(2/20) Village Diary (26 page)

The children elected to play indoors during the dinner hour, and as the weather was so appalling, it seemed the best thing to do. Jigsaw puzzles, beads, picture books, crayons and paper, and plasticine modelling kept them ad engrossed, and they begged to be allowed to hear 'Listen with Mother' at a quarter to two. As a special treat I switched it on. It is, as everyone knows, a programme intended for children under school age, but most of the Fairacre children listen with attention to it. This does not surprise me with the infants, for our children are remarkably unsophisticated and appreciate stories, games, songs and so on intended for much younger people; but I am astonished that some children of eight or nine, in my own class, should still get satisfaction from this excellent programme. I should be interested to know if other teachers find that their children are equally responsive, for I should have thought that the natural reaction of the older child to 'Listen with Mother' would have been impatience. In any case, it is a compliment to the planners of this programme, which I am happy to pass on.

Joseph Coggs has brought his tortoise to school. This animal has been lost dozens of times during the summer, but has been found in various parts of the parish and returned to Joe. Now, it is comatose and ready to hibernate, and Joseph's mother has asked if we can find it accommodation in school. Today, the children put it in a box of dry earth and leaves, and it is back in the corner of the lobby. With any luck, it should survive, and will certainly be less disturbed there, despite forty-odd children's attention, than it would be in the Coggs' crowded and ramshackle cottage.

We sent the children home ten minutes earlier this afternoon, much to their jubilation. The classroom was already too dark to see properly, and the four inadequate bulbs, which hang naked from the ceiling, did little to help. The children ran off into the mist, squealing like piglets, and shouting joyfully to each other.

Miss Jackson and I stoked up a roaring fire, drew the curtains to shut out the first dismal, dispiriting day of November, and made anchovy toast for tea. I only hoped that all our pupils were as happily and snugly sheltered.

I am appalled at the amount of litter lying about in Fairacre's once tidy lane. I suppose it is more noticeable since poor old Bannister, the road man, died a few weeks ago, for no one can be found to take the job on.

At this time of year, too, the leaves are thick in the sides of the roads and any rain carries them along to the drains which soon get blocked. Then again, far more things are wrapped in paper these days; but litter baskets stand outside the grocer's shop, the butcher's and the 'Beetle and Wedge' and one would have thought that three would have been ample in a little place like Fairacre. I can't help feeling that this nuisance shows complete callousness towards the look of the place, and also an unpleasant trait in the public's attitude to the welfare state. As Mrs Pringle horrified me by saying, when commenting on the rubbish blowing about near the church: 'We pays to have it done, don't we? In rates and that?' Presumably, that should be enough!

I have been having an extraordinary anti-litter campaign at school, but with only partial success. Linda Moffat, of ad people, peeled a mint sweet free from its wrappings in the playground, and let each wisp flutter delicately to the ground. When the last had fallen, I pounced upon her, and drove her into picking each minute piece up.

She obeyed, with a mixture of one-humouring-an-idiot and genuine bewilderment, which made me give yet another blistering lecture to Fairacre School, which the children listened to with great resentment, as it should have been a percussion band period, and they felt themselves most hardly used.

Mrs Willet commented on this problem too when I went down to her cottage to leave a message for Mr Willet.

'Not much good ticking off the children,' she remarked, 'when the parents are behaving like that!' She nodded through the window towards Mrs Coggs who was passing. The latest baby was blissfully clawing a newspaper and dropping the pieces over the side, while its mother gazed at it with fond pride.

Mrs Willet was busy making sloe gin when I called. She sat at her kitchen table, pricking the sloes diligently with a stout darning needle, and dropping them into a bottle half-full of gin.

'Ready at Christmas!' she said proudly. 'I do a bottle every year, and sometimes wine as well!'

She opened her larder door and displayed the riches inside. It was as well-stocked with jars and bottles as Miss Clare's, and I was struck—not for the first time—with the versatility and energy of the average countrywoman.

