Cut and Come Again (25 page)

After breakfast on fine summer mornings I used to drive my grandfather's two black cows out of the farm-yard, cracking them across their bony buttocks with an old thorn stick as black as the cows with age and use, and take them along the road-side where they could roam knee-deep in summer grass and fill their bellies for the day. The road ran from east to

west. The village lay to the west, and away to the east stretched a great plain of open country, where windmills stood on every bit of rising ground arid villages with silver spires in every hollow, wood after wood and cornfield after cornfield patterning the land between. I hardly ever drove the cows to the west. Day after day I turned their heads towards the morning sun and let them roam downhill towards the plain, past the blackthorn scrub where the verge widened and gipsies drew up their caravans and downhill to the stream running over the road a yard of brown and silver water. The stream was the parish boundary, and there I let the cows drink before driving them back again. It was the easiest laziest work in the world. The cows could look after themselves while I looked in the hedgerows for a finch's nest or for an ash-stick to peel to fantastic patterns or while I lay on my back in the grass and looked blankly at the larks in the summer sky.

Hardly anyone ever came along the road except perhaps a farmer driving to market in a trap, sitting with his wife under the big green sun-umbrella. Or a drover with a herd of sheep, or a gamekeeper with a dog, or a girl in a black habit taking her morning ride on a sleek brown pony as proud as herself. Sometimes the gipsies had pitched on the brow of the hill and they would be peg-making or tinkering by the fire as I drove the cows

past, hoicking and blustering at the animals to make them go faster, afraid that the gipsies would kidnap me and hamstring the cows and take us all away in the yellow-and-emerald van with the shining brass wheel hubs and door-knobs and lanterns.

Frightened of the gipsies one day, I drove the cows on the following morning towards the village, westward. Coming near the village I looked ahead and saw approaching me another boy, also driving a cow
,
a lean, red-and-white beast with narrow udders and a crippled, shambling walk.

The cows drew level with each other, the old red cow on one side of the road, our black ones on the other, and presently the boy and I drew level with each other too. I should have gone past without speaking, but as we drew level he shouted across at me:

‘Tame work!'

‘Yes,' I said feebly, for I thought it was fine work.

‘So deuced silly, cows.' he said, swishing with his walking stick at some purple thistle-heads. ‘Anything doing the other way?' and he pointed eastward.

‘Not much. Some gipsies. That's about all.'

‘Gipsies? Bit tame, don't you think? Anyway, I'll keep on. Going to turn your old crocks round and come back with me?'

‘Your old cow isn't so fat,' I said.

He wasn't at all offended. Aiming at the thistle-heads again he agreed with me – a rotten old
cow,
an old hag, fit for nothing.

‘Whose cow is it?' I asked him.

‘Old Strawn's – doddering old fool, my uncle. Got about fifty beastly cows, but he sends me out with this cripple. Frightfully low down.'

Old Strawn was a milkman who sold milk from a bucket, house to house, and they used to say that he watered his milk from the pond where his only cow squelched to drink and cool her legs. If he had lived for a thousand years he would never have had fifty cows, and turning our cows about, I said:

‘If you mean Strawn the milkman, he's only got one cow.'

‘Ah, until yesterday, yes. But he bought up a lot yesterday – made a good deal.'

I did not know what to say and we walked on for a good distance, each of us cracking our cows forward, without speaking much. During this time I kept looking at the

boy out of the corner of my eye, inexplicably fascinated by him. He spoke in a strange, high-pitched, superlatively refined voice, and he was dressed, as it were, in keeping with his voice, his neat black coat and trousers and wide starched collar and black bow all as new and sleek as his cow was old and bony, his whole demeanour as superior as she was humble.

We let the cows roam on and we followed them down the hill and past the gipsies and down to the stream. There they drank and then stood without drinking to cool their hocks in the running water. Sometimes I had seen a kingfisher swoop up-stream in the brown shadows of the willows and alders, and while the cows drank I leaned on the white wooden bridge & watched, and suddenly I saw the bird sweep under me like a blue arrow and pierce the flicker of shadow and sunlight.

‘Did you see it?' I said to the boy.

‘See what?' he drawled.

Before I could reply to his bored voice we heard an irate shout, and a toothless old man, with an angry white beard, came running down the hill, hoicking and driving our cows before him. We had let the cows wander over the parish boundary, and as he came nearer he shouted:

‘Take your damn cows off – take 'em off into your own parish. Who d'ye think you are? Take 'em off!'

I ran across the brook and drove the cows back across it again, the old man shaking his fist at me, and we whacked the cows with our sticks and drove them fast up the hill again. Half-way up the hill the boy flung himself on the grass and glared back in the direction of the old man, his face supercilious and angry.

‘In Jamaica I'd have shot that fellow.' he said.

I stared, and in astonishment repeated: ‘Shot him?'

‘Shot him,' he said. ‘Shot him or knifed him – probably knifed him. Quieter, the knife.'

‘Have you been in Jamaica, then?' I asked, and my voice must have trembled with fear and wonder.

