by H. E. Bates
‘That there thumb,’ he said, holding it up and giving a look of solemn beery innocence over the top of it, ‘saved me life. If it hadn’t of been for that there thumb——’
Breaking off, he shook his head sadly, as if the mere awful memory of it were too much to bear.
‘When was that?’ I started to ask him, but he cut me short and said:
‘You hold hard a minute. Don’t be in sich a plaguin’ ’urry. You hold hard while I recollect it.’
You had to be very patient while my Uncle Silas recollected things. His way of recollecting things was to cock his bloodshot eye on the distances, take a pinch of snuff or two, blow his nose like a foghorn on a vast red handkerchief and gradually let fall slow, ripe, rich crumbs of detail. As a boy I used sometimes to feel as if he were really making up the stories as he went along: a feeling that, as it now turns out, was a perfectly correct one.
‘I wur doin’ a bit o’ paper ’anging at the time,’ he said.
My Uncle Silas had tried such a variety of jobs in his long life, from thatching to grave-digging, that I was not at all surprised about the paper-hanging.
‘Up at the mansion,’ he said. ‘Right up the top of the house. Beautiful view up there. All over the river and the park.’
He was going on to tell me how in those days they had hundreds of deer in the park and thousands of pike as big as hippopotamuses in the river when I thought it time to remind him about the thumb.
‘Don’t be in sich a plaguin’ ’urry,’ he said. ‘I’m a comin’ to that as fast as a nag with a pincushion stuck in its behind.’
It took him in fact all of another hour to come to the business of the thumb, but meanwhile he said:
‘Well, there I wur a-doing this paper ’anging, pleasant as you like, no hurry and nobody a-botherin’ on me. And she a-bringing me a lump of apple turnover and a jug o’ beer whenever she could git away upstairs.’
‘She?’
‘Under-cook,’ he said. ‘Nice little gal. Plump as a pigeon. Named Lizzie. Very bright brown eyes. Very bright and round. Just like a pigeon.’
He blew snuff from his nose with the big red handkerchief.
‘Oh! married, mind y’. Married to a groom named Walt Thomas. Narrer man though. Terrible narrer.’
‘And she brought you apple turnover?’
‘Ah,’ he said and he started to lick his wettish thick red lips in recollection.
‘Very nice apple turnover?’
‘Very nice,’ he said.
‘With cloves in?’
‘With cloves in,’ he said, ‘and a mite o’ cheese, and them apples as turn pink when they’re done.’
I could not help thinking how very pleasant it must have been to be paper hanging in such delightful circumstances, with a nice plump little pigeon bringing you apple turnover and jugs of beer and such a nice view over the river and the park. But I am, as I was then, an inquisitive person by nature and I said:
‘When did she used to bring the apple turnover?’
‘Well, it all depended,’ he said. ‘Sometimes she’d nip up of a morning. And sometimes she’d nip up of a evening.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘and what about the thumb?’
‘’Course she wadn’t supposed to,’ he said and I knew the thumb was still a long way away, ‘but she were a very kind-hearted gal. Very kind-hearted. Couldn’t bear to see nobody suffer.’
I could not swallow at all the notion of my Uncle Silas suffering, especially in these pleasant circumstances of the apple turnover, the beer, the nice view over the river and the park, and the little pigeon, and as if guessing this he said:
‘Well, I mean she couldn’t bear to think on me up there all alone. It wur ’nation lonely up there at times. I used to git oncommon sorry for meself.’
He shook his head so sadly that I felt uncommonly sorry for him too.
‘It wur a big drop out o’ them winders too,’ he said. ‘Fifty feet. Perhaps ’undred.’
I could not think why he suddenly introduced the height of the windows in this melancholy fashion and I said:
‘Is that how you hurt your thumb? Falling out of the window?’
‘She come up,’ he said, ‘one evening in late September. I wur papering a box bedroom at the time and I wur havin’ a bit of a up-and-a-downer with the paper.’
I was already thinking of asking him if it had been very nice paper when he said:
‘Big baskets of roses all over it. Blue ’uns and red ’uns. It wur very tricky, that paper. You’d got to git the blue ’uns matchin’ the blue ’uns and the red ’uns matchin’ the red ’uns and what it wanted wur really two pair of ’ands.’
