The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

BY

H. E. BATES

Contents

Foreword by Lesley Pearse

A Note from the Family

The Lily

The Revelation

The Wedding

Finger Wet, Finger Dry

A Funny Thing

The Sow and Silas

The Shooting Party

Silas the Good

A Happy Man

Silas and Goliath

A Silas Idyll

The Race

The Death of Uncle Silas

The Return

Sugar for the Horse

The Bedfordshire Clanger

Queenie White

The Blue Feather

The Foxes

The Double Thumb

Aunt Tibby

The Little Fishes

The Widder

The Eating Match

The Singing Pig

The Fire Eaters

Loss of Pride

Shandy Lil

A Teetotal Tale

A Note on the Author

Foreword

I have always believed that H. E. Bates was the absolute master of short story writing. He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus world would stay with you long after you’d finished the story.

When I first started writing I tried my hand at short stories, assuming quite wrongly it would be easier than attempting a book. Bates was my guiding light; there appeared to be a simplicity about his work that I sought to emulate. I did get a few short stories accepted by magazines, but they could never be in his league. I certainly never created anything as lovely as ‘The Watercress Girl’. Did any writer before or since? I think I found it in a magazine and read it curled up in my aunt’s spare room one wet school holiday and then went on to rush to the library to find more of his work. Fair Stood the Wind for France was the first book I borrowed and I was totally hooked on his work, but it was always the short stories I really admired the most.

Lesley Pearse, 2015

A Note from the Family

My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them—especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets—a new lease of life.

There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H. E. Bates Companion—a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found.

I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

Tim Bates, 2015

We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes—you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

The Lily

My Great-uncle Silas used to live in a small stone reed-thatched cottage on the edge of a pine-wood, where nightingales sang passionately in great numbers through early summer nights and on into the mornings and often still in the afternoons. On summer days after rain the air was sweetly saturated with the fragrance of the pines, which mingled subtly with the exquisite honeysuckle scent, the strange vanilla heaviness from the creamy elder-flowers in the garden hedge, and the perfume of old pink-and-white crimped-double roses of forgotten names. It was very quiet there except for the soft, water-whispering sound of leaves and boughs, and the squabbling and singing of birds in the house-thatch and the trees. The house itself was soaked with years of scents, half-sweet, half-dimly-sour with the smell of wood-smoke, the curious odour of mauve and milk-coloured and red geraniums, of old wine and tea and the earth smell of my Uncle Silas himself.

It was the sort of house to which old men retire to enjoy their last days. Shuffling about in green carpet-slippers, they do nothing but poke the fire, gloomily clip their beards, read the newspapers with their spectacles on upside down, take too much physic, and die of boredom at last.

But my Uncle Silas was different. At the age of ninety-three he was as lively and restless as a young colt. He shaved every morning at half-past five with cold water and a razor older than himself which resembled an antique barbaric billhook. He still kept alive within him some gay, devilish spark of audacity which made him attractive to the ladies. He ate too much and he drank too much.

‘God strike me if I tell a lie,’ he used to say, ‘but I’ve drunk enough beer, me boyo, to float the fleet and a drop over.’

I remember seeing him on a scorching, windless day in July. He ought to have been asleep in the shade with his red handkerchief over his old walnut-coloured face, but when I arrived he was at work on his potato-patch, digging steadily and strongly in the full blaze of the sun.

Hearing the click of the gate he looked up, and, seeing me, waved his spade. The potato-patch was at the far end of the long garden, where the earth was warmest under the woodside, and I walked down the long path to it between rows of fatpodded peas and beans and full-fruited bushes of currant and gooseberry. By the house, under the sun-white wall, the sweetwilliams and white pinks flamed softly against the hot marigolds and the orange poppies flat opened to drink in the sun.

‘Hot,’ I said.

‘Warmish.’ He did not pause in his strong, rhythmical digging. The potato-patch had been cleared of its crop and the sun-withered haulms had been heaped against the hedge.

‘Peas?’ I said. The conversation was inevitably laconic.

‘Taters,’ he said. He did not speak again until he had dug to the edge of the wood. There he straightened his back, blew his nose on his red handkerchief, let out a nonchalant flash of spittle, and cocked his eye at me.

‘Two crops,’ he said. ‘Two crops from one bit o’ land. How’s that, me boyo? Ever heard talk o’ that?’

‘Never.’

‘And you’d be telling a lie if you said you had. Because I know you ain’t.’

He winked at me, with that swift cock of the head and the perky flicker of the lid that had in it all the saucy jauntiness of a youth of twenty. He was very proud of himself. He was doing something extraordinary and he knew it. There was no humbug about him.

Sitting in the low shade of the garden hedge I watched him, waiting for him to finish digging. He was a short, thick-built man, and his old corduroy trousers concertina-folded over his squat legs and his old wine-red waistcoat ruckled up over his heavy chest made him look dwarfer and thicker still. He was as ugly as some old Indian idol, his skin walnut-stained and scarred like a weather-cracked apple, his cheeks hanging loose and withered, his lips wet and almost sensual and a trifle sardonic with their sideways twist and the thick pout of the lower lip. His left eye was bloodshot, a thin vein or two of scarlet staining the white, but he kept the lid half-shut, only raising it abruptly now and then with an odd cocking-flicker that made him look devilish and sinister. The sudden gay, jaunty flash of his eyes was electric, immortal. I told him once that he’d live to be a thousand. ‘I shall,’ he said.

When he had finished the digging and was scraping the light sun-dry soil from his spade with his flattened thumb I got up languidly from under the hedge.

‘Don’t strain yourself,’ he said.

He shouldered his spade airily and walked away towards the house and I followed him, marvelling at his age, his strength, and his tirelessness under that hot sun. Half-way up the garden path he stopped to show me his gooseberries. They were as large as young green peaches. He gathered a handful, and the bough, relieved of the weight, swayed up swiftly from the earth. When I had taken a gooseberry he threw the rest into his mouth, crunching them like a horse eating fresh carrots. Something made me say, as I sucked the gooseberry:

‘You must have been born about the same year as Hardy.’

‘Hardy?’ He cocked his bloodshot eye at me. ‘What Hardy?’

‘Thomas Hardy.’

He thought a moment, crunching gooseberries.

‘I recollect him. Snotty little bit of a chap, red hair, always had a dew-drop on the end of his nose. One o’ them Knotting Fox Hardys. Skinny lot. I recollect him.’

‘No, not him. I mean another Hardy. Different man.’

‘Then he was afore my time.’

‘No, he was about your time. You must have heard of him. He wrote books.’

The word finished him: he turned and began to stride off towards the house. ‘Books,’ I heard him mutter, ‘Books!’ And suddenly he turned on me and curled his wet red lips and said in a voice of devastating scorn, his bloodshot eye half-angry, half-gleeful:

‘I dare say.’ And then in a flash: ‘But could he grow goosegogs like that?’

Without pausing for an answer, he strode off again, and I followed him up the path and out of the blazing white afternoon sun into the cool, geranium-smelling house, and there he sat down in his shirt-sleeves in the big black-leathered chair that he once told me his grandmother had left him, with a hundred pounds sewn in the seat that he sat on for ten years without knowing it.

‘Mouthful o’ wine?’ he said to me softly, and then before I had time to answer he bawled into the silence of the house:

‘Woman! If you’re down the cellar bring us a bottle o’ cowslip!’

‘I’m upstairs,’ came a voice.

‘Then come down. And look slippy.’

‘Fetch it yourself!’

‘What’s that, y’old tit? I’ll fetch you something you won’t forget in a month o’ Sundays. D’ye hear?’ There was a low muttering and rumbling over the ceiling. ‘Fetch it yourself!’ he muttered. ‘Did ye hear that? Fetch it yourself!’

‘I’ll fetch it,’ I said.

‘You sit down,’ he said. ‘What do I pay a housekeeper for? Sit down. She’ll bring it.’

I sat down in the broken-backed chair that in summer time always stood by the door, propping it open. The deep roof dropped a strong black shadow across the threshold but outside the sun blazed unbrokenly, with a still, intense midsummer light. There was no sound or movement from anything except the bees, droll and drunken, as they crawled and tippled down the yellow and blue and dazzling white throats of the flowers. And sitting there waiting for the wine to come up, listening to the bees working down into the heart of the silence, I saw a flash of scarlet in the garden, and said:

‘I see the lily’s in bloom.’

And as though I had startled him, Uncle Silas looked up quickly, almost with suspicion.

‘Ah, she’s in bloom,’ he said.

I was wondering why he always spoke of the lily as though it were a woman, when the housekeeper, her unlaced shoes clip-clopping defiantly on the wooden cellar-steps and the brick passage, came in with a green wine-bottle, and, slapping it down on the table, went out again with her head stiffly uplifted, without a word.

‘Glasses!’ yelled my Uncle Silas.

‘Bringing ’em if you can wait!’ she shouted back.

‘Well, hurry then! And don’t fall over yourself!’

She came back a moment or two later with the glasses, which she clapped down on the table just as she had done the wine-bottle, defiantly, without a word. She was a scraggy, frosty-eyed woman, with a tight, almost lipless mouth, and as she stalked out of the door my Uncle Silas leaned across to me and said in a whisper just loud enough for her to hear:

‘Tart as a stick of old rhubarb.’

‘What’s that you’re saying?’ she said at once.

‘Never spoke. Never opened me mouth.’

‘I heard you!’

‘Go and put yourself in curling pins, you old straight hook!’

‘I’m leaving,’ she shouted.

‘Leave!’ he shouted. ‘And good riddance.’

‘Who’re you talking to, eh? Who’re you talking to, you corrupted old devil? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you weren’t so old I’d warm your breeches till you couldn’t sit down. I’m off.’

She flashed out, clip-clopping with her untied shoes along the passage and upstairs while he chanted after her, in his devilish, goading voice:

‘Tart as a bit of old rhubarb! Tart as a bit of old rhubarb!’

When the house was silent again he looked at me and winked his bloodshot eye and said ‘Pour out,’ and I filled the tumblers with the clear sun-coloured wine. As we drank I said, ‘You’ve done it now,’ and he winked back at me again, knowing that I knew that she had been leaving every day for twenty years, and that they had quarrelled with each other day and night for nearly all that time, secretly loving it.

Sitting by the door, sipping the sweet, cold wine, I looked at the lily again. Its strange, scarlet, turk’s-cap blossoms had just begun to uncurl in the July heat, the colour hot and passionate against the snow-coloured pinks and the cool larkspurs and the stiff spikes of the madonnas, sweet and virgin, but like white wax. Rare, exotic, strangely lovely, the red lily had blossomed there, untouched, for as long as I could remember.

‘When are you going to give me a little bulb off the lily?’ I said.

‘You know what I’ve always told you,’ he said. ‘You can have her when I’m dead. You can come and dig her up then. Do what you like with her.’

I nodded. He drank, and as I watched his skinny throat filling and relaxing with the wine I said:

‘Where did you get it? In the first place?’

He looked at the almost empty glass.

‘I pinched her,’ he said.

‘How?’

‘Never mind. Give us another mouthful o’ wine.’

He held out his glass, and I rose and took the wine-bottle from the table and paused with my hand on the cork. ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘tell me.’

‘I forget,’ he said. ‘It’s been so damn long ago.’

‘How long?’

‘I forget,’ he said.

As I gave him back his wine-filled glass I looked at him with a smile and he smiled back at me, half-cunning, half-sheepish, as though he knew what I was thinking. He possessed the vividest memory, a memory he often boasted about as he told me the stories of his boyhood, rare tales of prize-fights on summer mornings by isolated woods very long ago, of how he heard the news of the Crimea, of how he took a candle to church to warm his hands against it in the dead of winter, and how when the parson cried out ‘And he shall see a great light, even as I see one now!’ he snatched up the candle in fear of hell and devils and sat on it. ‘And I can put my finger on the spot now.’

By that smile on his face I knew that he remembered about the lily, and after taking another long drink of the wine he began to talk. His voice was crabbed and rusty, a strong, ugly voice that had no softness or tenderness in it, and his half-shut, bloodshot eye and his wet, curled lips looked rakish and wicked, as though he were acting the villainous miser in one of those travelling melodramas of his youth.

‘I seed her over in a garden, behind a wall,’ he said. ‘Big wall, about fifteen feet high. We were banging in hard a-carrying hay and I was on the top o’ the cart and could see her just over the wall. Not just one—scores, common as poppies. I felt I shouldn’t have no peace again until I had one. And I nipped over the wall that night about twelve o’clock and ran straight into her.’

‘Into the lily?’

‘Tah! Into a gal. See? Young gal—about my age, daughter o’ the house. All dressed in thin white. “What are you doing here?” she says, and I believe she was as frit as I was. “I lost something,” I says. “It’s all right. You know me.” And then she wanted to know what I’d lost, and I felt as if I didn’t care what happened, and I said, “Lost my head, I reckon.” And she laughed, and then I laughed and then she said, “Ssshhh! Don’t you see I’m as done as you are if we’re found here? You’d better go. What did you come for, anyway?” And I told her. She wouldn’t believe me. “It’s right,” I says, “I just come for the lily.” And she just stared at me. “And you know what they do to people who steal?” she says. “Yes,” I says, and they were the days when you could be hung for looking at a sheep almost. “But picking flowers ain’t stealing,” I says. “Ssshhh!” she says again. “What d’ye think I’m going to say if they find me here? Don’t talk so loud. Come here behind these trees and keep quiet.” And we went and sat down behind some old box-trees and she kept whispering about the lily and telling me to whisper for fear anyone should come. “I’ll get you the lily all right,” she says, “if you keep quiet. I’ll dig it up.”’

He ceased talking, and after the sound of his harsh, uncouth racy voice the summer afternoon seemed quieter than ever, the drowsy, stumbling boom of the bees in the July flowers only deepening the hot drowsy silence. I took a drink of the strong, cool, flower-odoured wine and waited for my Uncle Silas to go on with the story, but nothing happened, and finally I looked up at him.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

For a moment or two he did not speak. But finally he turned and looked at me with a half-solemn, half-vivacious expression, one eye half-closed, and told me in a voice at once dreamy, devilish, innocent, mysterious and triumphant, all and more than I had asked to know.

‘She gave me the lily,’ he said.

The Revelation

My Great-uncle Silas was a man who never washed himself. ‘God A’mighty,’ he would say, ‘why should I? It’s a waste o’ time. I got summat else to do ’sides titivate myself wi’ soap.’ For years his housekeeper washed him instead.

Every morning, winter and summer, he sat in the high-backed chair under the window of geraniums waiting for that inexorable performance. He would sit there in a pretence of being engrossed in the newspaper of the day before, his waistcoat on but undone over his collarless blue shirt, his red neckerchief dangling on the arm of the chair, his face gloomy and long with the wretchedness of expectation. Sometimes he would lower the corner of the newspaper and squint out in the swift but faint hope that she had forgotten him. She never did. She would come out at last with the bowl of water and the rank cake of yellow soap that he would say she had been suckled on, and the rough hand-flannel that she had made up from some staunch undergarment she had at last discarded. In winter the water, drawn straight from the well, would be as bitter and stinging as ice. She never heated it. And as though her own hands had lost all feeling she would plunge them straight into it, and then rub the soap against the flannel until it lathered thinly, like snow. All the time he sat hidden behind the newspaper with a kind of dumb hope, like an ostrich. At last, before he knew what was happening, the paper would be snatched from his hands, the flannel, like a cold compress, would be smacked against his face, and a shudder of utter misery would pass through his body before he began to pour forth the first of his blasphemous protestations. ‘God damn it, woman! You want to finish me, don’t you? You want to finish me! You want me to catch me death, you old nanny-goat! I know. You want me …’ The words and their effect would be drowned and smothered by the renewed sopping of the flannel and he would be forced at last into a miserable acquiescence. It was the only time when the look of devilish vitality and wickedness left his face and never seemed likely to return.

Once a week, also, she succeeded in making him take a bath. She gave him that, too.

The house was very old and its facilities for bathing and washing were such that it might have been built expressly for him. There was no bathroom. My Uncle Silas had instead a small iron bath, once painted cream and never repainted after the cream had turned to the colour of earth, which resembled some ancient coracle. And once a week, generally on Fridays and always in the evening, the housekeeper would drag out the bath from among the wine-bottles in the cellar and bring it up and get it before the fire in the living-room. Once, in early summer, as though hoping it might make that miserable inquisition of bathing impossible, he had filled the bath with a pillow-case of cowslip heads and their own wine-yellow liquor. It did not deter her. She gave him his bath in a pudding-basin instead, sponging him down with water that grew cooler and colder as he stood there blaspheming and shivering.

Very often on fine winter evenings I would walk over to see him, and once, almost forgetting that it was his bathnight, I went over on a Friday.

When I arrived the house was oppressively warm with the heat and steam from the copper boiling up the bath-water in the little kitchen. I went in, as I always did, without knocking, and I came straight upon my Uncle Silas taking off his trousers, unconcerned, before a great fire of hazel faggots in the living-room.

‘Oh! It’s you,’ he said. ‘I thought for a minute it might be a young woman.’

‘You ought to lock the door,’ I said.

‘God A’mighty, I ain’t frit at being looked at in me bath.’ He held his trousers momentarily suspended, as though in deference to me. ‘Never mattered to me since that day when …’

He broke off suddenly as the housekeeper came running in with the first bucket of boiling water for the bath, elbowing us out of her way, the water falling into the bath like a scalding waterfall. No sooner had the great cloud of steam dispersed than she was back again with a second bucket. It seemed hotter than the first.

‘Out of my way!’ she ordered.

‘Git us a glass o’ wine,’ said Silas, ‘and don’t vapour about so much.’

‘You’ll have no wine,’ she said, ‘until you’ve been in that bath.’

‘Then git us a dozen taters to roast. And look slippy.’

She was already out of the door with the empty bucket. ‘Get ’em yourself!’ she flashed.

‘I got me trousers off!’ he shouted.

‘Then put ’em on again!’

This relentless exchange of words went on all the time she was bringing the remaining buckets of water in and he was undoing the tapes of his pants, he shouting for the wine and the potatoes and she never wavering in her tart refusals to get them. Finally as he began to roll down his pants and she began to bring in the last buckets of water he turned to me and said:

‘Git a light and go down and fetch that bottle o’ wine and the taters. Bring a bottle of elderberry. A quart.’

While I was down in the cellar, searching with a candle in the musty, wine-odoured corners for the potatoes and the bottle, I could hear the faint sounds of argument and splashing water from above. I was perhaps five minutes in the cellar, and when I went back up the stone steps, with the wine in one hand and the candle in the other and the potatoes in my pockets, the sound of voices seemed to have increased.

When I reached the living-room Silas was standing up in the bath, stark naked, and the housekeeper was shouting:

‘Sit down, man, can’t you? Sit down! How can I bath you if you don’t sit down?’

‘Sit down yourself! I don’t want to burn the skin off me behind, if you do!’

While he protested she seized his shoulders and tried to force him down in the bath, but his old and rugged body, looking even stronger and more imperishable in its nakedness than ever, was stiff and immovable, and he never budged except to dance a little as the water stung the tender parts of his feet.

‘Git the taters under!’ he said to me at last. ‘God A’mighty, I’ll want summat after this.’

Gradually, as I was putting the potatoes in the ashes under the fire, the arguments quietened a little, and finally my Uncle Silas stooped, half-knelt in the water and then with a brief mutter of relief sat down. Almost in silence, the housekeeper lathered the flannel she had made from her petticoat and then proceeded to wash his body, scrubbing every inch of it fiercely, taking no more notice of his nakedness than if he had been a figure of wood. All the time he sat there a little abjectly, his spirit momentarily subdued, making no effort to wash himself except sometimes to dabble his hands and dribble a little water over his bony legs. He gave even that up at last, turning to me to say:

‘I never could see a damn lot o’ use in water.’

Finally when she had washed him all over, she seized the great coarse towel that had been warming on the clothes-horse by the fire.

‘You’re coming out now,’ she said.

‘I don’t know as I am.’

‘Did you hear what I said? You’re coming out!’

‘Damn, you were fast enough gittin’ me in—you can wait a minute. I just got settled.’

Seizing his shoulders, she began to try to force him to stand up just as she had tried to force him, only a minute or two before, to sit down. And as before he would not budge. He sat there luxuriously, not caring, some of the old devilish look of perversity back in his face, his hands playing with the water.

‘He’s just doing it on purpose,’ she said to me at last. ‘Just because you’re here. He wants us to sit here and admire him. That’s all. I know.’

‘Don’t talk so much!’ he said. ‘I’m getting out as fast as you’ll let me.’

‘Come on, then. Come on!’ she insisted. ‘Heaven knows we don’t want to look at you all night.’

The words seemed to remind my Uncle Silas of something, and as he stood up in the bath and she began towelling his back, he said to me:

‘I recollect what I was going to tell you now. I was having a swim with a lot o’ chaps, once, in the mill-brook at …’

‘We don’t want to hear your old tales, either,’ she said. ‘We heard ’em all times anew.’

‘Not this one,’ he said.

Nevertheless, her words silenced him. He stood there dumb and almost meek all the time she was towelling him dry and it was only when she vanished into the kitchen to fetch a second towel for him to dry his toes that he recollected the story he had been trying to tell me, and came to life.

‘I was swimming with these chaps, in the mill-brook, and we left all our clothes on the bank …’

‘Mind yourselves!’

The housekeeper had returned with the towel, and my Uncle Silas, as though he had never even heard of the tale he was so anxious to tell and I was so anxious to hear, said solemnly to me:

‘Next year I’ll have peas where I had taters, and taters where I had carrots …’

‘Dry your toes!’ said the housekeeper.

‘Dry ’em yourself and don’t talk so much!’

At the same moment she thrust the towel in his hand and then began to scoop the water out of the bath with an enamel basin and put it into a bucket. When the bucket was full she hastened out of the room with it, her half-laced shoes slopping noisily in her haste. Almost before she had gone through the door and long before we heard the splash of water in the sink my Uncle Silas said swiftly ‘Tot out,’ and I uncorked the wine-bottle while he found the glasses in the little cupboard above the fire.

We were standing there drinking the wine, so red and rich and soft, Silas in nothing but his shirt, when the housekeeper returned. She refilled the bucket quickly and hastened out again. No sooner had she gone than he turned to me to continue the story, and standing there, his thick, blue-striped flannel shirt reaching below his knees, the hairs on his thin, gnarled legs standing out as stiff as the bristles on his own gooseberries, the wine-glass in one hand and the towel in the other, he looked more wicked and devilish and ugly than I ever remembered seeing him.

Going on with the story, he had reached the point when the men, coming out of the mill-stream, had found their clothes gone, when the housekeeper returned.

‘I think I s’ll have peas along the side o’ the wood,’ he said serenely, while she refilled the bucket, ‘and perhaps back o’ the well.’

‘You get your toes dried and get dressed!’ she ordered.

‘And you mind your own business and get the supper. And look slippy!’

As soon as she had left the room again, he resumed the tale, but no sooner had he begun than she returned. It went on like this, he telling a sentence of the tale, and she returning and he interspersing some angelic and airy remark about his peas and potatoes until at last she came in to spread the cloth on the table and lay the supper. She was in the room for so long, laying out the plates and the cutlery, that at last he gave it up, turning to me with an air of satanic innocence to say:

‘I’ll tell you the name o’ the tater when I can think of it. My memory ain’t so good as it was.’

After that he proceeded meekly to put on his pants, tucking in the voluminous folds of his shirt before tying up the tapes. While the tail of his shirt was still hanging loose he remembered the potatoes I had put in the hot ashes under the fire and, seizing the toasting-fork, he began to prod their skins.

‘Damn, they’ll be done afore I get my trousers on,’ he said. And standing there, with the toasting-fork in his hand, his pants tight against his legs and the tail of his shirt protruding he looked more than anything else like the devil of tradition, prodding the roasting sinners.

The veritable air of devilishness was still about him when, finding a moment later that the housekeeper had left the room again, he turned swiftly to me to say:

‘Give us another mouthful o’ wine. I’ll tell you what happened.’

I had hardly begun to pour the wine into his glass before he began to say, in a devilish, husky voice that was hardly more than a whisper: ‘Some gals had got the clothes. They stood upon the bridge and dangled our trousers over and threatened to drop ’em in the mill-pond. What d’ye think of that? There we were swimming about wi’ nothing on and they wouldn’t give us the clothes.’

He went on to tell me how gradually they grew tired and desperate and at last angry at the three girls dangling over the bridge while they grew colder and colder in the deep mill-pool and how finally he himself climbed out of the water and ran up to the bridge, stark naked, and frightened the girls into dropping the clothes and retreating. Long before he had finished I noticed that the housekeeper had returned and was standing in the doorway, unseen by my Uncle Silas, attentively listening.

‘God A’mighty, you should have seen ’em drop the clothes and run when they see me. All except one.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Run off across the meadow with my clothes under her arms. What d’ye think o’ that?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Run after her.’

He ceased speaking, and taking a slow drink of his wine he moistened his thick, red lips with his tongue, as though the tale were not finished and he were trying to remember its end. A strange almost soft expression of reminiscence came over his face, flushed with the bath and the wine, as though he could see clearly the river, the meadow, and he himself running across the summer grass, naked, pursuing the girl running away with his clothes.

‘Rum un,’ he said at last. ‘I never did find out who she was. Never did find out.’

At that moment the housekeeper came in from the doorway, moving so quietly for once that he scarcely heard her, the sound of the cheese-dish being laid on the table startling him so much that he could only turn and stare at her, fingering the tapes of his pants and at a loss for words.

‘Didn’t you ever find out?’ she said.

‘No. I was just telling the boy. It’s been so damn long ago.’

She looked at him for a moment and then said:

‘I know who she was. And so do you.’

It was the only time I ever saw him at a loss for an answer and it was almost the only time I ever saw her smile. He stood there slowly licking his lips in uneasy silence until at last she snapped at him with all the old habitual tartness:

‘Get yourself dressed, man! I ain’t running away with your clothes now, if I did then.’

She began to help him on with his clothes. He still had nothing to say, but once, as she was fastening the back buttons of his trousers and he stood with his face turned away from her, he gave me a smiling but inscrutable look, rich with devilry, his eyelids lowered and his lips shining wet with the wine.

And I began to understand then something I had not understood before.

The Wedding

I was seven or eight and my Great-uncle Silas nearly seventy when his only son Abel was married to a girl named Georgina, and we all drove over for the wedding in the black-and-yellow trap with the white racy-looking horse, my grandparents and parents, my aunt and I, before the dew had dried on the buttercupped grass one May morning. The air was rich and summery and the sun was a long time breaking through the mist as we drove along. The wedding had come upon us suddenly. The girl, Georgina, had arrived that springtime to be a lady’s maid at the house where Abel had been a gardener for nearly twenty years. It was all over in a month; done, as my grandfather said, all of a damn pop. Nor did my grandmother like it; she was a little, pale woman, like a faded canary and as quick-tongued, and as she sat perched up on the high trap seat in her grey and purple silk I thought she looked as if she would like to peck at the creature who had seduced a solid, hard-hatted fellow like Abel with such indecent haste. Abel was nearly forty and the girl, it seemed, was only nineteen. But it was to be a great wedding.

We talked of it as we drove along. ‘I should think,’ said my grandmother, ‘he’s well set to work, marrying a filly like that. Nineteen!’ But my grandfather had seen the girl.

‘Dall it all,’ he kept saying, ‘she’s flash. And don’t she talk nice! Jest so. Ho dear, ho dear! I tell you she’s lovely.’

‘Yes, and without a farden to bless herself with, I’ll be bound. Who’s paying for the flash wedding?’

‘Silas, I expect.’

‘Ah,’ said my grandmother, ‘and I’d Silas him if I were Sarah Ann. I remember the last wedding we went to with Silas.’

My grandfather evidently remembered it too. He suddenly looked embarrassed, nudged my arm, and pointed with his driving whip at a cuckoo flying fast across a field of beans, calling as it flew, its voice trembling with the motion of its flight. My grandfather followed the bird until it alighted, far off, in an ash tree, and then he nudged me again and told me to look up, straight above, at a lark breaking into passionate song, and we turned our faces to the sun-misty sky and watched the bird twittering up and up, out of sight.

‘You’ll get something you don’t expect,’ my grandmother warned us, ‘cocking your eyes at that bird.’

‘Tchk! Tchk!’ said my grandfather to the horse.

‘And look at you!’ exclaimed my grandmother, suddenly. ‘Whoa! I never saw such a man in all my born days. You’ll be hanging yourself in the reins next.’

‘Whoa!’ said my grandfather gloomily.

The horse stopped and my grandmother leaned across me and seized my grandfather’s collar, which had sprung away from its stud, catapulting his necktie away and releasing his white starched dicky from its top buttonhole.

‘Hold still,’ urged my grandmother. ‘That comes of gaping at birds instead of driving on as you should do.’ She fixed the collar, smoothed the tie and flattened the dicky, and my grandfather, looking extremely meek and ill at ease in the iron-starched collar and front and his best black clothes and hard hat, drove on again, straining his sun-tanned neck so that the guides tautened in agony. ‘Lord, man, anybody’d think you’d been hung,’ said my grandmother.

As we drove on the mist began to disperse, the sun shining through at first softly and at last with the strong thundery heat of the May morning. ‘I don’t know,’ said my grandmother, as though in hope, ‘as that girl ain’t going to have a wet ride after all.’

It was five miles to my Uncle Silas’s house, and though the wedding wasn’t until two o’clock, we had started the journey at ten o’clock in the morning. There was no sense, declared my grandmother, in not making a day of it; nor, said my grandfather, did we want to wrench the guts out of the horse. So we had started early, and we drove along all the time at the same solemn pace, the horse never breaking into a trot, my grandfather never using the whip except to flick away the flies; and now and then we would stop, perhaps to admire a field of young barley, or to have a word by the roadside with a man my grandfather hadn’t seen for a year, or to gaze at the bluebells staining the dark earth of the woods we passed. At every hill we stopped so that my parents and my grandmother and aunt could alight and walk up the hill. My grandfather and I remained in the trap, sitting well forward in the seat in order to relieve the strain on the horse. And once, going up a hill by a spinney, we heard a nightingale, and then another and another, singing fitfully, but with breaks of wild passion, in the young hazel trees. Cuckoos were calling continually in their full bold mocking, and when we stopped to listen it sounded as though the cuckoos were contradicting the nightingales, their monotonous cries half-drowning the others’ wild spasmodic singing.

‘We must ask your Uncle Silas,’ said my grandfather, ‘if he knows to a nightingale’s.’

‘He’ll have enough to think on,’ said my grandmother, ‘with that other nightingale.’

It was nearly twelve o’clock when we arrived at my Uncle Silas’s house, the little reed-thatched house standing at the top of the violet-banked lane by the spinney of pines. The lane, steep and narrow, was cobbled with white hoof-smooth stones, and at the bottom of it were all alighted, my grandfather and I leading the horse.

‘Dall it,’ exclaimed my grandfather as we came within sight of the house, ‘can I see straight?’

We all stopped on the crest of the slope, and my grandmother let out an exclamation of tart astonishment:

‘A tent! What the ’nation do they want with a tent? Ain’t that just like Silas?’

‘It might be Georgina’s doing,’ said my aunt. ‘I heard she’d got money.’

‘I’d Georgina her!’ cried my grandmother as we went on.

As we came nearer the house the tent which had been erected in Uncle Silas’s paddock seemed larger than ever, a big square marquee like a sort of squat steeple, the canvas as white as the moon-daisies growing thicker than the grass in the field. Little yellow and green and blue and scarlet pennants fluttered above it listlessly, and its ropes were as clean as new straw. Long trestle tables had been erected both inside it and on the surrounding grass, and waiters in shirt-sleeves were already rushing hither and thither, spreading cloths even whiter than the tent, arranging flower-vases, carrying glasses and cups and plates and cutlery, salt-silvered hams and joints of beef and roast fowls and loaves and cheese, dark bottles of wine and cases of beer and stone jars of home-made, unloading them from a wagon which had been drawn up before us by two satiny black horses with their ears in little silk nets and their tails plaited and tied with bows of white and cornflower-blue.

‘It’s a licker,’ said my grandfather, who seemed, I thought, to be not so much astonished as delighted. ‘Look at them bottles!’

‘You look at what you’re doing,’ said my grandmother.

And very slowly we all walked on to the house, marvelling at the tent and the food-laden tables and the sweating waiters.

Just as we drew up behind the wagon an extraordinary figure in yellow corduroy trousers, a blue shirt, a red waistcoat, and a squashed brown panama, came rushing excitedly out of the house carrying a tray of glasses and bottles with one hand and trying to keep up his trousers with the other. He was waddling on his thick bowed legs across the paddock, chuckling wickedly, when my grandmother arrested him.

‘Silas!’ she shouted. ‘Do you want to blind us all?’

‘Lord A’mighty,’ said my Uncle Silas, ‘I never seed you.’ He stopped abruptly and, still holding up his trousers, came rolling back across the paddock towards us.

I whispered to my mother, ‘Why can’t he walk straight?’

‘Sshh!’ she said. ‘It’s the heavy bottles.’

From the way in which my grandmother began to address my Uncle Silas it seemed as if it were the heavy bottles.

‘Silas,’ she said, ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself at twelve o’clock in the morning.’

‘I am,’ he said wickedly.

‘And what’s happened to your trousers?’

‘They’ll be down any minute.’

‘Silas, you’re not responsible! Where’s Sarah Ann?’

‘Gone down to church to titivate the altar.’

‘I’ll titivate you in a minute!’ she threatened, and before Silas could move or speak she was off towards the house, nipping along in her inexorable, quick, bird-like fashion.

When she returned a moment or two later my Uncle Silas was already totting out for the waiters and my grandfather and himself, the beer in the glasses shining a rich tawny dandelion-gold in the noon sunlight. He was standing at one end of the long trestle-tables, pouring out beer with one hand and still holding up his trousers with the other, when she arrived behind him. He had no chance with her. ‘Stand still,’ she said, seizing his trousers. ‘It’s a darning needle,’ and with her lips set tartly she proceeded to sew on his lost buttons, her hands spider-quick and neat with the thread. ‘I’m surprised at you, Silas,’ she would say. ‘And if you touch that glass I’ll prick you.’

My Uncle Silas stood with a sort of meek wickedness, winking at the waiters.

‘And what about this girl?’ said my grandmother. ‘Didn’t waste no time, did she?’

‘Nor did you.’

‘I said what about her?’

‘Lovely.’

‘And who’s paying for all this—this tent an’ all?’

‘A markwee,’ my Uncle Silas corrected her. ‘A markwee.’

‘Well, whatever it is. You ain’t paying for it, I hope?’

‘Lord Henry and Lady Hester,’ said my Uncle Silas, ‘are paying for every mite and mossel.’

‘Everything?’

‘Every drop and crumb.’

‘And the tent?’

‘And the markwee.’

My grandmother had no more to say. She was finished. She put the final stitch into my Uncle Silas’s trousers and stuck the needle into some invisible place among her skirts. My Uncle Silas drank his beer at one draught, and my grandmother seemed to be so flabbergasted that she did not see him pour out another, not only for himself, but for my grandfather too.

She stalked off into the house, and my parents and my aunt followed her. My grandfather and I stayed with Uncle Silas and the waiters, marvelling at the meat and drink that the men kept unloading from the wagons. The heavy summer air, fragrant already with the scents of grass and roses and the old lilac trees near the garden, was thick also with the smell of meat and beer and new warm bread.

‘I never seed hams like ’em,’ marvelled my grandfather.

‘No, and you never will again,’ said my Uncle Silas.

We went into the marquee and marvelled again at the joints, the roast ducks and chickens, the salads and wines, the bright sherried trifles, the wine jellies, the strange sauces and cakes and finicking tit-bits and sweets all arranged on the long, white tables.

‘Is there any mortal thing in the eatin’ line as you ain’t got, Silas?’ said my grandfather.

‘Nothing,’ said my Uncle Silas.

‘And where’s Abel?’

‘Skulking upstairs like a young leveret. Frit to death.’

When we left the marquee and went across the paddock towards the house my Uncle Silas bawled out:

‘Abel!’

An upstairs window opened and Abel put his head out. Abel looked as though he had been carved crudely out of raw beef; he had a thick black wig of hair and the eyes of a mournful cow. There was something sleepy, simple, and pathetic about him. I believe my Uncle Silas was eternally ashamed of him.

‘Damn it, man,’ said my Uncle Silas, sharply, ‘there’s half the guests here a’ready, and you still a-bed!’

‘I ain’t a-bed,’ said Abel. ‘I’m buttoning me shoes up.’

It was more than my Uncle Silas could stand. ‘Buttoning me shoes up,’ he muttered, waddling off. ‘Buttoning me belly button.’

And following him, we went into the garden. There we heard the nightingales again, one against another, tuning up, half sharp, half sweet, their notes enriched by the sultry summer air under the shelter of the pines. The scent of lilac in the full heaviness of its blossoming was like a drug, marvellously fragrant. The green peas were bursting into white flower and the first roses were crimsoning the house wall, their glossy leaves splashed with the white droppings of the swallows flying to and fro to nest under the thatch-eaves.

All the time we were in the garden my Uncle Silas talked more garrulously and more excitedly than usual, and he was still very garrulous and excited when the cabs and wedding-flies drove up the lane to take us to church. And I remember saying to my mother again as he walked down the lane with us: ‘Why can’t he walk straight?’

‘Ssh!’ she whispered. ‘It’s this rough lane.’

We all drove to the church in flies and cabs drawn by white horses with polished hoofs and silk-ribboned bridles. There were more than a hundred guests, a great dazzle of white dresses and white buttonholes, and my Uncle Silas looked magnificent. There was a sort of purposely devilish splendour about his light grey coat and trousers, his yellow carnation, his canary waistcoat, and his grey square bowler rakishly cocked askew as though to match that everlastingly devilish look in his bloodshot eye.

‘Well,’ said my grandmother, ‘it might be a skittle-match to look at Silas.’

The church was full, and I remember my grandfather saying to me: ‘Don’t want to hear a lot o’ popery and hymn-singing, do you?’ and we stayed outside together, looking for nests in the churchyard yews and reading the names on the tombstones until the wedding was over.

It was not until then, when the church door opened and the guests and the congregation began to flock into the churchyard that I saw Georgina.

‘Ain’t she flash?’ whispered my grandfather. ‘Didn’t I say so?’

She was unforgettably lovely. As she came from the church-porch with Abel, who looked more than ever solemn and simple in his suit of blue serge, his bowler hat, and his light brown button-boots which squeaked a little, she seemed to me more beautiful, more spirited, and more enchanting than perhaps she really was. She was very dark, her black hair and eyes shining vividly against her white wedding dress. Her face seemed full of a half-angelic, half-wicked vivacity and the conflicting lights and expressions of pure naivety and passion. She was across the churchyard and in the wedding-fly in a moment, and I did not see her again until we were all sitting about the long tables in the marquee eating and drinking and talking and laughing, with the sweating waiters rushing hither and thither, juggling with food and drink, madly trying to serve everyone at once.