Mrs Willet can tackle a hundred jobs, without having been specifically
taught
any of them. She can salt pork or beef, make jams, jellies, wines, chutneys and pickles; she can bake pies—with ad manner of pastries—cakes, tarts and her own bread, which is particularly delicious. She makes rugs, curtains, and her own clothes. She can help a neighbour in childbirth and—at the other end of life's span—compose a corpse's limbs for decent burial. She is as good a gardener as her husband, can distemper a room, mend a fuse, and sings in the choir.

She is, in fact, typical of most countrywomen, and with them she shares that self-reliance which is the heritage of those who have had to face tackling daily jobs of varied kinds.

Mrs Willet is small and pale and yet she is always on the go,' as she herself will ted you. The fact that she can do so many things, and takes enormous pride in doing them wed, is, I think, the secret of this apparently inexhaustible energy. There are so many different activities to engage her, that when she tires of one, there is another to which she can turn and get refreshment. From turning her heavy old mangle in the wash-house, she will come in and sit down to stitch a new skirt. She will prepare a stew, and while it simmers on the hob, filling the little house with its fragrance, she will practise her part in Mr Annett's new anthem, ready for the next church festival. And—this perhaps is the most important thing—she sees a satisfying result from her labours. The clothes blow on the line, the skirt is folded and put away in the drawer ready for next Sunday; Mr Willet will come in 'sharp-set' and praise her bubbling stew; and, with any luck, Mr Annett will congratulate her on her grasp of that difficult passage just before the basses come in.

It is a creative life. There is something worth while to show for energy expended which engenders the desire to accomplish more. Small wonder that the Mrs Willets of this world are happy, and deserve to be so.

Mr Willet, as the school's shipshape condition testifies, is equally resourceful. There are very few jobs that are beyond Mr Willet's powers. He replaces hinges, panes of glass, roof tiles, fence palings, and other casualties of school life. I have seen him giving a hand with thatching, cleaning out a wed, felling a tree, and catching a frightened horse. He can build a shed or a garage, laying bricks and smoothing cement with the best of them, fashion a pair of wooden gates, or erect a bird bath or sundial. He knows how to prune any shrub that grows, how to graft, how to lay a hedge, where to get the best manure, pea-sticks, bean-poles and everything else necessary to maintain a flourishing garden. To me and to the managers of Fairacre school he is beyond price, saving many a repair bid and foreseeing any possible trouble and forestalling it with his capable old hands.

And yet, when his modest cheque arrives at the end of the month, he receives it with a bashfulness which puts my own eagerness to shame.

Two days before half term I received a note from Miss Clare inviting me there for the next evening.

Dr Martin had hailed me from his car, soon after his visit, and told me that 'he'd had a word with Miss Clare about having someone in the house.' With that he had driven off—so that I wondered how much Miss Clare knew, when I approached her door.

She greeted me as warmly as ever, and before long, introduced the subject of lodgers herself.

'Dr Martin suggested that I joined forces with my sister Ada, but of course that's out of the question. He insists that someone should be with me—foolishly, I think—but I feel that I must do as he says. Do you think my spare bedroom and the little front parlour would be suitable?'

I said that any lodger would be lucky to get them. Then I took a deep breath, and said that I believed Miss Jackson would be prepared to make a change.

'But I must warn you,' I said, 'that she's not awfully easy in some ways. Getting her up is a dreadful job each morning. She sleeps like the dead—and you shouldn't have to run up and down stairs after her, with your wonky heart.'

'I shouldn't dream of doing so,' answered Miss Clare, 'and in any case Dr Martin said that she would have to understand, from the first, that I could not do all I should wish to do for her—' She broke off and began to laugh. 'There!

Now the cat's out of the bag! Yes, my dear, I'm afraid the doctor and I have been discussing this business. Quite unforgiveable of us, behind your back!'

'Don't worry,' I said. 'I can guess who started the conversation, and, frankly, I should be glad to be relieved of my lodger. We see too much of each other for the thing to work properly—and I'm probably a bit irritable after school, and let things rile me unnecessarily.'

'As we're being honest, I'd better tell you that Doctor Martin said as much. His words were: "If you want to see Miss Read staying sane, you'll take pity on her and remove her assistant. That poor girl gets a pretty thin time of it, living with her headmistress"!'

