(2/20) Village Diary (27 page)

He switched to another aspect of rural housing.

'Mr Roberts gave young Miller the rough side of his tongue evidently.'

'Oh? What's the trouble there?'

'Well, you know his old dad is the main tractor driver and his old mum does a turn mornings for Mrs Roberts? That cottage has got four rooms, and when young Em got married he hadn't got no place to go, so home he comes, wife and all, to live with the old people. Mr Roberts told him dat he was to find somewhere—but you know how it is—he just never! Now the baby's come, and it grizzles all night and fair drives the old folks dotty. Young Em works up the atomic and gets good pay. He's got no business in a tied cottage and he knows it. It's been that awkward. Mr Roberts don't want to lose his best tractor man, by being too sharp, and yet why should that young Em live off of him?'

I said it was certainly unjust.

'Looks as though this baby'll settle things. The old chap's getting proper fell-up and Mr Roberts told Em he wasn't going to have one of his best workers upset, because his son was "a selfish lout." Ah! that was his words, miss! Ern says he ain't stopping to be insulted, so I reckons he'll sling his hook—and a good job too.'

He seized the broom he had leant against the wall, during this interesting gossip, and stumped off to resume sweeping the scattered coke in the playground.

'How all you ladies does run on!' he called wickedly over his shoulder.

The half-term holiday flew by, and a week later Miss Jackson left the school-house to take up her new quarters with Miss Clare. I must say she seems very much happier, and has been remarkably punctual, despite her journey, each morning.

It was soon after her departure that Amy called to insist on taking me to a play, being performed nightly at the Corn Exchange in Caxley, by a repertory company.

'But it's so cold in the evenings,' I protested weakly. 'All I want to do after school, is to settle in here by the fire and doze with Tibby.'

'
Exactly?
said Amy vehemently. She was back in her old dictatorial form, I noticed, quite unlike the unhappy Amy who had told me of her mythical friend's matrimonial sorrows, on an earlier visit.

'You live in this
backwater'—here
she waved a disdainful hand round my comfortable sitting-room, with such effect, that I could almost imagine the reeds standing in muddy water and the whirring of wild duck around us—'and dream your life away! This play will pull you up sharply, my girl!'

I began to say that I didn't want to be pulled up sharply, but Amy swept relentlessly onward.

'It deals with Problems of the Present. I admit it's Sordid and Brutal—but life's like that these days. Even the decor is symbolic. The first set shows a back alley in a slum. It could be anywhere, the Gorbals, or New Orleans, or Hong Kong —and the windows are shuttered, symbolizing Blank Weariness. In the centre of the stage is a dustbin, symbolizing Filth and Hopeless Waste and Rejection.'

'You don't sav!' I interjected, trying to restrain my mounting hysteria.

'If you are going to
be
flippant,
' said Amy severely, 'I shall think twice about taking you, I haven't forgotten your disgraceful behaviour at that Moral Rearmament meeting!'

I said that I was sorry, and begged her to forgive me. She looked somewhat mollified.

'The actors speak in blank verse—the language is rather strong, naturally—but when the play is dealing with such things as rape, homosexuality, betrayal and lingering death, both of spirit and body—one must expect it!'

I said it sounded quite delightful, so fresh and wholesome, but that they were reviving
Genevieve
at the local cinema, and could we go to that instead? Amy ignored this pathetic plea, and was about to continue, when I capitulated.

'All right, I'd come,' I said sighing. 'But I warn you! If any old Father This or Brother That comes wailing on to the stage—as I feel in my bones he must—I shad walk straight out, stating in a clear, carrying voice that I am taking my custom to a nice, clean, cheerful entertainment at the cinema opposite!'

I gave Mrs Partridge a lift to Caxley on Saturday morning. I was off to buy some really thick winter gloves, despite the reproaches of my account book which makes gloomy reading. Mrs Partridge was about to buy Christmas presents for relatives abroad.

'Have you heard the good news about Mr Mawne?' she asked, as we passed Beech Green school. My godson, I noticed, was taking the air in his perambulator in the front garden of the school-house.

'I heard that he was trying to find a house,' I said guardedly.

