Chewing the Cud

by Dick King-Smith

  Going to the flicks was a weekly event, almost always by ourselves while Gladwyn sat in for us. Once only, while someone else looked after the children, we took him with us. I can't remember if the film was an uproarious comedy. It needn't have been, because many different stimuli would set him off, but I do recall the embarrassment of having every eye in a crowded cinema focused upon us as Gladwyn, more or less continuously, screamed and shrieked with maniacal laughter, the tears coursing down his cheeks.

  Once I wrote a musical, in partnership with a doctor friend. I composed most of the tunes and wrote all the lyrics, while Jimmy's main contribution was to play the piano. I can neither read nor write music, so I would sing each new song into a huge old-fashioned tape recorder and then Jimmy would play them. This he could do only in something called three flats, a key in which I found it difficult to sing. So that when we performed a selection of the numbers in front of professionals, as we did on a couple of occasions, hoping to interest them, it must have sounded a bit odd.

  The Canutopian, as I titled it, was the story of a rough-hewn Canadian cousin of a well-to-do English county family. He comes to stay on a visit and falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the house.

  Not long before, Julian Slade had had a huge success with Salad Days, and our rather simple, naive composition was much of the same kind. Except that Slade succeeded and we failed. Still, we had a lot of fun doing it, tiring as it occasionally was, such as the evening when Jimmy and his wife arrived at Woodlands Farm at 9 P.M., saying blithely that they had secured for their small children a sitter-in who was willing to hold the fort until 2 A.M. And

  I had to get up to milk at 5:30 A.M. I still think that a lot of the songs were quite good, and the words weren't bad either. One of the numbers, I recall, was “Time Is Ours to Spend.” We spent it pleasantly enough.

  Twice a year we went to a hunt ball. One was the annual gathering of the beagling folk, exchanging breeches and tweeds and stout boots for formal evening clothes, and the mud of the plowed field for the floor of the Pump Room or the Guildhall.

  The other was much grander and took place at the house of that great hunting duke, where gathered all the nimrods of note from Gloucestershire and neighboring counties with their hard-riding, hard-running, or hard-wading wives (fox, hare, or otter — everybody chased something).

  The house was in fact not large enough to hold such a field, and the actual dancing was done in a big, cold marquee attached to one side of it. Glimpses were to be had, on the way to the lavatory perhaps, of the duke warming his coattails before his fireside among a select group of cronies in their coats of blue and buff or blue and yellow or pink or green. (Father, incidentally, rated the duke, whom he met through such bodies as the Gloucestershire Society, as slightly superior to Churchill and marginally below the Queen.)

  This matter of dress, just after the war, was still of some import. For such a thing as the duke's ball, white ties and tails were very much the proper thing for men. Some callow youths might come in dinner jackets, one or two even daring to wear a soft shirt. But I by chance possessed the correct garb and so, for a time at least, wore it, though it was not suited to my figure. It shows to its best on tall, slim, long-necked fellows. And the wearing of my particular clothes was made even less fetching by the fact that they had belonged to my great-uncle Sidney.

  In cut they were far from fashionable — I dare say he first wore them while Trollope was still alive — and in color a kind of rusty black. But the principal trouble stemmed from the fact that Uncle Sid, though I never set eyes upon him, must by comparison with me have been very tall, extremely narrow-chested, and pot-bellied.

  Setting off for either of these annual fandangos was therefore a matter necessitating a particular drill. First, strong safety pins were needed to draw together behind me the spare material of the overlarge waistband; it did not matter that this left the seat of the trousers puckered into a series of vertical creases like the corrugations of a fan, since all was concealed by the overlong tailcoat. Next, a shortish but strong pair of suspenders was essential, to hoist the trousers to maximum height and thus to allow at least the soles of my shoes to escape below the endless trouser legs; this in itself rendered the fly buttons useless because of altitude and made the passing of water a major undertaking. And last, if I were not to split the ancient cloth of the coat, I needed to make my shoulders no wider than had been Uncle Sid's. This I could do only by rounding my back, keeping my elbows close to one another, and bending always slightly forward, so that all in all I looked like nothing so much as a rather seedy, obsequious footman.