And at the table-head, next to Georgina and Abel, sat my Uncle Silas, and opposite him Lord Henry and Lady Hester, for whom Georgina and Abel worked. Lord Henry put on an eyeglass and read a speech, ‘Ee heev greet pleesyah,’ and so on, which we all applauded by banging the tables, making the glass and crockery dance and ring. After him, I remember my Uncle Silas rose with a sort of noble unsteadiness to his feet, waved his hands, almost pitched forward, clutched the table in time, took a drink to steady himself, and began a long, tipsy speech, which we almost drowned with our table-banging and laughter, and of which all I can remember is a kind of refrain that he kept repeating as he gazed with a sort of sleepily wicked admiration at Georgina:

‘Afore the night’s gone we’ll sing you a song. Me and the bride, eh?’

Georgina would smile without opening her lips, a marvellous, lovely, insinuating smile, and my Uncle Silas would wink and proceed with his speech, breaking now and then into long words which he could not pronounce with his drink-fuddled lips.

‘Silas has swallowed the dictionary,’ someone remarked.

‘Don’t know what it is,’ declared Silas, lifting his glass, ‘but it wants a hell of a lot o’ washing down.’

I could see my grandmother fuming, her lips set thin with exasperation. ‘You won’t catch me at another wedding with Silas,’ she said, ‘as long as I live. Not if I know it.’

‘Silas,’ she said to him, severely, when the feast was over, ‘you ain’t responsible.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘If you go singing one of your pub-songs with that girl,’ she warned him, ‘I see you know about it.’

He cocked his eye at her with purposeful devilishness.

It was late in the evening, just after the May dusk had begun to fall, when my Uncle Silas and Georgina sang their song. My grandmother protested and threatened, not knowing whether she was more disgusted with Silas for enticing the girl or with the girl for making a promise to sing a duet with a man who had been drunk since noon. She retired to the house, excusing herself when she found that the dew was falling. But I stayed outside, in the warm lilac-heavy air, and listened. The guests had been dancing on the grass to the music of two fiddles and a piano brought out of the house. There was a gay atmosphere of laughter and happiness, and besides the fragrance of lilac and may-blossom a strange odour of bruised grass and moon-daisies that the dancers had trampled down. My Uncle Silas and Georgina stood at the entrance to the marquee, and Silas took the girl’s arm in his and they sang ‘I’m Seventeen Come Sunday’ without the fiddles or the piano. Uncle Silas had the ugliest voice in the world, and the girl’s contralto seemed exquisite beside it. She put an unexpected spirit and passion into her voice:

‘Will you come to my mammy’s house

When the moon shines bright and clearly?

And I’ll come down and let you in

And my mammy shall not hear me.’

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother, who listened after all, from the house, ‘and that’s what she will do if I know anything.’

All the time my Uncle Silas and Georgina were singing, Abel was watching her. His eyes never flickered or changed their expression of wide, mute adoration. He looked not only as if he would do anything for her, but as if he would forget or forgive anything she did. He seemed almost stupefied with love and worship of her.

When the song was over my Uncle Silas kissed Georgina with a loud smack. Abel smiled with the serenity of pure adoration, while the guests laughed and applauded. In the silence before the music began for dancing again I could hear the nightingales singing unfrightened in the spinney, and the cuckoos, as in the morning, croaking across the darkening fields in mockery.

It was past midnight when we harnessed the trap and lighted the lamps and my grandfather led the horse down the lane. We could hear my Uncle Silas bawling ‘We won’t go home till morning’ long after we were on the road.

‘I’ll never come within fifty mile of a wedding with Silas if I live to be a thousand,’ my grandmother kept declaring. ‘And what in the wide world are you doing, man? Can’t you drive straight?’

My grandfather could not drive straight, and my grandmother, reaching suddenly across my sleepy face, took the reins from him and slapped them across the back of the horse.

‘Lord, I’d Georgina that girl if she were mine. Kissing Silas!—and he wasn’t the only one she kissed, either. Saucy! saucy ain’t the word! Somebody’s going to be led a fine old dance if I know anything about it. There’s going to be trouble afore the year’s out.’

But there was no dance and no trouble. Georgina died suddenly, in childbirth, the following spring. My Uncle Silas is dead too. But I shall never forget their song, the girl’s spirited loveliness, the feast in the marquee, the smell of lilac and wine and bruised grass, and the sound of the cuckoos contradicting the nightingales.

Finger Wet, Finger Dry

My Uncle Silas was a man who could eat anything. He could eat stewed nails. He had lived on them, once, for nearly a week. He told me so.

I was a boy then. At that time we used to drive over to see him, in the summer, about one Sunday a month, arriving in time for dinner, tethering the white horse about noon in the shade of the big Pearmain overhanging the lane outside. It was always what were we going to eat and what were we going to wet with? At dinner, once, we had pheasant, which was something very special, and I asked him if he had shot it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it just fell down the chimney.’ Another time we had a goose and I asked him if that fell down the chimney. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was sittin’ on eighteen eggs in the winter oats and I cut its two legs off wi’ the scythe. Cut ’em off and never broke egg. Ain’t that right, George?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ my grandfather said.

‘Well it ain’t, then,’ Silas said, cocking his bloodshot eye at him. ‘Don’t you go tellin’ the kid such blamed lies. Cut the goose’s legs off wi’ the scythe!—tck! tck! tck! tck! Don’t you believe it, boy. It’s just his tale. He’s just stuffin’ you. The goose went to sleep in the well-bucket and I went to draw some water one night and let it down unbeknownst and it got drowned.’

‘Couldn’t it swim?’ I said.

‘Oh! it was asleep. Never woke. It just went a belly-flopper and was done for.’

Another time we had venison. I knew what that was. ‘A deer,’ I said. ‘Did that fall down the well?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I shot it. With a bow and arrow.’

‘With what?’ I said. ‘How?’

‘Bow and arrow. One o’ these days I’ll show you.’ And he did. I badgered and bothered him until, one summer Sunday afternoon, he made an ash-bow standing as high as himself and cut arrows out of flower-canes. ‘You don’t believe me. Do you?’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll show you.’ He tipped the arrows with old shoe-awls and bits of filed wire and anything handy. ‘’Course they ain’t no venisons about,’ he said. ‘But I’ll show you.’ Then we went into the field beyond the house and Silas stalked an old cow. Finally he stood about ten yards away from her and shot her in the backside. The cow leapt up about ten feet in the air and tore about the field as though she were heat-crazy. ‘That’s how I done the venison,’ Silas said. ‘Only it was a bigger bow and a bigger arrow and I hit it a bit harder.

‘Now you know when Silas tells y’ anything it’s right, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You know Silas don’t tell lies, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You know Silas don’t stuff you with any old tale?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know now.’

It must have been some time after this that he told me the story of the nails, the stewed nails, because it was at some time when I had extra faith in him. I forget how it came up. Perhaps it was duck eggs; it may have been the sow. I know he said: ‘You kids—blimey, hair and teeth!—you don’ know what it is to go without grub. Look at me. I can eat anything. Had to. Look at that time I lived on stewed nails for a week.’

I just stared.

‘That’s one for you, ain’t it? That makes your eyes pop, don’t it? Stewed nails. For a week. And glad to.’

‘Didn’t they … didn’t they … weren’t you bad?’ I said.

‘Oh! they was just old nails. I had pepper and salt on ’em, too.’

I asked him how it happened, and when. I remember having no fear at all that he would tell me. We were alone, sprawling under the elders beyond the bean-rows, in the shade. He could tell me anything if we were alone. It was only in the presence of others that, sometimes, he was not so sure.

‘Oh, about fifty years ago. I was only a kid. About thirty.’ He stopped, eyed me seriously, squinted. ‘You ain’t goin’ tell nobody about this if I tell you?’

‘No. Oh, no!’

‘Thass right. There’s a policeman at the bottom o’ this. I don’t want to git into trouble. You cork it in.’

‘I will.’

‘Sure? You promise?’

‘Finger wet, finger dry,’ I said.

‘Thass right. And cut my throat if I tell a lie. This what I’m telling y’ is true.’

He took a quick look round, spoke lower, dropped an eyelid at me, and said: ‘I’d gone up to Sam Tilley’s to take the old sow to the boar. Sam was a policeman. His wife was a young gal about twenty. She was fiery an’ all. Nice gal. I knew her. Sometimes Sam was on nights and sometimes he was on days. That time he was on days. Well, it was a hot day and after the boar had finished she said: “If you’re tired, come in and sit down a bit.” So I went in and she said she was tired too. So I made no more to do. “Don’t wear a chair out,” I said. “Sit on my knee.” So she did. She was as light as a chicken, lovely.’ He paused, recollecting, licking his loose red lips, going off into a momentary trance. Oh! and then—dall it, what happened then? Where was I?’

‘She was tired … she was resting on your knee,’ I said.

‘Ah! Thass it. And then … oh! I know. We started playing with her duck eggs.’

‘What duck eggs?’

‘Oh! She kept ducks. Didn’t I say that? She had some lovely ducks. And she used to let me have eggs sometimes. I forgot how it was, but we started fooling about with her duck eggs. She kept hiding ’em and I had to find ’em … you know. Just fooling about.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Like hide the thimble,’

‘Thass it. Like hide the thimble. Like that. Only these was duck eggs.’

‘Where’d she hide ’em?’ I said.

‘Oh! In … where what? Oh! all over the show. Upstairs, downstairs. Everywhere. In the oven. In bed. Oh, she was a Tartar. She was hot.’

‘With running about so much?’

‘Ah, thass it! Running about so much. And then …’ He looked hard at me, without a twinkle. ‘You goin’ to cork this in? Keep it secret all right?’

I promised faithfully to cork it in, and he went on:

‘Well, then he turned up. Sam. All of a sudden she looks out of the window and there he is coming up the garden path. By God, that give me a turn.’

He made motions of a man in a variety of agonies, sweat, thirst, fright, more thirst. I could see he must have been a good deal upset.

‘What did you do?’ I said.

‘Oh! I never done anything. I couldn’t. I was scared stiff. It was her who done it. “Here, quick,” she says, “in the cellar.” And there I was. And there I stopped.’

‘How long for?’ I said.

‘For a week!’

‘A week! Why didn’t she let you out?’

‘She forgot! Forgot all about me. Didn’t I tell you how forgetful she was? Oh, she was shocking! Sometimes I’d go up for a dozen duck eggs and she’d bring the boar out and then I’d go for apples and she’d bring me duck eggs. You see?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. But why did she lock you in at all? You were all right. You weren’t doing anything.’

‘Here,’ he said. ‘You go up to the house and in the corner cupboard you’ll see a bottle marked liniment. You bring it. I want to rub my back. It gives me what’ho! every time I stir.’

So I went to fetch the bottle and after that, for some reason, perhaps because he kept drinking the liniment instead of rubbing his back with it, the tale warmed up. He began to tell me how he lay in the cellar night and day, in complete darkness, not daring to shout out and wondering what would happen to him. But what I wanted to know most was how he had lived—what he had had to eat.

‘Eat!’ he said. ‘Eat? I never had a mossel. Not a mossel. All I’d got was a mite o’ pepper and salt screwed up in a mite o’ paper in my westcit pocket.’

‘You must have got down to skin and bone,’ I said.

‘Skin and bone … you’re right,’ he said. ‘Thass about all I was. And shouldn’t have been that if it hadn’t been for the nails.’

He went on to tell me, then, how after the third or fourth day, after he had searched every inch of the cellar, floor and ceiling, on his hands and knees, he got so desperate that he began to prise out the nails of the floor boards and how after that there was nothing for it but to eat them and how he made a fire of his pocket linings and splinters of floor board and anything handy and lit it with the only match he had and how he collected water off the damp walls in a tobacco tin and how at last he put the nails in and stewed them.

‘Stewed ’em,’ he said. ‘All one night and all one day. And then ate ’em. I had to. It was either that or snuff it.’

‘By golly!’ I said. ‘What did they taste like?’

‘’Course it’s been a long time ago,’ he said. ‘They tasted like … oh, I don’t know. I had plenty o’ pepper and salt on ’em. That took the taste out a bit.’

I sat silent, thinking it over.

‘’Course it’s the iron what done it,’ he said. ‘Iron’s good for you. Ain’t it? It was only the iron what done it.’

I still sat silent. It was a fine story, but somehow it seemed, as I sat there in the hot shade of the elders, with their thick, sourish smell rank in the sun, almost too good. I couldn’t swallow it. I believed all about the duck eggs and the woman and the cellar and everything—all except the nails. Stewed nails! I kept turning it over in my mind and wondering.

And he must have seen my unbelief. Because suddenly he said:

‘You don’ believe me now,’ he said. ‘Do you? You think I’m stuffin’ you?’

He looked at me long and hard, with a gaze from which the habitual devilry had been driven out by a marvellous innocence.

‘Look at that then.’

He seemed suddenly to have had an inspiration. He opened his mouth, baring his teeth. They were old and broken and stained by the yellow and brown of decay.

‘See ’em?’ he said. ‘That’s rust. Nail rust. It got into my teeth.’ He spoke with impressive reverence. ‘It got into my teeth eating them nails and I never been able to get it out again.’

He gave a sigh, as though burdened with the telling of too much truth.

‘That’s where women land you,’ he said.

A Funny Thing

My Uncle Silas and my Uncle Cosmo belonged to different worlds; but they were men of identical kidney. Uncle Cosmo was a small man of dapper appearance with waxed moustaches who wore a gold ring on his right hand and a wine-coloured seal on his gold watch-chain, and a green homburg hat. He carried a saucy silver-topped walking stick and smoked cigars and looked exactly what he was: a masher. If Uncle Silas was the black sheep of one side of the family, Uncle Cosmo was the black sheep of the other. He habitually did an awful thing for which, I think, nobody ever forgave him; he spent his winters abroad. He sent us picture-postcards, then, of orange-trees in Mentone, the bay at Naples, Vesuvius, the gondolas of Venice, of himself in a straw hat on Christmas Day at Pompeii, and wrote, airily: ‘On to Greece and Port Said to-morrow, before the final jaunt to Ceylon.’ He was reputed, though nobody ever said so, to have a fancy lady in Nice, and there was something about a scandal in Colombo. Returning home in the spring of every year, he brought us oranges fresh from the bough, Sicilian pottery, Oriental cushions, shells from the South Seas, lumps of gold-starred quartz and the war axes of aboriginal chieftains, and advice on how to eat spaghetti. He twiddled his seal and told amazing stories of hot geysers on remote southern islands and bananas at twenty a penny and how he had almost fought a duel with a Prussian in Cairo. Cosmopolitan, debonair, a lady-killer, Uncle Cosmo was altogether very impressive.

The only person not impressed by Cosmo was my Uncle Silas.

‘You bin a long way, Cosmo,’ he would say, ‘but you ain’t done much.’

‘Who hasn’t? I’ve travelled over half the globe, Silas, while you sit here and grow prize gooseberries.’

‘I dare say,’ Silas said, ‘I dare say. But we only got your word for it. For all we know you might stop the winter in a boardin’ house at Brighton.’

‘Silas,’ Uncle Cosmo said, ‘I could tell you stories of places between here and Adelaide that would make your liver turn green. Places——’

‘Well, tell us then. Nobody’s stoppin’ you.’

‘I’m telling you. Here’s just one thing. There’s a desert in Assyria that’s never been trodden by the foot of man and that’s so far across it would take you three years to cross it on a camel. Now, one day——’

‘You ever bin across this desert?’

‘No, but——’

‘Then how the hell d’ye know it takes three years to cross?’

‘Well, it’s——’

‘What I thought,’ Silas said. ‘Just what I thought. You hear these things, Cosmo, you hear a lot, and you’ve bin a long way, but you ain’t done much. Now take women.’

‘Ah!’

‘What about this fancy affair in Nice?’

‘I haven’t got a fancy affair in Nice!’

‘There you are. Just what I thought. Big talk and nothing doing.’

‘She lives in Monte Carlo!’

‘Well, that ain’t so wonderful.’

His pride wounded, Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath, drank a mouthful of my Uncle Silas’s wine as though it were rat poison, pulled his mouth into shape again and said: ‘You don’t seem to grasp it. It’s not only one woman, Silas, in Monte Carlo. There’s another in Mentone and another in Marseilles and two in Venice. I’ve got another who lives in an old palace in Naples, two I can do what I like with in Rome, a Grecian girl in Athens, and two little Syrians in Port Said. They all eat out of my hand. Then, there’s a piece of a Viscount in Colombo and a Norwegian girl in Singapore, and I forget whether it’s four or five French girls in Shanghai. Then, of course, in Japan——’

‘Wait a minute,’ Silas said. ‘I thought you went abroad for your health?’

‘Then in Hong Kong there’s a Russian girl who’s got a tortoise tattoed on her——’

‘Well, there ain’t nothing wonderful in that, either. Down at The Swan in Harlington there used to be a barmaid with a cuckoo or something tattoed on——’

‘Yes, it was a cuckoo,’ Uncle Cosmo said. ‘I know, because I got her to have it done. She liked me. Yes, it was a cuckoo. And that’s why they always used to say you could see the cuckoo earlier in Harlington than anywhere else in England.’

My Uncle Silas was not impressed. He took large sardonic mouthfuls of wine, cocked his bloodshot eye at the ceiling and looked consistently sceptical, wicked, and unaffected. When Uncle Cosmo then proceeded to relate the adventure of the two nuns in Bologna, my Uncle Silas capped it with the adventure of the three Seventh Day Adventists in a bathing hut in Skegness. When Uncle Cosmo told the story of how, in his shirt, he had been held up at the point of a pistol by a French husband in Biarritz, my Uncle Silas brought out the chestnut of how a gamekeeper had blown his hat off with a double-barrelled gun in Bedfordshire. The higher my Uncle Cosmo flew, the better my Uncle Silas liked it. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ Uncle Cosmo said, ‘of the three weeks I spent in a château in Arles with the wife of a French count?’

‘No,’ Silas said. ‘But did I ever tell you of the month I spent with the duchess’s daughter in Stoke Castle? The Hon. Lady Susannah. You can remember her?’

‘Well, I—how long ago was this?’

‘This was the winter of ninety-three. You ought to remember her. She used to ride down to Harlington twice a week, with a groom in a dogcart. Used to wear a black coat with a splashed red lining.’

‘Dark girl?’

‘That’s her. Black. Long black hair and black eyes and long black eyelashes. A dazzler.’

‘Well, Silas, now you come to say, I——’

‘Now wait a minute, Cosmo. You know what they used to say about this girl?’

‘Well——’

‘Never looked at a man in her life.’ My Uncle Silas went on: ‘Never wanted to. Cold as a frog. Nobody couldn’t touch her. Chaps had been after her from everywhere—London, all over the place. Never made no difference, Cosmo. She just sat in the castle and looked out of the window and painted pictures. See?’

‘Well, I——’

‘You know the castle at Stoke? Stands down by the river.’

‘Oh, yes, Silas. Very well, very well.’

‘The grounds run right down to the river,’ Silas said. ‘Well, that winter I’d been doing a little river-poaching down there—eel lines and jack-snaring. You know? And about six o’clock one morning I was coming along under the castle wall with about thirty eels in a basket when she copped me.’

‘Who?’

‘Her. The gal. She was sitting in a gateway in the wall with her easel, painting. It was just gettin’ light and she told me afterwards she was painting the dawn over the river. “You been poaching,” she said. Well, what could I say? I was done. She had me red-handed and she knew it.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Well, Cosmo, she done a funny thing. She says, “I won’t say nothing about this business if you’ll come up to the castle and let me paint your picture just as you are. Old clothes and eels and everything.” So I says, “It’s a go,” and we went up to the castle and she began to paint the picture straight away that morning. “The whole family’s away abroad for the winter, and I’m all alone here except for the groom and butler,” she says. “And after to-day you come along every morning and catch your eels and then come up to the castle and let me paint you.”’

And my Uncle Silas went on to relate, between wry mouthfuls of wine, how for more than a week he had done as she said, trapping the eels in the early morning and going up to the castle and slipping in by a side door and letting the girl paint him in her room. Until at last something happened. It rained torrentially for a whole day and the succeeding night and when he went down to the river on the following morning he found the floods up and the small stone cattle bridge leading over to the castle smashed by water. It meant a detour of six miles and it was almost eight o’clock by the time he reached the castle. He slipped in by the side door as usual and went upstairs and into the girl’s room, and there, standing before a cheval mirror, the girl was painting a picture of herself in the nude.

‘And that just about finished it?’ Cosmo said.

‘No, Cosmo, that just about begun it.’

‘Well,’ Cosmo said, ‘what did she do?’

‘A funny thing, Cosmo,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘a funny thing. She just went on painting. “I thought you weren’t coming,” she says, “so I got on with this picture of myself. You like it?” Well, I was standing so as I could see the back of her in the flesh, the sideways of her in the picture and the front of her in the mirror, and I was flummoxed. “Well,” she says, “perhaps you don’t like it because it isn’t finished? Let me put my clothes on and let’s have some fried eels and you tell me what you think of it.”’

So my Uncle Silas went on to say they had fried eels and talked about the picture and he said something about not being able to judge the picture on such short acquaintance with the model. ‘You’ll see me again to-morrow,’ she said, and so it went on: she painting herself in the nude, Silas watching, until at last, as Silas himself said, a month had gone by and he’d caught almost every eel in the river.

‘You heard me say she was cold?’ he said. ‘Never looked at a man and never wanted one? That’s a fairy tale, Cosmo. Don’t you believe it. It’s true she never looked at men. But she looked at one man. And you know who that was.’

‘Yes, but what stopped it?’ Cosmo said.

‘What stopped it? A funny thing, Cosmo, a funny thing. There were twenty bedrooms in the castle, and we slept in every one of ’em. Then, one night, I was a little fuzzled and I must have gone into the wrong room. As soon as I got in I saw her in bed with another man. She gave one shout. “My husband!” she says, and I ran like greased lightning and down the drainpipe. The funny thing is she wasn’t married, and never was, and I never did find out who the chappie was.’

‘You never found out,’ Uncle Cosmo said.

‘No,’ Silas said. ‘I never did find out.’

‘Well,’ Cosmo said, ‘it’s been a long time ago and I dare say it wouldn’t break my heart to tell you. I happen to know, Silas, who that man was.’

‘You do?’

‘I do.’

‘Well,’ Silas said, ‘who was it?’

Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath and twiddled his waxed moustaches and tried to look at once repentant and triumphant. ‘Silas,’ he said, ‘I hate to say it. I hate it. But that man was me.’

For about a minute my Uncle Silas did not speak. He cocked his eye and looked out of the window; he looked at the wine in his glass; and then finally he looked across at Uncle Cosmo himself.

‘Cosmo,’ he says at last, ‘you bin a long way and you’ve heard a tidy bit, but you ain’t seen much. Don’t you know there ain’t a castle at Stoke? Nor a river?’

Uncle Cosmo did not speak.

‘And don’t you know where you was in the winter o’ ninety-three?’

Uncle Cosmo did not speak.

‘Didn’t you tell me only yesterday,’ Silas said, with his hand on the wine, ‘you was in Barbadoes that year, a bit friendly with a bishop’s daughter? Now ain’t that a funny thing?’

The Sow and Silas

Every August, on the Sunday of Nenweald Fair, my Uncle Silas came to visit us. He was a man, sometimes, of strict habits; he wound up his watch after every meal, never let a day pass without a bottle of wine, and never stirred out without his gall-stone, a lump of barbaric rock as large as a pheasant’s egg treasured as the relic of an operation at the early age of seventy, carefully wrapped up in a piece of his housekeeper’s calico and reverently laid away in the bum-pocket of his breeches.

And in the same strict way he started off early to visit us, spending the whole of Saturday oiling and polishing the harness and grooming the horse, and then another hour on Sunday grooming the horse again and tying his own necktie, all in order to be on the road by eight o’clock. From my Uncle Silas’s house to my grandmother’s it was less than seven miles; an hour’s journey. But somehow, at Souldrop, the horse was tired or my Uncle Silas was tired, and he knew the widow who kept The Bell there; and it seemed a shame to go past the door of the pub itself without going in to take and give a little comfort. And whether it was the giving or the taking of the comfort or what we never knew, but it was nearly eleven o’clock by the time my Uncle Silas drove on to Knotting Fox, where he knew the landlord of The George very well and the barmaid better. From Knotting Fox to Yelden it was less than three miles and at Yelden my Uncle Silas had a distant relation, a big pink sow of a publican, who had married a second wife as neat as a silk purse. And at Yelden he had no sooner seen the bottom in a quart twice than it was dinner time. ‘Stay and have a bit o’ dinner now you are here,’ the little silky woman would say, ‘if you don’t mind taking it with me while Charlie looks after the bar. We have to take it separate on Sundays.’ And my Uncle Silas would consent to stay, almost forgetting to wind up his watch after the dinner in the back parlour with her, and looking like a man on fire when he climbed into the trap at last and drove on to Bromswold, still out of his course, to sit in the bar of The Swan there all afternoon, reverently unwrapping his gall-stone and wrapping it up again for whoever was there to see. ‘Feel on it, man. Go on, feel the weight on it. That’s a tidy weight, y’know. And it used to be bigger, me boyo. Bigger. Used to be bigger’n a duck’s egg. What d’ye think o’ that? Think of having that inside ye. Eh?’

And all the time, at my grandmother’s, we were waiting for him, eating first dinner and then tea without him.

‘D’ye reckon Silas ain’t coming this year?’

‘I’ll Silas him if he does!’

‘Silas is allus like that there ham. He gets hung up.’

‘Yes,’ my grandmother would say, ‘and that’s what I’d do with him if I had my way.’

But finally, towards dusk, my Uncle Silas would arrive, lit up, his hat on the back of his head, his face as red as a laying hen’s, his neck-tie undone, a pink aster as big as a saucer in his buttonhole, his voice bawling like a bull’s to the horse:

‘Whoa! Damn you, stan’ still. Whoa! George, hold this damn nag still a minute. I wanna git out. Whoa! Stop him.’

‘He’s bin a’standin’ still about five minutes, Silas.’

‘Stop him! Whoa. He keeps movin’ on and twitterin’ about. Stop him! Every ’nation time I try to git out o’ this trap he moves on.’

‘The nag’s as still as a mouse, Silas. You catch hold o’ me. You’ll be all right. That’s it. You catch hold o’ me. That’s it.’

And somehow my Uncle Silas would alight, waddling across the farmyard on his half-bandy legs like a man on a ship, in gentle staggers of uncertainty, bawling at the top of his devilish voice:

‘And now we’re here, we are here! Whoops! Steady, lost the leg o’ me drawers.’

And then in the house: ‘Where are y’, Tillie, me old duck! Come on, give us a kiss, that’s it, give us a kiss. What! Th’ old nag lost a shoe. I’ve bin hung up ever s’long. The old nag lost a——’

‘And very lucky you didn’t lose yourself, too, I should think!’

‘Ah, come on, Tillie, give us a kiss. Silas come all this way and you ain’t goin’ give him a mite of a kiss?’

‘I’d be ashamed of myself!’

‘I am.’

‘Then just sit down quietly somewhere and don’t plague folks and don’t act the jabey. George, you get the ham cut and see that there’s a knife and fork for everybody and enough bread.’

‘After you do that, George, me old beauty, go an’ look in the back o’ the trap ——’

‘I recollect I left a few empty bottles under——’

‘He’ll do no such thing, Silas!’

‘God A’mighty, Tillie. God A’mighty, Tillie, they’re empty.’

‘Trust you!’

‘Tah! Let ’em all come!’

And finally we would sit down to supper, the big dining-table and the many little tables crowded with relatives, my grandfather carving the ham and beef, my Uncle Silas staggering round the table and then from one table to another with bottles of cowslip wine, totting it half over the table-cloth, giving an extra stagger of devilry against the ladies, and taking no notice even of my grandmother’s tartest reprimands and bawling at the top of his voice:

‘Let ’em all come!’

‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you shall not come here, Silas, if you can’t behave yourself!’

‘Let ’em all come!’

And bawling constantly, spilling the wine on the floor as he walked, he would get back to his chair at last, only to stagger up again in less than a minute to fill another glass or kiss the lady next to him and show his gall-stone or, worst of all, tell us a story.

‘George, me old beauty, d’ye recollect the time as we cut the buttons off old dad Hustwaite’s trousers? Remember that, George, me old beauty? Cut ’em off while he sat there in The Dragon and then——’

‘By golly, Silas, you do——’

‘Cut some more ham, George, quick. There’s two plates empty.’

‘George cut the buttons off while I played him dominoes——’

‘Some more pickle, Mary Ann?’

And one year, as we sat there eating in the summer half-darkness, the room rich with the smell of ham and beer and the wine my Uncle Silas had spilled wherever he went, and all of us except my grandmother laughing over Silas unwrapping his gall-stone and laying it tenderly in its calico again, my grandfather for some reason got up and went out, and in less than five minutes was back again, with a scared look on his face.

‘Silas,’ he said. ‘Summat’s happened. The pig’s out.’

‘Not the sow, George? The sow ain’t out?’

‘Busted the door down. How the ‘Anover——’

‘Let me git up. God A’mighty, let me git up.’

Somehow my Uncle Silas staggered to his feet.

My grandfather and he were men of utterly opposite character, my grandfather as mild as a heifer, Silas as wild as a young colt, but where pigs were concerned they were equal men. Pigs brought out in them the same tender qualities; they gazed in mutual meditation over sty-rails, they suffered from the same outrage and melancholy when their litters failed or their sows were sick. A sow was sacred to them; litters were lovelier than babies.

And my Uncle Silas staggered up as though he were choking.

‘My God, let me git out. Let me git out.’

He pushed back his chair, lurched against the table, made an immense effort to right himself, somehow managed to stagger to the door, and then bawled:

‘George, boy, she ain’t in pig?’

‘Yis!’ We heard the faint voice far across the farmyard in answer.

‘My God!’

The next moment we heard my Uncle Silas slither down all the five stone steps of the back door, blaspheming at every step and blaspheming even more as he sat on his backside in the hen-mucked yard outside. In another moment we heard him blaspheming again as he got to his feet, and still again when he found he could not keep them. By that time all the men in the room were standing up and half the women saying, ‘Sit down, man, do. All this fuss about a pig!’ and some of us were already making for the door.

When I arrived on the threshold, Silas was still sitting in the yard. He seemed to be trying to straighten his legs. He kept taking hold first of one leg, then another. One minute they were crossed and he was trying to uncross them. A minute later they were uncrossed and he seemed to be trying to cross them again.

He saw me coming down the steps.

‘Git me up!’ he bawled. ‘God A’mighty, me legs are tangled like a lot o’ wool. Git me up!’

I got hold of him by the shoulders and was getting him to his feet, he staggering and slithering like a man on skates and swearing wildly all the time, when suddenly there was a bawl of alarm from across the yard and I saw the sow come round the straw-stack.

‘Silas, stop her, stop her!’ my grandfather shouted. ‘Head her off, Silas!’

‘Git me up, boy, git me up!’

Somehow I managed to get my Uncle Silas to his feet as the sow came blundering across the yard. There was something pathetic about her. She was like a creature in anguish. She was snorting and grunting and slobbering with distress and as my Uncle Silas advanced to meet her he spread out his arms, as though in tender readiness to embrace her.

‘Goo’ gal, goo’ gal,’ he kept saying. ‘Come on now, tig, tig. Goo’ gal. Whoa now!’

Suddenly she saw him. But it was as though she had not seen him. She simply lifted her head and kept straight on. My Uncle Silas too kept straight on, muttering all the time in his thick tender voice: ‘Goo’ gal, come on now, tig, tig, goo’ gal. Tig!’ and she snorting and slobbering in the gentle anguish of alarm at her predicament.

All at once my Uncle Silas stopped. He held up his arms and began to leap about with a sort of lugubrious excitement, like a man trying to hold up a train. ‘Back, back!’ he kept shouting. ‘Back. Tig back! Tig!’

But the sow kept straight on. She seemed if anything to increase her pace. And suddenly my Uncle Silas let out a curious yell of blasphemous astonishment and threw up his hands.

The next moment the sow hit him. She caught him full between the legs and she went on after she had struck him, so that momentarily my Uncle Silas was lifted up. For another moment he seemed to ride on the sow’s head, backwards, his squat bow legs flapping like the ears of the sow herself. Then the sow threw him. She gave a sort of nodding toss of the head as a horse does to a fly, my Uncle Silas falling flat on his back in the yard again, his legs waving, his arms clawing wildly at the sow as she stampeded over and past him, her great teats flapping his face and half-smothering his roars of blasphemous rage.

Then something happened. My uncle let out a yell of extreme triumph. The sow stopped. She seemed to stagger, as Silas himself had done, as though her legs were tangled among themselves, and with my Uncle Silas bawling at the top of his voice she gave a sudden sigh and sank on her side.

‘George, boy, I got her, I got her! George, I got her!’

‘Hold her, hold her!’

‘I am holding her! She’s atop on me!’

‘Hold her for God’s sake. Hold her!’

My grandfather came running across the yard and all the men and half the women out of the house. I ran up too.

My Uncle Silas had his arms round the sow’s neck. They were locked in embrace, the sow herself was lying over on his chest, her great belly flattened out softly over one of his legs, her teats distended, as though she were about to give suck to a litter.

‘I’m holding her, George, I’m holding her.’ He spoke with alternate triumph and tenderness. ‘Goo’ gal, tig, lay still, goo’ gal.’

‘You hold her a minute, Silas, while we git her up.’

‘I’m holding her, George boy. I got her all right.’ There was a look of perfect beatitude on my Uncle Silas’s face as he lay there with the pig in his arms, a look of pure intoxicated content. ‘Goo’ gal, tig. I got her, George boy. Tig, tig. Goo’ gal!’

‘Now, Silas’—my grandfather and four men bent over the sow, seizing her great carcase, in readiness to upheave her—‘when we lift you let her goo.’

‘I got her, George boy, I got her.’

‘You let her goo when we lift, Silas.’

‘Tig, tig.’

‘Now, Silas, now, let goo. Silas, let goo. Dall it, how can we lift her up if you don’t let her goo?’

‘You wanted me to git her and I got her. Thass all right, ain’t it?’

‘Yes, Silas, yes. But we can’t git her up if you don’t let her goo.’

‘She’s all right. Let her alone. Good old gal, tig, tig.’

‘Let goo, Silas, let goo!’

Then the men and my grandfather heaved again, but my Uncle Silas’s arms were tight round the sow’s neck and the sow herself lay half over him with blissful content, immovable.

‘Silas, you must let goo! Now then! Silas! Why the ’Anover don’t you let goo! Let goo, Silas, let goo!’

‘Thass all right, George boy, thass——’

At that moment my grandmother came up. She was a small, tart, wiry woman, like a bird; her words were like swift pecks at Silas.

‘Silas, get up. Get up! Silas, I will not have it. Get up!’

‘He won’t let goo,’ my grandfather said. ‘Every time we try to pull the sow off him he won’t let goo.’

‘Oh, won’t he?’

She suddenly seized hold of Silas by the head, just under the neck. From that moment my Uncle Silas lost some of his gaiety and content.

‘Tillie, what y’doing on? Let us alone. Tillie, me old——’

‘If we can’t pull the sow off him we’ll pull him off the sow. Get hold of him.’

‘It’s all right, Tillie. I got her; lemme goo bed with her. I wanna goo bed with her. I wanna——’

‘I’d be ashamed of myself, Silas. Stand up!’

Suddenly my grandmother heaved him by the neck and the men heaved too. The sow gave a grunt and a struggle as my Uncle Silas was heaved from beneath her, and in another moment both he and the sow were jerked to their feet, her great teats swinging free and the back buttons of my Uncle Silas’s trousers bursting off at the same time like crackers.

‘My God, that’s done it. Hold ’em up, Silas!’

My Uncle Silas gave a single wild stagger, his trousers falling down, concertina-fashion, before the men caught him and lifted him up and carried him off into the house, his legs wind-milling, his wicked devilish voice bawling all over the farmyard above the voices of the shrieking ladies:

‘Let ’em all come!’

It was the last I saw of him that night. In the morning, when I came downstairs, the guests had gone, my grandfather was in the fields, and there was no one about except my grandmother, who sat in the chair by the kitchen window, sewing the buttons on the back of a pair of tweed breeches.

‘Your breakfast’s just in the oven,’ she said.

For ten minutes I went on eating and she went on sewing, neither of us speaking. Then she bit off her cotton and laid the breeches on a chair.

‘When you’ve finished your breakfast you might take them up to him,’ she said. ‘Put them down outside the door.’

After breakfast I took the breeches upstairs. I knocked at my Uncle Silas’s door, but no one answered. Then I knocked again, but nothing happened, and finally I opened the door a crack and looked in.

‘Your breeches,’ I said.

My Uncle Silas lay submerged by the bed-clothes. I could see nothing of him but his mouse-coloured hair and a single bleary bloodshot eye which squinted over the coverlet at me.

‘Eh?’

‘Your breeches.’

‘Um.’

After that one utterance he was silent. It was, indeed, all I ever heard him say of his behaviour with the sow, except once, when I reminded him of it over a glass of wine. And then he said:

‘What sow? When was that?’

‘You remember,’ I said. And I told him about it again, laughing as I spoke, telling him how he had caught the sow and held her down and then how the buttons of his breeches had snapped off as we strained to release him.

‘You must have been some buttons short that night,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

He sat silent for a minute, his glass empty in his hand, his lips wet and shining with wine, looking at me with the blandest cocking of his bloodshot eye in an innocent effort of recollection.

At last he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s some things you can’t remember.’ His hand was on the bottle. ‘Mouthful o’ wine?’

The Shooting Party

My Uncle Silas had a small rough paddock with a bramble cowshed at one corner, with two or three acres behind it for corn and potatoes, and one Boxing Day he said to Sammy Twiggle:

‘Sammy, Sam boy, there’s a couple of pheasants as big as turkeys roost in that ash again my hovel. Come up a New Year’s Eve and we’ll git the gun. Make a party on it.’

Sammy was a retired house-painter, and he stood about six feet, with arms as long as a monkey’s and a face like a laying hen. His nose was bulbous.

My Uncle Silas was no beauty either, with one eye bloodshot and his way of looking cock-eyed and satanic at the same time. But he could see all right, and so could Sammy. From the tops of ladders, they would say, you got a funny view of the world.

So Sammy came stooping in at Silas’s door, like a beery giraffe, about one o’clock on the afternoon of the New Year’s Eve, and Silas said: ‘Sit down, Sammy, and let’s have a wet afore we start. Mouthful o’ wine? Tot o’ cowslip?’

He filled two tumblers with wine, and then, as they were drinking, he looked hard at Sammy, in wonder. ‘What the Hanover’s that on top o’ your head, Sammy?’ he said.

‘That?’ Sammy said. ‘That? That’s a shootin’ hat.’ It was a big, loose green felt with a fancy feather in it.

‘Shootin’ hat? Looks more like a pair o’ the old lady’s ham-bags dyed green. Shootin’ hat. Where’d you git it?’

‘You gotta wear a proper hat for shootin’,’ Sammy said. ‘Any fool knows that. This hat belonged to Lord William. It’s a real shootin’ hat.’