'Well!' I exclaimed, flabbergasted at Doctor Martin's duplicity. He'd certainly seen the best way to get Miss Clare to fall in with his machinations! I wouldn't mind betting, I thought to myself, that the harrowing tale he had pitched me was all part of his low cunning! However, I could not help feeling amused at the skilful way in which he had worked on us both, and could do nothing of course to let Miss Clare know of his conversation with me, which had led up to the present situation.

'I'm sure he's right,' I said, swallowing my bitter pill. 'She'll be much happier with you, if you feel up to coping with the extra work. Why not write to her? I'll take a note back, if you like.'

She fetched her old red leather writing-case, which the Partridges had given her one Christmas, and sat down at the table. The room was very quiet as she wrote. A coal clinked into the hearth and the tabby cat stretched itself on the rug. I leant back and closed my eyes and thought wryly of the lengths to which conscientious doctors will go for their favourite patients.

At last the letter was finished, and Miss Clare handed it over for my perusal. It said:

Dear Miss Jackson,

I understand from Miss Read that you are still looking for permanent lodgings. Would you care to come here? lean offer you a bedroom and a separate sitting-room, and should be very glad to welcome you.

If this interests you perhaps you could come to tea one day soon, to see if the accommodation is suitable and to discuss other arrangements.

Yours sincerely,

Dorothy Clare

It was written in her beautiful, flowing, copper-plate hand, which has been Fairacre's model for forty years, and, with its even spacing and equal margins was a work of art, most pleasing to the eye.

'I'm sure she'll jump at the chance,' I told her, handing it back to be put in its envelope, 'and I shall be able to revert to my pleasant solitary state, and talk nonsense to the cat without being afraid that I'm overheard.'

And so Miss Jackson's future was settled, to the great comfort of Miss Clare, Dr Martin, Fairacre's headmistress—and, most important, to the happiness of Miss Jackson herself.

***

'Heard about that chap Mawne?' asked Mr Widet, the next morning. 'They were saying after choir practice that there's two places he's trying for. That pair of old cottages on the road to Springbourne, where Mr Roberts' old shepherd lived some while ago, afore he moved up to the council houses; and Captain Whatsisname's—you knows, up the back there.' He waved a massive thumb in the direction of the 'Beetle and Wedge.'

'Bit big, aren't they?' I said, and then wished I hadn't.

'They says as he's settling down here,' said Mr Willet stolidly. I was grateful for his sober face. 'Maybe he's having relations, and that, to live there too.'

'Quite likely,' I said.

'It do seem wrong to me,' went on Mr Willet thoughtfully, 'the way that folks with a bit of money, buys up these old cottages us village chaps have always lived in. Don't leave nothing for us.'

'But everyone's bursting to get into a council house,' I protested. 'You know the heart-burning that goes on, every time a few are allotted to different families.'

'Ah!' said Mr Willet, nodding sagely. 'They all wants a council house—but not at the rents they asks for them.'

'Good lord!' I expostulated, 'the houses are subsidized now! They're living partly at other ratepayers' expense. They get the amenities they ask for cheaper than they would in a private house. What more can they want?'

'Take old Burton, that used to be shepherd. He used to pay three bob a week for that cottage. Now his rent's nearer thirty-three.'

'And how can you expect any landlord to keep a cottage in repair for three bob a week? I should have thought you'd have seen the sense in that!'

Mr Willet was not at all put out by my heat. He stropped his chin thoughtfully, as he replied.

'Tisn't that I don't see the sense.
Of course,
three bob's not enough.
Of course,
thirty-three don't cover the proper cost of one of them new council houses-I knows that. But, you think again. What is a chap like old Burton to do, on his bit of money? Where is he to live, if he's to stay in Fairacre?'

I pondered this problem. Mr Willet, who had obviously given this matter much more earnest thought than I had ever done, spoke again.

'If the council could build some real
little
places—nothin' elaborate, mind you—as could be let fairly cheap, why, they'd go like hot cakes. That's the thing—some real
little
places for us old 'uns.'