‘So she helped you?’
‘You’re gittin’ to be a very fly boy,’ he said. ‘Very fly.’
He blew his nose on the big red handkerchief again, cocked his eye on the distance with that particular ripe, virtuous leer of his and said:
‘Ah! She wur kind-hearted enough to give me hand with the paper.’
‘And did you get on much better then?’
‘Got on,’ he said, ‘like house a-fire. One minute she’d be up the steps holding the top o’ the paper and I’d be down the steps holding the bottom o’ the paper. Course we got tangled in the trellis work a bit——’
‘I thought you said big baskets?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘when I come to recollect a bit clearer it wur trellis work. A lot o’ very tricky trellis work. Well, by the time we’d got tangled up in this trellis work a time or two and I’d had a sup o’ beer and a bite o’ turnover and she’d had a sup o’ beer and a bite o’ turnover an we’d untangled weselves it started to git dark all of a pop——’
He suddenly paused, as he often did at the most interesting part of a story, and looked at me with positive sternness.
‘I don’t want you goin’ clackin’ all over the shop if I tell you this,’ he said. ‘It were a terrible serious matter.’
‘The dark?’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the dark.’
I could not think of any possible reason for the dark being such a terribly serious matter and again he fixed on me an eye of positive, almost reproving sternness as I asked him why.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘we wur in it. Me an’ ’er.’
‘Oh?’ I said.
‘Yis, me an’ ’er. The little pigeon. There we wur—trapped in the trellis work—in the dark—and ’im a-bawling upstairs.’
‘Him?’
‘The groom. The narrer man I told you about it. Bawlin’ his head off, a-shoutin’ “Lizzie! Lizzie!” and askin’ where th’ Hanover she’d got to. And there she wur all of a tremble and me tryin’ to calm her down and she a-wonderin’ what he’d say when he found her there.’
‘You could have told him,’ I said, ‘that you’d got tangled in the trellis work.’
‘And me a-wondering too,’ he said. ‘And him a-bawlin’ and her a-tremblin’ and me a-wonderin’ and him a-bangin’ on all the bedroom doors.’
‘Did he bang on the door of the boxroom?’
‘Like a damn cannon ball!’ he said.
‘And what,’ I said, ‘did you do?’
‘Hopped out o’ the winder,’ he said, ‘oncommon quick.’
There crossed my mind, for a sickening second or two, the dreadful impression of my Uncle Silas not only hopping out of the window but falling for fifty, perhaps a hundred feet below.
Then he held up his double thumb.
‘Jist got out o’ the window and hangin’ on like grim death outside when the sash fell down.’
With sickening nausea I looked at the horny, flattened, misshapen thumb, unable to say a word. With ghastliness I saw my Uncle Silas dangling there, trapped and saved by one excruciating piece of flesh.
‘Did it,’ I said at last, ‘hurt very much?’
‘Onaccountable,’ was all he said, ‘onaccountable.’
And then, to my very great surprise, there passed over his face a smile of remarkably enra
ptured cunning, as if he were remembering with great pleasure something other than his pain.
‘But wuth it,’ he said. ‘Well wuth it, boy.’
As if tasting the remnants of something delicious he passed his tongue across his lips and I could only think that he was recollecting the pleasures of the beer, the apple turnover and the cheese.
‘Damnit,’ he said with sudden ripe enthusiasm, ‘I’d a-gone back and let the winder fall down on me other thumb!’
‘And why,’ I said, ‘didn’t you?’
For a moment my Uncle Silas did not answer. Then finally he gave me a long, virtuous, solemn and reproving stare.
‘Boy,’ he said, ‘I think it’s about time for you to git home for your supper and me to git back home for a mouthful o’ wine. You’re a-gittin’ too fly by half, boy. You’re a-startin’ to ask a sight too many questions.’
Aunt Tibby
Very few people ever got the better of my Uncle Silas, whether it was in the business of eating and drinking, fishing or poaching, women or prize parsnips, and about the only person ever to do so was my Aunt Tibby.