‘Is it?’ Silas said. ‘Well, I’ll lay y’a a brace o’ pheasants to a trousers button it ain’t. So there. And I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a fishin’ hat. The pheasants’ll think you’re a blamed old turkey or summat. A proper shootin’ hat’s a deer-stalker. Looks like Noah’s ark on your head, only upside down. I’ll show you. I got one.’

So Silas went upstairs and came down with a check deerstalker on his head, and Sammy nearly had a fit.

‘That? That’s a pike-fishin’ hat,’ he said. ‘You undo the flaps and you can sit then all day and your ears don’t git cold.’

‘Sammy,’ Silas said, ‘a gent was killed in this hat. Shot at. Mistook for a pigeon. That’ll show you whether it’s a shootin’ hat or not. Look,’ he said. ‘You see them two little holes this side? Well, that’s where the bullets went in. And you see them two little holes that side? That’s where they came out. Drop more wine?’

Silas filled up the tumblers and Sammy, defeated, drank.

‘You got the gun loaded?’ he said.

‘I bin loading it all morning,’ Silas said.

The gun was a muzzleloader, about fifty years old, and it was the reason for Sammy and my Uncle Silas coming together. The gun had once belonged to Sammy and my Uncle Silas had bought it from him for fifteen shillings and a young pig on one condition. And the condition was that Sammy should come and shoot with it once a year.

It was a very good gun, except for one thing. There were times when it would not go off. The trigger would jam and nothing on earth would move it. Finally, just as you had given it up as a bad job, it suddenly went off and blew the roof out or killed a cow or something. Otherwise a fine gun.

Silas always loaded it with powder and shot and old newspapers and rusty nails and old rats’ nests and hairpins and dried mice and brace-buttons, and, in fact, almost anything lying about, and when it did go off it made a considerable impression.

‘Yes, I got him loaded,’ Silas said. ‘But we can sit a minute. They don’t begin to roost until about three o’clock. And, by gosh! Sammy, they’re as fat as butter. They’re as big as turkeys. I been laying corn down for ’em for over a fortnight. You could catch ’em wi’ your hands.’

‘Cocks?’ Sammy said.

‘Cocks. And I tell y’ they’re as big as turkeys.’

After that they sat still, Silas filling and refilling the glasses, for a long time. It was a cold afternoon, with a light piebald fall of snow on the fields and the air dead still and frozen.

By the time they were on the fourth bottle it was three o’clock, and Sammy said: ‘If we don’t git started, we shan’t see whether they’re cocks or hens or bushel baskets.’

‘Sammy,’ Silas said, ‘them pheasants are so tame you could catch ’em in mousetraps. It’ll be kids’ play. What’s wrong wi’ sittin’ here? Ain’t we all right? Another mouthful o’ wine?’

So they sat for another half-hour, and the feeling of twilight, snow-wild, was already growing strong when finally Silas got up and staggered into the kitchen for the gun and the powder-horn and the ramrod and the bag of rusty nails and brace-buttons and odd sweepings up for the reload. ‘You carry the bag and the shot, Sammy,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry the gun. And put your hat on straight.’

Very offended, Sammy staggered up, with his hat cocked on the back of his head looking like a cross between a bishop’s mitre and a pair of horse’s ear-bags. ‘Hat’s as straight as I am,’ he bawled. ‘Look at that blamed stag-stalker o’ yourn. Terrible.’

‘Deer-stalker!’ Silas shouted. ‘Not stag-stalker. Anyway, it’s better’n wearing the old woman’s trousers. Pipe down. And let’s git on.’

‘Shame to leave that drop in the bottle,’ Sammy said, ‘ain’t it?’

‘It is, Sammy, it is. Put it in your pocket. Take it with us.’

So Sammy put the wine bottle in his poacher’s pocket, and, carrying gun and bags and bottle, they staggered down the garden and over the fence and across the field. In the light snow their tracks made a kind of crazy chain, linking up and staggering away, so that Silas bawled at last: ‘What’s the use o’ me walking straight if you don’t? Pull your hat out your eyes, man. How d’ye expect to see straight?’

‘Who can’t see straight? Eh? Who can’t see straight? I’m all right. Where are them pheasants? That’s what I wanna know.’

‘Sammy boy,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘in a minute. All in good time. Whoa. Stand still. You see that hovel?’

‘Which one?’

‘That one! There’s only one!’

‘You’re a liar. There’s two.’

‘All right, Sammy. There’s two. Now you walk over and behind that hovel and you’ll see ’em sittin’ on the grass waitin’ for you. Two cocks. Eatin’ corn. All you gotta do is beat ’em up and I’ll have ’em down afore you can wink.’

‘All right,’ Sammy said. ‘Only for God’s sake take that blamed stag-stalker off. Else they’ll be frit at you.’

‘Deer-stalker!’ Silas shouted.

Sammy made snake-tracks in the snow. Silas moved after him with dreamy caution. Twilight was deepening with a savage orange light on the horizon beyond the hovel. Suddenly Sammy set up a great shout and the pheasants came over towards my Uncle Silas on fast, dark wings.

Silas took aim, the gun wavering about as though held by a man with St Vitus’s dance, and then shot. The kick of the muzzle-loader knocked him instantaneously flat on his back, and the pheasants veered and swooped and screeched away beyond the house and the spinney and were lost to sight.

‘You beat ’em too sharp!’ Silas bawled.

‘Too sharp be damned!’ Sammy shouted. ‘That blamed stag-stalker frit ’em to death.’

They stood in the snow, holding each other up, and had a slight offended altercation. It was growing darker. They had a drink. After the shot and the screech of pheasants the day was dead silent. And after the drink they began suddenly to speak in low voices, as though afraid of being heard.

‘Sammy, listen to me. You git over th’ other side o’ that hedge and go round by Acott’s barn and see if you can beat summat up while I git loaded again. There’s pheasants run about there like hens. I’ll stand under the hedge, so’s nobody’ll see me. We’ll have a couple down in a pop.’

It was almost dark when Sammy climbed the fence, and to Silas, standing under the hedge, the clouds looked like tawny elephants. He stood there for a long time, but nothing happened, and then finally he heard Sammy’s voice, in a whisper: ‘Ain’t you seen it?’

‘Seen what?’

‘That pheasant. I beat one up as big as a turkey. It walked through.’

‘Walked, by golly? I ain’t seen a thing.’

‘Wait a minute. I’ll whistle when it’s up.’

In a moment Silas heard a faint whistle like the air escaping from the hole in a barrel, but he could see no bird. He waited, and then Sammy called in a whisper: ‘Why don’t you shoot?’

‘I ain’t seen nothing.’

‘Then take that stag-stalker off and look. He’s sittin’ on the fence by the hovel. Pip ’im.’

Silas looked. ‘By gum,’ he said. ‘By gum, if that ain’t the biggest pheasant I ever see.’

‘Shoot man, shoot afore that blamed hat scares it.’

‘Shut up, women’s breeches, and let me git aim.’

In the half-darkness Silas took long, slow, unsteady aim at the colossal silhouette of the bird on the fence, and then pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. No sound. And the bird still sat there. In a great sweat of trouble Silas cocked again, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. To Silas the world went round. The great elephant clouds swam tipsily. And still that colossal myth of a bird sat on the fence. Then he cocked a third time and took aim and pulled again. But the gun was dumb.

‘Sammy,’ he called. ‘Sammy boy. She’s stuck. Quick, Sam boy, Sammy.’

Sammy fell over the fence, and when he got up again they struggled feverishly, in a sweat of despair, to ease the trigger off. But it was no good. It was as though the thing had frozen. And finally Sammy said: ‘It’s no use. I’ll catch it in me hands. You stop here while I creep up and drop on it. If he gits up and you can fire, then fire like blazes.’

Sammy made strange tracks in the snow and finally went behind the hovel, and from that moment my Uncle Silas lost him. All the time he stood trying to ease the gun off, but it was no go.

Then suddenly he looked at the fence and he could see, not one bird, but a brace; two vast shapes huddled like roosting turkeys. He began to stagger towards them, stumbling like a man who had seen a vision. It was a sportsman’s nightmare; to see, not thirty yards off, a brace of the biggest, and to have, at the same time, a gun that wouldn’t go off.

And finally he could bear it no longer. He stopped, took an aim in which the barrel wobbled like a jelly, and then touched the trigger. The gun went off immediately and knocked him flat on his back. It always did that. He expected it, and he was not surprised.

What did surprise him was a sound of moaning. It came from beyond the fence. My Uncle Silas struggled up, rolled across the field like a sailor on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, and found Sammy lying in the ditch, with no hat on, and a fifteen-pound turkey dead on his chest.

‘You’ve killed me,’ Sammy said. ‘You blowed my hat to bits.’

‘Good God, it is a turkey,’ Silas said.

‘I’m shot,’ Sammy said. ‘You shot my hat off. I’m done.’

‘There was another one. A brace,’ Silas said.

‘For God’s sake,’ Sammy said. ‘The blood’s running down my chest. For God’s sake, if it’s the last thing you do, git me up.’

So Silas picked up the turkey with one hand and got Sammy up with the other, and it turned out, after a time, that it was not blood running down his chest but wine. Then it seemed that Sammy could stand up, then that he could walk about, and finally that it was not he that was shattered at all, but his hat.

‘We gotta find it,’ he kept saying, ‘we gotta find it.’ And at last they did find it, in the next field, in a patch of kale.

‘By gum, there’s some air-holes in it,’ Silas said. ‘The old lady’ll feel a draught, won’t she?’

And the idea was so good and he laughed so much that Sammy wanted to fight him, there and then, in the darkness and the snow.

But two days after New Year’s Day he laughed the other side of his face. Sammy’s old lady came up then, and gave him a couple of cracks with a copper-stick that he felt for a month.

For it appears, after all, that she did wear that hat. But my Uncle Silas, in revenge, would never have it at all that it was on her head.

Silas the Good

In a life of ninety-five years, my Uncle Silas found time to try most things, and there was a time when he became a grave-digger.

The churchyard at Solbrook stands a long way outside the village on a little mound of bare land above the river valley.

And there, dressed in a blue shirt and mulatto brown corduroys and a belt that resembled more than anything a length of machine shafting, my Uncle Silas used to dig perhaps a grave a month.

He would work all day there at the blue-brown clay without seeing a soul, with no one for company except crows, the pewits crying over the valley or the robin picking the worms out of the thrown-up earth. Squat, misshapen, wickedly ugly, he looked something like a gargoyle that had dropped off the roof of the little church, something like a brown dwarf who had lived too long after his time and might go on living and digging the graves of others for ever.

He was digging a grave there once on the south side of the churchyard on a sweet, sultry day in May, the grass already long and deep, with strong golden cowslips rising everywhere among the mounds and the gravestones, and bluebells hanging like dark smoke under the creamy waterfalls of hawthorn bloom.

By noon he was fairly well down with the grave, and had fixed his boards to the sides. The spring had been very dry and cold, but now, in the shelter of the grave, in the strong sun, it seemed like midsummer. It was so good that Silas sat in the bottom of the grave and had his dinner, eating his bread and mutton off the thumb, and washing it down with the cold tea he always carried in a beer-bottle. After eating, he began to feel drowsy, and finally he went to sleep there, at the bottom of the grave, with his wet, ugly mouth drooping open and the beer-bottle in one hand and resting on his knee.

He had been asleep for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes when he woke up and saw someone standing at the top of the grave, looking down at him. At first he thought it was a woman. Then he saw his mistake. It was a female.

He was too stupefied and surprised to say anything, and the female stood looking down at him, very angry at something, poking holes in the grass with a large umbrella. She was very pale, updrawn and skinny, with a face, as Silas described it, like a turnip lantern with the candle out. She seemed to have size nine boots on and from under her thick black skirt Silas caught a glimpse of an amazing knickerbocker leg, baggy, brown in colour, and about the size of an airship.

He had not time to take another look before she was at him. She waved her umbrella and cawed at him like a crow, attacking him for indolence and irreverence, blasphemy and ignorance.

She wagged her head and stamped one of her feet, and every time she did so the amazing brown bloomer seemed to slip a little farther down her leg, until Silas felt it would slip off altogether. Finally, she demanded, scraggy neck craning down at him, what did he mean by boozing down there, on holy ground, in a place that should be sacred for the dead?

Now at the best of time it was difficult for my Uncle Silas, with ripe, red lips, one eye bloodshot and bleary, and a nose like a crusty strawberry, not to look like a drunken sailor. But there was only one thing that he drank when he was working, and that was cold tea. It was true that it was always cold tea with whisky in it, but the basis remained, more or less, cold tea.

Silas let the female lecture him for almost five minutes, and then he raised his panama hat and said, ‘Good afternoon, ma’am. Ain’t the cowslips out nice?’

‘Not content with desecrating holy ground,’ she said, ‘you’re intoxicated, too!’

‘No, ma’am,’ he said, ‘I wish I was.’

‘Beer!’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you leave the beer alone in here, of all places?’

Silas held up the beer-bottle. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘what’s in here wouldn’t harm a fly. It wouldn’t harm you.’

‘It is responsible for the ruin of thousands of homes all over England!’ she said.

‘Cold tea,’ Silas said.

Giving a little sort of snort she stamped her foot and the bloomer-leg jerked down a little lower. ‘Cold tea!’

‘Yes, ma’am. Cold tea.’ Silas unscrewed the bottle and held it up to her. ‘Go on, ma’am, try it. Try it if you don’t believe me.’

‘Thank you. Not out of that bottle.’

‘All right. I got a cup,’ Silas said. He looked in his dinner basket and found an enamel cup. He filled it with tea and held it up to her. ‘Go on, ma’am, try it. Try it. It won’t hurt you.’

‘Well!’ she said, and she reached down for the cup. She took it and touched her thin bony lips to it. ‘Well, it’s certainly some sort of tea.’

‘Just ordinary tea, ma’am,’ Silas said. ‘Made this morning. You ain’t drinking it. Take a good drink.’

She took a real drink then, washing it round her mouth.

‘Refreshin’, ain’t it?’ Silas said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s very refreshing.’

‘Drink it up,’ he said. ‘Have a drop more. I bet you’ve walked a tidy step?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I have. All the way from Bedford. Rather farther than I thought. I’m not so young as I used to be.’

‘Pah!’ Silas said. ‘Young? You look twenty.’ He took his coat and spread it on the new earth above the grave. ‘Sit down and rest yourself, ma’am. Sit down and look at the cowslips.’

Rather to his surprise, she sat down. She took another drink of the tea and said, ‘I think I’ll unpin my hat.’ She took off her hat and held it in her lap.

‘Young?’ Silas said. ‘Ma’am, you’re just a chicken. Wait till you’re as old as me and then you can begin to talk. I can remember the Crimea!’

‘Indeed?’ she said. ‘You must have had a full and varied life.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She smiled thinly, for the first time. ‘I am sorry I spoke as I did. It upset me to think of anyone drinking in this place.’

‘That’s all right, ma’am,’ Silas said. ‘That’s all right. I ain’t touched a drop for years. Used to, ma’am. Bin a regular sinner.’

Old Silas reached up to her with the bottle and said, ‘Have some more, ma’am,’ and she held down the cup and filled it up again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She looked quite pleasant now, softened by the tea and the smell of cowslips and the sun on her bare head. The bloomer-leg had disappeared and somehow she stopped looking like a female and became a woman.

‘But you’ve reformed now?’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Silas said, with a slight shake of his head, as though he were a man in genuine sorrow. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ve reformed.’

‘It was a long fight?’

‘A long fight, ma’am? I should say it was, ma’am. A devil of a long fight.’ He raised his panama hat a little. ‘Beg pardon, ma’am. That’s another thing I’m fighting against. The language.’

‘And the drink,’ she said, ‘how far back does that go?’

‘Well, ma’am,’ Silas said, settling back in the grave, where he had been sitting all that time, ‘I was born in the hungry forties. Bad times, ma’am, very bad times. We was fed on barley pap, ma’am, if you ever heard talk of barley pap. And the water was bad, too, ma’am. Very bad. Outbreaks of smallpox and typhoid and all that. So we had beer, ma’am. Everybody had beer. The babies had beer. So you see, ma’am,’ Silas said, ‘I’ve been fighting against it for eighty years and more. All my puff.’

‘And now you’ve conquered it?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said my Uncle Silas, who had drunk more in eighty years than would keep a water-mill turning, ‘I’ve conquered it.’ He held up the beer-bottle. ‘Nothing but cold tea. You’ll have some more cold tea, ma’am, won’t you?’

‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said.

So Silas poured out another cup of the cold tea and she sat on the graveside and sipped it in the sunshine, becoming all the time more and more human.

‘And no wonder,’ as Silas would say to me afterwards, ‘seeing it was still the winter ration we were drinking. You see, I had a summer ration with only a nip of whisky in it, and then I had a winter ration wi’ pretty nigh a mugful in it. The weather had been cold up to that day and I hadn’t bothered to knock the winter ration off.’

They sat there for about another half an hour, drinking the cold tea, and during that time there was nothing she did not hear about my Uncle Silas’s life: not only how he had reformed on the beer and was trying to reform on the language but how he had long since reformed on the ladies and the horses and the doubtful stories and the lying and everything else that a man can reform on.

Indeed, as he finally climbed up out of the grave to shake hands with her and say good afternoon, she must have got the impression that he was a kind of ascetic lay brother.

Except that her face was very flushed, she walked away with much the same dignity as she had come. There was only one thing that spoiled it. The amazing bloomer-leg had come down again, and Silas could not resist it.

‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he called after her, ‘but you’re liable to lose your knickerbockers.’

She turned and gave a dignified smile and then a quick, saucy kind of hitch to her skirt, and the bloomer-leg went up, as Silas himself said, as sharp as a blind in a shop-window.

That was the last he ever saw of her. But that afternoon, on the 2.45 up-train out of Solbrook, there was a woman with a large umbrella in one hand and a bunch of cowslips in the other. In the warm, crowded carriage there was a smell of something stronger than cold tea, and it was clear to everyone that one of her garments was not in its proper place. She appeared to be a little excited, and to everybody’s embarrassment she talked a great deal.

Her subject was someone she had met that afternoon.

‘A good man,’ she told them. ‘A good man.’

A Happy Man

There were many sides to the character of my Uncle Silas which were very doubtful; but there was nothing doubtful about his friendship with Walter Hawthorn.

Walter and Silas had been friends for fifty or sixty or perhaps even seventy years, though for more than half that time they had never seen each other. Walter had been a soldier: long periods of service on the North-West Frontier, the Sudan, garrison at Singapore.

He was a big man, with huge sun-dark hands, massive shoulders as stiff and square as iron brackets. He had been wounded twice on the Frontier and once in the Sudan, but he never talked about it. They had given him medals for conspicuous gallantry in a tribal ambush in Afghanistan and others for long service and distinguished service, and he had a row of ribbons that was like a section out of a rainbow. But he never wore the medals or the ribbons and when folks tried to get him to talk about his campaigns and his bravery he would just say, ‘Yes, that was in ’79. It was bad,’ or ‘Yes, that was in ’84. That was the day.’

He was a man who had seen things and done things and had helped to make history, but it was as though he had done nothing at all. There are men who go round the world and see all there is to be seen and who come back and say, ‘It was very nice indeed.’

Walt Hawthorn was one of these men. Except that when he came home, after more than forty years of service, he didn’t even say that. He said nothing at all, and settled down to grow flowers.

It was not the fact that he grew flowers that was in any way remarkable: it was the kind of flowers he grew. My Uncle Silas also grew flowers. He had always been an ugly little man, and it was as though the littleness and ugliness in him demanded to be expressed in something huge and wonderful.

His dahlias were like grand velvet cushions of salmon and scarlet, his asters like ostrich plumes of pink and mauve. He gloried in sprays of monster golden lilies that were like the brasses in an orchestra. He liked roses into which he could bury his face.

But Walt Hawthorn was fond of little flowers. His garden was at the other end of the lane from my Uncle Silas, and the two gardens were like the plus and minus of things. Where my Uncle Silas’s flowers flaunted and flared over the hedge in the sun, Walt Hawthorn had scarcely a flower that could look over the fence.

In spring he grew things like forget-me-nots and violets and narcissi and Dresden daisies; in summer he had virginia stock and snapdragons and pinks and button asters. When he went to my Uncle Silas’s garden my Uncle Silas would take a yardstick to the dahlias, but when Silas went to see Walt Hawthorn, Walt would take him to see a rose no bigger than a thimble or his six-inch fuchsia, in a pot, with flowers no bigger than a pendant ear-ring.

They went on like this for years. It seemed to consolidate their friendship. With other men my Uncle Silas boasted of his flowers as he boasted of his women, or he lied of one as easily as he lied of the other. But he never boasted to Walt Hawthorn, and, except for one simple occasion, he never lied.

Walt Hawthorn and my Uncle Silas, though they differed in almost every other way, were alike in one thing. They liked a drink about midday. And every day, just before twelve o’clock, they walked down to The Swan with Two Nicks and, without fail, they drank the same thing: a pint of draught ale.

One day when my Uncle Silas shouted: ‘Ready, Walt?’ over the fence it was three or four minutes before Walt Hawthorn appeared. It was a blinding hot day in July, the crest of a heat wave that had been rising for almost a week, and when Walt appeared my Uncle Silas noticed a curious, unusual thing about him. He was wearing a bunch of flowers in his buttonhole.

Normally, beside my Uncle Silas, Walt Hawthorn looked like a man on stilts; but that day, as they walked down the road in the blazing sunshine, it seemed to Silas that Walt had shrunk a little. The brackets of his shoulders seemed to have bent down a little. His feet kept scraping the ground.

My Uncle Silas looked at the flowers in his buttonhole. ‘Toffed up a bit?’ he said.

‘Ah,’ Walter said. His eyes were fixed on the distance. ‘Got me medals on.’

Silas did not take much notice of that remark. He took it for a kind of joke. He did not take much notice of the next remark either.

‘Don’t walk so fast, general,’ Walt said.

The reason Silas did not take much notice of this remark was because there were odd times when Walt Hawthorn did call him ‘general’. What he noticed was that Walt was walking very slowly.

Silas noticed this all the way to the pub and all the way back, and he noticed it even more the following day. It was hotter than ever that day, and Walt had a bigger bunch of flowers in his buttonhole.

‘Got your medals on again?’ Silas said.

‘Yes,’ Walt said, and suddenly he took one of the flowers, a pansy, and put it in Silas’s buttonhole.

Silas did not say anything. There was nothing very odd after all in putting a flower in the buttonhole of a friend. But when they reached the pub something else happened.

Walter began to take all the flowers out of his own coat and put them into Silas’s buttonholes—not only the buttonholes of his coat but the buttonholes of his waistcoat and then the buttonholes of his trousers. The large sun-browned hands moved very gently. They handled the little virginia stocks and pansies and pinks, limp now from sun, with crazy affection. My Uncle Silas did not say anything, but as he sat there, letting the flowers be threaded foolishly and lovingly into his garments, he felt that he saw a big man growing little before his eyes.

He saw the eyes of a big man who had seen the world and had helped to hammer out its history becoming the eyes of a child who has seen nothing and wants to do nothing better than play with a handful of flowers.

Gradually Silas got Walter Hawthorn out into the sun again and began to lead him home. For a time they walked very slowly. Suddenly Walter leapt into the air and slid down into the ditch by the roadside, pulling Silas with him, and began to fire at rebel tribesmen on the North-West Frontier.

It was then that my Uncle Silas began to tell lies to Walter Hawthorn. He told him lies about everything: the dead, the living, the way the fight was going. After the skirmish was over he got Walter back to his house and then told more lies. Yes, there was plenty of ammunition. Yes, the general was here. Then Walter began to point to the flowers in the garden, raving. ‘See ’em?’ he yelled. ‘See ’em? See ’em, general?’ and Silas got ready to lie about them, too, thinking that perhaps Walter saw them as soldiers. But Walter leapt up in crazy terror. ‘It’s a mirage!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a bloody mirage.’

Soon after that he became quieter. He sat in the kitchen, in the cool, out of the sun, and Silas gave him a little whisky and water. Then Silas got him to lie down on the sofa, and after that he went home.

It was less than two hours when Silas went back to him. When he went into the garden, in the dead still heat of the afternoon, he was dumbfounded. The flowers had been pulled up everywhere; they were strewn over the paths and the grass and the steps of the house and in the house itself. They had been clawed up by the desperate savagery of a man who sees a mirage and wants to grasp it before it vanishes, and Walter himself was lying down among them, exhausted, like a man who had fought all his campaigns in a single afternoon.

Later that evening they fetched him in an old-fashioned limousine with black bobbed curtains that could be drawn over the windows. He was quite quiet and gentle and Silas helped to lead him out of the house. In his huge feeble hands he held large bunches of little flowers.

‘Well, general,’ he said to Silas, ‘where are we bound for this time? India?’

‘India it is,’ Silas said.

He stood in the road and watched the limousine depart. As it went down the road he saw one of Walter Hawthorn’s huge hands come out of the window. The hand flung flowers on to the road, and in that moment it seemed to my Uncle Silas that Walter Hawthorn was a happy man.

Silas and Goliath

When I was a little boy my Uncle Silas used to tell me about a man named Porky Sanders, and how he knocked him into Kingdom Come.

‘Porky the Gorilla they used to call him,’ he would say, ‘and he was champion o’ the world.’

‘A boxer?’

‘A boxer?’ my Uncle Silas would say with great derision. ‘Boxing wasn’t heard on. I’m talking about the days o’ prize fights. I’m talking about the days when you chewed a man’s ear off if you didn’t like his whiskers.’

‘Did you ever chew a man’s ear off?’ I would say.

‘Boy,’ he would say to me with great solemnity, ‘I was the champion ear-chewer of the county.’

Then he would go on to tell me that it was about the year 1870. ‘The year the horned wheat stood nearly ten feet high in Deanes’ forty acre, at the bottom of the lane. I ain’t kiddin’ you. Everything was bigger in them days.’

‘Take a man,’ he would say, ‘like Porky. At the time I’m tellin’ y’ about, Porky stood six foot six and weighed about twenty stone. He could hold six beer-glasses in the palm of his hand. Yes, boy. And two men could stand in one leg of his trousers. Yes!’ he would say, ‘all the best men were big men in them days.’

‘But you were a little man,’ I would say.

My Uncle Silas would look at me with a deadly serious cock of one eye, with the bland, sly darkness that he always kept for awkward moments and awkward questions.

‘Yes, boy. Yes, I was a little man,’ he would say. ‘But I always had a big head.’

After that my Uncle Silas would go on to describe not only how big Porky Sanders was and how famous he was, but what a smashing, hell-fire, holy terror he was. It was not simply that he was a man who fought: it was not only that he was a man who bit off other men’s ears. It seemed that he was a kind of dictator who walked about crushing other men under his foot like beetles.

He walked into public-houses and bounced beer-barrels; and if the landlord didn’t like it, he would, my Uncle Silas said, bounce the landlord. If he fancied an apple, he clawed branches of apples from over a garden wall as he passed; if he wanted a leg of mutton, he walked into the butcher’s shop and grabbed the meat with one hand and belted the butcher with the other, and then walked out of the shop gnawing the raw meat like a toffee-apple.

If he fancied a girl he picked her up and walked away with her under his arm, more or less, like a prize puppy. He drank a gallon of beer at a time, and when he walked down the street the women went indoors and the men all got together in a bunch for safety.

Did I know a man named Sip Turner, my Uncle Silas said, a man with a nose that looked like a corkscrew? Well, that was some of Porky Sanders’s work. Porky had picked up the man by the nose and spun him round like a Catherine wheel, one day in ’69, because he wouldn’t call him ‘sir’. That’s the kind of man he was, Silas said, the biggest belching blustering blackguard in the county. A real gorilla.

‘And why,’ I would want to know, ‘did they call him a gorilla?’

My Uncle Silas had an answer for everything. ‘Been a sailor,’ he said. ‘Been a sailor and got marooned for eighteen months on an island off the coast of Africa, and all that time never ate nothing but gorilla meat. Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘That’s what made him so strong.’

And so gradually I got fixed in my mind the awful, bloodthirsty, terrifying picture of the flesh-eating, ear-chewing, woman-grabbing Porky Sanders. The only thing that began to trouble me was how my Uncle Silas had knocked him into Kingdom Come.

‘I am coming to that,’ he would say. ‘I am coming to that. You see, it was like this. There was a lady. A great friend of mine. Vicky her name was. And one day Porky picked her up.’

Here my Uncle Silas would pause with great significance, as though this had been one of the fundamental moments in history. ‘And that,’ he would say, ‘is where he made a very great mistake.’

‘I bet you challenged him?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ my Uncle Silas would say. ‘Yes, boy, I challenged him. Raw fists. Any time. Any place. Every knock-down a round. Fight to go on until one man couldn’t get up no more. Yes, I challenged him—and he laughed at it. Laughed fit to bust himself.’

I asked what happened then.

‘I just let him laugh, boy,’ he said, ‘and then got to work. You see, Vicky didn’t like being picked up by that gorilla any more than any other girl. She hated it like poison, but she couldn’t do nothing. So I got on to her first. “Vicky,” I says to her, “play on his pride.”’

And then he would go on to tell me how the girl had played on his pride, asking him if he was afraid of a little bit of a winkle like Silas, telling him how people were saying he was afraid, and urging him to cut Silas up, once and for all, into sausage meat. She kept at him for days, and at last it worked. ‘Then,’ Silas said, ‘I got her to feed him on cucumbers. You see, it was hot weather. And she’d say to him, “Porky dear, you got to keep your blood cool. Porky dear, the best thing in the world you can eat is cucumbers.” And she got round him on that, too, and somehow she kept him on nothing but cucumbers for a fortnight.

‘Cucumbers and beer,’ he said, and then went on to tell me how he worked with the landlord at the pub, too: how the beer would be free for Porky every night, and not only how it would be free, but how every pint had been specially jiggered behind the bar: a spoonful of salts in it, a pill or two, a packet of something from the chemist’s, things that turned his stomach to fire and water.

‘So that in the end,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘what with the bellyache from the beer and the bellyache from the cucumbers, Porky turned up for the fight looking as green as a boiled frog.’

‘And all you had to do,’ I said, ‘was lick him with one hand.’

‘Better than that,’ my Uncle Silas said, with great modesty. ‘Better than that. I licked him with no hands at all.’

There was always a moment in my Uncle Silas’s stories when something or other seemed too good to be true, and this, it seemed to me, was such a moment.

Uncle Silas must have seen the doubt rising in my eyes, for a moment later he went on:

‘Boy, didn’t I tell you I was a little man, but I had a big head? Well, I didn’t tell you that for nothing!’ He cocked his bloodshot eye at me with swift, diabolical wickedness. ‘The fight was down on Vine Hills,’ he went on, ‘you know—under the wood, just before you get to that big slope.’

‘Near the river?’ I said.

‘Near the river,’ he said, and then he went on to tell me how it had happened: how all he did was to clutch the gorilla by the waist and bunt his head into a stomach tired and weak already from beer and purges and cucumbers, and how at first it was a kind of standstill bunting, then a run and a bunt, and then a charge and a bunt, every bunt producing a low, agonised, sour sort of groan.

Finally, I got a picture of my Uncle Silas standing halfway across the field, and Porky being held up by the thick excited crowd, and my Uncle Silas bearing down on him with a sort of charge of the Light Brigade, Porky being driven inexorably farther and farther down the slope until at last, with a triumphant and masterful bunt, my Uncle Silas put him with a sort of inverted belly-flopper into the river.

At the end of it my Uncle Silas would gaze airily about him with extreme modesty. ‘Yes, that’s how,’ he would say, ‘I knocked Porky Sanders into Kingdom Come.’

‘Is it?’ a voice would say.

And we would turn to see, as always at the conclusion of some riper, more racy tale, my Uncle Silas’s housekeeper in the room; tart, irascible, iron-eyed, disgusted. ‘Well, if it is,’ she would say, ‘I’d be ashamed. I’d be ashamed I would. Telling the boy such downright nonsense and such tales about things that never happened.’

For a minute my Uncle Silas, sardonic and unruffled, would retain a kind of apostolic composure.

Then he would speak. ‘Tales?’ he would say. ‘I don’t see no difference in telling a tale like that and telling a tale about a woman turning into a pillar o’ salt, or a man who was alive for three days in a fish’s belly.’

And now that I come to think of it, nor do I.

A Silas Idyll

‘The world,’ my Uncle Silas used to say, ‘looks different from the top of a ladder.’ It was a remark based on years of experience, for in the sixties and seventies my Uncle Silas had been a thatcher.

It was a good trade, with plenty to do, and as time went on my Uncle Silas bought himself a little beer-coloured nag and a little flat two-wheeled cart, and drove himself for twenty or thirty miles out and about the countryside, thatching barns and houses, stacks and lych-gates.

He could cling to the side of a house in a March wind like a monkey, and there was no one like him for combing out the thatch until it was as smooth as a girl’s hair or trimming a rippled eave to the line of a scallop-shell.

In an age of thatchers he was a master, and, like all masters, he signed his work. His signature was a cockerel. With a comb like a newt and a tail like a fan of barley and looking altogether flamboyant and triumphant about something, this cockerel was twisted out of straw and fixed to gable and stack-top and barn-roof wherever my Uncle Silas went.

It was a sign that became in time as well known as a barber’s pole, and in time, too, it gave rise to a sort of proverb. ‘When the cockerel’s about,’ they said, ‘let the hens look out.’

One day my Uncle Silas was thatching a shop-roof down in Bedford. On the lower floor of the shop you could buy ribbons and calico, dress materials and hats; on the upper floor there were twenty little dressmakers working under a supervisor, who looked, as my Uncle Silas said, as if her bosom was made of mangel-wurzels and her heart of crab apples. She was very fair, solid, and suspicious.

Every time he went up the ladder with a load of straw or pegs she clucked like an old hen with chickens. Every time he came down again she would be standing at the window, spread out, hiding the chickens behind her. All the time, my Uncle Silas said, she looked as red as if she was going to lay an egg.

A mourning order had come in; everyone was working against time. The girls were pretending to be very serious, as if damped down by death, and they had not time to look at him.

All except one. She was a little brown creature sitting near the window, and every time Silas went up or down the ladder she lifted her head and grinned at him. Her hair was a brownish-red shade, and it crinkled and fluffed like hens’ feathers.

Once when he came up the ladder the window was open enough for him to speak to her. ‘Nice day,’ he said.

‘Very.’

That was all she said. But it almost made my Uncle Silas swoon off the ladder. It had a tender, intoxicating sound that turned his legs to water. When he came down again he said:

‘When does old turnip-face go home for dinner?’

‘Doesn’t go. Has dinner here.’

‘When do you go?’ he said.

‘Don’t go. Have my dinner here, too.’

As he went down the ladder he heard the old turnip’s voice snap out: ‘Less looking out of the window, Elizabeth, and more concentration on your work. I’ve to take these dresses to be fitted at two o’clock.’

At five minutes to two my Uncle Silas saw the old turnip-faced supervisor come out of the shop with a large brown-paper parcel under her arm; at two o’clock precisely he was up the ladder, giving a sort of cockadoodledoo to the girls through the window; at ten minutes past two he had climbed through the window and was properly playing the cockerel in the henroost.

The girls fluttered and twittered, and it wasn’t long before he was plaiting a love-knot with some odd strands of straw for the little brown-haired creature who had been sitting near the window.

She was so sweet and attractive that he forgot all about the thatching, and the girls, it seems, forgot all about the supervisor. My Uncle Silas was just beginning to plait love-knots for each of the twenty dressmakers on a sort of barter system, no kiss, no love-knot, when one of the girls, who had been downstairs to fetch a length of velvet, rushed excitedly into the room, slammed the door and said the supervisor was coming back upstairs.

Even as she spoke they could hear the clump of her feet on the stairs and in the ten clear seconds that followed there was nothing for it but to clap my Uncle Silas, like Falstaff, into the nearest linen basket.

And from there, looking through the wickerwork, he saw the supervisor come in. She flounced in, put down the parcel in a great hurry and proceeded to tell twenty innocent-looking girls, half of them hiding love-knots to their bosoms, why she was back so soon.

It was the age of tight-lacing, fainting-fits, and general feminine hysteria in the face of catastrophe, and it seemed that the mother and daughter for whom the mourning dresses had been made were in a state of prostrate hysterics and could not be fitted.

‘Which is why,’ the supervisor said, ‘I had to come back. The mother is about my size and the daughter is about the size of one of you. We’ll have to fit them as best we can. Fanny, unpack the parcel. Lucy, help me off with my dress.’

Well, as my Uncle Silas said, the world looks different from up a ladder, but it’s nothing to how different it looks through the cracks in a linen-basket.

‘I always thought the Rock of Gibraltar was well fortified,’ he would say. ‘But it was nothing to the fortifications old turnip-face had on. She’d got more whale-bone than a whale. Talk about the Siege of Ladysmith. It was nothing. She could have held out for a century. Even her legs were in sandbags.’

‘Elizabeth,’ the supervisor said, ‘slip off your dress and just try the other one on.’

As she spoke, a sort of tittering rustle of feathers went through the twenty dressmakers; my Uncle Silas stuffed bits of dress material into his mouth to keep from having hysterics himself, and a moment later he was looking at the nicest array of pale pink petticoats he had ever set eyes on.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘pink petticoats. And fifty years ago that meant something.’

And then he would go on to tell me how he had remained a prisoner in the linen basket all that afternoon, taking his alternate review of, as he said, fortifications and fancy-work, until his body was cramped and stiff and even his heart had pins-and-needles.

And it was his heart, it seems, that went on having pins-and-needles for a long time afterwards, for when he finally got out of the basket late that evening, after the shop was closed and the girls had gone, he climbed down the ladder and almost fell into the arms of the little brown-featured creature waiting for him at the bottom with a straw love-knot pinned at her neck.

‘And what happened?’ I said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘I did the only thing you could do in them days when you’d seen a lady in her petticoats.’

‘And what was that?’

‘I married her,’ he said. ‘She’d have been your aunt if she’d lived.’

And as he spoke there would come into my Uncle Silas’s eye an expression not often seen there. It was soft, distant, regretful, and indescribably tender. It transfixed him for one moment and then he became his old sardonic self again.

‘Yes,’ he would say, ‘they say when the cat’s away the mice’ll play. But it’s nothing to what the hens’ll do when the cockerel pops in the roost.’

The Race

Goffy Windsor was a tall, streaky fellow with a horse-face and legs like ostrich’s, who boasted he could run a mile in five minutes.

My Uncle Silas, who had legs that wouldn’t have stopped a pig in an entry and who never, of course, boasted about anything, used to tell how he challenged Goffy to a five-mile race, and beat him to a frazzle.

There are many men like Goffy Windsor. When they are young men they win bets for drinking a quart straight off; they hit cricket balls for six; they floor the board at skittles five times running; they run a mile in five minutes.

No one has much to say about this. But gradually, as they grow older, they begin to recall how they drank a gallon straight off for ten nights running, how they hit a cricket ball over a church steeple and killed a chicken stone dead on the other side; how they used to be able to floor the skittle board six times out of six, blind-folded, left-handed, upside down, and throwing between their legs; and finally, how they nicked five seconds off the mile-time for the world’s record in 1889, easy as shelling peas, only it was never official.

