, Daniel still looking like a man with a problem. Not my problem, at any rate, though whether I’d got any nearer to our picture was anybody’s guess.
I strolled around the village for a while, taking my time about getting back to camp. I’d had enough political discussion for one day. By the time I got back a queue for supper had formed outside the kitchen of the old schoolhouse. Max Blume joined me while I was standing in it and was amused to hear about Harry Hawthorne’s encounter with arts and crafts. We collected our portions of corned beef hash and pickled cabbage on tin plates and strolled across the field, avoiding cowpats, to find a clean patch of grass to sit and eat on.
At this late stage of summer the sun was already well down below the hedge at the western side of the field and the air had a crisp edge to it. People were gathering in groups round fires, most of them still debating as if a day of talk hadn’t been enough. Somebody was squeezing a plaintive tune from a concertina. There was a general drift over to a group in the far corner of the field, first in twos and threes, then a steady stream. The attraction might be the bonfire, bigger and brighter than the rest, or the sound of a violin and a stamping of feet that vibrated through the hard ground.
‘Sounds like a party,’ I said. ‘Shall we go over and have a look?’
We took our plates back to the kitchen and followed the general movement. By the time we got to the big bonfire most of the camp was standing round it with a space cleared between the audience and the flames. In the space two lines of silhouetted figures were dancing to the music of the violin, sticks in their hands, feet thudding in unison.
‘Yes, I was afraid they might be committing morris,’ Max said.
The lines moved towards each other, clashed sticks three times as precisely and solemnly as duellists, danced away. The crowd watched mostly in silence until the music stopped in a gliding arpeggio fr
om the violin and the two lines of dancers came to a halt. They were all women, the Londoners I’d noticed on the train. Some applause, some friendly insults flung between the dancers and friends in the crowd. One of them called, at a man who must have said something critical, ‘Well, you come and try it if you think it’s so easy.’ Laughter and mock struggles as the man was pushed forward by his friends, more horseplay as two apprentice morris sides were pulled into the space in front of the fire. The violin struck up again, with the concertina artist playing alongside, but less expertly.
The violinist was a real musician, with some of the fire of a gypsy fiddler. I glanced over and saw it was a woman, or rather a girl with long red hair. The girl in the blanket, now out of her chrysalis and seeming to fly in the firelight like some exotic moth. She was as thin and mobile as the flames, her whole body swaying with the music, booted foot beating the ground, sweeping the bow at full stretch of her long, bare arm.
The new dancers got in a terrible muddle even though the experts tried to push and pull them into line: they hit each other’s shoulders with their sticks and yelled out, stumbled and had to be grabbed by their arms to stop them falling backwards into the fire. After all the earnestness, it was good to watch the Scipians having fun. Max touched my arm and pointed to Harry Hawthorne, galumping like a cart-horse among ponies, half-empty beer mug in one hand, stick in the odier. He wasn’t trying to keep time or attending to the experts. As we watched he dropped the stick, grabbed a plump girl by the waist and twirled her round and round, faster and faster, still keeping a firm grip on the beer mug with his other hand. The dancers drew back from the whirling menace the two of them made, then gave up dancing altogether and formed a circle round them, laughing and clapping. And all the time the thin fiddler girl went on playing her wild music, with a face as blank as a hired mourner at a funeral. The plump girl tripped, Harry Hawthorne fell over on top of her and the beer went flying. The music stopped and a chant started, ‘Speech, speech, speech!’
He was breathless. He was at least half drunk. He had grass in his unkempt hair and beard, beer soaking into this thick flannel shirt. He roared at them from the ground, ‘You want a speech?’
Yes, after a day of talking, they wanted a speech from Harry. Several people helped him up. He started in a rambling way, glad they were all there, glad they were allowed a few grudging days off by their money-grubbing bosses who sweated the life out of them in factories or crushed it out of them in mines and foundries. A few shouts of support, but this was nursery stuff for the Scipians. They wanted more from Harry Hawthorne and they got it. You could hear him climbing out of the beer fumes and the twopenny-halfpenny oratory into what he really wanted to say.
‘You deserve more, you know that, I know that. But do you know why you deserve more?’ He waited.
‘Because we’re the producers of wealth,’ somebody shouted.
Harry shook his head. ‘True, but that’s not it.’
‘Because we need more.’ From the fierce Lancashire woman.
‘True too, but that’s not it either. Anybody know?’
He let the silence stretch out for some time, then answered his own question in a voice now so soft that it was almost a whisper. They had to move inwards to hear him; light from the bonfire flickered over their intense faces.
‘Because you can enjoy more.’ He waited for it to sink in, then let his voice roar out, so that the people who’d crowded in got the full blast of it.
‘Enjoy! That’s the word to remember, my friends and comrades. If you can’t enjoy – if you haven’t got strength and appetite and laughter in you – then you can have as many meetings and minutes and votes and amendments and statistics and percentages as you like – and they’re all as useless as a picture of a mug of beer to a man dying of thirst. And that’s the big difference between the likes of us down here and those up there.’