  And then there was the problem of transport. The Land Rover is an able vehicle but in its basic early form not ideally designed for use in the depths of winter, when one is tarted up to the nines.

  Ours had a canvas hood, which kept out rain but not cold air, and either no heater or one so inadequate as to be unmemorable. Myrle's dress would thus need insulating with several coats and rugs, and Uncle Sid's regalia was covered by a duffle coat and over that a leather jerkin. Gloves and scarves were de rigueur and hot-water bottles not unknown.

  The other practical problem was one of cleanliness. The Land Rover had to be swept clear of calf dung or goat pel-lets, and the whole of the inside, front as well since the pedals were always plastered in muck, washed out with disinfectant. All we then needed was a couple of paper chickmeal sacks under our feet, and then it was off to the ball and onto the floor. The hunched style of dancing that Uncle Sid's suit forced upon me was no doubt taken to be an effort to accommodate my height to Myrle's, and no one ever commented on the slight pungency of disinfectant.

  Hunting people are supposedly weatherproof, and bad conditions like a heavy snowfall never seemed to affect the attendance. But on occasion the gods of the elements had a quiet snigger.

  One year the roads were sheeted with black ice by the time that the merrymakers drove away from the great duke's house, and as a convoy of twelve cars came, quite circumspectly, down a nearby hill, the fun began.

  The leading driver, all his steering, gear changing, and braking availing him naught, eventually came, once gravity had done with him, to a broadside stop at the bottom. Into him bumped the second. Solemnly, inexorably, almost in strict tempo, the remaining ten skated into one another in a weird moonlit ballet.

  Car number thirteen was being driven by a gallant and distinguished colonel, whose long service to the British Raj had clearly created the man most fitted to unscramble such a scene of chaos. The ability that had solved great problems of military engineering from Calcutta to Kandahar was not likely to have much trouble sorting out a dozen cars in Old Sodbury.

  Carefully he stopped short of the melee. Taking in the situation with one incisive glance, he got out. Masterfully he strode towards the incompetent fools who had been unable to cope with something as simple as a slippery road.

  But even as crisp words of command rang out, in tones that had reduced sepoys to sobs and jemadars to jelly, they were drowned by a sudden loud crash as number fourteen smashed the colonel's car to scrap.

  Hunt balls, of either persuasion, were on the whole pretty unremarkable. The prevailing characteristic of the dancers was likely to be heartiness, since a good proportion would be what a pair of Gaelic friends always referred to as “honkers”: English persons, that is, usually of the upper-middle classes, given to the public expression of their opinions in very loud voices and not infrequently capable of a fair degree of unthinking condescension towards lesser mortals. Honkers particularly enjoyed such dances as the Posthorn Gallop and when in wine favored such amusements as throwing bread rolls, balancing full glasses on their heads, or for a good laugh, setting the occasional tablecloth on fire. They would holler unself-consciously whenever they viewed another of the species, of either sex, across the floor.

  We usually made up a party of eight or ten other couples and were not wholly innocent of honkerishness. Usually plenty of food and exercise kept the eff
ects of drink at bay, and now and again pleasantly uninhibited moments would make the evening one to be remembered, like one particular gathering at the Pump Room.

  By suppertime our party had grown by the addition of three total strangers who came to sit with us unasked — a dull girl with a very long double-barreled name, a man who was introduced as “Armadillo Dung,” and a second man who said nothing but looked ill.

  As we all sat eating, strange expressions varying from pleasure through puzzlement to downright annoyance began to pass over the faces of the women as each glanced, or studiously did not look, at her neighbor, be he someone else's husband or Armadillo Dung or the unnamed stranger. Beneath the table, the smallest and most sloshed of us was crawling happily round on hands and knees, feeling each and every female leg in turn.