It was like this with Goffy Windsor. Whenever there was a crowd of strangers in The Swan with Two Nicks on a Saturday night, Goffy would begin to demonstrate the kidney punch he used for knocking out the welter-weight of Great Britain and Ireland in 1891—‘Of course the kidney punch is barred now,’ he’d say—or the under-arm break that made a ball come in two feet six and bowl Georgie Colson, the county man, in 1894—‘only, of course, they bowl over-arm nowadays’—or the famous occasion when he did the mile in 4 minutes 59.3 secs. on a practice run—‘and old Charley Taylor would tell you it was right, too,’ he’d say, ‘only Charley’s dead.’

One night Goffy was telling a young man in a fancy pullover how he once raced against all-comers at the Crystal Palace and left them standing, when my Uncle Silas interrupted.

‘Goffy,’ he said, ‘you were a ’nation good miler. But anything over a mile and you were poor stuff. Why, I’d lick you myself.’

‘Don’t talk wet,’ Goffy said.

‘I ain’t talking wet,’ Silas said, ‘I’m challenging you. If this gentleman here likes to put up a bit of a side-stake I’ll race you for five miles any day. When and where you like.’

‘That’s fine,’ the young man said. ‘I’ll put up a couple o’ quid stake. Go on.’

So they settled it there and then that Goffy and Silas should run a race in three weeks’ time, on a Sunday morning, between Carlton and Solbrook, on the top road above the river.

‘I don’t want to be hard on you, Silas,’ Goffy said. ‘So I’ll give you a mile start.’

‘No,’ Silas said. ‘But I’ll tell you what. You can give me five minutes’ start. All right?’

‘Anything you like,’ Goffy said.

‘And everybody off the track. No bikes. Nobody. That all right?’

‘Anything you like,’ Goffy said.

They shook hands on it and the young man in the pullover put down his money with the landlord, and the next day Goffy went into training. He put on a sweater and rubber shoes and trotted through the village every morning. In the evenings, at the pub, he drank ginger ale and slapped his chest and let allcomers feel how his legs were coming on.

All the time my Uncle Silas did not do anything. He did not go into training and he could see no sense in drinking ginger ale. He did not boast at all, but three days later he gave out that he couldn’t sleep at nights for sciatica.

‘Sciatica?’ they said. ‘That ain’t much good for running, is it?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. And I get cramp too. Chronic.’

By that time everybody was talking about the race and there was already a lot of money on it, too. When the word went round that my Uncle Silas wasn’t training and that he was suffering from cramp and sciatica the odds against him lengthened to 10 to 1.

That night he talked it over with Walter Hawthorn, and the next day Walter gave it out that Silas was suffering from a strained groin and rheumatics in the knee joint, and one or two other minor ailments, like gum-boils.

Altogether everybody thought that Silas was in a very poor way indeed, and that day Walter Hawthorn got a lot of money on him at 20 to 1. The night before the race Uncle Silas threw a fit, so next morning the starting price was 33 to 1.

The race was due to start at ten o’clock from The King’s Head in Carlton. Goffy turned up looking like an ostrich in white drawers, and did a lot of fancy exercises, loosening-up, in front of the pub. My Uncle Silas was in just his shirt and trousers and a pair of rubber shoes, and had an ash-bough in his hand to keep the flies away.

At ten o’clock my Uncle Silas went trotting off, looking just like a squat little pig that can’t and won’t be hurried.

My Uncle Silas trotted on for five minutes and then calmly lay down in the middle of the road. He lay there for a few minutes, fairly comfortable, resting, getting his wind back, and then Goffy came ostriching out of the distance, wheezing like a harmonium.

Goffy hadn’t then got his second wind, and he was trying to go very hard when he saw Silas lying flat in the road as if he were dead.

He bent over my Uncle Silas. ‘Silas,’ he said, ‘are you all right? Y’ain’t done for?’

My Uncle Silas, who was lying on his back, gave a groan somewhere between a bellyache and the sound of a priest intoning for a lost soul.

‘Can I do anythink, Silas?’ Goffy said. ‘Can I do anythink?’

‘In my hip-pocket,’ Silas whispered. ‘There’s a bottle in me hip-pocket.’

Goffy lifted Silas upright, and then found the bottle and put it to Silas’s lips. ‘What is it, Silas?’ he said.

‘Whisky,’ Silas said in a slobbing sort of voice. ‘Have a drop.’

By this time Goffy was feeling badly about things. He kept thinking about Silas’s sciatica and rheumatics and the fit he had thrown, and he took a long, sudden drink of whisky to steady himself.

‘Goffy,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘it might be the last time I shall see you. If it is, I want you know you ain’t to blame.’

Goffy, who had eaten nothing since six o’clock that morning, and had drunk nothing stronger than ginger ale for a fortnight, took another smack at the whisky.

‘You think you can carry me to the house back there?’ Silas said. ‘Carry me if you can, Goffy.’

Goffy looked up and saw a house about half a mile back along the road. His heart sank. ‘It’s too far,’ he said. ‘But I’ll run back. I’ll run back as quick as I can and get somebody.’ Then he took another swig at the whisky and pelted back along the road.

My Uncle Silas let him get safely round the first bend in the road and then he got up and trotted steadily on. He knew that he had almost a mile start and he knew something that Goffy didn’t know. The whisky was a mixture of whisky, brandy, and rum in equal parts.

A mile farther on, as he passed a house, a man named Arthur Watkins rushed out, yelling:

‘Hey, where’s Goffy?’

‘Miles back,’ Silas said. ‘In a bad way. You ought to give him a drink of summat when he comes by.’

Fifteen minutes later, when Goffy came by feeling as if he were running upstairs and his head knocking on the ceiling, Arthur Watkins rushed out with a tumbler of elderberry wine.

Goffy took hold of the elderberry wine and killed it in one smack, and then went on with his eyes bulging out of his head like boss-marbles. He was mad with Silas and mad with himself. He couldn’t see straight, and half a mile farther on a man rushed out of a row of cottages with a glass of parsnip wine eight years old. Goffy drank it in one blow and then rushed off again, feeling as if he were on a roundabout.

‘Hey! Not that way,’ the man said. ‘You’re going back.’

By the time Goffy got as far as the bridge at Filmersham, and was lying down on the river bank, bathing his head in the water, my Uncle Silas was sitting in The Swan with Two Nicks having a pint of draught ale with bread and cheese and a bunch of spring onions.

Everybody was very mad with Goffy, because the odds were extremely painful, and for many years Goffy was very mad with my Uncle Silas. Indeed, from that time onwards he never talked about races at all.

Races, on the other hand, appeared to interest my Uncle Silas more than ever.

‘Goffy,’ he would say, ‘I know you ain’t a reading man. But some day you ought to read about a race between the tortoise and the hare.’

The Death of Uncle Silas

When I heard that my Great-uncle Silas was dying, I did not believe it. He was so old that it had always been hard for me to realise that he had ever been born. It had always seemed to me that he had simply turned up, very old and imperishable, with his crimson neckerchief and his bloodshot eye as bright as the neckerchief, his earth-coloured breeches, his winey breath, and that huskily devilish voice that had told me so many stories and had left as many tantalizingly half-told. Yet I remember how he would often tell me that he could recollect—the word was his own—standing on a corn-sheaf, in his frocks, and sucking at the breast his mother slipped out of her dress and held down for him in the harvest-field. ‘They had the titty, them days, till they were damn near big enough to reap and tie.’ Though he might very well have made it up. ‘I was allus tidy thirsty,’ he would say at the end of that story, or in fact at the end of any story. ‘Mouthful o’ wine?’ he would say. It was his favourite phrase.

It was early autumn, in the middle of harvest, when I heard that he was dying. If it had been winter, or even spring, I might have believed it. But in autumn, and at harvest, it was unthinkable, absurd. His late peas would be coming into pod: for seventy years he had reckoned on them, without fail, for a last blow-out, with a goose and a dish of apple-sauce made from his own first cookers, on Michaelmas Sunday. Who would pick the peas and gather the apples and lard the goose if he were to die? His potatoes would be dead ripe, the pears would be dropping into the golden orchard as mellow as honey, the elderberries would be drooping over the garden hedge in grape-dark bunches, ripe for wine. What would happen to them if Silas died? What could happen? No one else could dig those potatoes or garner those pears or work that wine as he did. The very words ‘Silas is dying’ seemed fantastic. Moreover I had heard them before. Hearing them once, I had hurried over to see him for the last time, only to find him up a ladder, pruning his apple trees with a jack-knife, all of a muck-sweat, with his jacket off, in the winter wind. ‘I heard you were dead,’ I said. He hawked and spat with a sort of gay ferocity. ‘Ever hear the tale of the old gal who heard I was dead and buried, and then seed me in The Swan? She never touched another drop.’

When the news again came that he was dying I thought of his words. And I did not trouble to go over to see him. In imagination I saw him digging his potatoes in the hot September sun or mowing the half-acre of wheat he grew every other year at the end of the paddock, ‘just so as I shan’t forget how to swing a scythe’. The wheat kept him in bread, which he baked himself. He sent me a loaf sometimes, its crust as crisp as a wheat-husk and a dark earth-colour, and I often went over to help him band and carry the wheat. Even when I heard he was dying I expected every day to hear he had mown the wheat and was ready for me. I took as little notice of the news as that.

But unexpectedly there came other news:

‘They say Silas doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time.’

Not ‘Silas is ill’, or ‘Silas is dying’, or even ‘Silas is unconscious’, but ‘Silas doesn’t know what he’s doing’. The words were ominous, a contradiction of my Uncle Silas’s whole life, his principles, his character, his amazing cunning, his devilish vitality. They perturbed me, for they could mean so much. They might mean that my Uncle Silas had so changed that he now no longer knew beer from water or wheat from beans; that he had dug his potatoes under-ripe or carried his wheat wet or made his wine from green elderberries. If it meant these things then it also meant the end. For what separated my Uncle Silas from other men was exactly this. He knew what he was doing. How often had I heard him say with a cock of his bloodshot eye and the most devilish darkness: ‘I know what I’m doing, me boyo. I know what I’m doing.’

The day after hearing the news I went over to see him. His little stone reed-thatched house, squatting close under the shelter of the spinney of pines, was visible from afar off. There was always a puff of wood-smoke rising from the chimney, very blue against the black pines, winter and summer alike, if my Uncle Silas were at home. It was lovely September weather, the air breathless, the sunshine very soft and the pale amber colour of new wheat straw, and I saw the smoke rising up as straight as the pines themselves as I walked up the lane to the house.

It was a good sign. If the smoke were rising my Uncle Silas was at home; if he were at home it was a thousand to one, in summer-time, that he was in the paddock or the garden, or if not there, by his chair at the window, his mole-coloured head and his scarlet neckerchief just visible among the very old, sweet-leaved white and mauve geraniums.

But that afternoon he was not in the paddock, where the wheat stood ripe and half-mown, and I could not see him in the garden, where the pears lay wasp-sucked and rotting in the yellowing grass. Walking up the garden path, with the rank marigolds and untidy chrysanthemum stalks swishing heavily against my legs, I frightened a jay off the pea-rows. I stopped at once. But my Uncle Silas did not appear. The jay squawked in the wood. A jay on the pea-rows, and no sign from my Uncle Silas! I did not even look for him at the window, among the geraniums.

As I reached the door of the house I heard the clopping of the housekeeper’s untied shoes coming along the stone passages to meet me. Before she appeared, I stepped over the threshold and looked into the room. The house was the same as ever, with the same eternal smell of earth and tea, of wood-smoke and balm, of geranium-leaves and wine. There was even the faint earth-smell of my Uncle Silas himself. But his chair was empty.

The housekeeper appeared a moment later, as scrawny and frigid as ever, and more straight-lipped, in the same black skirt and grey shirt-blouse and iron corsets that she seemed to have worn ever since my Uncle Silas had first engaged her, bringing with her as she had done for so many years, that smell of carbolic soap which had so often made him say, ‘I do believe you were suckled on soap.’ But that afternoon she looked tired, she seemed relieved to see me, and she broke out at once:

‘Oh! dear, he’ll wear me out.’

There was a sort of melancholy affection for him in her voice, and I knew at once that there must be something wrong.

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

But before she could reply his own cracked voice called suddenly:

‘I’m here, me boyo, in here.’

‘Where’s that?’ I called.

‘In the parlour,’ the housekeeper whispered.

‘All among the fol-di-dols,’ called my Uncle Silas. ‘Come in.’

As I walked across the passage between the two rooms the housekeeper entreated me in another whisper, ‘The doctor says you mustn’t tire him.’

The doctor! My Uncle Silas not to be tired! He who could have mown a forty-acre field and not be tired! It was all over, I thought, as I pushed open the parlour-door and went in and met the stale antimacassar odour of the closed room.

And there, under the window, on an old black couch of American leather, with a green horse-rug over him and his sun-brown arms lying uselessly over the rug, lay my Uncle Silas. By his side was the night commode, and a little bamboo table with two wine-glasses and two bottles of lemon-coloured and blackish medicine on it.

‘Now don’t go and talk and tire yourself,’ said the housekeeper.

‘Go and wring yourself out, y’old wet sheet!’ he croaked.

‘What’s that? If you ain’t careful, I’ll pack me bag and leave you lying there. So I’ll tell you!’

‘Pack it! And good riddance.’

‘Ah, and I will!’ She flashed off to the door.

It was the old game: she was always leaving and never leaving; my Uncle Silas was always dismissing her and always keeping her.

‘Look slippy and bring us a bottle o’ cowslip,’ he said. ‘And don’t talk so much.’

But she was outside the door, without a word and not heeding him, before he had finished speaking. He lay back on the sofa, gloomily. ‘Won’t even let me wet me whistle,’ he said.

He lay silent for a moment or two, his eyes watery, his chest heaving a little.’ I puff like an old frog,’ he said. I did not answer, and until he regained his breath and his calmness I could not look at him again, and I let my eyes wander over the room instead, over the fol-di-dols he hated so much, the accumulated knick-knacks of nearly a hundred years, the little milky glass vases, rose-painted cups, mahogany tea-caddies, ruby wine-glasses, all the dear pretty things that he despised and never used. To find him there among them was a tragedy itself. He loved living things; and the only living things in that room were ourselves and the afternoon sunlight yellowing the closed window.

‘Sit down,’ he said at last. His voice so weary that I hardly recognised it. ‘Can you find a seat? All the damn chairs in this room are bum-slippy!’

I sat down on one of the black American leather chairs that matched his couch.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

He shook his head. ‘I ain’t worth a hatful o’ crabs.’

I could hardly bear the words. To hear that he didn’t know what he was doing, to see a jay on his pea-rows, to find that he mustn’t drink or talk or tire himself and now to hear him say, ‘I ain’t worth a hatful o’ crabs.’ My heart sank. It seemed to mean that his spirit was already dead. And no sooner had I thought it than he half-cocked his eye at me with a faint flicker of the old cunning.

‘See that jay on the pea-rows?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. I’ll jay him.’

And then, with a sudden satanic flash of his bloodshot eye that surprised and delighted me, he whispered:

‘Mouthful o’ wine?’

I sat astonished. ‘I thought they wouldn’t let you drink?’ I said.

He winked. ‘In the medicine bottles,’ he said. ‘Elderberry in the dark and cowslip in the light. Pour out. Mouthful o’ cowslip for me.’

Smiling, I poured out the wine and he lay smiling back at me with all his old subtlety and wickedness. As I gave him the glass he whispered: ‘I fill ’em o’ nights when she’s a-bed.’

We drank in silence.

‘What’s the doctor say?’ I asked.

‘Says another drop o’ wine will kill me.’

He finished his wine and wiped out the glass on the horse-blanket before putting it back on the table. The wine twinkled in his eyes and had already flushed away the dead yellow colour of his skin. And suddenly he shot up in bed, craning his tough thick neck to look out of the window:

‘That jay again! God damn it, go and get my gun.’

I knew he meant it and I rose at once and went to the door. But he had raised his voice, and the housekeeper had heard him. She was in the room almost before I had moved, with the old despairing cry:

‘Oh! he’ll wear me out!’

She seized him sternly, forcing him back on the pillows while he shouted at her:

‘You interferin’ old tit! I’ll shoot that jay if I have to shoot you first!’

‘He don’t know what he’s saying or doin’,’ she said to me. And then to him, as she straightened his blankets inexorably:

‘You’ll take your medicine now, jay or no jay, and then get some sleep.’

As she took up the dark medicine bottle and poured out his measure into the wine-glass he kept lolling out his tongue, sick-fashion, and rolling his eyes and complaining, ‘It’s like drinking harness oil and vinegar, oh! it’s like drinking harness oil and vinegar. Ach!’

‘Drink it!’ She forced the glass into his hands and he crooked his elbow on the pillow, lolling his tongue in and out.

She turned away to draw down the blinds. No sooner was her back turned than he lifted his glass and gave me a swift marvellous look of the wickedest triumph, licking his thick red lips and half-closing his bloodshot eye. The glass was empty and he was lying back on the pillows, smacking his mouth sourly, before she turned her head again.

‘I’ll come and see you,’ I said, with my hand on the door-latch.

‘Ah, do. I s’ll have the taters out next week and the wheat down. Come and give us a hand.’ The faint shadow of that wicked and triumphant smile flickered across his face. ‘So long, me boyo.’

Outside, in the garden, I asked the housekeeper what was the matter with him.

‘It’s senile decay,’ she said. ‘He’s losing the use of his legs and half the time he don’t know what he’s doing. It’s just the medicine that keeps him going.’ I had no doubt it was.

But one morning, a week later, I heard that he was dying; and in the afternoon I went over to the house. A gentle rain had been falling all morning, a quiet whispering September rain, and the air, very still and sultry, was saturated with the fragrance of wet pines. Crossing the paddock, I noticed that the wheat had been mown and half-banded and that the elderberries had gone from the garden-hedge. In the garden itself there was an intense rain-heavy stillness, unbroken except for the fretful twitter of swallows gathering on the house thatch. Looking across the rank thicket of dahlias and sunflowers beyond the apple trees I caught a glimpse of a dead blue jay strung on a hazel-stick among the pea-rows, its bright feathers dimmed with rain.

The housekeeper came to meet me at the door, her finger uplifted and her lips pursed tight to silence me.

‘How is it with him?’ I whispered.

‘Bad,’ she said. ‘Very bad. He won’t see to-morrow.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘He won’t know you. He’s very strange.’

Yes, he was very strange. He had begun to turn day into night, she told me: he would doze all day and then, in the dead of night, while she was asleep, he would wake and ferret in the cellar or mow his wheat and dig his potatoes and gather his elderberries for wine. She had suspected nothing until, awakened early one morning by a gun-shot, she had hurried into the garden to find him stringing up a dead jay in his pea-rows. It seemed that sometimes, too, he would drink his medicine in one swig, by the bottleful. He was so far gone as that.

When she had finished speaking I went into the house to look at him: he lay there, as before, on the leather couch, among the fol-di-dols, the green horse-rug over him and his brown hands lying listlessly outside it. He seemed to be asleep: yet there was something half-alert about the expression of his closed eyes, as though he were listening to me or perhaps to the rain. I stood for a moment watching him. And suddenly his eyes half-opened and a gaze that had in it some of the old strength and wickedness rested on me darkly. In a moment his lips moved too.

‘What’s the weather?’ he said.

‘It rains,’ I said.

‘Let it,’ he whispered.

It was a flash of the old spirit. In a moment it was gone and his lips closed without another sound, and his eyelids lowered with a sharp flicker that was like a last wink at me.

I never heard him speak again. When we went in to him again, in the evening, he had turned day into night for the last time. The rain had ceased. The sun had broken through and was shining on the empty medicine bottles and his dead hands.

The Return

A little more than a year after my Uncle Silas died and was laid under the sycamores in the churchyard overlooking the river, I walked through the fields one afternoon to look for the last time at the little house by the pine spinney where he had lived for seventy years. It was soft autumn weather; the sunlight as mellow and still as Silas’s cowslip wine.

As I went up the lane to the house I looked for the old sign of things: smoke rising from the chimney; the old summer bird-scares, age-green hats on sticks and inside-out umbrellas and twirling shuttlecocks; scarecrows made up of odd legs of Silas’s pants and bell-bottomed trousers and the housekeeper’s ancient hat and chemises; the ladder in the late apple trees; the bonfire filling the garden and the spinney and the fields with smoke that hung in sweet-smelling clouds under the pines and the golden cherry leaves. I listened for the cluck of Silas’s hens and the grunting and rooting of the solitary sow he had always kept in the black sty under the elderberries at the garden end.

But it was very quiet, oddly silent everywhere. I could hear nothing. And then, coming to the garden gate, I saw that the gate and the fence, rain-green and patterned with prints of orange fungus for as long as I could remember, had been neatly repaired and painted white. The effect was curiously sepulchral. But it did not trouble me. It was only when I saw, beyond the fence, the stump of a sawn-down apple tree, and then another, and then another of a cherry tree, and beyond that a wide empty space where the gooseberry trees had been, and beyond that another white fence in place of the old wild elderberry hedge, that I began to grow perturbed and finally angry. And for some minutes I stood there on the grass outside, helpless, staring at the white fences, the empty garden, the sawn-off tree-trunks, the newly white-painted windows until suddenly I could bear it no longer. It was the trees which finished me: lovely summer apple trees and the black-heart cherry trees and the yellow plums. Sawn down! Scrapped! God Almighty!

I opened the gate and slammed it shut again and walked up the path to the front door. It was shut—and painted white! The saintly effect of that repeated whiteness was too much. I hammered the door with my stick. I was pretty well worked up, ready for anything, with enough scorching irony ready on my lips to have burnt the paint off that door.

And then, waiting there, furious, I saw something else. The old sweet pink-and-white double roses that had grown on either side of the door for countless years had been sawn down too. The anger went out of me at once. I went listless. And there I stood; feeling pretty idiotic and as dumb as a brick, the irony evaporated with the anger, my whole spirit flat.

Then the door opened. And instantly my anger rose up again; but not bitterly. It was a sweet, nice anger—precise, juicy. My mouth was watering as though after a sour-sweet apple.

A young woman had opened the door. She too was dressed in white. She seemed to me like a paling out of the white fence; straight up and straight down, straight and white whichever way I looked at her. Her face was white, too: a pasty, town white. She was knitting. She carried the white wool and the white bone needles in her hands. She looked newly married. And, seeing me standing there, angry-faced, with the stick, she looked frightened.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said. I spoke nicely, sweetly: as though I wanted to sell her an insurance policy or a sewing machine.

‘Good afternoon.’ Her voice was prim: a white blameless-life kind of voice, decently distant, half afraid.

‘I was wondering,’ I said, ‘if you would allow me to take some notes about the house and garden. They have—historic associations.’

She looked more scared than ever. I could see at once that she thought I was a liar and a trickster. Her white-knuckled hand was tight on the door, ready to slam it in my face. Her prim eyes were full of the fear that I was about to burst in and take the spoons and seduce her and help myself to the food in the pantry.

Then I said: ‘I am a reporter. I represent The Nenweald Telegraph.’

The change in her was wonderful. She softened at once. She put the white knitting in the pocket of her white overall. But still a little of her fear remained.

‘My husband isn’t in,’ she said.

‘I have three children,’ I told her.

The remark finished it all. For one moment she seemed to waver, in doubt, and then I said:

‘It would make a nice little article. We might want a picture to go with it.’

I was saved again. She could see herself in the paper; the highest of all honours.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you much,’ she said. ‘We have only just come to live here. We are only just married.’

‘Just so.’

I took out an old envelope and scribbled on it: ‘White bridal veil.’

‘When did you first occupy the house, Mrs——?’

‘Mrs Wade-Brown. Early this summer.’

‘Who lived here before that?’

‘An awful old man. I didn’t know him, but the place was in an awful state. Seeds hung up in paper bags all over the bedroom ceilings. Rotten apples on the bedroom floors. And there was no bathroom. We had to have a bathroom put in.’

‘You had to have a bathroom put in,’ I said, and I wrote on the envelope: ‘White bath.’

‘He was a terrible old man who lived here,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Did you know him?’ she said.

‘Everybody knew him. He was famous—notorious.’

‘We found hundreds of empty bottles in the cellar,’ she said. ‘He must have done nothing else but drink.’

‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘He drank himself to death.’

She was speechless.

‘It was the cellar I wanted to see,’ I said. ‘It is the cellar which is historic.’

She hesitated.

‘In what way historic?’ she asked. ‘I was a school-teacher before I was married. I never heard of it.’

‘A man hid there,’ I said. ‘A sort of conspirator. A long time ago.’ I was not lying now: it was true. My Great-uncle Silas had hidden there, with the police of half the county looking for him, though that is another story.

I began to wipe my boots on the doormat, scribbling with mock deference on the old envelope all the time.

And, finally, she led me into the house. Stepping over the threshold, I breathed in at once, instinctively, to catch the smells of old tea and earth and wine and geraniums, all the warm rich odours of my Uncle Silas’s long existence there. But the air was dead: stale with the odours of new French-polished furniture and wool rugs and oilcloth. And one look at the room was enough: the prim, black-framed verses on the clear walls, new fire-grate in place of the old faggot-oven, the wedding presents all arranged on the piano and the sideboard with the correctitude of a showroom in a furniture shop. There was something ice-cold about its parsimonious respectability.

The woman saw me looking at it. ‘It’s very different from when we found it,’ she said.

‘Very different.’

‘You must mind the stairs down to the cellar. They’re very dark. We never use it.’

‘Perhaps I’d better go first,’ I said. ‘I could light a match for you.’

‘No, no. I’ll get a candle.’

There was a spirit of devilry in me, a sudden inheritance from my Uncle Silas himself, and suddenly, while she was looking for the candle in the back-kitchen, I slipped down the stairs as quickly and easily as unbuttoning the button of an old waistcoat—zip!

Then at the bottom, turning and looking up again, I saw the woman’s face above the unlighted candle. She looked scared again.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Did you fall? Wait a minute. I’ll bring the candle.’

She came timidly down the dark stairs, and I took the candle at the bottom and struck a match and lighted it.

We were in the cellar. And suddenly I breathed. It was like the breath of another world: the wine and dampness, the musty odour of ferment and dust and spider-webs. The walls were yellow in the candle-light. Big shadows fell and ballooned over them as I raised and lowered the candle.

‘Was it in here he hid?’ she said.

‘In here.’

And then I saw something: bottles, dark dust-covered bottles, six or seven of them, standing in the darkest corner.

‘Bottles,’ I said. I tried to be casual, indifferent, as though bottles could mean nothing to me.

‘Where?’ she said. ‘I thought the cellar was empty.’

I put the candle on the stone floor and took up one of the bottles. It was full. I held it in my hand for a moment in suspense. Then I took out the cork and sniffed. It was wine, elderberry. I did not know what to do with myself. I was smelling the wine again when the woman said:

‘What is it?’

‘Vinegar,’ I said. ‘Smell.’

She smelled. ‘It’s queer vinegar,’ she said.

‘It’s worked,’ I said, ‘fermented. It’s in a state of ferment.’

I hardly knew what I was saying. I put back the cork and picked up another bottle and uncorked that and sniffed again. It was elderberry.

‘Vinegar,’ I said.

Then I took up another bottle and another and another.

‘They’re all vinegar,’ I said.

Then suddenly I saw a bottle of light glass: I could see the wine in the candlelight, glowing with the lovely translucent cowslip light I knew so well.

‘What’s that?’ she said.

I smelled. The old delicate flower aroma of the wine was wonderful.

‘Harness oil,’ I said.

I put the cork back before she could move or speak. There were still two other bottles. I picked them up and sniffed of them and recorked them before she could wink.

‘All harness oil,’ I said.

‘The old man left them. That awful old man,’ she said. But I was looking at the bottles in mock perplexity.

‘They’re dangerous,’ I said.

‘How? Dangerous!’

‘They may burst—blow up. You’d better get rid of them.’ I picked up the candle. ‘Get a sack and we’ll put them in and I’ll dump them in the ditch when I go.’

‘Would you?’

Five minutes later we came up the cellar steps again, she carrying the candle, I with the sack of wine on my back.

‘Outside,’ she kept saying. ‘Outside. Whatever you do, put them outside.’

I laid the sack tenderly on the earth outside the door.

‘It’s very good of you,’ she said. ‘Have you taken all the notes you want?’

‘I should like to see the garden,’ I said.

We walked together down the garden path. The place had been ruined: a neat, parsimonious little lawn had been laid down where Silas had grown his potatoes; the old sun-flowers had gone and the old lilac trees; the place where the loveliest of all lilies had grown was a bed of red geraniums. I could not bear it. Only the thought of the sackful of harness oil and vinegar kept me from flying into anger again.

Then, at the foot of the garden, I saw something which almost shocked me. It was the pig-sty. The lilacs and cherry trees and lilies and roses had gone, but the pig-sty remained.

‘You keep pigs?’ I said.

‘Oh, no, no. I should be sick.’

‘But there’s the sty.’

‘Oh, but it’s empty. It’s going to be knocked down. My husband is going to knock it down. We shall use it for firewood when winter comes.’

I leaned over the sty-rails and looked on dung-stained bricks and whitewashed shelter. Then I unlatched the gate and walked into the sty. I was just bending down to look through the pig-door when the woman cried out:

‘Oh, don’t go in there!’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.

‘There’s a gun in there.’

‘A gun?’

‘It’s been there ever since we came. My husband found it. It’s loaded. He daren’t let it off.’

I looked at her seriously.

‘Have you a licence?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘You know you can get into serious trouble for having a gun without a licence,’ I said.

‘Trouble? No!’

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘And then guns are dangerous. You say it’s loaded?’

‘Yes.’ She was scared, whiter than ever.

‘I’d better have a look at it,’ I said.

I bent down and went into the inner sty. The floor was still strawed and the gun was hanging on a nail on the wooden wall. I took it down. It was plainly my Uncle Silas’s gun. His name was lettered on the stock in crude letters almost smoothed out again by use and time. It was an old muzzle-loader, and the barrel had been stuffed with paper and filings and old nails and ball bullets and powder. I had seen my Uncle Silas knocked flat on his back into the potatoes with the kick of it.

After a moment I went through into the sty-yard, carrying the gun in my hand as carelessly as though it had been a banana.

The woman retreated away.

‘Do be careful,’ she said.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going to let it off.’

She was terrified. ‘When? How?’

‘Have you got some string?’ I said. ‘Good string. A long piece.’

She fled into the house. While she was gone I leaned the gun against the sty-rail and stared about the garden, trying hard to find some object in it that I could blow to smithereens, but the place was as bare as a piece of ploughed-land. And very soon the woman came running back with the string in her hands.

‘You won’t hurt anything? You’ll be careful? You won’t do any damage?’

I began to fix the gun to the sty-rails, lashing it with string, and when that was finished I tied the remaining string to the trigger.

The woman was trembling.

‘You’re not frightened?’ I said. I spoke sweetly to her, with the greatest consideration.

She shook her head.

‘You must stand away,’ I said.

At first she stood a yard or two away, and then ten yards, and then when she saw me cocking the gun and letting out the string she was thirty yards off, and the last I saw of her was as she stood on the threshold of the house, with her hands over her ears and her face as white as her wool.

A second later I pulled the string. The bang was terrific, shattering. I had aimed the gun at the pines, and the moment after the shot had torn through the trees there was a sound as though the sky were suddenly hailing cotton reels. And then before the last of the pine-cones had clattered down it seemed as though I had peppered all the rooks and jackdaws in the parish. There was nothing but a wild sound of the cawing and squalling birds flying high over the garden and the pines in the still, autumn air.

It was a wild, crazy sound, and it brought the woman running out of the house again.

‘Is it all right? What have you done? What is it?’

I was untying the gun from the sty-rails as she came up, and I turned to her and spoke with great seriousness again.

‘You see what might have happened,’ I said. ‘You see? This gun is so old it might have burst.’

She nodded.

‘I’ll take the gun away and ditch it with the bottles,’ I said. ‘It’s no good.’

The rooks were still flying wildly round and round, and the sound of their calling and of my voice seemed to terrify her into acquiescence. She said nothing, and I finished untying the gun.

We walked back up the path in silence, the rooks and daws still circling madly above the pines. It was not until we reached the house that she spoke at all.

‘I’m sorry you had that trouble,’ she said. She spoke as if I had done her a great service. ‘I shall be glad to be rid of the awful things.’

‘I’m sure you will.’

‘My husband is a teetotaller, and he doesn’t shoot,’ she paused. ‘Have you got your notes?’

‘I’ve got my notes,’ I said.

We stood in silence for a moment, awkwardly. I wanted to get away before her suspicions began again and she sent for the police, and I began to screw up the neck of the sack in readiness to swing it over my shoulder.

And then she remembered something.

‘Once before,’ she said, ‘someone else came and wanted to look round the house.’

‘Yes?’

‘A woman,’ she said. ‘She said she wanted to look at the place again for the last time.’

For some reason I could find nothing to say, and I stood in silence while she told me of how on a day in summer a woman—it could only have been my Uncle Silas’s housekeeper—walked into the garden and stood there like someone stupefied, not saying much except to repeat at intervals that she wanted the old bath. ‘I should like the old bath as a keepsake, to do my washing in.’ The young woman didn’t understand her, and then the old woman stood there in the garden and began to cry, still saying that she wanted the old bath, until finally, as the young woman herself said to me, ‘I had to send her away because I could see she was either drunk or wrong in the head.’

I picked up the sack and slung it on my shoulder. ‘I shan’t want to carry it far,’ I said.

‘It’s good of you to carry it at all,’ she said.

A moment later I thanked her and said good afternoon and opened the white garden gate and began to walk down the lane with the sack filled with the bottles on my shoulder.

At the foot of the lane I turned back. She was still standing there, at the white gate, watching me, as though she were still thinking about me.

I was thinking, too. But not of her, or the changed house, or the desolated garden, or the heavy wine-bottles clanking in the sack, or even my Uncle Silas himself.

I was thinking instead of that tart and irascible housekeeper, a flint-hearted iron-corseted woman, a tartar, a sour old tyrant, standing there in the summer garden, all broken up and stupefied, weeping her heart out for something nobody would ever understand.

Sugar for the Horse

My Uncle Silas had a little mare named Jenny, warm, brown and smooth-coated, with a cream arrow on her forehead and flecks of cream on three of her feet. She was a very knowing, friendly creature and she could take sugar off the top of your head. ‘Goo anywhere and do anything,’ my Uncle Silas would say. ‘Only got to give her the word. Goo bed wi’ me.’

‘Upstairs?’ I said.

‘Upstairs, downstairs,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Anywhere. Where you like. I recollect——’

‘Start some more tales,’ my grandmother would say. ‘Go on. Stuff the child’s head with rubbish. Keep on. Some day he’ll know the difference between the truth and what he hears from you.’

‘Is the truth,’ Silas said. ‘She come to bed with me arter the 1897 Jubilee. Over at Kimbolton. I oughta know. There was me and Tig Flawn and Queenie White——’

‘That’s been a minute,’ my grandmother said. She was very small and tart and dry and disbelieving. ‘How old’s Jenny now? Forty?’

‘Well, she’s gittin’ on,’ Silas said. ‘I recollect that day Queenie had a big hat on. We got the hat off her and put it on Jenny and she come up to bed with me just like a lamb.’

‘Who was Queenie White?’ I said. ‘Did she come to bed with you too?’

‘I’m only tellin’ on you about the horse,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Queenie was afore your time.’

‘Pity she wasn’t before yours,’ my grandmother said.

‘Ah, but she wadn’t. Course,’ he said to me, ‘I could tell you a lot about her. Only you wanted to know about the horse. Well, she come to bed wi’ me——’

‘Did she?’ my grandmother said. ‘Well, I warn you here and now she’ll never come to bed in no house of mine.’

Some time later my Uncle Silas came down to Nenweald Fair, on the second Sunday in August, about the time the corn was cut and the first dewberries were ripe for gathering, with Jenny in a little black trap with yellow wheels and a spray of ash-leaves on her head to keep the flies away. There was always a wonderful dinner for Nenweald Fair and Silas always kept it waiting. There was always roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce and chicken to choose from, and little kidney beans and new potatoes with butter, and yellow plum pie and cream with sugar on the pastry. There were jugs of beer on the sideboard by the clock with the picture of Philadelphia. The batter of the Yorkshire pudding was as buttery and soft as custard and all over the house there was a wonderful smell of beef burnt at the edges by fire.

But my Uncle Silas was always late and my grandfather, an indulgent, mild-mannered man unaccustomed to revelry and things of that sort, was always full of excuses for him.

‘Very like busted a belly-band coming down Longleys Hill or summat,’ he would say.

‘Start carving,’ my grandmother would say. ‘I’m having no dinner of mine spoilt for Silas or anybody else.’

‘Hold hard a minute. Give him a chance.’

‘The meat’s on the table,’ she would say, ‘and if he’s not here that’s his lookout,’ and she would plant the meat before my grandfather and it would sizzle in its gravy.

It was my Uncle Silas’s custom, and my grandmother knew it and knew it only too well, not only to arrive late for that dinner but never to arrive alone. He had a habit of arriving with strange men with names like Tig Flawn and Fiddler Bollard and Slob Johnson and Tupman Jarvis. That day he arrived, about two o’clock, when most of the meat had gone and the last of the yellow plums were cooling in the dish, with a man named Ponto Pack. I always wanted him to arrive with Queenie White and see what my grandmother thought of that, but he never did and I was always rather disappointed. Whenever he did arrive my grandmother always looked as if she could hit him over the head with the pastry-board or some other suitable instrument, and that day, when I looked out of the window and saw Silas and the man Ponto, like some gigantic blond sow, falling out of the trap, I felt the carving knife would hardly have been too much.

‘Let ’em all come!’ my Uncle Silas roared and gave prodigious beery winks from a bloodshot eye that was like a fire in a field of poppies.

‘You’re late,’ my grandmother said. ‘Get your dinner and stop shouting as if you were in Yardley Open Fields.’

‘Got hung up,’ Silas said. ‘Belly-band broke.’

My grandmother gave my grandfather such a killing and merciless look that he went out at once to give Jenny a rub down and a drink of water, and Ponto made strange strangled noises with whole potatoes, and said, for the first of several times:

‘Onaccountable. Most onaccountable.’

He was such a large man, bulging flesh as tight as bladdered lard into his suit of green-faded Sunday black, that when the rest of us had left the table it still seemed full. His eyes, pink-edged, beery, almost colourless, were uncannily like the eyes of a blond and farrowing sow. He had nothing to say all day but:

‘Onaccountable, George,’ or ‘Onaccountable, Silas. Most onaccountable.’

In the afternoon it was very hot and everyone, including Silas, went to sleep in the front parlour or under the laurel trees, and I played giving Jenny lumps of sugar off the top of my head in the little paddock at the back of the house. I was giving her the seventh or eighth lump of sugar and wondering whether she ever did go to bed with my Uncle Silas or whether it was just another story, when my grandmother rapped on the window and said:

‘Come you in out of that sun. You’ll never stay awake tonight without you get some rest.’