'Well, it's ad settled. He's renting Brackenhurst, where Captain Horner and his family were. He has been posted to Nairobi or Vancouver, or one of those places out East,' said the vicar's wife with a fine disregard for geography, 'and will be away for five years, poor dear. Still, it's very nice for Mr Mawne. Now, he really will be able to settle down in Fairacre, and look for a place to buy if he feels like it. He's a great asset to the village, you know.'

I said yes, I did know—the church accounts, for instance.

Mrs Partridge laughed and said that she didn't suppose that it was for the sake of the church accounts that Mr Mawne was making his home in Fairacre, and added that I was apt to belittle myself.

With this cryptic and uncomfortable remark still echoing in my ears, I drew up by the kerb, and allowed Mrs Partridge to alight.

As I made my way through Caxley's jammed High Street to the car park-which is ignored by most of the residents, who prefer to drive themselves mad by attempting to wedge their cars outside the shops rather than carry a basket for five minutes—I wondered how much longer I should have to endure Fairacre's romantic and ill-founded conjectures about my private life, in silence.

In the Public Library I was delighted to come across Mrs Finch-Edwards. She was looking through an enormous book, with plates showing eighteenth-century costumes. We had a sibilant but eager exchange of news under the silence notice. Lucidly, we were alone in the non-fiction department, and apart from a glare from a tousled young man in a spotty duffle coat who passed through, carrying an aggressive-looking book with a Left-Wing coloured jacket, we were undisturbed.

'We're making costumes for the Caxley Octet's concert after Christmas,' she whispered excitedly. 'It's to be a period programme. Eighteenth-century music and clothes and furniture. Isn't it lovely? Mrs Bond plays the viola and it was she who asked us to design and make the costumes. Isn't it fun?'

I said it certainly was, and that she and Mrs Moffat would be famous in no time, and that Mr Oliver Messel and Mr Cecd Beaton would have to look to their laurels.

'Oh, I don't think so!' protested Mrs Finch-Edwards seriously. 'I mean, they're
really
good. It will be some rime before we can compete with them!'

On which satisfactory note we parted.

Mrs Pringle staggered in with a bucket of coke this morning, puffing and blowing like a grampus, and limping with great exaggeration whenever she remembered.

'If them as uses this coke so heavy-handed had to lug this 'ere bucket in, day in and day out,' she remarked morosely, dumping it noisily on a well-placed
People
by the guard, 'it might be an eye-opener to them! Flared up again, my leg has."

I said I was sorry to hear that, and perhaps Minnie would help out again. As I had intended, this touched Mrs Pringle's pride. She drew in her breath sharply.

'What? And let her ruin my blackleading again? Not likely! I'll struggle on, thank you!'

She settled herself on the front desk, folded her arms upon her black wooden jumper, and embarked on a short gossip, before the school bell summoned the children.

'I hear there's going to be more changes in the village,' she began circumspectly. This, I suspected, referred to Mr Mawne's plans, but since our altercation over that gentleman, Mrs Pringle has been most careful not to mention him by name.

`That poor young Captain Horner's been took off to Siberia or Singapore—some place anyway—where the army's looking for trouble," she continued. From her tone one would have imagined that the army had nothing better to do than stir up strife in a desultory way, with the ends of their bayonets, and solely for their own idle pleasure.

'So his house, I understand," went on Mrs Pringle delicately, 'has been let to someone!"

I said shortly that I knew that Mr Mawne had taken it.

'Oh, Mr Mawne is it?" said Mrs Pringle, feigning extreme surprise. 'There now, that will be nice!"

'What other changes are there?' I asked, leading her, I hoped, to safer ground.

'That empty cottage, where old Mr Burton used to live years back—that's being done up.'

'Who for?'

'Well, now, it's for a distant relation of mine. My old auntie married again, on the passing of her first husband to higher things, the second one being quite a young man, but steady. They had two children, pretty sharp, and this girl's the daughter of the second one. No! I'm telling a he! He had but the two boys. Gladys was Tom's girl. Very refined she is—has her hair permed and all that, and speaks ladylike—and marrying a nice young chap at a baker's in Caxley. She was over last week. We had a nice set-down with the teapot and she told me all about him. "Auntie," she said, "he's wonderful! Love is the most important thing in the world!"'

Mrs Pringle's sour old face wore a maudlin simper which astonished me.

'And what did you say?' I asked, fascinated.