  No sooner had he been discovered and hauled out than the face of the nameless man, which had now turned putty-colored, fell forward with a splash into his plate, and ominous convulsive sounds threatened worse to come. With great presence of mind somebody grabbed a jug of water that stood, surprisingly, among the army of bottles and emptied it into a pot plant in time to catch the stranger's sole contribution to the evening.

  And to round that night off, there were a couple of splendid public rows. One was a case of good old-fashioned jealousy between husband and wife.

  “Just how many more times do you intend to dance with so-and-so?”

  “As many as I like. If you want to dance with me, you've got a tongue in your head.”

  “Bloody disgusting, slobbering all over the bloody man. Everybody's been looking at you.”

  “I was not slobbering, as you call it. And everybody's looking at you, shouting and yelling and making an idiot of yourself.”

  “I AM NOT SHOUTING…!” And so on.

  The other barney was a little more unusual, for the couple were newly engaged and might therefore have been expected to be happy with one another. But suddenly, for whatever cause — and we could not hear above the music the furious words that we could see them spitting as they danced angrily past the band — the girl broke free from her fiancé's grip and tore off her engagement ring. Setting herself like a discus thrower, she hurled it into the midst of the bemused musicians even as they resolutely rendered some sweet song for young lovers.

  And after the ball was over and we were muffled and gloved for the cold haul home, we took a last look into the dimmed and deserted ballroom. The stage still held one large shadowy figure, searching on hands and knees for that symbol of happy bondage that was gone with the wind or more probably with the brass, straight down somebody's euphonium.

  Memory treasures one last unforgettable picture, at the very end of yet another annual beaglers' assembly, this time at the Guildhall. Coats had all been left somewhere in the upper regions of the building, so that Thomas Baldwin's fine flight of stairs carried a press of people making their way up or down, a way that was unusually narrow by reason of a magnificent display of many-colored flowers arranged along the length of the staircase.

  Suddenly the gaze of the entire company, both those like us who were gathered in the great hall below already dressed for the journey and those climbing or descending, was drawn to one of our party, a tall figure standing midway between top and bottom. A steady stream of men and women gingerly edged their way past him, faces rigid in their studied lack of expression.

  His customary short “nose-warmer” pipe was clenched between his teeth, his handsome head was bent in concentration, and he wore the blissful look of the man who is bursting and has made it to the garden at last as with both hands he carefully directed upon that great bank of chrysanthemums a steady, clearly visible, and seemingly never-ending parabola of pee.

  Chapter 12

  GOATS, CHILDREN, AND DUCKS

  Sunday 14 May

  Sunday after Ascension

  Drove Rachel to Saanen billy goat.

  Actually the workaday pattern of life was a very sober-colored one. As a rule, we had a drink proper only at weekends. The perfect caveat passed the bottom of the farm drive every morning, in the shape of the tragicomic figure of Cider Harry, en route for the Ring of Bells. During the war, Cider Harry had been that then most respected of rural figures, the local police sergeant. But now, only a handful of years later, that alcoholic drink made from apples had cost him first his stripes and then his job and made of him a sad figure of fun.

  Cider Harry

  He always smiled.

  It was a fact of course

  They like that kind of copper in the force;

  Smiling, and six foot, give or take an inch,

  And fifteen stone, say, sixteen at a pinch;

  Benevolent and fatherly and fat,

  Face red as fallen crabs.

  The apple that

  Caused Harry's downfall from sobriety

  Was of a different variety:

  For it was scrumpy that laid down the law.

  A dozen pints a day?

  It could be more.

  I don't know why.

  I mean I don't know why

  He drank so hard. Perhaps to damp some dry

  Old scar, drown some old love's still frantic clutch,

  Or did he simply like the stuff too much?