She must have known what was coming. About half-past six my Uncle Silas and my grandfather and Ponto Pack had another jug of beer in the shade of the laurel trees and my Uncle Silas, wet-lipped, bloodshot eye wickedly cocked, began to talk about ‘gittin’ the belly-band mended while we think on it.’ It did not seem to me to be a thing that wanted thinking on at all, and I do not think my grandmother thought so either. She had put on her grey silk dress with the parma violet stitching at the collar and her little high hat with michaelmas daisies on the brim, and it was time now to be thinking of ‘walking up street.’ To walk up street on the Sunday of Nenweald Fair was a gentle, ponderous, respectable, long-winded custom, and it was something about which neither my Uncle Silas, my grandfather nor Ponto Pack seemed, I thought, very enthusiastic.

‘You goo steady on up,’ Silas said. ‘We’ll come on arter we git the belly-band mended.’

‘If everything was as right as that belly-band nobody would hurt much,’ she said.

‘It’s too ’nation hot yit for traipsing about,’ Silas said.

‘Onaccountable hot,’ Ponto said. ‘Most onaccountable.’

Ten minutes later the trap went jigging past us up the street, my Uncle Silas wearing his black-and-white deerstalker sideways on, so that the peaks stuck out like ears, and Ponto, bowler hat perched on the top of his head like a cannon ball, looking more than ever like some pink-eyed performing pig. My grandfather pretended not to see us and my grandmother said:

‘What one doesn’t think of, the other will. The great fool things.’

We seemed to take longer than ever that sultry evening to make the tour under the chestnut trees about the crowded market-place. I always got very bored with the gossiping Sunday-starched crowd of bowler hats and parasols and I kept thinking how nice it would be if my Uncle Silas were to come back with Jenny and I could do my trick of giving her sugar, in full view of everybody, off the top of my head. But Silas never came and by ten o’clock I was yawning and my grandmother had even stopped saying darkly, whenever there was something nice to listen to, ‘Little pigs have got big ears,’ as if I hadn’t the vaguest idea of what she meant by that.

I went to bed with a piece of cold Yorkshire pudding to eat and fell asleep with it in my hands. It is hard to say now what time I woke up, but what woke me was like the thunder of one crazy dream colliding with another somewhere at the foot of the stairs. The piece of cold Yorkshire pudding was like a frog crawling on my pillow, and I remember wanting to shriek about it just at the moment I heard my Uncle Silas roaring in the front passage:

‘Git up, old gal! Git up there! Pull up, old gal!’

A terrifying sound as of madly-beaten carpets greeted me at the top of the stairs. It was my grandmother beating Ponto Pack across the backside with what I thought was the stick we used for stirring pig-swill. She could not get at my Uncle Silas because Silas was leading Jenny up the stairs; and she could not get at my grandfather because he was lying like a sack of oats on Jenny’s back. Ponto was pushing Jenny with his round black backside sticking out like a tight balloon and my Uncle Silas kept bawling:

‘Git underneath on her, Ponto. You ain’t underneath on her.’

Every time Ponto seemed about to git underneath on her my grandmother hit him again with the swill-stick. I thought he did not seem to mind very much. He laughed every time my grandmother hit him and then pushed himself harder than ever against Jenny’s hindquarters and called with pig-like fruitiness to my Uncle Silas, tugging at the bridle on the stairs:

‘Can’t budge the old gal, Silas. Most aggravatin’ onaccountable.’

‘Get that mare out of my house, you drunken idiots!’ my grandmother shrieked.

‘Gotta git George to bed fust,’ Silas said. ‘Must git George to bed.’

‘Get that horse off my stair-carpet!’

‘Gotta git George to bed. Good gal!’ Silas said. ‘Come on now, good gal. Tchck, tchck! Up, mare! That’s a good gal.’

By this time my Uncle Silas had succeeded in tugging Jenny a quarter of the way upstairs when suddenly, down below, sharp and sickening above the pandemonium of voices, there was a crack like a breaking bone. Ponto Pack roared, ‘Silas, she’s hittin’ me on the coconut!’ and at the same moment Jenny had something like hysterics, whinnying terribly, and fell down on her front knees on the stairs. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Why th’ Hanover don’t you git underneath on her? She’ll be down atop on y’!’ and for a moment I thought she was. She gave a great lurch backwards and my grandfather let out a groan. My grandmother hit Ponto another crack on the head with the swill-stick and suddenly the whole essence of the situation became, to me at any rate, splendidly clear. My Uncle Silas and Ponto were trying to get my grandfather to bed and my grandmother, in her obstinate way, was trying to stop them.

I remembered in that moment the cold Yorkshire pudding. I fetched it from my bedroom and went halfway down the stairs and held it out to Jenny, most coaxingly, in the flat of my hand.

Whether she thought, at that moment, that I in my white nightshirt was some kind of newly-woken ghost or whether she decided she had had enough of the whole affair, I never knew. Ponto had hardly time to bawl out from the bottom of the stairs, ‘It’s most onaccountable, Silas. I can’t budge her!’ and my Uncle Silas from the top of the stairs, ‘Hold hard, Pont. The old gal’s knockin’ off for a mite o’ pudden!’ when my grandmother, aiming another crack at Ponto’s head, hit the mare in her fury a blow above the tail.

The frenzy of her hysterical ascent up three steps of stairs and then backwards down the whole flight was something I shall not forget. My grandfather fell off the mare and the mare fell sideways on him, and then my Uncle Silas fell on the mare. The three of them fell on my grandmother and my grandmother fell on Ponto Pack. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Let ’em all come!’ and my grandmother hit Ponto twenty or thirty blows on the top of the head with the swill-stick. My grandfather fell off the horse’s back and landed with a terrible crash on the umbrella-stand, and the portrait of Gladstone fell down in the hall. The cold Yorkshire pudding fell down the stairs and I fell after it. My aunt came in the front door with a policeman, and Ponto yelled, ‘It’s onaccountable, Silas, most onaccountable!’ just as the mare broke free and charged the sideboard in the front room.

My Uncle Silas sat on the bottom of the stairs and laughed his head off, and I began to cry because I was sorry for Jenny and thought it was the end of the world.

The Bedfordshire Clanger

My Uncle Silas was very fixed and very firm in the notion that women were no good to you. ‘They’re allus arter you, boy,’ he said. ‘Allus arter you.’

I was, at the time, very small, and it was much too soon for me to point out that Silas, on the contrary, was always arter them.

‘Like her,’ he said. ‘Take her. Allus arter me.’

At the age of ninety-one my Uncle Silas still had something of the look of a crusty farmyard cock. He gave a great sniffing sort of sigh, fixed his bloodshot eye on me in cunning reminiscence and whipped a dewdrop off his nose.

‘She wadn’ half a tartar,’ he said. ‘Everlastin’ arter me. Night and day.’

‘Doing what?’ I said.

‘Plaguing on me.’

‘For what?’

‘Tormentin’ on me,’ he said. ‘Whittlin’ me to death.’

His bloodshot eye had a crack of scarlet glee across it.

‘What was her name?’ I said.

‘Tutts,’ he said.

‘That’s a funny name.’

‘She wur a funny woman,’ he said. ‘She wur very near the death on me.’

Since my Uncle Silas had reached the nineties and looked, in his leathery and ruddy heartiness, good for another dozen years, it seemed a very good moment to ask how death by Miss Tutts had been avoided so long ago.

‘I give her gee-up,’ he said. ‘That’s how.’

It seemed a very good moment also to ask how he had given her gee-up, and if possible why and what with, but he surprised me a little when the answer came.

‘I laid her out with a Bedfordshire clanger,’ he said.

I did not know what a Bedfordshire clanger was, and it occurred to me for a moment that it was an awful sort of lie. But he said:

‘Sort o’ pudden. Suet. Hard as a hog’s back.’

We were sitting among the gooseberry bushes at the time, by the bottom of Silas’s garden, under the wood, where sun lay warm by a fringe of hazels. Gooseberries, ripe and golden-green and fat as plums, bowed down the branches of the squat trees, and now and then Silas lazily pinched one with crabbed fingers and split it open and shot its sweet jellied seeds on to his ripe and ruby tongue.

‘Kept a boarding-house,’ he said.

For some moments he squirted gooseberry seeds into his mouth and chewed through what I hoped were moments of reminiscence, champing at the sourer skin. His gills seemed to laugh up and down, from the acid of the gooseberries, like the gills of an old and crusty cock.

‘Them are the ones you want to be careful on,’ he said.

I bit on a gooseberry too. Silas fixed his eyes on a point somewhere far away and I could smell the strong odour of corduroys warm in the sun.

‘Young chap at the time,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Apprentice. Innocent young chap.’

It has always been difficult for me to conjure up a picture of my Uncle Silas at the age of innocence, but I did not say anything and he went on:

‘Me an’ Arth Sugars,’ he said. ‘We boarded together.’

I wanted to know who Arth Sugars was and he said:

‘Arth wadn’t all ninepence. Had a kink somewhere. Wanted to be inventor.’

‘What did he invent?’

‘Well, for a start-off nothing much,’ he said. ‘But then I got there——’

He picked another gooseberry and squashed it against his tongue and gave a great sucking sound at the bursting purse of seeds. ‘Chronic,’ he said several times. ‘Chronic,’ and then went on suddenly with a horrible reminiscence of that far-off boarding-house, where he and Mr. Sugars, the inventor, had starved.

‘Day in and day out,’ he said, ‘the same sort o’ grub. No different. Week-days and Sundays. No different. Allus the same.’

‘What grub?’

‘Pudden. Just pudden.’

‘What sort?’

‘Plain.’

He shook his head with great sadness so that I, too, could feel how terrible it was.

‘Think on it,’ he said. ‘Dinner—tea—supper, week in, week out, months on it. Just plain.’

‘Suet?’

He turned on me with a horrible sort of bark that made me feel ashamed. ‘It might have been suet once,’ he said. ‘But when we got it—ah! boy, it wur harder ’n prison bread.’

He paused and at that moment I suddenly discovered a defect in all this. I could not picture Miss Tutts. I could not conceive what sort of person, physically, she was.

‘I wur coming to that,’ he said. ‘Whady’ think she was?’

‘Think?’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Fat or thin?’

‘Thin,’ I said.

He cried out with a bark of triumph.

‘I knowed you’d say that. Thin, you says, eh? You think she wur thin, you says. She wur mean and a tartar, so she must be thin? Eh? Ain’t that it?’

‘I suppose I——’

‘Well, you’re supposing wrong. Fat—that’s what she wur. Like a twenty-score sow in pig.’

He looked at me with such an air of pained and sharp correction that I said I was sorry I had been mistaken.

‘And a good thing for you. ’Cause now you’ll understand better, see? Her so fat and me an’ Arth so thin. It makes it wuss, don’t it? Makes it chronic, don’t it, eh?’

I said it made it very chronic. I said something, too, about how greatly they must have suffered, and he said:

‘Suffered? We suffered till we couldn’t suffer no longer.’

‘And then what did you do?’

‘Put paid to her,’ he said.

I asked him how they put paid to her. Slowly he squeezed another gooseberry against his bright red tongue and said:

‘Fust of all we give her a Seidlitz powder.’

‘Wasn’t she very well?’ I said.

‘Oh! she wur well,’ he said, ‘but we jis’ wanted to see what happened. We jis’ put the Seidlitz powder in the——, well, that don’t matter now. Have another gooseberry, boy. Help yourself to another gooseberry.’

I helped myself to another gooseberry and said I hated Seidlitz powders.

‘They fizz,’ I said.

‘Thass it,’ he said. ‘Thass just it. They fizz.’

His gills began laughing again with the droll shagginess of an old cock and I said:

‘Didn’t it make a difference?’

‘Well, it made a difference,’ he said, ‘in a way. But not to us.’

‘The puddings didn’t get better?’

‘Not until arterwards,’ he said darkly. ‘Not until afterwards.’

My Uncle Silas relapsed into a veiled and secret sort of meditation, one eye closed. He did not speak for some time and I began to grow impatient to know what lay behind that arterwards. I was afraid for some moments that he would fall asleep there, in the warm July air among the gooseberry bushes, and never tell me.

Presently I nudged him and asked him not to go to sleep and he flickered an eye:

‘Don’t whittle me, boy,’ he said. ‘I’m a-recollectin’ on it.’

He suddenly gave an immense and fruity chuckle, something like a joyful belch partly arrested. It was the sound I knew, long afterwards, as something always preceding the greatest lie. Then he shook his head as if it were all terribly serious and said:

‘Millions on ’em.’

‘Millions of what?’ I said.

‘Puddens.’

He did not look at me. He fixed his bloodshot, wicked eye on the distance and grunted, ‘Never see nothing like it, boy, you never see nothing like it,’ and then went on to tell me, between winey belches that rippled out of his corduroyed belly like waves, how he and Arth Sugars, tired of that long prison diet of suet, decided to discover for themselves how Miss Tutts made and kept up the supply; and how they crept down to the basement at midnight, with a candle, and found there, in rows upon rows, on high shelves, enough puddings to feed an army.

‘Millions on ’em,’ he said. ‘All wrapped up in old ham-bags and shimmies and skirts an’——’

‘What did you do?’ I said.

‘Filled ’em.’

I asked him how they filled them and what with, and he said, airily:

‘Different flavours.’

‘Strawberry and raspberry?’

‘Ah! better’n that,’ he said. ‘Some on ’em we filled with brimstone. Then we had a Seidlitz or two. A few Epsoms. Then some as Arth invented. Then I don’t know as we didn’t have a——, well, anyway, we wur half-way through the brimstone when we had company.’

‘Who?’

‘Her,’ he said.

He shook his head.

‘Never see nothing like it in your life. Half-starve naked. In her nightshirt.’

‘Enough to catch her death,’ I said.

‘It wur,’ he said. ‘There wur we a-top of a step-ladder, and there wur Arth holdin’ the candle and a-givin’ me the different flavours. I wur just pickin’ a pudden up when she come ravin’ in——’

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘Dropped it,’ he said.

‘On her?’

‘On her,’ he said. ‘Give her such a clout—it jis’ shows you how hard they was, jis’ shows you—give her such a clout she wur cold in a couple o’ seconds.’

‘That was awful,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Awful,’ he said. ‘Do? Arth run upstairs like a hare for a burnt feather and the smellin’ salts.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what did you do?’

‘Kept her warm,’ he said. ‘Thass what you got to do when folks are cold, ain’t it? And she wur very cold, I tell you boy, in that there nightgown. Very cold.’

I did not speak. A little doubt assailed me. I could not in that moment reconcile the picture of my Uncle Silas keeping Miss Tutts warm in the basement at midnight with the way the story had begun. There seemed, suddenly, great discrepancies somewhere. Hadn’t it begun by Miss Tutts tormenting him? Hadn’t she been a terror, a plague, and a tartar? It seemed very strange to me that plaguing and tormenting and pursuit could end with Miss Tutts being warmed in my Uncle Silas’s arms. Strange that things could change so quickly.

‘And did things change?’ I said. ‘You know—the puddens. Were they better?’

My Uncle Silas fixed his roving bloodshot eye on the distance and with a delicious spurting juicy sound, squirted the seeds of another gooseberry against his tongue.

‘Arter that,’ he said, ‘I wur never in want fur the nicest bit o’ pudden in the world.’

Queenie White

The name of Queenie White was hardly ever mentioned in our family, except of course by my Uncle Silas, who was inclined to mention it rather frequently.

‘Now that wur the year when me and Queenie——’

‘We don’t want to hear it, thank you, we don’t want to hear it, we don’t want to hear it!’

‘Now wait half a jiff,’ Silas would say. ‘If you can hold your horses I wur going to say as that wur the year we had snow in July——’

‘We know all about it, thank you. We know all about it. We know all about it.’

The trouble was that everyone else except myself seemed to know all about it and it was on an afternoon in September, many years later, before I was able to clear up the mystery of the unmentionable Queenie White and what she had done, if anything, to make her name resound so unspeakably in the ears of the women of my family.

That afternoon I walked over to see my Uncle Silas, taking with me a drop of something I thought would please his palate, and as we sat in the garden, in the drowsy wasp-laden air, under a big tree of Blenheim apples, he turned to me and said:

‘This is a drop o’ good, boy. Red-currant, ain’t it?’

I said that it was red-currant and he rolled another mouthful of it over his thick red tongue before saying:

‘It’s a bit sharper ’n elderberry and it ain’t so flowery as cowslip, but it’s proper more-ish all the same. Proper more-ish.’

A moment later he started to look very dreamy, as he always did in the act of recollecting something far away, and said:

‘You know the last time I tasted red-currant? It’s bin about forty years agoo—over at The Cat and Custard Pot, at Swineshead.’ He gave one of those ripe, solemn pauses of his. ‘Wi’ Queenie White.’

It was always a good thing not to hurry my Uncle Silas in the matter of these more distant recollections and I did not say a word. I poured him another glass of red-currant wine instead and after some moments he picked up the glass and gazed softly through the pure bright wine, an even purer and sharper crimson than the half-transparent, polished currants themselves had been, and said:

‘Yis: she kept The Cat and Custard Pot, or any road she and her husband did.’

I said I was surprised to hear that Queenie White was married but he said blandly:

‘Oh! yis. Married all right. Well, that is if you could call Charley White a man. He wur more like a damn bean pole with a boiled egg stuck on top.’

I must confess that I was not as interested in the appearance of Charley White as in what a woman called Queenie could possibly look like, but there was no hurrying my Uncle Silas, who shook his head in slow disgust and suddenly let out one of those rare-flavoured rural words of his.

‘Maungy,’ he said. ‘That’s what he wur, Charley White. Maungy. A mean, maungy, jealous man.’

I don’t suppose you are ever likely to find the word maungy in any dictionary but the effect it gives is, I think, a very expressive one. You get the impression of something between mingy and mangy and I knew at once, in this case, that Charley White could only have been a mean, moody misery of a man.

‘Wuss ’n a chapel deacon,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Allus countin’ the ha’pence and puttin’ a padlock on the far-dens. If it hadn’t been for Queenie the pub’d never ha’ sold a ha’poth o’ homebrewed to a stray tom-cat in a month o’ Sundays.’

By this time I was more eager than ever to hear what Queenie White had looked like, but my Uncle Silas said:

‘Yis, an’ a lot older ’n her too. Perhaps he’d told her the tale pretty well and she thought he’d got money but I be damned if I know how she ever got married to that streak o’ horse——. Well, never mind, she wur, poor gal, and she had to put up wi’ it.’

Then: ‘Or any road she did till she met me.’

In the very expressive pause that followed I had a moment of recollection myself and said:

‘Jalous he was and held her narwe in cage; for she was wild and young and he was old.’

‘What wur that you jist said?’ my Uncle Silas asked sharply.

‘That was a line of poetry,’ I said, ‘about a carpenter and his wife. By a man named Chaucer. It made me think of Queenie White.’

‘Chaucer?’ he said. ‘Any kin to old Blunderbuss Chaucer over at Stanwick Woods? He wur a rate old poachin’ man.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘this Chaucer was a long way before your time.’

‘Then he must have been a fly ’un,’ my Uncle Silas said.

After that he took another drink of red-currant wine, afterwards brushing the back of his hand across his wet red lips, and then went on to tell me how, in her narrow cage, where even the farthings were padlocked, Queenie White did all the work, attracted all the customers and never had a night’s fun or day’s outing from one year’s end to another.

‘Very sad gal, Queenie,’ he said. ‘Proper un’appy.’

‘You might tell me what she looked like,’ I said.

‘Queenie? Big,’ he said. ‘A very big gal.’

He licked his lips slowly.

‘And when I say big I don’t mean ugly big.’ He lowered his voice a fraction. ‘I mean beautiful big.’

The wine, I thought, was beginning to inspire him now and he went on:

‘You’ve ’eerd talk o’ gals with them titty little waists what you can get your two hands round? Well, Queenie’d got a waist like a big sheaf o’ corn—summat big and strong you could git holt on. Solid. And legs an’ arms like a mare. And upstairs——’

Here he glanced, I thought, at the upstairs windows of the house, as if thinking that someone might be looking down on us from there, but instead he was really preparing, as I heard a moment later, to complete the description of Queenie White.

‘Beautiful bosom,’ he said. ‘Like a winder ledge. You could a’ laid a bunch o’ flowers on it easy as pie.’

This charming picture of the upper parts of Queenie White’s figure brought her fully to my mind’s eye at last, except for one thing.

‘What colour hair?’ I asked him.

He seemed for a moment uncertain, I thought, about the colour of Queenie White’s hair, and he paused for several moments longer, pondering on it.

‘If I wur to tell you it wur just about the colour of the sand that day we nipped off to the sea,’ he said at last, ‘that’d be about as near as I could git to it.’

‘The sea?’

‘Yis,’ he said, ‘the sea. We done a bunk together.’

He ruminated a little more on this, stooping down after some moments to pick up a big fallen apple from the grass. After he had polished this apple on his corduroy trousers he held it up to me, clenching it hard in his hands.

‘She wur as firm as that there apple,’ he said. ‘Beautiful an’ firm. No: she wadn’t one o’ them Skinny Lizzies, Queenie, all gristle and bone and suet. They didn’t call her Queenie for nothing—and I tell you, boy, that’s what she looked like. A red-’eaded queen.’

All this, I thought, was so interesting that I poured him another glass of red-currant wine. And again, before drinking, he held it up to the light of the clear September afternoon. All the ripeness of late summer floated down through it, pouring on to his crusty hands a tender crimson glow.

‘What I can’t a-bear is a man what’s maungy,’ he said. ‘A man what’s jealous. I see that gal a-working night an’ day there and him a-locking the fardens up and skin-flintin’ over every pint o’ beer and a-fiddle-faddlin’ over how many matches in a box. God A’mighty, I believe he grudged breathin’ too often—he hated wastin’ ’is breath. He even grudged her peelin’ the skin too thick off a tater. Yis!—God’s truth, I be dalled if he didn’t measure a tater skin one day. Told her it wur too thick to give to pigs!’

You didn’t often see my Uncle Silas in a state of anger, but suddenly he lifted the apple and threw it violently across the garden, where it burst on the pig-sty door.

‘That’s what I’d a-like to ha’ done to ’im,’ he said. ‘Throwed ’im up against the ’ug-sty. Instead o’ that I said to myself “Silas,” I said, “you’re a-goin’ to give that there young gal one day in her life as she’ll never forgit if she lives till bull’s-noon.”’

It was June, he said, when they did their bunk together. They waited until the long, bald, jealous bean-pole of a husband had gone off to market one Wednesday—‘allus went skin-flintin’ off to market of a Wednesday wi’ a couple of rabbits or a hare or a brace o’ birds some old poacher had brought in to swop fer a pint—allus on the mek-haste, never ’ettin’ on ’em, no blamed fear, not Charley’—and Silas could drive her to the station in a trap.

That day she was wearing a big white hat with an ostrich feather that she hadn’t worn since the day she was married and a mauve-coloured coat with big black buttons and silk frogs across the front. I imagined her to look splendidly gay and fresh and excited: exactly, as Silas said, like a queen.

The bunk, he was careful to explain several times, was only for the day.

‘I wanted her to ’ave jist one damn good day she’d allus remember,’ he said. ‘Hang about Charley. Hang about the old tits a-gossipin’. Hang about whether she wur a married woman. Hang about the consequences. Dammit! What the ’Anover are we ’ere for? Not to be maungy old narrer-gutses like Charley White, I tell you! We’re dead a long time.’

If there had been another apple at hand at this moment he would, I believe, have hurled that too at the pig-sty door.

‘Sea wur beautiful,’ he said. ‘She’d never seen the sea afore. Couldn’t credit it. Beautiful blue. Beautiful an’ calm. Beautiful sand. She couldn’t credit it. We lay there aside of a big sand-dune very nearly all day a-starin’ at it. And then——’

He broke off and in the long expectant pause that followed I saw that his glass was almost empty. I started to fill it up again and then noticed that, for once, he was hardly watching me. His eyes were resting softly on the September distances, as if he were actually staring at the sea.

‘Then what?’ I said.

‘Then she done summat terrible onexpected,’ he said.

He drank, wiping his mouth. I waited, and again he shook his head.

‘Wouldn’t go home,’ he said.

He stared thoughtfully into his glass, putting it slowly down.

‘Couldn’t turn her,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t budge. Couldn’t git round her nohow.’

I at once pointed out that he had, after all, got round her easily enough to do the bunk in the first place, and he readily agreed that this was so.

‘Yis, but that wur when she wur low,’ he said. ‘It’s easy to git round wimmin when they’re low. But arter a day at the sea wi’ me she wur a different woman.’

I said that I did not doubt at all that any woman would be.

‘Arter all,’ he said, ‘if you turn a nag out into a medder where the grass is sweet it ain’t likely he’s a-goin’ back all that eager to eat chaff and wezzles in a stable, is it?’

I agreed. ‘But what did you do?’

‘Had to give in to the gal,’ he said. ‘Dall it, it wur awk’ard, though.’

It had never been a particularly remarkable feature of my Uncle Silas’s character, I thought, to find such situations awkward, but in this case he was very quick to enlighten me.

‘For one thing I hadn’t got the money,’ he said. ‘I’d on’y come out fer the day.’

‘I’m sure that worried you,’ I said. ‘How much longer did you stay?’

‘Best part of a fortnit.’

‘On whose money?’

‘Her’n,’ he said. ‘Or rather it wur Charley’s. She’d been fly enough to bring it with her.’

It now began to be borne upon me why the name of Queenie White had been, for so many years, an unspeakable one in our family.

‘It wur oncommon awk’ard,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘But arter a few days I started to git used to it.’

Remembering Queenie White’s waist that was like a sheaf of corn, her limbs that were like a mare’s and her splendid bosom on which you might have laid a bunch of flowers, I did not think that getting used to it could, after all, have been so very difficult.

‘Then the money run out.’

‘Made quite a difference, I suppose?’

He pondered.

‘Well, it did in a way,’ he said, ‘but not half so much difference as Charley White did when he turned up.’

He took a rapid drink, as if fortifying himself, and I filled up his glass again.

‘I wisht you could ha’ seen that there fight, boy,’ he said. ‘It wur a proper stack-up. Me a little ’un and him that long thin streak o’ goat’s——boy, it wur a proper rare ’un, that wur.’

I filled up my own glass this time and urged him on with murmurs of approbation.

‘Fust he hit me with a pint pot,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Well, I’d be damned if I wur a-standin’ that, so I hit him wi’ one. Then he fetched me a couple o’ rip-tearing snorters across the chops and I hit him one in the bread basket. Then he blacked my eye and I blacked one of his’n back again. Arter that I dunno what he did hit me with. It felt like a damn cannon ball or summat and I started sailing down the Milky Way. When I come round——’

The admission that my Uncle Silas had been laid out quite startled me, but not nearly so much as the fact that he suddenly started roaring with laughter.

‘You never see anything so damn’ funny in your life, boy.’

He took a deep swig of wine and slapped his other hand down on his knee.

‘What was going on?’ I said.

‘Queenie wur givin’ ’im a good hidin’,’ he said. ‘Ah! an’ it wur a good ’un too. I told you how big an’ strong she was. Well, she wur a-mowin’ into ’im like a Irishman a-mowin’ into a forty-acre field o’ barley.’

‘Pleasant sight,’ I said.

‘Not fer ’im it wadn’t,’ he said. ‘When she’d finished with ’im he looked as if he’d been through a mangle back’ards. He wur a-layin’ flat on ’is back sayin’ “No, Queenie, no, please, that’s enough o’ that!” and she wur a-wipin’ the floor with ’im. And then when it wur all over she picked ’im up and dragged ’im off like a rabbit skin.’

‘Home?’

‘Home,’ he said.

‘And did you,’ I said, ‘go on seeing her after that?’

‘Course they wur a big scandal,’ he said. ‘You bet your breeches they wur. All the old tits wur a-twitterin’ an’ a-gossipin’ an’ a-maunderin’ about it fer years. Couldn’t stop talkin’ about it. Loved it. Couldn’t forgit it. Just their drop.’

‘But did you——’

‘Oh! yes, I used to see her,’ he said. ‘Used to see her quite often. She got out a good deal arter that, happy as you like, when she liked and how she liked. Oh! yis, she wur a free woman arter that. She wur boss arter that.’

Pondering on the word free, I found it difficult to phrase what was in my mind. Running away with another man’s wife was, it seemed to me, not altogether a light affair and what I wanted to know was if my Uncle Silas perhaps——

‘I know what you’re a-thinkin’,’ he said. ‘You’re a-wonderin’ if me an’ Queenie—well, we never. She wur a good gal arter that. The only thing was——’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘I used to take her a bunch o’ flowers sometimes of a Sunday,’ he said.

He slowly lifted his glass, staring through it, and I saw once again how the red glow of it poured on to his crusty hand a tender pool of light. About us, under the tree, the air was full of the hum of wasps as they worked among the fallen September apples and for some moments longer his voice was hardly louder than the sound of wings as he described for me how Queenie White would hold the flowers to her face, rest them on her splendid bosom and talk briefly of the beauty of the sea.

Suddenly he clasped my own hand in his own oyster-crusty palm.

‘Mek the most on it while you can, boy,’ he said. ‘Take a tip from Silas—mek the most on it while you can.’

He stared with dreamy contemplation at the last of his wine.

‘Course she’s dead now,’ he said. ‘Bin dead a good while. But I often wonder whether I shall see her—you know, up there. That’s if I ever goo.’

‘You’ll go,’ I said.

‘I ain’t so sure,’ he said. ‘But I know one thing—there ain’t a better-lookin’ gal up there.’

With that certain air of sadness that sometimes overlaid his devilry he once more contemplated the soft September distances, raised his glass and then blessed the name of the woman whose waist was like a sheaf of corn and on whose queenly bosom you could have laid a bunch of flowers.

‘Mek the most on it while you can, boy,’ he said. ‘Mek the most on it while you can.’

The Blue Feather

I once made a chance remark to my Uncle Silas that had the remarkable effect of making him turn quite pale.

‘I was going by Castle Hanwick yesterday,’ I started to say.

‘God A’mighty boy, don’t mention that there place to me,’ he said. ‘God A’mighty.’

Ordinarily my Uncle Silas’s face presented a plummy mixture of reds and purples, with the bright veins of his bloodshot eye most fierily pronounced; but now a distinct pallor, I thought, began to spread through what he always called his gills.

‘Don’t mention that there place,’ he said again. ‘It fair curdles me. I had a terrible narrer squeak there.’

I thought I detected in this the beginnings of some ill-timed amorous adventure, such as my Uncle Silas being locked in a still room with a parlour-maid or having perhaps to cope with the unexpected misfortune of being found under, if not in, the mistress’s bed; but I was mistaken.

‘Poachin’,’ he said. ‘Well, I’d bin a-poachin’, we’ll say that. No denyin’ that. Got a couple o’ brace of pheasants on fish-hooks and raisins—nothing much. That never worrited me. It wur what ’appened arterwards what prit’ near cooked me.’

His gills, I noticed, had by this time recovered their customary ruby health, though his voice still quavered.

‘I tell you, boy,’ he said, ‘I wur prit’ near cooked that time.’

He then began to describe for my benefit, as if I had never seen it before, the house at Castle Hanwick and its surroundings. It is one of those great mansions, not castle-like in shape, though a castle in name, that stand splendidly on the escarpment of the middle, flowery reaches of the River Ouse, overlooking the river twisting on its many turns across the reedy meadows below. The place has been sold up now and they keep idiots there, or prisoners without bars: it hardly matters which. But in my day, and still more in my Uncle Silas’s day, the land bloomed and yielded in splendidly ordered pattern and fertility above the valley, its woodlands full of game and foxes, its park carrying a herd of deer which you could see sometimes flicking away in fear beyond big roundels of copper-beeches.

These, at any rate, were my own impressions, but my Uncle Silas said, when I mentioned the Castle’s late lost lushness:

‘Ah! I know: it wur like that one time and it wur like that agin. But round about ’85 it wur a sight different. It changed a terrible lot about that time.’

He broke off and was silent and I thought for a moment, as he actually closed his eyes, that he was going to drop off into one of those cock-like uncommunicative dozes of his, when he would suddenly wake up and say: ‘Lost meself for a moment, boy. Where wur I?’

This time I gave him no chance. ‘You were saying you were poaching.’

‘So I wur,’ he said. ‘One October morning. Bin at it all night and jist nippin’ back home. Got the pheasants in a sack with about half a hundredweight o’ water-creeses a-top on ’em.’

He went on to say how beautiful the water-cresses had been in a little brook that ran down through the southern end of the parkland. ‘Very frem,’ he said, using one of those good local words of his. ‘Frem and young. Bin a very good late season for ’em that year.’

I now reminded him of his remark about how much the place had changed round about 1885 and he said:

‘That’s right. Gone to rack and ruin. The old man of all, old St. John Featherstone, died about 1882. Terrible gambler—spent most of his time in clubs in London. And in two or three years you couldn’t see the place for briars and nettles. Like a damn jungle everywhere.’

‘But still pheasants.’

‘Oh yis, pheasants,’ he said. ‘I ain’t sayin’ they wadn’t no pheasants. Else I shouldn’t ha’ bin there. What I’m a-sayin’ is that a few year afore that your life wouldn’t ha’ bin worth ’atful o’ crabs if you’d ha’ bin seen even starin’ over the fence. Keepers everywhere. Armies on ’em. On sentry.’

That October morning my Uncle Silas skirted a bed of osiers by the brook and worked his way southward across the park, taking advantage of the coverts, just as day was breaking. He was feeling pretty cocksure, safe and pleased with himself when, as he hopped over a stile at the end of an avenue of big straggling rhododendrons, a man popped up out of the bushes and barred his way with a six-foot ash-pole.

‘I wur never more surprised in me life,’ Silas said. ‘It fair took the wind out on me.’

‘Keeper?’

‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Oh! no. No sich thing. It was ’im ’isself. Eldest son. The young St. John Featherstone. Well: I say young. Man about sixty I should say.

‘Difficult situation.’

‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘Oh! no. Never bothered me a bit. Wouldn’t ha’ bothered you either if you’d ha’ seen im.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you. Give you a rough idea on ’im if I can. Tall man, terrible thin and bent over at the top, like a parson a-prayin’. Very holler-chested, with a gruet big Adam’s apple like a pump handle stickin’ out over one o’ them high starched collars. Straw hat on his head—October, mind you—and big fishin’ boots over ’is cricket flannels. What d’ye make o’ that?’

It was really not necessary, as I well knew, to say what I made of it.

‘And the face?’ I said.

‘Looked like a blood’ound out o’ sorts,’ my Uncle Silas said.

Here my Uncle Silas raised his voice and started to give an imitation of the accents of the English aristocracy.

‘“My man,” he says, he says, “what you a-got in that there bag, my man, eh?” So I says water-creeses, sir, I said, water-creeses, sir, on’y water-creeses, and then he cackled like a gander and said, “Ho, so it’s only water-creeses is it, it’s only water-creeses? In that there case,” he says, “in that there case,” he says, “my man, I suppose they have feathers on?” And I looked down and I be damned if they wasn’t a pheasant feather stickin’ out of a hole in the sack.’

‘You were cooked,’ I said.

My Uncle Silas, ignoring this, went on with his imitation of the English aristocracy.

‘“My man,” he says, he says, “my man, you’ve a-bin a-poachin’. I know, I know,” he says, “you’ve a-bin a-poachin’. And in that there case, my man,” he says, “in that there case, you’ll have the goodness to come up to the house with me.”’

I remarked for a second time how my Uncle Silas seemed to be cooked, but again he ignored me and went on to tell how there had been nothing for it but to go up to the house, quietly.

‘Not that I were worrit,’ he said. ‘We’d got a bridge to go over and I got it worked out I could drop the bag in the river when he wadn’t lookin’. But it never come orf—he kept me in front on ’im all the time.’

‘Now you were cooked,’ I said.

He turned on me quite sharply.

‘Dammit, don’t keep a-sayin’ I wur cooked,’ he said. ‘That’s later. You allus want to git on sich a ’nation long way ahead. It took days, this ’ere affair. It took weeks. I wadn’t cooked till later—and then’—here he cocked his head at me with severe remonstration—‘on’y damn near see? on’y damn near.’

I had sometimes known him to break off a tale in the middle and never resume it. And remembering it, I was quiet after that, trying not to upset him, simply listening.

‘I jist recollected one more thing as ’appened when we went up to the ’ouse,’ he said. ‘Funny thing—I don’t know what made me do it, but I spotted a jay’s feather that had dropped on a blackberry bush and I picked it up as we went by and put it in me cap. Stuck it in a-one side.’

The incident did not seem of very great importance to me and I was careful to say nothing about it.

‘Any road,’ he said, ‘we got to the house and the old bird locked me up in a room. I wur there about a hour and I thought he’d gone for old Bill Bollard, the policeman. Course I knowed Bill well. We wur ’and-in-glove most o’ the time.’

Soon after the hour was up there was a rattling of a key in the lock and the door opened and in came, to my Uncle Silas’s considerable surprise, the cook.

‘Gal named Em Pack,’ he said. ‘She hadn’t been there very long. Very particular sort o’ gal. Bit miserable. Chapel.’

And what she had to say also surprised my Uncle Silas considerably.

‘Your breakfast is ready,’ she said. ‘You’d better come and eat it while you can.’

He followed her into the kitchen, where she put before him a plate of bacon and two eggs. ‘You can have three if you like,’ she said. ‘Or four, or five, or half-a-dozen. I don’t care. I’m leaving tomorrow anyway.’

My Uncle Silas said he did not at all mind the prospect of a third egg or a couple of extra rashers of bacon and presently she cooked these too and put them before him.

‘Then,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘she started ’orse-facin’ at me. An’ if there’s anything I can’t a-bear it is being ’orse-faced at by wimmin. Said I ought to know better, poachin’ an’ trespassin’ on other people’s property. Said I ought to be ashamed o’ meself. Said it would serve me right when I went up there.

‘I didn’t know what she meant by up there at the time,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘so I asked her why she wur leaving.’

‘Never you mind,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’

‘See what?’ he asked her.

‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘When you get up there. When she gets hold of you.’

If there was any prospect from which my Uncle Silas did not shrink it was that of being got hold of by a woman and he ate his eggs and bacon calmly to the end. They were very good indeed, he said, and the only thing lacking was a glass of beer to wash them down.

‘You’ll get no beer here,’ she snapped, ‘so I’ll tell you. And I’ll tell you something else—you want to be sober when you go up there or else I’ll be blamed if you won’t think you’re seeing things.’

‘Well, I ain’t seed things on a pint yit,’ he said, ‘but I dessay there’s always a fust time.’

After that he finished his bacon and eggs and presently he was going upstairs, cap in hand, with the young St. John Featherstone, the ailing, drooping bloodhound. The house, as he described it, was dark and gloomy. Ancestral portraits, flanked by numbers of swords, battle-axes and breast-plates, hung on the walls about the stairs. A few moulting fox-heads, keeping funereal company with a stag’s head or two and a scraggy badger, filled the peeling walls of the landings beyond.

‘My sister will see you now,’ the drooping bloodhound said. ‘It is her place to deal with you.’

A moment or two later the old bloodhound knocked on a door, opened it and ushered my Uncle Silas into a room.