I have never quite understood what the name Tibby stood for, but my aunt, who comes from the opposite branch of the family from my Uncle Silas, that is to say the Rivers branch, and an exceptionally proud, sharp branch it is, was a very remarkable woman. She not only out-did my Uncle Silas; she actually outlived him by a year.
For the better part of forty years my Aunt Tibby kept an extremely comfortable, cosy, spotless little public-house called The Haymakers on the borders of Bedfordshire. This pub had something of the appearance of an elongated bee-hive. Its walls of white plaster were most pleasantly roofed with a thick brown nest of thatch that curved up and over five little leaded dormer windows. Downstairs the same number of casement windows, each heavy with trim white lace curtains, looked over a garden crowded in summer with orange marigolds, rambler roses, white madonna lilies and huge scarlet and yellow dahlias that lay among their lush dark leaves like splendid fruit tarts fresh from Aunt Tibby’s baking.
For my Aunt Tibby, among a great many virtues, some of which were daunting, not to say formidable, others of which were enchanting, was a remarkable cook. Her raised game pies, prepared for the great shoots of Victorian winter-times, were famous. Her hot Irish stew, always ready for hunting men when they came in half-frozen from scathing mid-winter meets, was so excellent that the receipt for it can be found in a volume of English native dishes under the title of Mrs. River’s Hunting Irish Stew, 1885.
She was also renowned for several other excellent dishes, notable among them Yorkshire pudding, cheese cakes, eel pie and chicken pudding, but among the most singular of her triumphs was her way with mashed potatoes. No one has ever really been near to gastronomic heaven unless he has tasted my Aunt Tibby’s mashed potatoes. Smooth, white and airy as swansdown, served with glorious parsley butter, they remain in my mind with the same exquisite pleasure as the pure high white clouds of a childhood summer’s day.
My Aunt Tibby was very justly proud and jealous of The Haymakers, with its floors scrubbed as clean and white as bone, its parlour cool in summer and snug as a moleskin in winter, its hunting and shooting patronage, and its impeccable standards of country food and drink and comfort, in which the most discriminating of the aristocracy, yeomanry and squirearchy could find absolute satisfaction. And there could never be, in consequence, as my Uncle Silas discovered, any monkey business at The Haymakers.
Looking back, I see that I have described my Aunt Tibby’s pub, garden, food and drink without having described my Aunt Tibby herself. In some ways this is rather difficult; in another way, not. For in many ways my Aunt Tibby was, strangely enough, not at all unlike an Uncle Silas in skirts.
I do not at all mean to suggest by this that she was a misshapen old female rapscallion who ate too much, drank too much, told too many lies or was fond of slap and tickle in the bar. She was in every way above reproach in these things. I simply mean that she gave the same impression of many-sidedness, craftiness, wisdom and that deep native cunning that was his charm. I simply wish to convey that she was, like him, a very deep one indeed.
She was a fairly tall woman, angular, long-armed and rather iron-clad about the bust. I cannot remember ever having seen her in anything but black. Her hair was black too and was invariably scraped up into a kind of big oval pincushion on the top of her head. Her dresses always had high lace collars, boned at the side, and the only luxury in the way of ornament that she ever permitted herself was a round silver brooch at her neck.
You might well expect from this that her face would be one of exceptional pallor, high resolve and severity. In fact it was a very deceptive face. It was, in the first place, very red. It flamed with myriads of tiny tangled crimson veins and its mouth was sharp and thin. Its deception lay in the fact that because of its redness you expected it to be jolly and because of the thinness of its mouth you expected it to be severe.
The truth was that it was both severe and jolly. The mouth appeared to be full of the sternest unspoken reprimands. It was only when you looked at the bright clear blue eyes that you saw that they were almost constantly laughing. Then you saw that all the myriad crimson wrinkles of her face seemed to be laughing too. And sometimes, to your great astonishment, she suddenly winked at you.
I must here remove what I feel may be one further mistaken impression about her. She was not abstemious. Like my Uncle Silas she very much liked a tot of this or that. She was very partial to a drop of whisky. Under the iron-clad bust she was ripe and warm. She took a drink with her customers and liked a joke at the bar.