'I said: "Glad," I said, "you're right," I said, "it's only True Love that matters!" Don't you reckon that's right, Miss Read?'

Thus appealed to I found myself saying cautiously that I supposed it was important, but agreed privately with the Provincial Lady's secret feeling that a satisfactory banking account and sound teeth matter a great deal more.

'Believe me,' said Mrs Pringle, rising from the desk to continue her labours, 'there's nothing like it! Let it come early, let it come late-' Here she fixed me with an earnest and slightly watery eye—'it's love that makes the world go round!'

Walking almost jauntily, and without a trace of a limp, she went, humming romantically, on her way.

The children came rushing in a few minutes later, in the greatest excitement.

'Joe Coggs, miss!'

''E's fell over!'

'Cut his head open, miss!'

I quelled them as best I could as I made my way into the playground, thinking, not for the first time, how very much I disliked that word 'open,' added to these statements of injury. Somehow, 'He has cut his head,' sounds the sort of injury that I can cope with. Add that unnecessary and obnoxious word, and at once I visualize a child's head cloven in half, and looking like a transverse section in a botanical drawing. It is unnerving, to say the least of it, and I must admit that I am a squeamish woman at the best of times.

We met Joseph in the porch, surrounded by a crowd of garrulous well-wishers, who were almost tearing the clothes off his back in their anxiety to assist his passage. Luckily, the wound turned out to be a minute cut on his forehead, which was soon put to rights with a piece of adhesive bandage.

Prayers were over, and the children were just settling down to arithmetic, when the vicar called with the hymn list. He seemed disposed to chat and I brought another chair and set it by my desk.

He had just come from old Mr Burton's council house, where he had lived since giving up his regular shepherding.

'I'm afraid he's sinking,' said the vicar sadly, looking down at the leopard-skin gloves on his thin knees. 'It was a pity he ever left that little cottage of his. He's ailed ever since he went up to the council house. He was too old to uproot himself, you know.'

'It was jolly damp and uncomfortable in that cottage,' I replied, 'and the only water available was from that stand pipe out in the lane. I should have thought he would have been much more comfortable in the new house.'

'More comfortable in his body perhaps,' said the vicar slowly, 'but not in his spirit. In the first place he has little privacy there, in full view of his neighbours. And then, that little old cottage was like a snail's shed to the snail. He'd lived in it all his life, and it had vital associations. The mantelpiece, for instance, with its rest above it for whips, and the bracket below for his old gun, the peg on the back door where he hung his canvas lunch bag—it was an old A.R.P. gas-mask holder, I remember—the kitchen shelf still showing grooves where his wife screwed the mincer, and where his children had nicked the edges with their penknives—why, the whole place was a record of his life! Take him from that at the age of seventy-odd, and how can you expect him to flourish? One might just as wed tear up a primrose plant from the wood and expect it to flower in concrete!'

I agreed and said that I'd heard he had become very morose lately and inclined to be querulous.

'Naturally,' went on the vicar, 'he feels lost and without value there. Have you read
Lucy Bettesworth
by George Bourne?'

I said that I had not.

'I'll lend it to you,' said the vicar, 'he sums up this problem so wed in one of the essays in the book. "Whatever is agreeable and kindly in bis nature"—I quote from memory—"is kept alive by the intimate touch of homely possessions. They are the witness of his life's work, and surrounded by them he still feels a man." So true, so true!' sighed the vicar, reaching for his biretta.

By this time the children were getting restless. I could see that Ernest had contrived a warlike weapon from his ruler and an elastic band, and was busy making ammunition with pellets of pink blotting-paper, which he was ranging with military exactitude along the groove of his desk. The next stage, I knew, would be to dip each pellet in the inkwell before letting it fly gloriously abroad, and I was anxious to see the vicar comfortably to the door before this last and lethal step was taken.

On the threshold he paused again, and said more cheerfully: 'Young Captain Horner is off to Malta, I hear, and has let his house to Mr Mawne. So that's quite settled. I have written to him, and my wife and I hope you will both come to tea as soon as he is back. I must say I shall be glad to see him. The Free-Will Offering Fund has somehow become inextricably involved with the Altar-Flowers and Church-Fabric Accounts—most mystifying. They're all together in a chocolate box, but I can't find enough money to tally with the three accounts.'