‘And there she wur,’ he said. ‘This ’ere female.’

The word female is, at this point, a most important one. My Uncle Silas referred to the opposite sex, generally, in four main categories: gals, old gals, wimmin and females. He might occasionally refer also to ladies, young fillies, old tits and possibly bits of fancy goods. I have heard him also speak of wenches.

Beyond doubt the strongest, most astringent, most scornful and devastating of these words was female. It is clear that Em Pack, the cook, was a female. Females were the tart ones, the dry-lipped ones, the chapel ones, the vinegar-and-starch ones, the horse-facers.

‘God A’mighty,’ he said, and I thought he gave a shiver. ‘There she sat. Like a white toad.’

He gave another shudder and half-amended what he had said by adding:

‘Well, not real white. Mucky white. But jist like a toad.’

It is difficult to give any idea of my Uncle Silas’s pronunciation of the word toad. On his lips it became a sort of ripe snarl, long and scornful:

‘There she wur a-sittin’ in a big four-poster, like an old white toooooard.’

Her mouth, he said, was wide and drooping, the upper lip thick and overhanging the other, like an eave. The flesh of the neck was deeply baggy, hanging like a dewlap, pulsating slowly and sloppily up and down as she breathed. Over the eyes hung thick toad-like lids, creased and drowsy, the eyes themselves bulged and dropsical. Most of the time the mouth hung open, revealing long, yellowish teeth and a pallid, panting tongue.

‘Come here. Come closer. What is your name?’

‘Voice jist like a toad too,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Croakin’ at me.’

‘You’ve been stealing water-cress,’ she said.

‘On’y a mossel, ma’am,’ Silas said. ‘That ain’t——’

‘Are you married?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Come closer to me, come closer.’

He stood by the bed, the clothes of which he swore had not been changed ‘since the Christmas afore last, at least,’ holding his cap before him in his hands. He was close enough now to see the colour of her eyes. Surprisingly enough they were a sharp deep black and ‘I got a funny idea somehow,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘that she might have half been a good-lookin’ gal at some time.’

‘Come closer. Let me look at you. We shall send you to prison for six months, you know that, don’t you? The last one went to prison for nine months.’

Again she croaked to him to come closer, and again she accused him about the water-cress. He couldn’t understand, he said, why she never mentioned pheasants and he was pondering on this queer omission for the third or fourth time when suddenly she croaked:

‘What is that in your cap? Let me see.’

He lifted his cap, remembering the jay’s feather he had stuck in it, and before he knew what was happening she had snatched the cap with a cackling croak of triumph from his hands.

‘You may go now!’ she said. ‘You are on bail now. Tomorrow we shall see what we shall do with you. But you are on bail now. Your cap is your bail. What a pretty feather.’

‘Now look ’ere, ma’am,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘that’s damn near a new cap.’

‘Is it? Is it? So much the better.’

Cackling again, she put the cap under the bedclothes.

‘Now your bail is locked up,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow morning you must surrender to your bail. Tomorrow morning we shall decide what we shall do with you.’

‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘I wur gittin’ jist a bit tired o’ this ’ere goodly lady an’ ’er bail and surrender and I dunno what-all and I said to her:

‘Ma,’am,’ and here my Uncle Silas took a step closer to the bed, ‘I’ll give you about ten half-jiffies to give me my cap back or else I’m a-comin’ in there to git it. Wherever you’ve got it ’id.’

This threat to her privacy under the bedclothes did not perturb her in the least, my Uncle Silas said.

‘Fact on it wur it made her wuss,’ he said. ‘She shook her fist at me and waggled her ugly old dewlap and said I’d better look out what I wur a-doin’ or else she’d have me not on’y for poachin’ and trespassin’ but for assault and battery too.’

‘I know my law!’ she said to him. ‘I am well up in law!’

‘All right, ma’am,’ my Uncle Silas said at last. ‘I’ll be back tomorrer morning. But ’ithout you give me that cap o’ mine back mighty sharp I’ll git the law on you too. For stealin’ other folkses property.’

‘Oh! you will, will you?’ she said. ‘And where are your witnesses? You see, I know my law. You stole four pheasants and a great deal of water-cress and we have witnesses. The last poacher we had here stole only one pheasant and no water-cresses and he got nine months. We know how to deal with poachers.’

She was inclined to talk very fast and by the time she had finished she looked more than ever like a toad with her panting dewlap and her wide mouth slightly slobbering and my Uncle Silas suddenly decided he would give her best for the day.

‘You got to ’umour these ’ere females,’ he said. ‘It’s no use you a-forcin’ on ’em.’

I asked him now if he got his cap back and what happened and if she cooked him for the poaching but he said:

‘Well, I wur back next morning and she wur as sweet as a sugar-ball. You couldn’t ’ave ’ad nobody sweeter.’

Here he cocked his eye at me, shook his head slowly and went on:

‘That’s ’ow wimmin are. Jist like blamed old toads one day, a-croakin’ an’ a-orse-facin’ at you, and the next morning as sweet as summerin’ apples, a-dearin’ an’ a-fussin’ on you.’

‘You’re not going to tell me she deared and fussed you?’

‘Oh yis I am,’ he said. ‘She deared and fussed me for damn near a fortnit.’

I said I was anxious, if he didn’t mind, to hear exactly what he meant by dearin’ and fussin’.

‘Well, it wur funny,’ he said. ‘Fust it wur “Ad I ’ad me breakfast?” an’ then “Wur I tired? Would I like a glass o’ beer?” and then it wur “If they was any-think I wanted I’d on’y got to say the word.”’

‘Crazy,’ I said, and it was the only word I could think of for a woman who looked like a white toad, kept a man’s cap in her bed and, as in the nursery rhyme, would never let it go.

‘Poor gal,’ he said.

He shook his head several times, giving once again what I thought was a slight shudder.

‘Well, there wur no sense not ’umourin’ on ’er,’ he said, ‘so there I wur, nearly every morning, up there, askin’ ’er for me cap and she a-pretendin’ she ’adn’t made up ’er mind whether to prosecute me or not. Then one day I had a grave to dig up at the church-yard and I never turned up.’

‘Trouble?’ I said.

‘Never sich a gooin’-on in your life,’ he said. ‘She started ’orse-facin’ and a-tunin’ and a-bawlin’ and I dunno what. “Ma’am,” I told ’er, “I wur on’y diggin’ a grave and folkses got to be buried, ain’t they?”’

‘Dig mine! Dig mine! Dig mine!’ she said. ‘Go away now I beg you and dig mine!’

‘It wur summat cruel,’ he said. ‘It turned your ’eart over. I’d ’ad about enough. I’d stopped a-wonderin’ a good while afore why old Emily Pack couldn’t stand it no longer and so now I said, “Ma’am, I ain’t a-comin’ up ’ere no more. Either gimme me cap or put me in clink—I don’t care which you do. But I ain’t a-traipsin’ up ’ere no longer.”’

The intensely black haunting eyes looked at him from the toad-like face a long time before answering. Then she said, slowly:

‘Come back tonight. I’ve put it away. But I’ll find it by tonight. Come up at seven and I’ll give it back to you.’

He had never seen her by night before. He had seen her only white and creased, toad-like and croaking, by the light of day.

And that evening, when he came up to her, only a candle was burning in a single brass stick by the bedside and she was lying down in the bed. She had brushed her white hair until it lay loose on her shoulders. She did not look so toad-like, he said, as she lay there in the light of the candle; nor was her voice so croaking as before.

‘Where’s me cap, ma’am?’ he said. ‘I got to git back to fill in this ’ere grave.’

She turned and fixed him with the intensely black haunting eyes.

‘It’s here in my bed,’ she said. ‘Come and find it with me.’

‘I bin up to some capers in me time,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘but I drawed the line at that one. Clink or no clink, I started for the door. Sharpish too.’

He had hardly reached the door before he heard her shrieking. A second later he turned and saw that she had leapt from the bed.

‘There she wur,’ he said. ‘Starve naked, with a double-barrel gun in her hands.’

‘I’ll shoot you if you don’t stay with me,’ she said. She put the gun up to her scraggy naked shoulder and aimed it straight at his face. ‘I’ll shoot—I will—I’ll shoot.’

‘I knowed I wur damn near cooked then,’ he said to me. ‘Lucky I’d got another ’at wi’ me. Old deer-stalker I use to wear a-winter times. “All right,” I said, “you put the gun down and I’ll stay a-long o’ you for a minute or two.” So she put the gun down and half a jiff later I throwed the deer-stalker at the candle.’

She fired both barrels at him in the darkness. He dived for the door and the last he heard of her, as he half-fell downstairs, was her voice in a croaking, toad-like wail:

‘Dig mine!’ she was crying. ‘Dig mine! It’s time to dig mine!’

He paused and I thought, once again, that his gills showed the faintest sign of pallor.

‘Not long arter that they took her away, poor gal,’ he said. ‘She’d bin away afore, but I never knowed.’

‘Dead now?’

‘Dead now,’ he said.

He shook his head, looking far away from me.

‘Did you ever get your cap back?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but she left me a little summat in her will.’

He paused a little longer this time and then, very slowly, put his hand in his waistcoat pocket.

‘Come in envelope with a big wax seal on it,’ he said. ‘I allus carry it with me.’

In his hand lay a pretty bright blue feather.

‘Terrible mockin’ sort o’ bird, I allus think,’ he said, ‘the jay.’

The Foxes

My Uncle Silas, not unnaturally, and as might have been expected, had little use for the church.

‘Can’t a-bear popery and ’umbug!’ he would say. ‘Can’t a-bear folks a-maunderin’ an’ a-moolin’ about in church, singing psalms in night-shirts!’

And it followed naturally on this, also, that he had little use for parsons.

‘Fool of the family,’ he would say, ‘like old Rev. Frog-Face we had here in ’93.’

Here he would give an imitation of the Rev. Frog-Face, tall, nasal, drooling, hollow-chested and vacuously dithering, riding a strange sort of bicycle and peering through gold Oxonian pince-nez at the simple, robust world of my Uncle Silas and his fellow countrymen.

‘“Marning, marning!” Voice like some old yoe a-lambin’. “Marning, Silarse. And how does the world use you and yours this marning, Silarse?”’

My Uncle Silas thought that, on the whole, his long life, bathed though it had been in much beer and cloaked under a good many adventurous petticoats, had been a pretty good one. ‘And arter all it’s mine,’ he would say. ‘I done what I liked with it and took the good with the bad. Anythink wrong wi’ that?’

I would assure him that I thought there was, all things considered, nothing wrong with that at all.

‘Well, Frog-Face did,’ he said. ‘He wur allus at me to git me to live it different. Wanted to git me to reform.’

The idea of this formidable prospect made me start to laugh, but my Uncle Silas stopped me instantly.

‘Ah! you can laugh,’ he said, ‘but when a man’s ’appy what sense is it a-trying to git ’im to start all over again and be miserable? ’Ithout they’re miserable, some folks, they don’t think they’re good.’

I heartily agreed with this and he went on:

‘Allus a-poppin’ ’is ’ead over the garden fence and wantin’ a word wi’ me. Voice like some old yoe a-lambin’. “Silarse! I should like a word in your ear, Silarse, if you don’t mind.”’

My Uncle Silas would then go on to describe what one of these words in his ear was like and how he himself replied.

‘Silarse, not to put too fine a point on it, I hear that you were roaring drunk again outside The Swan with Two Nicks on Friday.’

‘No, sir.’

‘And that you were not only drunk but that you and Sam Twizzle and Plum Walker went out of the public house, took the bridle off Milkman Randall’s pony and sold it back to him in the bar.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Silarse, Silarse, be careful what you say. My many informants have another story.’

‘Well, they might do. But it ain’t mine.’

‘Then do you deny you were drunk outside The Swan with Two Nicks on Friday?’

‘I do. It ’appened to be Sat’day.’

‘And I suppose you also deny that you and your friends robbed Milkman Randall of his pony’s bridle and sold it back to him in the bar?’

‘I do. It wadn’t the bridle at all. It wur the whole ’nation harness.’

‘Silarse, Silarse!’

‘Well, if he wadn’t fly enough to look arter ’isself while he wur tryin’ to creep round the barmaid’s apron that’s ’is look-out, ain’t it, not mine?’

This might have been enough, as my Uncle Silas pointed out, to put off any ordinary mortal; but parsons, as he remarked, are often persistent, thick-skinned and nosey to a point of driving an ordinary mortal off his head.

‘Course we give old Milkman ’is ’arness back next day. Just a bit o’ sport, that’s all. Sort of thing we used to do when we was all in beer. Got to do summat to mek life worth while. Like that day we sent the landlord o’ The Crown an’ Anchor a tallygram——. Well, that don’t matter. Jist a bit o’ sport.’

My Uncle Silas then went on to tell me how, at last, he grew very tired of these essays of interference in the normal, worth-while sport of life and how he resented, above all, the notion that there was no good, no purpose and no future in his kind of living.

‘No good will come if it, Silarse, I warn you, no good will come of it.’

‘Well, I don’t doubt you’re right. But all I can say, parson, is this. If what’s a-comin’ is ’arf as good as what’s bin then it won’t be a-miss. If ’arf the gals——’

‘Wine and women! Wine and women! They’ve been the downfall of many a better man than you, Silarse, many a better man than you.’

‘Then good luck to ’em, that’s all I can say.’

But terrier dogs and parsons, as my Uncle Silas remarked, have this much in common: once they get their teeth in there’s no shaking them off.

‘Well, I got my chance at last,’ Silas said. ‘One day old Frog-Face come a-botherin’ and a-pesterin’ on me to shoot an old fox what wur a-tekkin’ ’is cockerels.’

He paused and I waited for him to go on; but suddenly he went off down one of his smaller tributaries of recollection.

‘Oh! I forgot to say there wur two on ’em. Curate too. Lived in that there big rectory under them big cedar trees. Gloomy old place. You could drive a carriage and four down the stairs. I jistly forgit the curate’s name, but he wur a lean ’un too. They were a damn good skinny pair. Both on ’em half-cock.’

‘Silarse, I should appreciate it as a very great favour if you’d have a go at this wretched animal. It has eluded both of us and everybody else assigned to it.’

‘Shootin’ foxes? I ain’t very gone on that.’

‘The animal is a poultry maniac. He had six last night, four last Sunday while I was in church.’

‘I ain’t very gone on it.’

‘Another week and we’ll have nothing left, Silarse. I beg you as a very great favour.’

‘I ain’t very gone on it. Besides, Sammy Twizzle’s got my gun.’

‘There will be a quart of beer for you and for Sam too, I can assure you that——’

‘It’ll very like be all-night job. A quart don’t goo far. I generally reckon a barrel for a thing like a fox.’

‘Very well, Silarse, very well. If they are your terms.’

This, as my Uncle Silas pointed out, was something hard to refuse; but before finally agreeing on things he felt that he had, as he said, to point out to the Rev. Frog-Face a serious possibility.

‘The last fox I see shot was over at Joey Tyler’s,’ he said. ‘An’ he come back an’ ’aunted ’im. Makin’ a terrible noise of a night-time. Cruel. Like a lost soul.’

‘I doubt very much,’ the Rev. Frog-Face said, smiling, ‘if foxes have souls.’

‘Don’t you believe it, parson,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘They’re nasty-souled animals, foxes. Especially vixens.’

There are, as no doubt you know, many kinds of foxes.

‘And it wur jist as I thought,’ Silas said, ‘it wur a two-legged ’un. We hadn’t bin a-sittin’ there on the barrel above hour when up come Tunchy Mackness. Carrying a big sack. Well, o’ course, we knowed Tunchy well. Knowed ’im years a-new.’

My Uncle Silas then went on to describe a brief interlude in which he, Sammy Twizzle and Tunchy Mackness sat for half an hour under one of the big cedar trees, working out the night’s arrangements.

‘Well, we wanted to give Tunchy a fair chance,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘so we said to him, “Tunchy, it’s like this ’ere. You tek another half dozen cockerels and nip a couple for us and then give us another barrel and we won’t say a word. But ’ithout you give us the barrel——”’

There was, I thought, a slight flaw in this otherwise profitable arrangement and I said:

‘Eight cockerels while the two of you were on guard?’

‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘we wur a-goin’ to pretend they was two foxes an’ one on ’em took the cockerels while we was a-chasin’ the t’other. Anyway, that don’t matter. Tunchy agreed and about midnight we bunked ’im off ’ome with the cockerels.’

During all this I had detected an unusual change in my Uncle Silas’s behaviour and I was about to remind him of it when he said:

‘Don’t keep chippin’ in all the time. I’m a-tryin’ to recollect summat.’

I said I was sorry; I had only wanted to put right what I felt was an important omission. But he ignored this completely and said:

‘Any road about one o’clock I made a noise like Bedlam and Sammy let the gun off twice in the paddock at the back. About five minutes later old Frog-Face and the curate come a-scorchin’ downstairs and out into the garden in night-caps and night-shirts, a-bawlin’:

‘“Silarse! Silarse! Did you get the villain, Silarse?” Voice like some old yoe a-lambin’ as usual. “Did you get him, Silarse?”’

At this point my Uncle Silas proceeded to address himself to the Rev. Frog-Face in the sternest possible way, wagging an admonishing finger, as if in fact he were present among us.

‘“Parson,” I says to ’im, “they wur two on ’em. That’s why you’ve bin a-losin’ so many. Dog an’ a vixen. Sammy shot the dog out in the field, but the vixen got away! And parson,” I says, “I don’t envy you. I don’t envy you!”’

‘Why, Silarse, why?’

‘They never forgit, vixens. That’s why. They never forgit, especially when they lose a mate, and I’ll be burned if that there vixen won’t come back and ’aunt you.’

Here my Uncle Silas grinned and cocked his eye at me.

‘And what d’ye think old Frog-Face said, eh? “Silarse,” he said, “I haven’t the slightest doubt you’ll burn when the time comes, but that the vixen will come back in supernatural form I cannot believe.” What d’ye think o’ that, eh?’

My Uncle Silas did not pause for an answer and went on:

‘“All right, parson,” I says to ’im, “you can supernatural till the cows come ’ome, but I wouldn’t be in your shoes for two barrels o’ beer. Nor yit three. And as fer dealin’ wi’ that there vixen when she comes back I wouldn’t be here for four!”’

Here he paused most impressively, turning to me with an expression of great seriousness, as if perhaps he had even begun to believe in all this himself.

‘You know what we done?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘We went ’ome,’ he said, with great solemnity, ‘an’ started thinkin’.’

With patience I waited to hear the outcome of this remarkable pursuit and after some moments he said:

‘Upshot on it wur as Sammy got to know a publican over at Thurleigh what had a tame fox in the backyard. Brought it up from a cub. Could do anything. Et out o’ your ’and. Drink ’arf a pint wi’ you if you’d a mind to pay for it. Come like a dog when you whistled.’

At this point I was strongly tempted to ask if it could also sing The Bluebells of Scotland, but I refrained and he said:

‘We ’ad a bit of a job paintin’ on it white, but it didn’t look a-miss when we’d finished it.’

‘I believe you will burn,’ I said under my breath, but he didn’t hear me and went on:

‘An’ it wadn’t long afore we got ’im up to old Frog-Face’s. They was a big lawn in front of the ’ouse, with these ’ere big cedar trees both sides. So Sammy sat one side o’ the lawn and me the t’other. I’d got the fox. Then I started a-howlin’ and a-wailin’ like a good ’un. It were jist nice an’ dark at the time.’

Here, for the second time, he paused to draw a picture of the Rev. Frog-Face and his curate scorching into the garden in night-caps and night-shirts.

‘That wur the signal,’ he said. ‘Sammy give a low whistle and I let the fox goo. God A’mighty, we’d got it trained so well I thought it were gooin’ to run up their damn night-shirts—it went that close, boy.’

He whacked his hand down on his corduroyed knee several times, his cheeks wagging with laughter.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we done that fer about six nights. Not reg’lar, o’ course. But jist often enough t’aggravate ’em to death.’

‘Upshot?’ I said.

‘Upshot wur,’ he said solemnly, ‘as I ’ad a visit from Frog-Face. He were in a terrible bad state. Nerves like frog-spawn. All of a-totter an’ a-quiver. Curate couldn’t come, poor feller. He were bad a-bed and wuss up.’

He licked his lips with great satisfaction and again I was reminded of what seemed to be a change in his habits, but he gave me no time to discuss it and said:

‘Begged on me to shoot it. Went down on his knees an’ begged on me. Begged on me—they wur damn near tears in his eyes. “Silarse,” he said, “Silarse—I beseech you. Rid us of this gharstly visitation.” Well, I couldn’t very well say no, could I?——’

‘Four barrels?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said blandly. ‘No. We didn’t want to be too ’ard on ’im. We didn’t want to be too ’ard. We didn’t want to be greedy. We settled fer three barrels—arter all, it took three nights to git rid o’ the damn ghost—and twothri pipes o’ bacca. And that wur cheap at the price.’

He paused again and gave a slight diabolical start of one eye, remembering something.

‘Oh! yis, and we got ’arf a sovereign for the brush.’

‘For the what?’

‘Jist shows you what born fools parsons are,’ he said. ‘On’y ’arf-sharp, that curate. Wuss’n Frog-Face. ’Adn’t got twopennorth o’ split peas in ’is ’ead.’

‘I think I smell burning,’ I said, under my breath, but his ears were quick and he said:

‘Wad are you a-mutterin’ about? What was you a-goin’ to say to me jist now?’

Then I remembered the omission, the change in his habits, and what I thought was his odd behaviour throughout the telling of the tale.

‘You haven’t had a drop of wine all evening,’ I said.

He looked up at me with gloom.

‘I know, boy,’ he said. ‘We’ve tasted the last on it. The parsnip won’t be ready fer a fortnit.’

‘“Give us the little foxes,”’ I said,—‘What time does The Swan with Two Nicks close?’

He whipped out his watch from his waistcoat with the alacrity of a man about to start a race between two horses.

‘You’ll jist be in time, boy,’ he said. ‘You’ll jist be in time!’

‘Shall I bring a barrel?’

He leapt up, sprightly as a young hound.

‘I’ll come wi’ you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’ll never lift it. There’s a knack wi’ barrels. You got to know the knack. They ain’t many know the knack——’

I took his arm.

‘Except,’ I said, ‘the two-legged foxes.’

The Double Thumb

I have so often described my Uncle Silas as a wicked old reprobate of a liar with a bloodshot eye and a strawberry nose who ate too much and drank too much and worked too little that I sometimes wonder if there is not some other feature about him that would, perhaps, bring him more freshly to mind.

Pondering on this, I can think of nothing more striking than his double thumb.

This thumb was his left one and it had something of the appearance of the leg bone of a chicken flattened out at the end. It was very horny, very rough and just about double the size of an ordinary thumb. The nail was double too, with just a suggestion of a heart-shaped appearance about it, and very thick and crusty, like an oyster shell.

When I was a little boy my Uncle Silas used to let me hold this thumb in my hand and I used to marvel at it, with its oyster-shell roughness and its wonderful size, greatly.

‘Was it like that,’ I asked him once, ‘when you were born?’

‘When I wur what?’ he said, rather as if a common circumstance like birth had never happened to him or had happened so long ago that, at the age of ninety, he scorned to remember it. ‘Born with it? That there thumb wur a accident. A terrible bad accident. I were nearly killed.’

‘Killed?’ I asked him. ‘How?’ and I was quite horrified.

‘That there thumb,’ he said, holding it up and giving a look of solemn beery innocence over the top of it, ‘saved me life. If it hadn’t of been for that there thumb——’

Breaking off, he shook his head sadly, as if the mere awful memory of it were too much to bear.

‘When was that?’ I started to ask him, but he cut me short and said:

‘You hold hard a minute. Don’t be in sich a plaguin’ ’urry. You hold hard while I recollect it.’

You had to be very patient while my Uncle Silas recollected things. His way of recollecting things was to cock his bloodshot eye on the distances, take a pinch of snuff or two, blow his nose like a foghorn on a vast red handkerchief and gradually let fall slow, ripe, rich crumbs of detail. As a boy I used sometimes to feel as if he were really making up the stories as he went along: a feeling that, as it now turns out, was a perfectly correct one.

‘I wur doin’ a bit o’ paper ’anging at the time,’ he said.

My Uncle Silas had tried such a variety of jobs in his long life, from thatching to grave-digging, that I was not at all surprised about the paper-hanging.

‘Up at the mansion,’ he said. ‘Right up the top of the house. Beautiful view up there. All over the river and the park.’

He was going on to tell me how in those days they had hundreds of deer in the park and thousands of pike as big as hippopotamuses in the river when I thought it time to remind him about the thumb.

‘Don’t be in sich a plaguin’ ’urry,’ he said. ‘I’m a comin’ to that as fast as a nag with a pincushion stuck in its behind.’

It took him in fact all of another hour to come to the business of the thumb, but meanwhile he said:

‘Well, there I wur a-doing this paper ’anging, pleasant as you like, no hurry and nobody a-botherin’ on me. And she a-bringing me a lump of apple turnover and a jug o’ beer whenever she could git away upstairs.’

‘She?’

‘Under-cook,’ he said. ‘Nice little gal. Plump as a pigeon. Named Lizzie. Very bright brown eyes. Very bright and round. Just like a pigeon.’

He blew snuff from his nose with the big red handkerchief.

‘Oh! married, mind y’. Married to a groom named Walt Thomas. Narrer man though. Terrible narrer.’

‘And she brought you apple turnover?’

‘Ah,’ he said and he started to lick his wettish thick red lips in recollection.

‘Very nice apple turnover?’

‘Very nice,’ he said.

‘With cloves in?’

‘With cloves in,’ he said, ‘and a mite o’ cheese, and them apples as turn pink when they’re done.’

I could not help thinking how very pleasant it must have been to be paper hanging in such delightful circumstances, with a nice plump little pigeon bringing you apple turnover and jugs of beer and such a nice view over the river and the park. But I am, as I was then, an inquisitive person by nature and I said:

‘When did she used to bring the apple turnover?’

‘Well, it all depended,’ he said. ‘Sometimes she’d nip up of a morning. And sometimes she’d nip up of a evening.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘and what about the thumb?’

‘’Course she wadn’t supposed to,’ he said and I knew the thumb was still a long way away, ‘but she were a very kind-hearted gal. Very kind-hearted. Couldn’t bear to see nobody suffer.’

I could not swallow at all the notion of my Uncle Silas suffering, especially in these pleasant circumstances of the apple turnover, the beer, the nice view over the river and the park, and the little pigeon, and as if guessing this he said:

‘Well, I mean she couldn’t bear to think on me up there all alone. It wur ’nation lonely up there at times. I used to git oncommon sorry for meself.’

He shook his head so sadly that I felt uncommonly sorry for him too.

‘It wur a big drop out o’ them winders too,’ he said. ‘Fifty feet. Perhaps ’undred.’

I could not think why he suddenly introduced the height of the windows in this melancholy fashion and I said:

‘Is that how you hurt your thumb? Falling out of the window?’

‘She come up,’ he said, ‘one evening in late September. I wur papering a box bedroom at the time and I wur havin’ a bit of a up-and-a-downer with the paper.’

I was already thinking of asking him if it had been very nice paper when he said:

‘Big baskets of roses all over it. Blue ’uns and red ’uns. It wur very tricky, that paper. You’d got to git the blue ’uns matchin’ the blue ’uns and the red ’uns matchin’ the red ’uns and what it wanted wur really two pair of ’ands.’

‘So she helped you?’

‘You’re gittin’ to be a very fly boy,’ he said. ‘Very fly.’

He blew his nose on the big red handkerchief again, cocked his eye on the distance with that particular ripe, virtuous leer of his and said:

‘Ah! She wur kind-hearted enough to give me hand with the paper.’

‘And did you get on much better then?’

‘Got on,’ he said, ‘like house a-fire. One minute she’d be up the steps holding the top o’ the paper and I’d be down the steps holding the bottom o’ the paper. Course we got tangled in the trellis work a bit——’

‘I thought you said big baskets?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘when I come to recollect a bit clearer it wur trellis work. A lot o’ very tricky trellis work. Well, by the time we’d got tangled up in this trellis work a time or two and I’d had a sup o’ beer and a bite o’ turnover and she’d had a sup o’ beer and a bite o’ turnover an we’d untangled weselves it started to git dark all of a pop——’

He suddenly paused, as he often did at the most interesting part of a story, and looked at me with positive sternness.

‘I don’t want you goin’ clackin’ all over the shop if I tell you this,’ he said. ‘It were a terrible serious matter.’

‘The dark?’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the dark.’

I could not think of any possible reason for the dark being such a terribly serious matter and again he fixed on me an eye of positive, almost reproving sternness as I asked him why.

‘Because,’ he said, ‘we wur in it. Me an’ ’er.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘Yis, me an’ ’er. The little pigeon. There we wur—trapped in the trellis work—in the dark—and ’im a-bawling upstairs.’

‘Him?’

‘The groom. The narrer man I told you about it. Bawlin’ his head off, a-shoutin’ “Lizzie! Lizzie!” and askin’ where th’ Hanover she’d got to. And there she wur all of a tremble and me tryin’ to calm her down and she a-wonderin’ what he’d say when he found her there.’

‘You could have told him,’ I said, ‘that you’d got tangled in the trellis work.’

‘And me a-wondering too,’ he said. ‘And him a-bawlin’ and her a-tremblin’ and me a-wonderin’ and him a-bangin’ on all the bedroom doors.’

‘Did he bang on the door of the boxroom?’

‘Like a damn cannon ball!’ he said.

‘And what,’ I said, ‘did you do?’

‘Hopped out o’ the winder,’ he said, ‘oncommon quick.’

There crossed my mind, for a sickening second or two, the dreadful impression of my Uncle Silas not only hopping out of the window but falling for fifty, perhaps a hundred feet below.

Then he held up his double thumb.

‘Jist got out o’ the window and hangin’ on like grim death outside when the sash fell down.’

With sickening nausea I looked at the horny, flattened, misshapen thumb, unable to say a word. With ghastliness I saw my Uncle Silas dangling there, trapped and saved by one excruciating piece of flesh.

‘Did it,’ I said at last, ‘hurt very much?’

‘Onaccountable,’ was all he said, ‘onaccountable.’

And then, to my very great surprise, there passed over his face a smile of remarkably enraptured cunning, as if he were remembering with great pleasure something other than his pain.

‘But wuth it,’ he said. ‘Well wuth it, boy.’

As if tasting the remnants of something delicious he passed his tongue across his lips and I could only think that he was recollecting the pleasures of the beer, the apple turnover and the cheese.

‘Damnit,’ he said with sudden ripe enthusiasm, ‘I’d a-gone back and let the winder fall down on me other thumb!’

‘And why,’ I said, ‘didn’t you?’

For a moment my Uncle Silas did not answer. Then finally he gave me a long, virtuous, solemn and reproving stare.

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘I think it’s about time for you to git home for your supper and me to git back home for a mouthful o’ wine. You’re a-gittin’ too fly by half, boy. You’re a-startin’ to ask a sight too many questions.’

Aunt Tibby

Very few people ever got the better of my Uncle Silas, whether it was in the business of eating and drinking, fishing or poaching, women or prize parsnips, and about the only person ever to do so was my Aunt Tibby.

I have never quite understood what the name Tibby stood for, but my aunt, who comes from the opposite branch of the family from my Uncle Silas, that is to say the Rivers branch, and an exceptionally proud, sharp branch it is, was a very remarkable woman. She not only out-did my Uncle Silas; she actually outlived him by a year.

For the better part of forty years my Aunt Tibby kept an extremely comfortable, cosy, spotless little public-house called The Haymakers on the borders of Bedfordshire. This pub had something of the appearance of an elongated bee-hive. Its walls of white plaster were most pleasantly roofed with a thick brown nest of thatch that curved up and over five little leaded dormer windows. Downstairs the same number of casement windows, each heavy with trim white lace curtains, looked over a garden crowded in summer with orange marigolds, rambler roses, white madonna lilies and huge scarlet and yellow dahlias that lay among their lush dark leaves like splendid fruit tarts fresh from Aunt Tibby’s baking.

For my Aunt Tibby, among a great many virtues, some of which were daunting, not to say formidable, others of which were enchanting, was a remarkable cook. Her raised game pies, prepared for the great shoots of Victorian winter-times, were famous. Her hot Irish stew, always ready for hunting men when they came in half-frozen from scathing mid-winter meets, was so excellent that the receipt for it can be found in a volume of English native dishes under the title of Mrs. River’s Hunting Irish Stew, 1885.

She was also renowned for several other excellent dishes, notable among them Yorkshire pudding, cheese cakes, eel pie and chicken pudding, but among the most singular of her triumphs was her way with mashed potatoes. No one has ever really been near to gastronomic heaven unless he has tasted my Aunt Tibby’s mashed potatoes. Smooth, white and airy as swansdown, served with glorious parsley butter, they remain in my mind with the same exquisite pleasure as the pure high white clouds of a childhood summer’s day.

My Aunt Tibby was very justly proud and jealous of The Haymakers, with its floors scrubbed as clean and white as bone, its parlour cool in summer and snug as a moleskin in winter, its hunting and shooting patronage, and its impeccable standards of country food and drink and comfort, in which the most discriminating of the aristocracy, yeomanry and squirearchy could find absolute satisfaction. And there could never be, in consequence, as my Uncle Silas discovered, any monkey business at The Haymakers.

Looking back, I see that I have described my Aunt Tibby’s pub, garden, food and drink without having described my Aunt Tibby herself. In some ways this is rather difficult; in another way, not. For in many ways my Aunt Tibby was, strangely enough, not at all unlike an Uncle Silas in skirts.

I do not at all mean to suggest by this that she was a misshapen old female rapscallion who ate too much, drank too much, told too many lies or was fond of slap and tickle in the bar. She was in every way above reproach in these things. I simply mean that she gave the same impression of many-sidedness, craftiness, wisdom and that deep native cunning that was his charm. I simply wish to convey that she was, like him, a very deep one indeed.

She was a fairly tall woman, angular, long-armed and rather iron-clad about the bust. I cannot remember ever having seen her in anything but black. Her hair was black too and was invariably scraped up into a kind of big oval pincushion on the top of her head. Her dresses always had high lace collars, boned at the side, and the only luxury in the way of ornament that she ever permitted herself was a round silver brooch at her neck.

You might well expect from this that her face would be one of exceptional pallor, high resolve and severity. In fact it was a very deceptive face. It was, in the first place, very red. It flamed with myriads of tiny tangled crimson veins and its mouth was sharp and thin. Its deception lay in the fact that because of its redness you expected it to be jolly and because of the thinness of its mouth you expected it to be severe.

The truth was that it was both severe and jolly. The mouth appeared to be full of the sternest unspoken reprimands. It was only when you looked at the bright clear blue eyes that you saw that they were almost constantly laughing. Then you saw that all the myriad crimson wrinkles of her face seemed to be laughing too. And sometimes, to your great astonishment, she suddenly winked at you.

I must here remove what I feel may be one further mistaken impression about her. She was not abstemious. Like my Uncle Silas she very much liked a tot of this or that. She was very partial to a drop of whisky. Under the iron-clad bust she was ripe and warm. She took a drink with her customers and liked a joke at the bar.

But she was also a disciplinarian and what she would never permit, as my Uncle Silas discovered, was any monkey business. She always insisted, for instance, that her barmaids were well-spoken, clean, good to look at and well behaved.

‘I like a girl with pride about her,’ she would say. ‘I’ll have no sluts here. I like my girls to be looked at, but they’ll behave themselves or they’ll know the reason why.’

My Uncle Silas was never a very frequent visitor to The Haymakers, and after the end of the eighteen-nineties, in fact, he ceased to be a visitor at all.

Why he ceased to be a visitor was one of those things which, for reasons best known to himself, he did not choose to tell me. My Aunt Tibby told me instead.

‘About that time I had a very pretty little maid named Thirza,’ she said. ‘Rather an unusual name, but then she was an unusual girl. Came from a very nice family, four boys and three girls, all the girls very dark and very nice looking. Thirza was the eldest. Dark glossy hair, dark eyes, very nice little figure and very capable hands.’

The reason for my Aunt Tibby’s mention of the hands was because, as she explained, the girl was a very capable cook.

‘You get girls that are good behind the bar and nice to the gentlemen and so on,’ my Aunt Tibby said to me, ‘but cooking they can’t abide. But Thirza wasn’t only good behind the bar and nice to the gentlemen. She could cook. She wanted to cook. She wanted to learn.’

‘A treasure.’

‘A treasure,’ my aunt said. ‘Worth her weight in gold. Quick as a little linnet. In fact that’s what she looked like—quick and bright as a linnet and just about as nice as could be. I wouldn’t have lost her for the world.’

Another remarkable thing about the girl, my Aunt Tibby said, was the speed with which she would pick up things, and soon my aunt was teaching her to make the famous raised game pies, the Mrs. River’s Hunting Irish Stew, the eel pie, the chicken pudding, the cheese cakes and all the rest.

‘And then one day,’ she said, ‘I think it would be the latter part of the summer of ’98, I’ll be burned if your Uncle Silas didn’t drop in one evening.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Not immediately,’ she said. ‘You know Silas. He thinks about women a lot, but he thinks of his belly first. I knew what he was after. He wanted to gorge himself on home-brewed and game pie. I used to keep a fair drop of home-brewed in those days. It came from the farm up the hill and it was very powerful.’

‘Game pie in the summer?’

She stared at me very severely.

‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, ‘how often pheasants break their necks on telegraph wires.’

And I could have sworn she winked at me.

‘Well, he stayed quite a while that night,’ she said, ‘gorging himself on cold pie and home-brewed and generally getting sauced up, but it wasn’t until he was nearly ready to go home that he caught sight of Thirza. She’d been in the kitchen all afternoon and evening, getting things ready for a big fishing party we had next day.’

I asked her how my Uncle Silas had reacted to his first meeting with this delightful creature.

‘Uncommon quiet,’ she said. ‘Too quiet. I didn’t like it at all.’

She went on to say something about still waters running deep and it was on the tip of my tongue to make a poorish pun about still Rivers running deep too when she said:

‘He was back next day.’

‘More game pie?’

‘And he was back the next,’ she said. ‘And the next. And the next. The reprobate. The old rascal.’

‘You must have been getting very short of pheasants by this time,’ I said, and she gave me one of her sharpest, severest looks.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think you’re a chip off the old block. You’ve got that same artful, mischievous look in your eye.’

I accepted this flattering comparison with my Uncle Silas in silence.

‘On the fourth visit,’ she said, ‘I caught him pinching her.’

‘Fourth visit?’ I said. ‘Not only uncommonly quiet. But uncommonly slow.’

‘I caught her sitting on his lap in the cellar,’ she said, ‘and him sitting on a barrel of home-brewed. Very merry and bright and saying he was going to marry the girl.’

‘Marry the girl?’ I said and I started to say something about how remarkably well my Uncle Silas must have been enjoying himself when she became very severe again.

‘I could see myself losing a very, very good girl,’ she said. ‘One way or another.’

I did not suggest that if I knew my Uncle Silas I knew which way that would be. I merely asked what sort of shindy she’d kicked up about operations in the cellar and how soon she’d got somebody to throw him out of the pub.