  They took away his stripes and then his job,

  For now the smile was fixed.The odd two bob

  From friends kept him in drink. His sister kept

  Him in a chicken house. Quite warm. She swept

  It out, removed the perches. “'Pon my soul,

  Can't have him in with us.

  He's no control.

  He's like a child.

  He'll do it in the road.”

  And so, where once with dignity he strode,

  He shuffles now behind the aimless grin

  With silly little steps towards the inn;

  Sits in the corner, blink and bow and beam,

  Until it's time for bed.

  You wouldn't dream

  How cozy, would you? Close the henhouse door,

  Shutters, and pop-hole. Shake the mousy straw.

  Feet in the nest box, pillow is a pile

  Of folded chickmeal sacks.

  See Harry smile.

  February 1972

  Unbuttoned, unlaced, his face a match for the reddest apple, he grinned his way along the road, his nose a huge squashed strawberry above the slack mouth. He was a big man, but his long stride had turned to a short nervous shuffle, as though he must keep both feet pressed to the ground or, raising one, risk a fall.

  Not quite oblivious to the world, for he would nod in answer to a greeting, Cider Harry hurried carefully towards the pub and then, much later, back home again, this time pausing once or twice to urinate in the hedge, his back politely turned to the passing traffic. Home, they said in the village, was a chicken house in his sister's garden. She would not have him come indoors.

  The memory of Cider Harry has lingered because I named my first goat, perhaps for some reason of resemblance, after his sister, a Mrs. Pearce.

  My Mrs. Pearce was a gentle, sweet-natured animal, black and white and carrying a modest pair of neat crenellated horns by which she could be led about without any of that pulling and head tossing or butting in which some goats indulge.

  She was very hairy, not only about the chin, so that a skirt or apron of hair hung about her almost to the ground. She was small, like her milk yield, and short, like her life with us. For when I went to milk poor Mrs. Pearce one morning in the orchard, where she was tethered, there she lay with her throat torn out.

  There had been some worrying in the district, and one dog, I suppose, could not tell the goats from the sheep.

  In due course I acquired a number of goats, but at least I had sense enough not to keep a billy. The smell of the one to which I first took my nanny goat was powerful enough even to have cleared Cider Harry's head. Large and shaggy, with a wicked sweep of horn, this animal was very obviously common in the unkindest sense of
the word, compounding its natural rankness by spraying itself with its own urine. Its coat thus more yellow than white, it would advance upon the visiting female, neck outstretched and head thrown back so that the horn tips rested upon its withers. Cold eyes half-closed in anticipation, nostrils flaring, it rolled its rubbery upper lip back from its dirty teeth with a horrid relish.

  A nice old superstition says that you never see a goat for the whole of the twenty-four hours because once every day it pays a visit to the Devil to have its beard combed. After a couple of times I decided never to see this one again, not for one minute, and took my animals in future to an elegant pedigree Saanen who was hornless, practically clean-shaven, and by comparison positively fragrant.

  First to wed this upper-class person was my fourth and favorite goat, Rachel. After Mrs. Pearce's tragic end, Mrs. Wilkins had slipped off a steep bank and strangled herself on her tethering chain, and Mrs. Maypole had tired of life and died in her sleep, so I renounced the local ladies and named Rachel for her looks, which were pure Old Testament.

  She was an Anglo-Nubian, a breed with large pendulous ears and a profile of Roman nobility. I couldn't find a billy of her own sort within range, but the gentlemanly Saanen was good enough, the object of our goat keeping being simply to produce milk to feed to dachshund puppies. It didn't matter how the kids turned out. Whatever they looked like, they were a delight to watch as they skipped about the orchard; and when they were old enough, we would sell the females and eat the males, another delight, like spring lamb with a hint of venison.

  Transport for animals at that time was a large custard-colored Austin van, once the property of a baker, which I had bought by mistake at a farm sale. Watching disinterestedly as the bidding reached thirty-six pounds, I had chanced to look towards the auctioneer, a friend, who nodded his head at me, so I nodded back, and he knocked it down to me.