He was pointing up the hill to Oliver Venn’s neat little mansion. It was perhaps unfair to Oliver Venn, given that he was after all a socialist of a kind and the host of the gathering. Still, somebody had to stand in for the capitalist system and as far as I was concerned Harry could be as unfair to him as he liked.
‘They keep the best things for themselves but the pity of it is they’re so full of fear that somebody will come and take them away that they can’t enjoy them. They have food and they can’t enjoy it because they’ve lost their honest appetite. They have music and they can’t hear it because they’re too busy listening to their cash registers…’
I noticed Daniel Venn standing opposite us, nodding vigorously when Harry talked about music.
‘They have their womenfolk dressed up in clothes worth six months’ wages, but there’s no honest love or beauty there because they’ll sell themselves to the highest bidder in the marriage market…’
Felicia? Surely not. Harry was firing at random, knowing nothing about the Venns. Anyway, why should I assume there was no honest love there?
‘So remember, demand your fair wages, demand your better working conditions, demand your eight-hour day.’ A thump of his great boxer’s fist into the palm of his hand on each ‘demand’. He dropped his voice again. ‘But remember, you deserve more than that. You deserve the fine food and wines, the pictures and the music and all the beautiful things they hug to their mean and frightened little hearts, because you’re the ones who can enjoy them best. And if they won’t give them – and believe me, they won’t willingly give them – then it’s your work and duty in life to go and take them. And enjoy them.’
Back to a roar for the last three words, and a storm of clapping and cheering. I thought: If he led a charge up the hill to the Venns’ house, I do believe they’d follow him, and more than half liked the idea. But he didn’t. He grabbed a mug of beer from somebody, put his arm back round the plump girl’s waist and drank like a man with a steelworks thirst. The music started up again, the concertina at first then the fiddle joining in. The expert dancers formed up in the space lit by the bonfire, this time without sticks. They seemed less sure of themselves, probably a new dance they were learning. They appealed to Daniel and he took over somebody’s place in the dance, calling out the moves when they wavered. In motion he was a jumping jack of a man with such buoyancy that you could tell he was having to rein himself in so as not to bound higher than the others. At one point the dancers got themselves in such a tangle that even Daniel was at a loss and the music died away. He ran a hand through his curls and called to the girl fiddler, ‘Daisy, how does it go? Is it leaders change places, then straight to two bars clap hands?’
‘No. Four bars change places, six bars side step, then clap hands.’
The fiddling girl’s voice was working class with an accent that might be Wiltshire or Berkshire.
‘That’s not the way I learned it from Mr Sharp,’ he said.
‘Well, he learned you it wrong then. It’s like I tell you.’
‘Six bars side step it is, then. Thank you, Daisy.’
The fiddle and concertina started up again and the dancers circled. I wondered if Daniel Venn had managed to get home yet to see his fiancée. I was curious about the relationship between the two of them. Why was he capering down here in a field instead of spending time with her? There was a pause in the music and I thought of going over to ask him if there’d been any progress about the picture, but then the violin and concertina started again and his head went up like a horse hearing the feed buckets clanking. This time it was a different kind of dance, with just four men taking it in turns to outdo each other in high leaps and fancy footwork and the crowd cheering them on as if at a sporting match. The girl fiddled faster and faster, the concertina player gave up in despair on a last dying wheeze and Daniel spun, leapt and capered like a man possessed until the other three simply gave best and stood back, admiring. One more run of notes from the fiddle and he spun until he was no more than a blur and collapsed panting on the grass.
Max had got into conversation with a Welshman abou
t some detail of trade union politics that sounded as complicated as the Trojan war and would probably go on as long. I left them to it and went for a walk round the margin of the field, in no hurry to claim my uncomfortable bed in the cheesy dairy. On the whole my day had been difficult but not, I hoped, entirely wasted. Daniel might be a wild lad, but I’d got him to take the problem seriously. I cut across the field back towards the bonfire, which was no more than a red glow now, hoping for another word with him. Only a dozen or so people were left around the dancing place, with most people gone to their beds or elsewhere. The girl was wrapping up her fiddle in a cloth, a group of men and women were discussing something quietly together and Daniel was still there, sitting by the fire with a bottle of beer in his hand, talking to Harry Hawthorne. It looked like an intense conversation. I noticed Harry glancing up at the girl with the fiddle as if she were part of what they were talking about.
It was coincidence that I happened to be there just when Daniel made his announcement. It’s likely that he was a little drunk, not so much from the ale as from the excitement of the dancing or Harry’s speech, or perhaps from nerving himself for what he was going to do. Anyway, Daniel leapt up from a sitting position straight to his feet and spun round as if starting another dance, with only the last of the flames this time for accompaniment.
Blood on the Wood Page 5