She was most affronted.

‘Somebody?’ she said. ‘I can throw them out myself when the time comes, thank you! There’s never been one I couldn’t throw out yet.’

And she gave me one of those half-stern, half-winking looks that were part of her formidable, baffling charm.

‘No: I didn’t throw him out,’ she said. ‘I invited him back the next Sunday.’

‘More game pie?’

‘“Silas,” I said to him, “if you’re going to marry the girl you’d better taste her cooking. You can’t marry a girl without tasting her cooking. Your belly knows better than that. Come back on Sunday and Thirza shall cook you a pie.”’

My Aunt Tibby went on to tell me how my Uncle Silas, proud and strutting as a peacock, came back the following Sunday; how she filled him up with all the home-brewed he wanted; and how at last, in the evening, she had him sitting down in the parlour, waiting for his pie.

‘“Made and baked by Thirza,” I said to him when I put it down. “That’ll show you whether she can cook or not.”’

It was, it seemed, a very large and handsome pie.

‘Pheasant?’ I said.

‘Well, it was very rich,’ she said. ‘I’ll say that. And so was Silas’s face when he took the top off.’

She regarded me for a moment with that almost prim sternness of hers, without the flicker of a smile.

‘I justly forget,’ she said, ‘whether it had four toads and eight frogs in it or four frogs and eight toads. Or whether it was three live eels and two slow worms or——’

Suddenly she broke off and lowered the lid of her left eye with crafty swiftness, giving a pained sigh that reminded me so much of my Uncle Silas when the tales were tallest and the burden of telling the truth was too much to bear.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that was many years before your time.’

The Little Fishes

My Uncle Silas was very fond of fishing. It was an occupation that helped to keep him from thinking too much about work and also about how terribly hard it was.

If you went through the bottom of my Uncle Silas’s garden, past the gooseberry bushes, the rhubarb and the pig-sties, you came to a path that went alongside a wood where primroses grew so richly in spring that they blotted out the floor of oak and hazel leaves. In summer wild strawberries followed the primroses and by July the meadows beyond the wood were frothy with meadowsweet, red clover and the seed of tall soft grasses.

At the end of the second meadow a little river, narrow in parts and bellying out into black deep pools in others, ran along between willows and alders, occasional clumps of dark high reeds and a few wild crab trees. Some of the pools, in July, would be white with water lilies, and snakes would swim across the light flat leaves in the sun. Moorhens talked to each other behind the reeds and water rats would plop suddenly out of sight under clumps of yellow monkey flower.

Here in this little river, my Uncle Silas used to tell me when I was a boy, ‘the damn pike used to be as big as hippopottomassiz.’

‘Course they ain’t so big now,’ he would say. ‘Nor yit the tench. Nor yit the perch. Nor yit the——’

‘Why aren’t they so big?’

‘Well, I’m a-talkin’ about fifty years agoo. Sixty year agoo. Very near seventy years agoo.’

‘If they were so big then,’ I said, ‘all that time ago, they ought to be even bigger now.’

‘Not the ones we catched,’ he said. ‘They ain’t there.’

You couldn’t, as you see from this, fox my Uncle Silas very easily, but I was at all times a very inquisitive, persistent little boy.

‘How big were the tench?’ I said.

‘Well, I shall allus recollect one as me and Sammy Twizzle caught,’ he said. ‘Had to lay it in a pig trough to carry it home.’

‘And how big were the perch?’

‘Well,’ he said, rolling his eye in recollection, in that way he had of bringing the wrinkled lid slowly down over it, very like a fish ancient in craftiness himself, ‘I don’ know as I can jistly recollect the size o’ that one me and Arth Sugars nipped out of a September morning one time. But I do know as I cleaned up the back fin and used it for horse comb for about twenty year.’

‘Oh! Uncle Silas,’ I would say, ‘let’s go fishing! Let’s go and see if they’re still as big as hippopottomassiz!’

But it was not always easy, once my Uncle Silas had settled under the trees at the end of the garden on a hot July afternoon, to persuade him that it was worth walking across two meadows just to see if the fish were as big as they used to be. Nevertheless I was, as I say, a very inquisitive, persistent little boy and finally my Uncle Silas would roll over, take the red handkerchief off his face and grunt:

‘If you ain’t the biggest whittle-breeches I ever knowed I’ll goo t’Hanover. Goo an’ git the rod and bring a bit o’ dough. They’ll be no peace until you do, will they?’

‘Shall I bring the rod for you too?’

‘Rod?’ he said. ‘For me. Rod?’ He let fall over his eye a tremulous bleary fish-like lid of scorn. ‘When me and Sammy Twizzle went a-fishin, all we had to catch ’em with wur we bare hands and a drop o’ neck-oil.’

‘What’s neck-oil?’

‘Never you mind,’ he said. ‘You git the rod and I’ll git the neck-oil.’

And presently we would be walking out of the garden, past the wood and across the meadows, I carrying the rod, the dough and perhaps a piece of caraway cake in a paper bag, my Uncle Silas waddling along in his stony-coloured corduroy trousers, carrying the neck-oil.

Sometimes I would be very inquisitive about the neck-oil, which was often pale greenish-yellow, rather the colour of cowslip, or perhaps of parsnips, and sometimes purplish-red, rather the colour of elderberries, or perhaps of blackberries or plums.

On one occasion I noticed that the neck-oil was very light in colour, almost white, or perhaps more accurately like straw-coloured water.

‘Is it a new sort of neck-oil you’ve got?’ I said.

‘New flavour.’

‘What is it made of?’

‘Taters.’

‘And you’ve got two bottles today,’ I said.

‘Must try to git used to the new flavour.’

‘And do you think,’ I said, ‘we shall catch a bigger fish now that you’ve got a new kind of neck-oil?’

‘Shouldn’t be a bit surprised, boy,’ he said, ‘if we don’t git one as big as a donkey.’

That afternoon it was very hot and still as we sat under the shade of a big willow, by the side of a pool that seemed to have across it an oiled black skin broken only by minutest winks of sunlight when the leaves of the willow parted softly in gentle turns of air.

‘This is the place where me and Sammy tickled that big ’un out,’ my Uncle Silas said.

‘The one you carried home in a pig trough?’

‘That’s the one.’

I said how much I too should like to catch one I could take home in a pig trough and my Uncle Silas said:

‘Well, you never will if you keep whittlin’ and talkin’ and ompolodgin’ about.’ My Uncle Silas was the only man in the world who ever used the word ompolodgin’. It was a very expressive word and when my Uncle Silas accused you of ompolodgin’ it was a very serious matter. It meant that you had buttons on your bottom and if you didn’t drop it he would damn well ding your ear. ‘You gotta sit still and wait and not keep fidgetin’ and very like in another half-hour you’ll see a big ’un layin’ aside o’ that log. But not if you keep ompolodgin’! See?’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘That’s why I bring the neck-oil,’ he said. ‘It quiets you down so’s you ain’t a-whittlin’ and a-ompolodgin’ all the time.’

‘Can I have a drop of neck-oil?’

‘When you git thirsty,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘there’s that there spring in the next medder.’

After this my Uncle Silas took a good steady drink of neck-oil and settled down with his back against the tree. I put a big lump of paste on my hook and dropped it into the pool. The only fish I could see in the pool were shoals of little silver tiddlers that flickered about a huge fallen willow log a yard or two upstream or came to play inquisitively about my little white and scarlet float, making it quiver up and down like the trembling scraps of sunlight across the water.

Sometimes the bread paste got too wet and slipped from the hook and I quietly lifted the rod from the water and put another lump on the hook. I tried almost not to breathe as I did all this and every time I took the rod out of the water I glanced furtively at my Uncle Silas to see if he thought I was ompolodgin’.

Every time I looked at him I could see that he evidently didn’t think so. He was always far too busy with the neck-oil.

I suppose we must have sat there for nearly two hours on that hot windless afternoon of July, I not speaking a word and trying not to breathe as I threw my little float across the water, my Uncle Silas never uttering a sound either except for a drowsy grunt or two as he uncorked one bottle of neck-oil or felt to see if the other was safe in his jacket pocket.

All that time there was no sign of a fish as big as a hippopotamus or even of one you could take home in a pig trough and all the time my Uncle Silas kept tasting the flavour of the neck-oil, until at last his head began to fall forward on his chest. Soon all my bread paste was gone and I got so afraid of disturbing my Uncle Silas that I scotched my rod to the fallen log and walked into the next meadow to get myself a drink of water from the spring.

The water was icy cold from the spring and very sweet and good and I wished I had brought myself a bottle too, so that I could fill it and sit back against a tree, as my Uncle Silas did, and pretend that it was neck-oil.

Ten minutes later, when I got back to the pool, my Uncle Silas was fast asleep by the tree trunk, one bottle empty by his side and the other still in his jacket pocket. There was, I thought, a remarkable expression on his face, a wonderful rosy fogginess about his mouth and nose and eyes.

But what I saw in the pool, as I went to pick my rod from the water, was a still more wonderful thing.

During the afternoon the sun had moved some way round and under the branches of the willow, so that now, at the first touch of evening, there were clear bands of pure yellow light across the pool.

In one of these bands of light, by the fallen log, lay a long lean fish, motionless as a bar of steel, just under the water, basking in the evening sun.

When I woke my Uncle Silas he came to himself with a fumbling start, red eyes only half open, and I thought for a moment that perhaps he would ding my ear for ompolodgin’.

‘But it’s as big as a hippopotamus,’ I said. ‘It’s as big as the one in the pig trough.’

‘Wheer, boy? Wheer?’

When I pointed out the fish, my Uncle Silas could not, at first, see it lying there by the log. But after another nip of neck-oil he started to focus it correctly.

‘By Jingo, that’s a big ’un,’ he said. ‘By Jingo, that’s a walloper.’

‘What sort is it?’

‘Pike,’ he said. ‘Git me a big lump o’ paste and I’ll dangle it a-top of his nose.’

‘The paste has all gone.’

‘Then give us a bit o’ caraway and we’ll tiddle him up wi’ that.’

‘I’ve eaten all the caraway,’ I said. ‘Besides, you said you and Sammy Twizzle used to catch them with your hands. You said you used to tickle their bellies——’

‘Well, that wur——’

‘Get him! Get him! Get him!’ I said. ‘He’s as big as a donkey!’

Slowly, and with what I thought was some reluctance, my Uncle Silas heaved himself to his feet. He lifted the bottle from his pocket and took a sip of neck-oil. Then he slapped the cork back with the palm of his hand, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and put the bottle back in his pocket.

‘Now you stan’ back,’ he said, ‘and dammit, don’t git ompolodgin’!’

I stood back. My Uncle Silas started to creep along the fallen willow-log on his hands and knees. Below him, in the band of sunlight, I could see the long dark lean pike, basking.

For nearly two minutes my Uncle Silas hovered on the end of the log. Then slowly he balanced himself on one hand and dipped his other into the water. Over the pool it was marvellously, breathlessly still and I knew suddenly that this was how it had been in the good great old days, when my Uncle Silas and Sammy Twizzle had caught the mythical mammoth ones, fifty years before.

‘God A’mighty!’ my Uncle Silas suddenly yelled. ‘I’m a-gooin’ over!’

My Uncle Silas was indeed gooin’ over. Slowly, like a turning spit, the log started heeling, leaving my Uncle Silas half-slipping, half-dancing at its edge, like a man on a greasy pole.

In terror I shut my eyes. When I opened them and looked again my Uncle Silas was just coming up for air, yelling ‘God A’mighty, boy, I believe you ompolodged!’

I thought for a moment he was going to be very angry with me. Instead he started to cackle with crafty, devilish, stentorian laughter, his wet lips dribbling, his eyes more fiery than ever under the dripping water, his right hand triumphant as he snatched it up from the stream.

‘Jist managed to catch it, boy,’ he yelled, and in triumph he held up the bottle of neck-oil.

And somewhere downstream, startled by his shout, a whole host of little tiddlers jumped from the water, dancing in the evening sun.

The Widder

On a day in early July my Uncle Silas and I harnessed the little brown and cream pony—the one that could take lumps of sugar off the top of your head—and put her in the trap and drove over the borders of Huntingdonshire, where a lady named Gadsby had a long rambling orchard, mostly of apples but also a few old tall pears, surrounded by decaying stone walls on the top of which bright yellow stone-crop lay like plates of gold.

‘Is she an old lady?’ I said, ‘Mrs. Gadsby?’

‘Well, she ain’t old,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘and she ain’t young. She’s a widder.’

Even though I was very small I knew quite well what widows were. Most of the widows I knew lived in alms-houses. They were either very portly and jolly or they were very thin and vinegary, with thousands of little cracks all over their shiny porcelain faces, just like old cups. All of them dressed in black and most of them wore little lace caps exactly like Queen Victoria’s, with black squeaky button shoes. Most of them suffered from asthma, rheumatics, arthritis or something equally crippling and a few of them actually walked with a stick and sometimes even two.

‘Does Mrs. Gadsby walk with a stick?’ I said.

‘Well, I ain’t seed her wi’ one,’ my Uncle Silas said.

‘Those old ladies in the almshouses walk with sticks,’ I said, ‘and they’re widows.’

‘Well, there’s widders and widders,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘just the same as there’s apples and apples. Some are a sight different from others.’

‘How do you tell the difference?’

‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said after some interval of thought, during which he spat twice over the side of the trap in a long swift streak that went straight over the hedgerow, ‘if you wur a-goin’ to tell whether a apple wur a sweet ’un or a sour ’un what would you do?’

‘Taste it.’

‘That’s jist what you do wi’ widders,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Gittup there!’

As he said this he flicked the reins over the pony’s back and we started to roll along at a smart pace between little spinneys of ash and hazel and high dusty hedgerows covered with pink wild roses and dykes smothered with meadowsweet and willow-herb. The day was hot and sunny and in the meadows, over the cow pancakes, there were brown sizzling crowds of flies.

Presently my Uncle Silas spat again and said something about ‘gittin’ a cravin’ for summat to wash the dust down’ and I thought this was a good opportunity for me to spit too. I wanted very much to spit like my Uncle Silas, in that fantastic way that went as straight as a white bow-shot for five or six yards, but most of mine landed on the mudguard of the trap and the rest down my shirt.

My Uncle Silas was very angry.

‘Now don’t you git a-spittin’ again like that,’ he said, ‘else I’ll ding your ear. This lady we’re a-going to see don’t like little boys what spit. See?’

I said I did see and he went on:

‘Now jist you mind your manners when we git there. And another thing. When I ask you to make y’self scarce you make y’self scarce. This lady don’t like little boys what keep a-peering and a-peeping and a-popping up all over the place when folks are talkin’. See?’

‘Yes, Uncle.’

‘All right then. See as you do,’ he said. ‘Dammit, gittup there! We ain’t got all day.’

I was so used to seeing my Uncle Silas with a pleasant, beery, winking look on his face that I was quite upset to see him shocked and angry. For the rest of the journey I sat quite silent, sorry I had offended him and determined to behave as well as I could when we got there.

Not long later we came to within sight of the orchard, with its stone walls and yellow stone-crop and the square stone house standing between. It looked a very pleasant house, with beds of white and purple stocks outside and big white trees of orange blossom about the door, and I said:

‘It looks a very nice house. What are we going for?’

‘We’re a-goin’ to taste the widder’s apples,’ my Uncle Silas said.

I suppose it must have occurred to me that apples in early July are not quite ready for tasting, but I said nothing, determined to be on my best behaviour, and soon my Uncle Silas was knocking on the door of the house, opening it and calling inside:

‘You there, Miss’ Gadsby? Anybody at home?’

At first I thought there was nobody at home. There was no answer from the house, even when my Uncle Silas called a second and then a third time.

Then somebody laughed from the direction of the orchard. I turned to look and there, coming up from under the big ancient apple trees, carrying a basket of raspberries in one hand and a basket of fat shining red and white currants in the other, was the widow.

She was not dressed in black, as other widows were. Nor was she wearing a cap like Queen Victoria’s, nor squeaky shoes. She was not walking with sticks and her face was not like an old cracked cup, shiny and full of wrinkles.

She was wearing a white blouse with pretty leg-of-mutton sleeves, a dark blue skirt and a belt of black patent leather. Her skin was very creamy and her eyes, which were wide and bright, shone gaily with greenish fires. In her ears were rather big dangling earrings, also black, made of jet, and every time she laughed, which she did a great deal, they trembled, swinging up and down.

But the most wonderful thing about her was not the earrings, the green eyes, the leg-of-mutton sleeves or the gay fruity way she had of laughing. It was her hair, piled up high on top of her head like a bright red-gold crusty loaf all fresh and twisted from the baker’s.

She reminded me so much of women I saw at fairs, holding rifles at shooting galleries or spitting on their hands as they pulled at skeins of peppermint rock, that I at once became very shy, remembering my Uncle Silas’s anger at my spitting.

‘Well, come inside, dear. Come inside. Come and take the load off your feet. And who is this fine big young man?’

‘Lizzie’s boy.’

‘Well, well, how are you, dear? Come inside. Do you like raspberries? Come inside.’

Soon we were inside the house, in a pleasant room full of mahogany tables and easy chairs and white china dogs on the mantelpiece, with my Uncle Silas not only taking the load off his feet but washing the dust down with a glass of greenish-yellow wine.

‘Very nice mouthful o’ cowslip,’ he said several times.

‘It should be, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s the five-year-old.’

‘I ain’t so sure,’ my Uncle Silas said, holding the glass up to the light, ‘as it ain’t a shade better ’n the eldenberry.’

‘Oh! no, oh! no,’ she said. ‘You think so, dear? The elderberry’s only the year before last, dear. It’s not ready.’

‘You can never tell if anythinks ready,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘until you taste on it.’

She laughed a great deal at that, in her wonderfully gay, rich fashion, her red hair seeming half to topple off her head like an over-sized loaf and the black earrings dancing, and soon she and my Uncle Silas were tasting the elderberry wine.

It was very difficult, as I could see, to decide whether the elderberry wine was better than the cowslip, or the other way round, and my Uncle Silas tasted several glasses while making up his mind. Rolling the wines round his tongue, cocking his eyes about the room, his cheeks growing steadily more and more like the flaring gills of an ancient turkey cock, he gradually took on a great air of ripe, saucy charm.

‘Another piece of caraway cake, dear?’

While my Uncle Silas and the widow were drinking wine and eating caraway cake I was eating caraway cake and raspberries. The caraway cake was very buttery and very good and my Uncle Silas took another thick fresh slice of it.

‘How do you find the cake, dear?’

‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘I’ll tell you. In one way it’s proper more-ish. And in another way it ain’t.’

‘Oh?’ she said, and I thought she seemed a little shocked to think that her caraway cake could be criticized. ‘You really mean that, dear? In what way?’

‘Well, it goos down quite tidy except for one thing.’

‘And what would that be, dear?’

‘The seeds git stuck in your gullet,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘and you gotta keep a-washin’ on ’em down.’

Again she laughed in wonderful rolling rich peals and soon she and my Uncle Silas were washing down the caraway seeds with more and more glasses of cowslip, her eyes shining more and more brightly, with amazing greenish fires.

All this time I had been wondering if it wasn’t time, at last, to go into the orchard and taste the apples. Perhaps my Uncle Silas read my mind about this, because suddenly he turned a solemn eye towards me and said:

‘Boy, you recollect what I told you?’

I recollected; I hadn’t forgotten how well I had to behave myself or that, when the time came, I had to make myself scarce.

‘Do you like gooseberries, dear?’ the widow said to me. ‘You’ll find beautiful gooseberries at the far end of the orchard.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘That’s it,’ Silas said, ‘you gooseberry off for half-hour or more. Gooseberry off until you bust.’

I knew that my Uncle Silas was very fond of gooseberries too and I said:

‘Shall I bring some back for you?’

‘Not jist now,’ he said. ‘We ain’t gooseberry hungry, are we?’ and as he looked at the widow I thought he winked at her.

Down at the far end of the orchard I lay in the long seeding summer grasses and ate gooseberries until, as my mother would have said, there were gooseberries coming out of my eyes. Some were pure golden; others were reddish pink, like grapes; but they were all luscious as I squirted the warm sweet seeds on my tongue.

But after a time, as it grew hotter and hotter and the midday air quieter and quieter except for the sound of grasshoppers and the voices of yellow-hammers in the hedgerows beyond the wall, I grew tired even of ripe gooseberries and I started back for the house.

The orchard branched off, half-way down it, into a disused stone pit down which the biggest of the apple trees grew and the oldest, tallest pears. Under the grassy banks in the pit the air was very hot and still, the shadows dark and compressed under the old high trees.

As I drew level with this part of the orchard I became aware of something very remarkable going on there.

Laughing and shrieking, my Uncle Silas and the widow were running races under the trees. My Uncle Silas had taken off his coat and collar and was running in his stockinged feet. The only thing the widow had taken off was her belt—unless my Uncle Silas had taken it off for her, because it was he who held it in his hands.

‘Gittup there, gal!’ he kept saying. ‘Gittup there!’

Every time he said this the widow gave her rich fruity peals of laughter and when I last saw her disappearing beyond dense masses of apple boughs at the far end of the stone pit she was only a yard or so ahead of my Uncle Silas and all the big red loaf-like pile of her hair was tumbling down.

‘Gittup there, gal!’ he was calling. ‘Git up, me old beauty!’

It was late afternoon before my Uncle Silas and I drove home again. The air of July was still very hot and now and then my Uncle Silas belched into it a fruitier, riper breath of wine.

I did not know at all what to think of the races in the orchard and at last I said:

‘Did you taste the apples?’

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Were they nice?’

‘Ah,’ he said.

I thought for a few moments before asking another question and then I said:

‘Were they sweet or were they sour?’

‘Sweet,’ he said.

‘All of them?’

‘Every jack one on ’em.’ he said. ‘Onaccountable sweet.’

Somehow I could not think that my Uncle Silas, what with the cowslip wine and the elderberry wine and the caraway cake and the races with the widow in the orchard, had had time to taste every jack one of the apples.

‘But did you taste them all?’ I said.

With tender rumination my Uncle Silas stared across the dusty hedgerows of wild rose and meadowsweet, lovely in the evening sun, and belched softly with sweetish cowslip breath before he answered.

‘No: but the widder told me how sweet they all wur,’ he said. ‘And a widder with a good orchard ought to know.’

The Eating Match

It was always wonderful at my Uncle Silas’s little house in the summertime, with the pink Maiden’s Blush roses blooming by the door and the cream Old Glory roses blooming on the house wall and the nightingales singing in the wood at the end of the garden and the green peas coming into flower. But it was also wonderful in the wintertime, when we could sit by the fire of ash-logs, roasting potatoes in their jackets, with my Uncle Silas hotting up his elderberry wine over the fire in a little copper pot shaped like a dunce’s cap.

‘Never bin able to make up me mind yit,’ he would say, ‘whether it tastes better hot or whether it tastes better cold.’

‘Then it’s about time you did,’ his housekeeper would say. ‘You bin tastin’ years a-new.’

My Uncle Silas’s housekeeper was, I always thought, a very tart old stick of rhubarb. She wouldn’t let you drop crumbs on the floor and I had to be very careful as I skinned the hot potatoes. She and my Uncle Silas were like flint and steel clashing against each other, always making sparks. The strange thing was that the more the sparks flew the better he seemed to like it. They always seemed, I thought, to urge him on to bigger and better lies.

So also did the hot elderberry wine.

‘You’ve ’eerd talk,’ he said to me one evening as we sat over hot wine and hot potatoes, ‘about the time I knocked Porky Sanders into Kingdom Come?’

‘You told me that,’ I said.

‘And you’ve ’eerd talk,’ he said, ‘about that race I had with Goffy Windsor?’

‘You told me that,’ I said.

‘But I ain’t never told you, have I,’ he said, ‘about th’ ettin’ match I had with Joey Wilks at The Dog and Duck one winter? That wur——’

‘Eating and drinking!’ his housekeeper snapped. ‘All you think about is eating and drinking! All you think about is your blessed belly!’

‘Well, dammit,’ Silas said, ‘I wouldn’t be much catch ’ithout it, would I?’

She gave a great snort of righteousness at that and my Uncle Silas, winking at me, pushed a poker into the fire and started to turn the roasting potatoes over.

‘They’ll be about another half-hour yit,’ he said. ‘Jist time for me to tell y’ about me and Joey Wilks and this ’ere ettin’ affair.’

He poured himself another glass of warm elderberry wine, leaned back and started to describe what kind of man Joey Wilks, a shoemaker, was.

‘Big man. About eighteen stone. Shoemaker. Come from Orlingford,’ he said. ‘Good craft, Joey was. Could mek a good pair o’ shoes. But a terrible boaster.’

‘Of course you never have been,’ his housekeeper said.

‘If I can do a thing I do it and I say so,’ Silas said. ‘But if I can’t do it I don’t do it and I don’t boast about it, like Joey did.’

‘Well, some ’d believe you,’ she said. ‘But I doubt if Gabriel will when the time comes.’

‘We ain’t talkin’ about Gabriel,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘We’re a-talkin’ about Joey Wilks. And I’m a-tellin’ you Joey was a terrible boaster and what he wur always a-boastin’ most about wur ettin’. And when he wadn’t a-boastin’ about ettin’ he wur a-boastin’ about drinkin’. He wur jis’ like that General over in America I heard about once—he wur allus boastin’ fustest with the mostest.’

‘Keep on,’ she said.

He kept on; and presently he was telling me of how Joey Wilks had boasted, one evening in The Dog and Duck, how he’d eaten a leg of pork, half a bushel of potatoes, six pounds of sausages, a dishful of baked onions, a big Yorkshire pudding and about a gallon of apple sauce, washed down with about ten quarts of beer, for his dinner the previous Sunday.

‘“Elastic belly, Joey, that’s what you got,” I told him,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘“Elastic belly and elastic mind. Allus stretchin’ it. I bet all you ever had was a mutton chop and a basin o’ cold custard.”’

Joey, my Uncle Silas said, didn’t like this much; in fact he very much resented it.

‘“If you’re a-callin’ me a liar, Silas,” he said, “you’d better look——”’

‘I ain’t callin’ you a liar, Joey,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘All I’m a-sayin’ is you didn’t do it, and if you did do it nobody never seed you.’

Joey got very flustered and blustered about this and at last my Uncle Silas said:

‘Well, if you’re so set on it, Joey, my old sport, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll challenge you to a ettin’ match.’

‘“Pah!” Joey said.’

‘Ettin’ and drinkin’,’ Silas said. ‘Hot food or cold food. Which you like. And plenty o’ beer. And a bet on the side if you’ve a-mind to.’

‘How much?’

‘I’ll give you,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘three to one. In sovereigns.’

Several times as he told me this he renewed his warm elderberry wine and once he gave the potatoes a turn in the hot red ashes.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when we finally got down to it we decided we’d eat jis the same as Joey said he’d eaten that Sunday. Pork and taters and sausage and baked onions and apple sauce and baked pudden. And plenty o’ beer.’

‘That I don’t disbelieve,’ his housekeeper said.

‘The landlady at The Dog and Duck cooked the grub,’ Silas said, ‘and we had the match in the back parlour. Course by the time the word got round there was a lot o’ money on it. Big bets. Toffs an’ all started layin’ a lot o’ big wagers.’

‘Mostly on you I warrant,’ his housekeeper said.

‘Well, that wur the funny thing,’ Silas said. ‘They wur mostly on Joey.’

He took another drink of elderberry wine, smacked his lips and said he wasn’t quite sure but he was very near damned if it didn’t taste better hot after all.

‘Well, that started me thinkin’,’ he said. ‘I started thinkin’ that if the money wur on Joey and Joey didn’t win then it’d be a fly thing if I had a little bit on it on meself.’

‘Trust you,’ his housekeeper said and now I too had something to say.

‘How did you decide the winner?’ I said. ‘Was it the one who ate most or the one who stood up longest?’

‘Well, as it ’appened,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘it wur the one what stood up.’

Refreshed with elderberry wine, he went on to describe how the food was laid out in the back parlour of The Dog and Duck: two big legs of pork and another in the kitchen oven, in reserve, and big dishes of onions and potatoes and apple sauce and pudding, and with it two barrels of beer.

‘And me at one end of the table,’ he said, ‘and Joey at the other. Like David and Goliath.’

‘How long did it last?’ I said.

‘I’m a-comin’ to that,’ he said, ‘in a jiffy. What I wur jist going to tell you about wur the beginning. Joey wur a very big man and he rushed in like some old sow at a trough, ettin’ wi’ both hands. Very big man. Joey was, Very big man. And no manners.’

He paused for a little more refreshment, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, a little sadly, I thought, this time.

‘Well, very big in the belly,’ he said, ‘but not,’ he went on, tapping his head, ‘very big up here.’

He went on then to tell us how he and Joey were eating for about eight hours, or it might even have been nine hours, he couldn’t justly remember. Anyway it was a tidy while, he assured us. Then, just as they were well on the way with the third leg of pork and the second barrel of beer, he thought he saw Joey showing signs of filling up a little.

‘He was a-gittin’ very dropsical about the eyes,’ he said. ‘Oncommon dropsical. More like a pickled cabbage. So I started askin’ for another leg o’ pork——’

‘Good Heavens,’ I said, ‘where did you put it all?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth,’ he said, taking a long slow deep swig of elderberry, ‘I wur puttin’ most on it in a bag.’

‘The truth! The truth!’ his housekeeper started saying. ‘I wonder the word don’t scorch your lips! My lord, I don’t want to be you when you meet Gabriel that day!’

‘I wur a very thin little chap at the time,’ my Uncle Silas went on, quite unconcerned, looking at the fire through the dark red rosiness of his glass, ‘and I got this ’ere bag sewn inside the top o’ me westkit. Then I had a big serviette round my neck and the bag droppin’ down a-tween me legs an’ all I had to do——’

‘All right for the food,’ I said, ‘but what about the beer?’

‘Oh! the beer never worried me,’ he said.

‘That’s a true word if ever I heard one,’ his housekeeper said.

‘Well, it wur all gooin’ on very smooth,’ Silas said, ‘when all of a pop I could see Joey wur done for. He’d been going very purple for about hour but all of a sudden he started to go very yeller. A very funny yeller. Then he went very stiff and white, jist like a cold beastin’s custard. He looked jist like a dead ’un.’

The prospect of a dead Joey Wilks seemed to scare people, my Uncle Silas said, and everybody started running about, trying to get Joey outside.

‘Terrible thing,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘couldn’t lift ’im.’

He drank sadly again.

‘Must ha’ weighed twenty stone or more with all the grub and the beer inside ’im,’ he went on. ‘Couldn’t lift him. Took every man jack in the room to git ’im up and out into the fresh air.’

‘And I suppose you,’ his housekeeper said, ‘sat there as cool as a cucumber and watched them do it?’

‘I did,’ he said, ‘there wur nothing wrong wi’ me.’

He leaned forward to poke at the roasting potatoes and as the poker touched the first of them I could hear the crackle of the crisp burnt jacket.

‘Well, I say I sat there,’ he said. ‘I did until I got a chance to nip the bag down the cellar steps——’

‘Gabriel, Gabriel!’ his housekeeper said, raising her hands to heaven, ‘Gabriel, I hope you’re listening!’

‘Then I went outside,’ Silas said, ‘and there wur Joey, laid out cold.’

‘Dead?’ I said.

‘Half-way,’ he said.

He paused for a few moments, shaking his head sadly, taking the opportunity to refresh himself again with a slow mouthful of wine.

‘Fust time I ever see what they wur a-doin’ to poor old Joey that day.’

‘What were they doing?’ I said.

‘Butterin’ his belly,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Only way to git the swellin’ down. Had to keep butterin’ on it for two more days.’

‘Gabriel, Gabriel!’ his housekeeper said, raising her hands again, ‘I hope you’re listening? I hope you’re taking it down?’

‘’Course you can use lard,’ my Uncle Silas said to me, airily, ‘but butterin’ on it’s better.’

Calmly, one by one, he started to take the roasting potatoes from the fire. Innocently, with virtuous care, he filled his glass with warm dark wine. Solemnly he raised the glass to heaven.

‘Your very good health,’ he said, ‘Gabriel, me boy.’

The Singing Pig

My Uncle Silas once had a sow that produced a litter of sixteen three times, seventeen twice and finally one of nineteen. She could also sing very nicely. She could sing The Bluebells of Scotland and several other tunes, including one my Uncle Silas himself composed for her.

I know all this because once, when he was staying with my grandfather and grandmother, he told me so.

‘Now about this ’ere tune I med up for the sow. It wur about an old gal what——’

‘That’s right!’ my grandmother said. ‘Fill the child’s head with more nonsense! Make up a few more tales! I’ll be burned if he won’t end up as bad as you are!’

‘Now look ’ere,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘it’s all very well you a-gittin’ obstropolus about it, but I’m a-tellin’ on you she could sing. And I’m a-tellin’ on you she could sing because I ’eard her sing. And so did George here. Didn’t you, George?’

George was my grandfather. He was a very mild, gentle man, not at all given to being obstropolus, as my Uncle Silas said of my grandmother, but most anxious at all costs to keep peace with the world.

‘Well, I don’t——’ he started to say.

‘And it’s no use you a-wellin’ and a-don’tin’, George,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘because you wur there. You ’eard her as plain as I did. I ’eard her a time or two afore you did, but you wur there that night when——’

‘What night?’ my grandmother snapped. ‘Some night you were well soaked, I warrant. If it were one o’ them nights I shouldn’t wonder what you did hear. Old Nick a-whistlin’ down your neck very likely.’

‘I’m a-talkin’,’ my Uncle Silas said, with great solemnity and a certain sadness of eye, ‘if you’ll give me a chance, about the night the old gal died.’

It was always rather touching, I felt, when my Uncle Silas revealed that certain sadness of eye. Suddenly he would draw from his breeches’ pocket his big red handkerchief, lift it to his face as if to wipe away a dewdrop or a tear and then, solemnly, slowly, sadly, let it fall to his lap.

There was in this gesture a certain element of fatalism, a faint suggestion of the last rites. It was also rather as if my Uncle Silas knew perfectly well that he was asking you to believe in the impossible and was resigning himself to the fact that you were, at the same time, a person of pitiful, puny belief.

‘Arter all,’ he would say, ‘you git dogs what can dance on their hind legs an’ count numbers an’ do tricks. You git talkin’ jackdaws and performing fleas. An’ I knowed a chap at Bedford once what had talkin’ hens——’

‘We had a talking hen once!’ I said. ‘It used to talk when you took it corn——’

‘There y’are, you see,’ my Uncle Silas said with bland and wonderful innocence, ‘jist what I’m a-tellin’ you.’

‘I don’t know what I’m standing here for, listening to your tomfool tales,’ my grandmother said in tart disgust, ‘when I’ve got starching and ironing to do——’

After my grandmother had flounced from the room my Uncle Silas suddenly winked at my grandfather and started whispering.

‘George,’ he said, ‘nip out the front door and underneath the back seat o’ the trap you’ll see me medicine bottles. Two on ’em. And on your way back bring me a wine glass.’

While my grandfather was out of the house my Uncle Silas blew his nose several times on his red handkerchief and once or twice coughed very heavily. I was quite worried by this and said:

‘Have you got croop? Is that what your medicine’s for?’

‘Well, it ain’t exactly croop, boy,’ he said, ‘an’ yit it is. I git a terrible dry ticklin’ now and then in me gizzard.’

‘Like hens do?’

‘Well, I’m an old cockerel,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘And it’s allus wuss wi’ cockerels.’

Presently my grandfather was back with the wine glass and my Uncle Silas’s medicine. There were two kinds of medicine, one pale yellow, the other a deep tawny red.

‘I hate medicine,’ I said.

‘Quite right, boy, quite right,’ my Uncle Silas said and started pouring himself a glass of the red medicine. ‘Terrible stuff, the way it hangs round your gills.’

A moment later the glass of red medicine disappeared with remarkable swiftness and my Uncle Silas was saying, as he smacked his lips loudly, ‘Allus git it down quick, boy, like that. Then it don’t taste so bad.’ At the same time he started pouring himself a glass of the yellow medicine and presently that too disappeared, also with remarkable speed.

From the cunning smile on my Uncle Silas’s face and the fruity way he smacked his lips several times I somehow got the impression that the medicine was, perhaps, not quite so bad after all.

‘Is it nasty?’ I said.

‘Well, it is,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘but I think I must be a-gittin’ used to it.’

He then put the two bottles of medicine into his jacket pocket and hid the wine glass behind the back of the chair. Then he settled back in the chair, gave a series of ripe, rumbling belches, wiped his lips with his red handkerchief, and said blandly:

‘Boy, I can feel it slippin’ down and a-doin’ me a bit o’ good a’ready.’

For a moment the crusty lids dropped over his eyes and he looked for all the world like a sleepy old cock about to drop off to sleep and I said:

‘Don’t go to sleep, Uncle. You said you’d tell me about the pig.’

He cocked one eye open.

‘Ah, the old gal.’

And for the second time he made that sad and regretful gesture of resignation, dropping his handkerchief on his knee.

‘Well, I bought her one day at Nenweald market,’ he said. ‘She wur about six weeks then and I was drivin’ her steady on back home—course you know about drivin’ pigs don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t hurry them.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Well, we jogged steady on and when we got to The Bull at Souldrop I could see she needed a rest. So I tied her up in the yard and went inside, and I wur jist about gittin’ to know what the inside of a mug looked like when a chap named Charlie Sanders come in and said “Silas, that pig o’ yourn ain’t ’arf makin’ comical noises.”’

My Uncle Silas then went on to tell me how he went out into the pub yard and found the pig not, as he was careful to explain, exactly singing, but making a curious kind of talking noise, as if she were actually trying to tell him something.

‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘but she stopped it as soon as we started on home. And then I twigged as that wur what she wanted. She wur tellin’ on me, see? Talkin’ to me. It makes me feel proper queer even now when I think on it.’

My Uncle Silas in fact felt so proper queer that he was forced, a moment later, to take another rapid dose of medicine.

‘But you said she did sing,’ I said.

Smacking his lips, my Uncle Silas said gently:

‘Yis, yis. I know. But that wur later. Fust she started to have the litters.’ My Uncle Silas for once appealed to my grandfather for both information and support. ‘How many litters did the old gal have, George?’

‘Well,’ my grandfather said, ‘she had a fourteen and a fifteen and then the two sixteens. And then——’

‘Most onaccountable,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Sixteen, then seventeen and then, dall it, I be damned if she didn’t have eighteen. Ain’t that right, George?’

‘That’s right,’ my grandfather said. ‘And then we thought she were goin’ to have nineteen——’

‘Don’t talk about it, George,’ my Uncle Silas said, and once again he used that sudden and resigned gesture of sadness, ‘it gives me a turn to think o’ the poor old gal.’

So much of a turn did it give my Uncle Silas that suddenly, once again, he was forced to take to medicine.

‘But when did she sing?’ I said. ‘All the time?’

‘No, no, no,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘No, no, no—on’y at them times.’

I naturally wondered about them times and I asked him what they were.

‘Them times,’ he said, ‘when she wur in pig. When she were a-havin’ on ’em. Ain’t that right, George?’