‘Born there.' he said. ‘Born and bred there. My father was a missionary. We came back on leave this year.' As he spoke he rolled up his sleeve and showed me a mark, like a purple berry-stain, just above his wrist.

‘See that?' he said.

‘Yes.' I said.

‘Spear.'

I could not speak for awe and the tight dryness of my throat.

‘My father was attacked – savages, of course – and we had to leave our house and flee for our lives. Terrible business. As we were running for the horses a native threw a spear. Drove straight through my arm and pinned me to the ground. I fainted, of course, but my father picked me up and leapt on his horse and rode off with me. We had to ride a hundred and fifty miles before we could get the spear out of my arm. Beastly business.'

‘Are there many savages?' I asked.

‘Swarms – can't move for them. Daren't go into the garden without a gun. Attack you for nothing.'

‘They wouldn't eat you?'

‘Might easily! Depends. Plenty of lions for that, of course. You might be in the garden and before you knew where you were a lion would be on you.'

I felt suddenly ashamed that I had hitherto looked upon Jamaica only as a land of banana-trees and sugar-cane, but I tried to look as if I had known all my life of the lions and savages too, though my mind was tingling with excitement at the wonder of his words and the air of subtle nonchalance with which he spoke them. We lay there in the long summer grass under the June sunshine for a long time, and he told me stories, grand, incredible impossible stories, warming up as he passed from one to another, heaping lie upon lie, though I did not know it then, as the morning went on. There was a story which he told so vividly that he seems to be telling it now, of a blazing hot afternoon on the open plain, with only isolated palm-trees providing shade, when he had gone out with his little sister, then about five, to catch some sort of lizard for her to keep as a pet when they came home to England. He became a good deal confused with his distances & sometimes it was five miles and sometimes it was fifteen that they had walked under the tropical sky without seeing the lizard, but at length they had found one, only to find at the same time

that they were lost, and that three lions were coming towards them, angry-tailed, sniffing human flesh.

I remembered how my heart thumped against the grass as he told, careless and nonchalant as ever, how he and his sister had climbed a palm-tree and he had shot at the lions with his revolver, killing two and wounding a third. It was a great story, and I gazed at him in a kind of giddy wonder as he told how suddenly another shot had rung out and how the lion had fallen dead, and how a horseman had ridden up, flourishing his smoking rifle, and had rescued them,
only
to fling them on his horse like carcasses and ride off with them into the hills where he held them to ransom. When the horseman rode up he was a Spaniard, and then in the hills he became an Indian, and when the boy stole his horse and rode off with his sister he was a Mexican, and it was the body of a dirty Portuguese that they had found on the following day, riddled with bullets from the boy's revolver. But I took no notice of these things. I listened to it all fascinated, not doubting a word.

When the story was finished we found that the cows had wandered far along the road and that it was dinnertime. As we caught up with the cows again the boy

asked me my name.

I told him. ‘What's yours?' I said.

‘Dodfish,' he said. He spoke as though it were the finest name in the world.

I dreamed of that name, and on the following day I drove the cows westward again, meeting him driving old Strawn's red skeleton of a cow, her teats looking leaner and her gait more crippled than ever.

‘Tame work,' he greeted me again.

I agreed with him quickly, and soon we had turned the cows about and were driving them eastward and he was telling me the finest stories in the world again, heaping lie upon lie, while I listened, as it were, with the very soles of my boots, never doubting him, the magic of his voice and the colour of his tales acting on me like hypnotism and wine together. After that we met every day for weeks, the old cow growing leaner and more halting as Dodfish grew more boastful and lying and his tales more wonderful.

Suddenly he ceased coming, and the summer passed, and finally I gave up hope of him, drifting back into the life I had always known, a life that seemed grey and humdrum after Dodfish and Jamaica.

It was twenty years before I saw him again. I had never forgotten him, and though as I grew up I discovered that he had left Jamaica when only six months old and had never returned, and though I knew he had fooled me every minute of those summer mornings, and that the chance of his tales being true was less even than the chance of his uncle's crippled old cow having a calf in her belly, I had never ceased to believe in him, and his tales were still vivid with life in my mind.

It was at a dance that I saw him; and I recognised him immediately. He had grown into a tall, well-made fellow with fine shoulders and sleek black hair shining with oil, but his face had about it all the old nonchalant, supercilious, captivating air, his eyes as enchanting and bored as when I had first met him on that summer morning.

As we danced I passed close to him and looked into his face, but he did not recognise me. He was dancing with a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, with fine fair hair and large, adoring eyes, dressed in a bright blue dress that reminded me of the kingfisher I had seen flash under the bridge that June morning with him. He danced proudly and beautifully, and as I passed him someone knocked against him clumsily and made him stumble.

I saw him glare with all the supercilious and offended pride of his nature, and I heard him mutter to the girl:

‘In Jamaica I'd have shot that fellow.' ·

And as he spoke I saw the girl raise her face and gaze at him with an expression of rapturous belief, not doubting a word, just as I must have looked at him, too, in the days when we kept cows together.

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.