But she was also a disciplinarian and what she would never permit, as my Uncle Silas discovered, was any monkey business. She always insisted, for instance, that her barmaids were well-spoken, clean, good to look at and well behaved.
‘I like a girl with pride about her,’ she would say. ‘I’ll have no sluts here. I like my girls to be looked at, but they’ll behave themselves or they’ll know the reason why.’
My Uncle Silas was never a very frequent visitor to The Haymakers, and after the end of the eighteen-nineties, in fact, he ceased to be a visitor at all.
Why he ceased to be a visitor was one of those things which, for reasons best known to himself, he did not choose to tell me. My Aunt Tibby told me instead.
‘About that time I had a very pretty little maid named Thirza,’ she said. ‘Rather an unusual name, but then she was an unusual girl. Came from a very nice family, four boys and three girls, all the girls very dark and very nice looking. Thirza was the eldest. Dark glossy hair, dark eyes, very nice little figure and very capable hands.’
The reason for my Aunt Tibby’s mention of the hands was because, as she explained, the girl was a very capable cook.
‘You get girls that are good behind the bar and nice to the gentlemen and so on,’ my Aunt Tibby said to me, ‘but cooking they can’t abide. But Thirza wasn’t only good behind the bar and nice to the gentlemen. She could cook. She wanted to cook. She wanted to learn.’
‘A treasure.’
‘A treasure,’ my aunt said. ‘Worth her weight in gold. Quick as a little linnet. In fact that’s what she looked like—quick and bright as a linnet and just about as nice as could be. I wouldn’t have lost her for the world.’
Another remarkable thing about the girl, my Aunt Tibby said, was the speed with which she would pick up things, and soon my aunt was teaching her to make the famous raised game pies, the Mrs. River’s Hunting Irish Stew, the eel pie, the chicken pudding, the cheese cakes and all the rest.
‘And then one day,’ she said, ‘I think it would be the latter part of the summer of ’98, I’ll be burned if your Uncle Silas didn’t drop in one evening.’
‘Trouble?’
‘Not immediately,’ she said. ‘You know Silas. He thinks about women a lot, but he thinks of his belly first. I knew what he was after. He wanted to gorge himself on home-brewed and game pie. I used to keep a fa
ir drop of home-brewed in those days. It came from the farm up the hill and it was very powerful.’
‘Game pie in the summer?’
She stared at me very severely.
‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, ‘how often pheasants break their necks on telegraph wires.’
And I could have sworn she winked at me.
‘Well, he stayed quite a while that night,’ she said, ‘gorging himself on cold pie and home-brewed and generally getting sauced up, but it wasn’t until he was nearly ready to go home that he caught sight of Thirza. She’d been in the kitchen all afternoon and evening, getting things ready for a big fishing party we had next day.’
I asked her how my Uncle Silas had reacted to his first meeting with this delightful creature.
‘Uncommon quiet,’ she said. ‘Too quiet. I didn’t like it at all.’
She went on to say something about still waters running deep and it was on the tip of my tongue to make a poorish pun about still Rivers running deep too when she said:
‘He was back next day.’
‘More game pie?’
‘And he was back the next,’ she said. ‘And the next. And the next. The reprobate. The old rascal.’
‘You must have been getting very short of pheasants by this time,’ I said, and she gave me one of her sharpest, severest looks.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think you’re a chip off the old block. You’ve got that same artful, mischievous look in your eye.’
I accepted this flattering comparison with my Uncle Silas in silence.
‘On the fourth visit,’ she said, ‘I caught him pinching her.’
‘Fourth visit?’ I said. ‘Not only uncommonly quiet. But uncommonly slow.’
‘I caught her sitting on his lap in the cellar,’ she said, ‘and him sitting on a barrel of home-brewed. Very merry and bright and saying he was going to marry the girl.’
‘Marry the girl?’ I said and I started to say something about how remarkably well my Uncle Silas must have been enjoying himself when she became very severe again.
‘I could see myself losing a very, very good girl,’ she said. ‘One way or another.’
