by H. E. Bates
Then he found out that the girl’s father, a gamekeeper, had got as far as having D.T’s about every three or four weeks and was now resting in a home for drunks on the other side of the county.
‘If you are coming to see Arabella,’ the mother said, ‘there must be no drink. Absolutely no drink. No talk of drink. We’ve been through purgatory enough already.’
‘Not half as much as I went through in the next five or six weeks, though, I’ll tell you,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Wust time I ever remember. Terrible. Like being in a desert. Thought I’d go mad.’
‘But the girl,’ I suggested, ‘was nice? She was worth it?’
With thoughtful melancholy my Uncle Silas started to de-flower another cowslip.
‘That wur the trouble,’ he said. ‘I wadn’t gittin’ much fur me money either.’
I found it hard to reconcile this remark with my Uncle Silas’s repeated description of the girl as a big juicy pear ripe for picking and I had actually started to say so when he pulled me up quite sharply.
‘Ah! but you forgit Ma,’ he said. ‘Ma was allus there.’
In the parlour, in the kitchen, in the garden, in the woods, across the meadows—Ma, it seemed, was always there.
‘Never went quite so far as smelling me breath,’ Silas said, ‘but that wur the rough idea. I be damned if I could ever git the gal alone.’
I could hardly believe that my Uncle Silas had utterly failed to find a way of removing the final obstacle to this frustrating state of affairs and I was quite relieved to hear him say:
‘Then I had a bit of inspiration. Bit of a brainwave. Very like it wur this teetotal business keepin’ me ’ead oncommon clear for a week or two, but suddenly it come over me all of a pop what was up with Ma.’
I ran my hand through the clothes’ basket and picked out a handful of juicy cowslip stems, at the same time watching Silas with an inquiring, crucial eye.
‘Jealous,’ he said. ‘That wur the trouble with Ma.’
Philosophically chewing on another cowslip stem, Silas expanded a little further on the theme that there are mothers who are sometimes uncommonly jealous of their handsome daughters.
‘Arter all it wur a bit lonely for her,’ he said. ‘With ’im not there and she only thirty-five. Got to remember that.’
I started to inquire how far this interesting discovery had carried him and he laughed for the second time that afternoon and said:
‘Arter that it wur easy. Plain sailing all the way. Decided I’d give it up. Rather have the beer than the gal. Hadn’t got the gal anyway.’
This seemed, I thought, rather a disappointing end to an episode that I felt would itself ripen like a pear, but my Uncle Silas hadn’t finished yet.
‘One night I decided I’d nip off home and never come back,’ he said, ‘but at the last minute I hadn’t the heart to tell the gal. Damn it, she wur a beautiful gal, she wur.’
Picking up another handful of cowslips, he went on to tell me how he said good night to the girl and her mother for the last time. It was summer and for some time after leaving there he walked up and down in the lane outside. ‘I wanted that gal very much,’ he said, and at last he could bear it no longer. He decided to go back to the house and see if he couldn’t talk to her alone.
‘They were both in bed by that time,’ he said, ‘and I had to git a ladder and prop it up aside the house so as I could wake her.’
He tapped softly on the window several times and called, ‘Arabella’ and at last a figure in a white nightgown appeared.
‘Arabella,’ he said, ‘I’ve got summat I must say to you.’
‘It’s not Arabella,’ a voice whispered, ‘it’s me.’
My Uncle Silas was never one to lose his head on such occasions and he said quickly:
‘Ma, I jist wanted to tell Arabella I shan’t be coming this way no more.’
My Uncle Silas laughed softly.
‘Thought she’d a fell outa the winder when I said that,’ he went on. ‘Thought she’d a shed a tear.’
‘Upset?’
‘Terrible. Couldn’t pacify her. Went on summat chronic—about how they liked me so much and how they’d miss me and all that. I wur so surprised I nearly fell off the damn ladder.’
‘Instead?’
He laughed softly again.
‘She said wouldn’t I come into the bedroom a minute and talk it over? So I nipped in for a minute or two.’ He was de-flowering cowslips quite fast now, chuckling. ‘Matter of fact we talked it over fur the best part o’ the night. Very understanding woman she turned out to be.’
‘And after that?’ I said. ‘What about the girl?’
‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ruminating on the flight of two cuckoos in pursuit above the spinney, ‘we come to a sort of pact. I said I’d keep Ma from being too lonely fur a night or two if she’d leave me alone now and then with the gal.’
The cuckoos, calling with throaty bubblings in the warm air, disappeared across the meadows of buttercups, their voices echoing in the still air.
‘Very useful ladder that wur,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Up one winder one night and t’other the next.’
I had nothing to say and my Uncle Silas, laughing with a voice as soft and juicy as a full ripe pear, de-flowered another cowslip.
A Note on the Author
H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym ‘Flying Officer X’. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950).
Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.
Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.
H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.
Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates.
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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
Stories compiled from My Uncle Silas first published in Great Britain in 1939 by Jonathan Cape Ltd and Sugar for the Horse first published in Great Britain in 1957 by Michael Joseph
‘Shandy Lil,’ and ‘A Teetotal Tale’ first published in Great Britain in 1965 in The Wedding Party by Michael Joseph
‘Loss of Pride’ first published in Great Britain in 1976 in The Yellow Meads of Asphodel by Michael Joseph
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader
Copyright © 1939, 1957, 1965, 1976 Evensford Productions Limited
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eISBN: 9781448215324
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