‘Well——’

‘Did she sing real songs?’ I said. ‘Like The Bluebells of Scotland?’

A certain dreaminess came over my Uncle Silas’s face as, for a moment or two, he pondered on this.

‘Now you come to say,’ he said, ‘it sounded uncommon like that the time she had sixteen. Then the time she had seventeen it were jist like The Rosy Tree.’

Several times during this conversation I thought how strange and queer and unlikely it was that a pig could sing but whenever I did so I remembered how true it was, as my Uncle Silas pointed out, that dogs could dance and jackdaws talk and fleas perform with little carriages, and my doubts were assailed. But what finally put an end to all my doubts was another sad, sudden dropping of the handkerchief as my Uncle Silas said:

‘Yis, she on’y done it at them times. When I sat up wi’ her o’ nights. There I’d be a-sittin’ all alone in the pig-sty with the lantin, a-waitin’, and all of a sudden she’d start. Then I knowed the little ’uns wur a-comin’.’

Inquisitively and sharply I picked on what I thought was a significant phrase in this.

‘All alone?’

‘I knowed you wur goin’ t’ask that,’ he said. ‘I knowed that’s what you’d ask. And that’s what I got a-thinking. There I was all alone wi’ her and I thought perhaps I wur ’earin’ things. But no,’ he went on, ‘no.’

Once again my Uncle Silas seemed so affected by his remembrance of things that he took another rapid dose of medicine.

‘But then your grandfather heard it,’ he said. ‘That night we both sat up with her and we thought she was goin’ to have nineteen. Ain’t that right, George?’

‘Well——’

‘Poor old gal,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘I shall never forgit it. Poor old gal.’

Picking up the medicine glass, slowly filling it and holding it up to the light, he seemed to stare through it as if seeing far beyond it the dark little pig-sty lit by nothing but the light of the candle lantern, with the sow breathing her gentle song. This too was what I saw as he described how, on a late October night, he and my grandfather waited for the sow to deliver her largest and, as it turned out, her last litter.

‘Too much for the old gal,’ he said. ‘But she wur a good old gal. She went on singing to the end.’

Slowly, with sadness, my Uncle Silas lifted the red handkerchief and let it fall to his knee; and if there had been a tear in his eye I should not have been surprised to see it there.

‘Poor old gal,’ he said and as he raised to her memory another glass of medicine I felt like crying too.

Perhaps there are no singing pigs; and perhaps it would be silly, in any case, to cry for them if there were. But then there are a great many people, as my Uncle Silas pointed out, who can’t sing either, and I can think of quite a few who do not move me half so near to tears as my Uncle Silas’s dying sow and her gentle song.

The Fire Eaters

My Uncle Silas at one time knew two gentlemen named Foghorn Freeman and Narrer Quincey and between them, literally and otherwise, they set the town on fire.

Foghorn Freeman was a big man with a voice that seemed to come, booming and hoarse, out of a cave; he wore crisp sandy military moustaches of splendid out-curving design and had lately returned—it was then some time in the early nineties—from service in India, I think the North-West Provinces, where women were two for an anna and life generally not much more expensive and where little things like setting towns on fire were, it seemed, all in the day’s work of a soldier of the Queen. ‘All Sir Garnet!’ Foghorn used to roar. ‘Catch ’em with their ambags down!’ Quincey was what my Uncle Silas called ‘a narrer-gutted man.’

They were the days when men went off into fits of the blues for three weeks on end, fighting the devil in the shape of street lamp posts and then rushing about the town screaming, ‘Don’t let ’em git me! They’re arter me! Don’t let ’em git me!’ My Uncle Silas and Foghorn and Narrer also rushed about the town, drunk as newts, tying tin-cans to cats’ tails, fighting all-comers, wrecking pubs, putting chamber-pots on steeples, roaring hell and damnation and engaging in other harmless pursuits like letting the fire-horses out at midnight.

‘Allus ready for a bit o’ fun,’ my Uncle Silas said when they rolled three lighted tar-barrels into the middle of the mayor’s parade on the Sunday of the Fifty-Feasts. ‘Loved a bit o’ fun. Liked to enjoy we-selves. Wadn’t a man who could stop us either.’

It was about this time that the parson died: an oldish, long-winded preacher, not necessarily killed, but then again not helped, by opening the Bible-class lecture on a quiet Sunday afternoon and seeing six demented ducks fly out to the tune of ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou sore distressed?’

In his place came a young man, fresh from Oxford I think, earnest and high-minded and rather short-sighted and with, as my Uncle Silas said, the mouth of a proper fly-catcher. My Uncle Silas had not much use for parsons. They roused the Saxon in him, or something else of that primitive, simple, earthy nature, with a parallel hatred of mealy, fly-catching mouths. Surplices and vestments inflamed him like red rags. Chanters and psalm-singers and Bible thumpers, of which the countryside was all too full, turned him into a healthy fire-eater on the devil’s side.

‘’Umbuggin’ popery!’ he used to rage darkly. ‘’Umbuggin’ money-mekking game.’

In the course of a few weeks the young new parson began to speak darkly too.

There were, he said from the pulpit, evil forces abroad. The devil’s forces and the devil’s voices and devil’s hands were at work in the town and everywhere the devil stalked unleashed and unafraid. After my Uncle Silas and Foghorn and Narrer had let the fire-horses out again and rung the Bede House bell at midnight and tied a chamber-pot on the weather-cock he preached, with pain and sorrow, of ‘the black trident that is pointed at the heart of this little town.’

‘We wur the trident he meant,’ Silas said, ‘me an’ old Foghorn and narrer-gutted Quincey.’

All this time the young new parson was to be seen flying open-mouthed across the small town square, under the chestnut trees, in vivid vestments that changed with flashing bewilderment from day to day, and even from morning to afternoon, according to the demands of the high ecclesiastical calendar. Stoles of gold and purple, glimpses of scarlet silk under long white surplices, beads and crosses—Rome, my Uncle Silas considered, had wormed its evil way into town.

‘Even had a hat on,’ my Uncle Silas said: as if that, above all, were the crown of popishness. ‘A black ’un. Looked like a cross between a saucepan and what we tied a-top o’ the Bede House weather-cock.’

‘Here’s the old gal with his ambags on!’ Foghorn would shout across the square. ‘Treacle trousers!’

Some time after this Silas had the misfortune, as he came out of The Griffin, blood-shot eye gleaming, red lips wickedly wet and a certain absence of steering noticeable in his thick bow legs, to run into the flying figure of purple and gold and scarlet, complete with canonical chamber-pot, as it flashed across the square.

‘Ah! Silas, I have been wanting for some time to buttonhole you.’

‘Well, ’ere’s me buttonhole,’ Silas said. ‘Now you git hold on it good an’ proper while you got the chance.’

‘I did not quite mean it like that. It was a sort of figure of speech—I——’

‘Well then,’ Silas said, ‘you jis stop figurin’ and speechin’ and git on wi’ your ’umbuggin’ fancy-work while I goo an’ ’ave a wet at The Dragon.’

‘I think it all too obvious you have had a wet already.’

‘Jis’ washed me mouth out with a drop,’ Silas said. ‘I don’t deny it.’

He blew with magnificent and snotty indifference into his large red handkerchief and the young man said:

‘You are a menace to the town. You and Freeman and that Quincey fellow. People are going in terror. They dare not go out at nights.’

‘Dear oh! dear.’

‘I will not tolerate it. It has gone beyond all limits. Never the one of you is ever seen at church, in God’s house, behaving in godly fashion—you take us back to the days of bear-baiting and cock-throwing and hooliganism of that kind.’

‘Dear oh! dear.’

‘You never lift a finger to show regret or mitigation. You glory in it!—that’s worst of all.’

‘Yessir.’ Silas had a way, sometimes, of lowering his eyes, of drawing half over them a pair of butter-smooth lids as meek and bland as a child’s. ‘If that’s the way it is I’m very sorry, sir. What would you like us to do?’

‘I should not take it at all amiss if you came to church once in a while——’

‘Very well then, sir,’ Silas said. ‘I ain’t much of a church-going man. Nor yit ain’t Foghorn and Quincey. But if we can git over there once in a while we will.’

‘I appreciate that,’ the young man said. ‘I truly appreciate it. It only remains to be seen——’

‘Yessir,’ Silas said. ‘It jis’ remains to be seen.’

The following Sunday there were Foghorn and Quincey and my Uncle Silas sitting in the front pew at church like a row of innocent owls. ‘You never see sich ’umbuggin’ palaver in all y’ damn days,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘A-burnin’ this and a-wavin’ that and a-waterin’ summat else. I never see sich ’umbuggin’ gooin’ on in me life. Wuss’n Sanger’s Circus.’

‘Might think we were a lot o’ bees,’ Quincey said, ‘a-being smoked out of hive.’

During the sermon Quincey, Foghorn and Silas sat listening as if they were made of butter and wondering all the time how soon they could escape and, as Silas said, ‘nip over to The Dragon and git the taint on it outa we mouths.’ My Uncle Silas had never dreamed of such popery. The puritan in him was inflamed as if by heresies. ‘Thought they wur never gooin’ to be done a-sciencing round in night-shirts,’ he said, ‘and cock-eyed hats and I don’ know what. Never see sich bowin’ and scrapin’ and groanin’ and fartin’ about in all me days.’

But after the sermon came an announcement that caused my Uncle Silas to put his elbow in Quincey’s ribs and made Foghorn begin to draw meditative hands slowly down his moustaches.

‘On the occasion of the celebration of the Jubilee of our dear Queen.’ There followed a good deal about homage and prayer, services and singing, solemn thanks and the ringing of bells. And then: ‘Of course we shall indulge in secular celebration too. There is to be a tea-fight and a torch-light procession and, of course, a bonfire.’

‘You ought to ha’ seen old Foghorn’s eyes light up,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘It wur wuth bein’ smoked out for.’

After the service the young parson came to shake hands with the converts to righteousness.

‘It has done my heart good. I cannot tell you how it has warmed me.’

‘Well, we’ll try t’ warm you a bit more yit,’ Silas said. ‘We’re learnt a lot today. Ain’t we, Foghorn?’

‘Too true,’ Foghorn said. ‘Too true.’

On the night of the Jubilee they lit the bonfire in the middle of the market square about eight o’clock. The square was packed with people and that, as my Uncle Silas said, ‘helped us a lot. In a crowd like that you hardly knowed t’other from which. Half on ’em a bit merry too.’

‘Course,’ he said, ‘I ain’t saying me an’ Foghorn and Quincey hadn’t had a drop o’ neck-oil—but then, arter all, it wur the Jubilee. The old gal ’d bin on the throne five minutes and it wur the proper time for a bit of a warm up.’

But the most excited man on the square that night was not my Uncle Silas, or Foghorn Freeman, or Quincey. It was the young parson, carried away on waves of excessive and loyal zeal not merely for his gracious Sovereign the Queen but for that roaring tower of spark and flame lighting up the square and all the streets about the square.

‘Keep her going, Narrow,’ he kept shouting. ‘Don’t let her die down, you fellows! Keep the pot boiling. Splendid, Foghorn! That’s a magnificent pile of faggots you have there. Pitch in!’

‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘we pitched in an’ all good and proper. He kept ravin’ for us to bring more wood for the fire and we kept a-bringin’ on it. I reckon he must have had two wagon loads o’ faggots in the rectory garden. Well, arter we’d got rid o’ them and a couple old hen-places and a half a pig-sty——’

‘Pile on the agony!’ the young parson kept shouting. ‘Pitch it on, you fellows, pitch it on!’

About eleven o’clock they started bringing out the furniture. ‘Just a few old chairs and things. Nothing much. A couple of old couches and a table,’ Silas said. ‘Me and Quincey kept bringin’ it out while Foghorn looked arter the parson’s maid in one o’ the bedrooms.’

That, it always seemed to me, was something much more in my Uncle Silas’s line; but he, it appears, had something else to do.

Soon he and Quincey were in another bedroom, rigging up the effigy. ‘Fust we got a coupla bolsters orf the bed and then we dressed it up, nightshirt and every mite o’ ’umbuggin’ palaver you could think on. I should think we put half a hundredweight o’ bibs an’ cassocks an’ nightshirts an’ fol-di-dols on that thing. In the finish they wadn’t another mite o’ popery left we could lay hands on.’

In the other bedroom Foghorn was all this time very successful in keeping the maid quiet and the maid, it seemed, did not mind at all.

‘And then Quincey dropped it,’ Silas said. ‘The pot I mean. We had it on the parson’s head and Quincey dropped it. Jist as we was gittin’ him down the stairs.’

The pot was china; and up in the bedroom the maid, hearing it crash downstairs, started screaming there were thieves about, but Foghorn—who was a good soldier of the Queen, my Uncle Silas said, with experience both at home and abroad—kept her quiet by telling her it was a cat with a milk-jug.

‘Any rate, I found another,’ Silas said. ‘A beauty. With roses on it. And we put it on the parson’s head and took him out into the square. We musta looked jis’ like one o’ them ’umbuggin’ fancy church processions.’

In the square there was so much shouting and singing, so much spark and fire, so much excitement and jollity in celebration for England, the Jubilee and the Queen that the guy with its load of vestments was on the fire and in full flame before the young parson, all merriment suddenly extinguished, saw himself burning away in mockery.

‘Burned beautiful too,’ my Uncle Silas used to say, in the dreamy regretful way he kept for these occasions. ‘Burned beautiful. Pot an’ all.’

It was, I used to say to my Uncle Silas in due course, a very successful evening for everybody, not counting the parson, but on the whole, perhaps, a little drastic.

His answer to this was quite pained.

‘They wur drastic days,’ he said, ‘dammit, man! if you never liked somebody you ’umbuggin’ well said so. You let ’em know. Bless me heart an’ life everybody’s gittin’ too soft be half nowadays.’

But burning furniture, I used to say, burning a man’s clothing, the very cloth and emblems of his calling, with a pot on his head. Not that I minded the pot so much; but the going was altogether a little rough, I thought, a little rough and rude.

To answer which my Uncle Silas used to turn on me his one good eye, the other closed and bloodshot, and say with that bland mock innocence, combined with a certain crooked sternness of his mouth, that he always kept for the finish of some taller tale:

‘We enjoyed we-selves, didn’t we? Dammit, man, what’s wrong wi’ enjoying we-selves? I enjoyed it. Foghorn enjoyed it. Quincey enjoyed it. The maid enjoyed it—I know she did, onaccountable well an’ all, because Foghorn told me so. Everybody enjoyed it——’

‘All except the parson.’

‘Oh! yis, well, I know,’ Silas said. ‘But dammit, it wur only a few bushes and old kitchen chairs and rags we burnt. Don’t forgit it ain’t bin so long since they’d a’ burnt him too. You ain’t goin’ to deny that now, are you?’

No, I said, I wasn’t going to deny that. But still, burning people out of house and home—that was a bit much, I thought, perhaps a bit too much.

‘Dammit, man,’ he said, ‘you’re gittin’ as bad as all the rest on ’em. I don’t know what the ’nation’s coming over everybody nowadays. Everybody’s stopped enjoyin’ theirselves. Everybody’s gittin’ too ’umbuggin’ soft by half.’

He fixed me with a stare of solemn tartness and disapproval from which for the life of me I could not tell whether he were serious or not, until suddenly he dropped a wicked lid.

‘It’s about time you had a mouthful o’ wine,’ he said. ‘Git the bottle down.’

Loss of Pride

My uncle Silas, all his life, was very fond of a baked potato. Whenever I walked over to see him on cold midwinter nights, when roadsides were crisp and white with hoarfrost and you could hear cold owl-cry haunting the woods, his first words were almost always: ‘You git the taters, boy, while I git the wine.’

He was always very particular, I noticed, about how the potatoes were cooked. ‘Course they’re better in a twitch fire,’ he often said, ‘when it’s died down a bit and you can poke ’em into that hot ash. You git that burnt taste in ’em then and it teks a bit o’ beatin.’

But in the absence of twitch fires he did the next best thing. At the side of his kitchen fireplace there used to be one of those big baking ovens, large enough to hold a side of mutton, where in the old days faggots were lit for baking bread. When the fired faggots had died down the big pink-and-white kidney potatoes, pricked all over with a fork, went into the bed of ash and soon the little kitchen was sweet and warm with the smell of their cooking.

‘Ever tell you about Pouchy Reeves and the baked taters? Bin a minute—very like I never did. The smell on ’em allus brings it back.’

In winter time we almost always drank elderberry wine, sometimes slightly mulled if the nights were very cold, and it was generally at about the third or fourth glass that some reminiscence, far out of the past, began.

I said I didn’t think he had; nor, I thought, had I ever heard of Pouchy.

‘Shoemekker. Hand-craft. Bit of a dab hand, I’ll grant him that. But knowed it—bit of a toff in a way, what shoemekkers used to call notch-above-a-tapper. Very cocky. Fancy westkits and walking sticks and big button-holes of a Sunday. Too high and mighty for the rest of us chaps.’

Here he licked a drop of wine from his lips with what I thought was no innocent relish and I proceeded to remark that it wouldn’t have surprised me at all to hear that Pouchy, with such a splendid array of attractions and accomplishments, was also a great one with women.

‘Never ’eerd nothing else. Wimmin mornin’, noon and night. He wur a-gittin’ on ’em into hayfields and stackyards and straw-barns and stables and I don’t know wheer so fast you’d a thought he never had a minute fer shoemekking left. Young and old. Let ’em all come. Used to reckon he had two sisters in the same bed one turn over at the old mill-house at Shelton Cross.’

I at once remarked that this seemed to be a matter of very serious rivalry and in return he gave me a look, over the top of his wine-glass, that was almost pious in the bland severity of its rebuke.

‘Now, hold hard. I’ve had a few gals in me time, one way an’ another, but like I allus tell you—I wur never arter them, they wur allus arter me.’

‘A very subtle difference.’

He said never mind about a very subtle difference, but when you got a man boasting he had two gals in bed at the same time and another up in the church belfry while the Sunday evening service was on and another in one corner of a wheatfield while her husband was mowing and bonding in another then you started to wonder.

‘Another thing. Like I say, I’ve had a gal or two in me time and some fair samples among ’em too but I never done no poachin’. But Pouchy—he wur different. He liked nickin’ on ’em from other chaps. It wur more fun.’

He then went on to ask me if I knew The Swan with Two Necks at Nenweald and the two old tits who kept it? When I said I did he said:

‘Never think they was sisters, would you? Nell, she’s like a damn great bean-pole and arms like a man. Lucy looks like a bit dropped off her, a real dillin. Course they’re gittin’ on a bit now but in my day Nell’d chook a man outa the bar as easy as spit in your eye. I seed her chook a man named Butch Waters out once, big labourin’ man, fists like legs o’ mutton. He never ony bounced once but it wur enough. He wur out cold as a gravestone fer a night and a day.’

After what was really an uncommonly long speech for him he took a good long draught of elderberry, refilled the glasses, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and then opened the oven door to see how the baked potatoes were coming on. A hot delicious fragrance floated through the open oven door and he gave a great smacking sniff at it and then pressed first one potato and then another with his thumb.

‘Give ’em another ten minutes. Git the butter and the salt, boy, then we’ll be ready for ’em. Plenty o’ butter.’

And what, I now wanted to know, having found the salt cellar and a big brown crock of butter, had the old tits to do with Pouchy?

‘Well, they wad’n old then. I’m talkin’ abut fifty year back. Very like more. In them days Lucy wur an uncommon good-lookin’ gal, but freckly, like a thrush’s egg.’

I here murmured that I supposed in consequence Pouchy was after her but he merely gave me another look of rather sharp reproof and said:

‘I’m comin’ to that if you’ll let me breathe. You will git so fur ahead on me. No, she wur a-courtin’ at the time.’

He laughed briefly, his old voice cracking, and took another sharp swig of wine.

‘Well, you could call it courtin’, in a way. This goodly chap Will Croome was arter ’er. Well, I say arter ’er. All he done wur to sit all night in the bar and just stare at ’er over ’is beer. Nice enough chap, but onaccountable shy. Bit on the deaf side, too.’

It was about this time, he went on, that Nell slipped on a patch of ice in the pub-yard and fell and broke her leg. It was mighty cold that winter: ten weeks of frost. You could put your skates on in the house and skate all the way through the frozen streets to the river. That was frozen solid too.

‘Well, about that time there wur allus me and Tupman Sanders and Olly Sharman and Ponto Pack and Gunner Jarvis in the Swan of a night and o’ course this goodly Will Croome staring at Lucy.’

And then, no sooner had Nell been taken off to hospital, than Pouchy began to come in.

‘Taters ready yit? Me belly’s rollin’ round. Give ’em another five minutes. I like ’em a bit black outside. Yis, Pouchy started to come in. Belch-guts. Mister High-and-Mighty. Notch above a tapper.’

‘After the girl?’

‘Well, at fust it wad’n so much that. It wur the way he kept on a-tauntin’ and a-teasin’ Will. Never give ’im no peace. Allus on at ’im. Nasty bits outa the side of ’is mouth. You know—“I see we got Will the Lady Killer in again tonight. Fast worker, Will. Moves like a whippet. Brought your salt with you tonight, Will boy? That’s how you catch birds, Will—puttin’ salt on their tails.” It made it wuss because most o’ the time Will couldn’t hear.’

It would never have happened, he went on to say, if Nell had been there. You wouldn’t have got away with that lark if Nell had been behind the bar. She’d have had you by the scruff of your neck and breeches and you’d have been out on your arse in one bounce if you tried that kind of caper.

‘Better git the taters out, boy. Afore me belly drops out.’

While I was getting the potatoes out of the oven and finding plates for them and putting the salt and butter handy on the kitchen table he reminded me that all this was in the days before the Swan burnt down. It was the old Swan then, stone and thatched, and along one side of it was the big covered way for coaches. Every Saturday night, in winter, a man named Sprivvy Litchfield came and stood in there with his old hot potato oven, with a paraffin flare on top.

‘We’d nip out and git half a dozen and eat ’em with the beer. Very good too, they wur. No better’s these tonight, though.’

The potatoes, scalding hot and floury and drenched in butter, were too much for my tongue but Silas simply forked them into his ripe old mouth with never a cooling breath and as if they were nothing but luke-warm custard. He crackled at the dark burnt skin too and it struck me that it was just like the skin of his own gnarled earth-brown hands.

‘Well, it got wusser and wusser, this ’ere teasin’ an’ tauntin’. I could see Lucy, poor gal, gooin’ off her napper. Then one night I caught her wipin’ her eyes and havin’ a bit of a tune in the passage and she said it wur more’n flesh and blood could bear. Tupman and Olly and Gunner and Ponto wur all fer bouncing Pouchy out but I said——’

At this point my Uncle Silas suddenly broke off, looking uncommonly crafty, his bloodshot eye half-shut, the other reflectively contemplating a lump of well-burnt potato skin.

‘Allus teks me back, whenever I git a-holt of a hot tater.’ He laughed very softly, shaking his head. ‘Never fergit it. See it now.’

My potato was cooler now and I sat eating the buttery salty flesh with relish too, waiting to hear what happened.

‘I recollected seeing a chap once in a pub over at Swineshead. He wasn’t quite all ninepence and two fellers put rum in his beer. Knock-out. Fast asleep in five minutes, just like a baby.’

Here I said that if this was all they did to Pouchy it sounded pleasant rather than otherwise and anyway harmless enough.

‘Well, it ain’t quite all,’ Silas said and once again he laughed very softly, his lips shining red with wine, ‘it ain’t quite all. Fust we treated him to a beer wi’ one rum in it, then one wi’ two in it, then one wi’ three in it. Lucy wur slippin’ on ’em in and we wur a-keepin’ Pouchy talking. He wur very happy and in about half hour or so he went out like a light.’

‘And then?’

Before answering my Uncle Silas took a long swig of wine and laughed with all his old fruity wickedness.

‘I went out and got a good big hot tater.’

And what, I begged him to tell me, did they do with the hot potato?

‘Dropped it into his breeches.’

‘Front or back?’

‘Well, he wur a-sittin’ down at the time, so we couldn’t very well git it down the back.’

He laughed again, really loudly this time, and said he wisht I’d bin there. Had I ever heard a pig being killed? It sounded just like that.

‘Injury permanent?’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t know about that. But it wur a good big tater and we got it well down there.’

Now I noticed that he had finished his first potato and I opened the oven door and took out another. As he pressed it with his thumb even he recoiled a bit and said blandly:

‘Sting a tidy bit when they’re hot, boy.’

As I sat watching him break the skin of the potato with his crusty fingers, I begged to know what happened to Pouchy after that.

‘Well, it wur a funny thing. He sort of went downhill. Took to the beer very bad. Went to the dogs. Never boasted about women no more. And in the end he wur half a cripple.’

This, I said, didn’t at all surprise me.

‘That’s right,’ he said. Slowly he picked up the bottle of elderberry, filled up the two glasses, held his own up to me and gave me one of those long solemn blood-shot winks of his. ‘Lost his pride. Onaccountable bad. Pass us the butter.’

Shandy Lil

I remember a July afternoon in my Uncle Silas’s garden when the raspberries were as big as walnuts and very nearly black. Where sun and shade met on the edge of the hazel spinney a line quivered all afternoon like pure white fire and far and deep under the trees the shade was black too.

We were supposed to be gathering raspberries for jam-making, but I was eating most of mine as I picked them and Silas wasn’t working very hard either. He was lying flat on his back between the tall dark rows of canes with his head on his rolled-up jacket and a soft straw hat on his face. Now and then he lifted up the rim of the straw hat like a trap door and dropped a raspberry into his mouth, smacking his wet red lips with the sound of a clapper.

‘These ’ere raspberries remind me of Pikey Willis,’ he said. ‘Can’t jistly recollect if I ever told you about Pikey, did I?’

No, I said, I had never heard of this Pikey.

‘Big man,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Onaccountable big an’ red. Very hairy too. Looked as if he’d got half a sheaf o’ barley growing on the backs of his hands. Had a big red beard too. Just like a fox’s brush dangling on his chops.’

After this he popped another raspberry into his mouth and shook his head thoughtfully and then surprised me by saying that he’d always felt onaccountable sorry for Pikey.

‘Very strong man, Pikey,’ he said. ‘Could lift a twenty score sow wi’ one hand.’

I didn’t say a solitary word to this, largely because it seemed to me I had heard something remarkably like it before. In a moment, I felt, I should be listening to the epic history of how my Uncle Silas had floored Pikey, the big boaster, in a wrestling bout, had beaten him cold with raw fists in a fight of fifty rounds or had put him under the table in a beer-drinking match after swallowing half a dozen barrels.

Instead I had another surprise.

‘Very nice chap, Pikey,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Very quiet. Onaccountable shy and timid. Allus blushin’. Might have been a gal.’

With a smack of his lips he popped another raspberry into his mouth and at the same time I remembered something. What about the raspberries? I said. What had they to do with Pikey?

‘I wur comin’ to that,’ he said, ‘if you’ll let me git me breath.’

And what was the reason, I said, for being sorry for Pikey?

‘I wur comin’ to that an’ all,’ he said, ‘if you don’t keep a-chivvyin’ on me all the time.’

If there was anybody less out of breath and less chivvied at that moment it was my Uncle Silas, lying flat on his back under his soft straw hat in the shade of the raspberry rows.

‘You’re allus in sich a nation tearing hurry to git on,’ he said. ‘Pipe down a minute. I’m a-recollectin’ on it.’

For the next few minutes, while my Uncle Silas lay sleepily lost in recollection, I lay down myself and stared up at the clear calm blue sky. Presently I heard him give a long slow ripe smack of his lips and say softly:

‘Yeller ’uns. Beautiful yeller ’uns they wur.’

Yellow what? I said. I hadn’t the faintest notion what he was talking about.

‘Raspberries,’ he said. ‘The raspberries Pikey growed.’

I had to confess I had never heard of yellow raspberries and he said:

‘Best flavour o’ the lot. Beautiful an’ sweet. Ain’t so big, mind you, but lovely and soft. You don’t see ’em growed much nowadays.’

For the second time, perhaps a little impatiently, I said I had never heard of yellow raspberries.

‘Neither had she,’ he said.

And who, I said, was she?

‘Shandy Lil,’ he said. He smacked his lips again, softly this time, in what I thought was slower, riper, fruitier recollection. ‘Shandy Lil.’

And who, I said again, was she?

‘Pikey’s gal,’ he said. ‘Any rate the gal he wur arter.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Never forgit it,’ he said with remarkable quickness. ‘Allus remember it. Beautiful hot evening. I’d bin a-mowin’ a medder all day and I’d knocked down about seventeen pints and wur just orf to The Swan with Two Nicks for another quart or two.’

In one quick leap my Uncle Silas was far ahead of me.

‘Hardly got five minutes up the medder lane afore I come across Pikey,’ he said, ‘sitting on ’eap o’ stones, trembling like a good ’un.’

At this point I tried to draw my Uncle Silas out by saying, as he so often reminded me himself, that that was just what women did to you, but he ignored this inviting remark completely.

‘Nussin’ a paper bag,’ he said. ‘Lookin’ jist like a boy as’d bin caught bird’s-nestin’ and couldn’t git rid o’ th’ eggs. Blushin’ an’ quiverin’ an’ quakin’ all over.’

Sucking at another raspberry almost black with bloom, he went on to say what a terrible thing it was to see a big strong chap like Pikey in such a nervous state. ‘I felt onaccountable sorry for him,’ he said, ‘and arter a bit I asked him what wur the matter.’

After this he paused for so long that I was about to show my impatience again by asking exactly what was the matter when he lifted the straw hat rather sharply and said:

‘It ain’t allus the strong ’uns as make a goo on it. Ain’t allus the big ’uns. Strength ain’t everything.’

A go of what? I asked him. And who with?

‘Wimmin,’ he said. ‘Pikey wadn’t gittin’ nowhere with that gal. He wur frit to death on her. Bin tryin’ to speak to her for weeks. Heart failed him every time.’

What was she like? I asked him again, this time firmly. Pretty?

‘Her mother kept a pub over at Nether Dean,’ he said with that remarkable quick blandness again, not even lifting the straw hat.

‘The Blacksmith’s Arms. Seems Pikey used to goo over every night and have a pint or two there and stare at this gal across the bar. That’s all. Jist stare. Wadn’t gittin’ nowhere. Never said a word.’

What was she like? I said again. Big? Fair?

‘Dammit, man, how do I know what she wur like?’ he said. ‘I ’adn’t set eyes on her yit, ’ad I? I’m still a-sitting on this ’ere ’eap o’ stones with Pikey and this goodly bag o’ raspberries, ain’t I?’

His voice, though juicy, was quite acid and I lay back in silence between the raspberry rows, momentarily subdued.

‘I’ll outline her in a minute,’ he said, ‘if you’ll hold hard. But I got to git there fust, ain’t I?’

In the process of getting there my Uncle Silas dwelt for some time on the pitiful nature of the raspberries in the paper bag. They were Pikey’s idea of a present to a girl, a sort of opening offering, but yellow or not, Silas said, they wouldn’t do at all.

‘“Fust you got wrap everything up, Pikey,” I told him. “That’s what wimmin like. Surprises. Unwrappin’ things. A bit o’ mystery. Next you got to roll up to that pub as if you are somebody. Git a trap and a spankin’ little mare and drive up in that. Tie a bit o’ ribbon on her tail and another bit on the whip and put a big Sweet William in your button-hole. You’ll never git nowhere crawlin’ and tremblin’ on your hands and knees. Wimmin don’t like that.”’

All Pikey could do, it seemed, was to sit on the heap of stones and say, over and over again: ‘I dussn’t do it, Silas, I dussn’t do it. I ain’t made that way.’

By this time I had begun to feel quite a bit sorry for Pikey myself. There is nothing quite so touching as a shy, helpless, muscular man.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘Well,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘when a chap don’t know how to do his courtin’ you best git on and show ’im. That’s what I say.’

Accordingly, two nights later, my Uncle Silas borrowed a trap and a little brown mare from a man named Joe Billington and tied a blue and yellow ribbon on the mare’s tail and a crimson bow on the whip.

‘Pikey picked a beautiful lot o’ raspberries and I laid ’em on a nice bed o’ leaves in a little bit of a flat basket. Then I covered ’em over with a bit o’ white muslin and tied it on with blue ribbon and then slipped a few cornflowers round the handle and tied them on too. Then I put a big red rose in me buttonhole and a big pink and white Sweet William in Pikey’s and we spanked off like a couple o’ dukes gooin’ to the races.’

This time I didn’t ask what happened. Somehow I knew that when they got to The Blacksmith’s Arms Pikey would sit in the trap outside, all of a tremble, and say ‘I dussn’t do it, Silas, I dussn’t do it. I ain’t made that way.’

‘Said it forty times if he said it once,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Couldn’t git him into that bar nohow. Wild horses wouldn’t git him in.’

At this point I made the inviting suggestion that my Uncle Silas had naturally had no such misgivings but, reposing blandly under the straw hat, he ignored that invitation too.

‘“Pikey,” I said, “you sit out here and hold the basket while I goo in an’ coax her. I’ll coax her the best I can and tell her all about you and arter a bit she’ll come out and then you can coax her. You can take her up the lane for a ride and gather a bit o’ honeysuckle. Beautiful honeysuckle I noticed on the edge o’ that spinney back there. Nothing like a bit of honeysuckle for coaxing gals.”’

When I asked how long the coaxing had taken and what had happened afterwards my Uncle Silas didn’t even bother to raise the rim of his straw hat.

‘It wur gittin’ a bit dusk when we come out, I know that,’ he said. ‘It wur still nation hot and the mare wur a bit restless. But that wadn’t all. Only thing in the trap wur th’ basket. Pikey had done a bunk. Chap sittin’ outside with his missus having a quart said he’d gone tearin’ down the road as if his beard wur a-fire.’

With slow care my Uncle Silas chose himself another raspberry. As he sucked it into his loose red lips it stained them with an almost purple smear.

‘Growin’ on a very tall hedge, that honeysuckle,’ he said. ‘Had a job to reach it.’

‘What was she like?’ I started to say again. ‘Dark? What was she——’

‘Growin’ up a big tall hedge, other side of a big dyke full o’ medder-sweet and willer-herb and burnet and all that.’

I didn’t ask what she was like any more. For some reason I had made up my mind that she was dark and how nice she would have looked with golden fingers of honeysuckle in her hair.

‘They say the best fruit’s allus at the top o’ the tree,’ Silas said. ‘So wur that honeysuckle. Too high for me. Couldn’t git at it nohow.’

With what I thought was some effort he managed a bit of a sigh.

‘Had to lift her up,’ he said. ‘On’y thing for it. Had to lift her up.’

Then he went on to say how light she was, light as a feather, and how he sat her on his shoulder. At first he clasped her round the legs but she laughed so much she couldn’t lift her arms. Then he put his hands round her waist and tried to lift her that way but the honeysuckle was still far out of reach and in the end they both fell down.

‘Fust time she fell a-top o’ me in the medder-sweet,’ he said. ‘Then we tried it again and I fell a-top of her.’

He sighed again, as if re-living, I thought, the long July dusk with the honeysuckle, the meadow-sweet and Shandy Lil. But suddenly he said:

‘That’s why them yeller raspberries allus remind me of her——’

‘Oh! damn the raspberries,’ I said. ‘I know all about the raspberries. What was she like, man?’

With solemn slowness he lifted an edge of his straw hat and cocked his eye at me.

‘If you goo over to The Blacksmith’s Arms at Nether Dean,’ he said, ‘you’ll see a gal there behind the bar. That’s Shandy’s grand-daughter.’

‘Anything like her?’

‘Spittin’ image,’ he said. ‘Same white skin. Same light brown hair. Colour o’ beer but not quite. More like a drop o’ Shandy.

He sighed again and from the spinney a breath of wind stirred the leaves and ran along the raspberry rows, blowing all the ripe fragrance of red-black fruit into the heat of afternoon.

‘Beautiful white skin,’ he said. ‘Beautiful little figure.’ He held up a big ripe raspberry and contemplated the firm red cone of it in a musing dream. ‘Hadn’t got a blemish on her nowhere.’

‘Nowhere?’

He chuckled for the last time, ripely.

‘Not as far as I could see,’ he said, ‘but then it wur gittin’ dark at the time.’

A Teetotal Tale

‘Fust started to drink beer when I wur three,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Not all that big amount, mind you. Jist a pint for breakfast.’

I confess it didn’t surprise me very greatly that my Uncle Silas had set himself so early an example in the matter of drinking and I merely remarked, half to myself, in a casual sort of way, how useful that early training had turned out to be, since he’d been going at it with unbroken relish ever since.

‘Jist wheer you’re wrong, boy,’ he said. ‘Jist wheer you’re wrong.’

A rather worried and melancholy look came over his face as he said this: a mere glimmer of uncertainty, but significant. At the same time he wiped a small drop of moisture from his bloodshot eye and gave a mumbling sort of sigh, letting up a little wind.

‘You’re not trying to tell me,’ I said, ‘that you gave it up at some time or other?’

Before answering he leaned back against the haystack where we had been sitting all afternoon and stared at the sky, blue and feathered with late May cloud above the masses of high yellow oak flowers that crowned the spinney. Between us stood a clothes basket full of cowslips, wilting in the genial warmth of afternoon. For over an hour we had been de-flowering the golden-fingered heads and laying them out on an ebony coloured tray to dry.

‘Gospel truth,’ he said. ‘I give it up once, boy. Good and proper. Strike me down if I tell a lie. I went teetotal.’

‘For how long?’ I said. ‘Five minutes?’

My Uncle Silas ignored me dreamily and for some moments longer went on de-flowering one cowslip after another. The weight of memory seemed to bear down on him rather heavily, I thought, but finally he struck one knee of his corduroys with a stern and solemn palm.

‘Prit near two months,’ he said. ‘Gospel. True as I’m a-sittin’ here aside this ’ere hay-stack. Prit near two months, boy. Teetotal.’

I remarked that it was a great wonder how he’d ever managed to survive the ordeal, but for nearly a minute he ignored that too. When he spoke again his eye was on the sky.

‘It damn well wur an’ all,’ he said. ‘Prit near the death on me.’

After this the melancholy look came back to his face again and he gave another rather worried, weighty sigh.

‘It wur cruel,’ he said. ‘Wuss’n being chained up. Wuss’n a nightmare.’

I started trying to think of some possible explanation to account for this extraordinary lapse on my Uncle Silas’s part and it came to me without difficulty.

‘Nothing to do with women, I suppose?’

My Uncle Silas slowly de-flowered another cowslip.

‘Two on ’em,’ he said. ‘They got round me, boy. They got round me. Two on ’em. Gal and her mother.’

The notion of anyone getting round my Uncle Silas, still less putting him off his beer for two months, was almost too much to bear. I couldn’t speak a word.

‘Beautiful gal an’ all,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’

He paused and held a pensive hand above the cowslips.

‘Ever seen a big ripe pear ’anging in a muslin bag?’

I said of course I had. That was the way my Uncle Silas had the big golden Williams hanging every September on the house wall.

‘Jist like that she wur,’ he said. ‘Firm and ripe. Like a nice ripe pear in a muslin bag.’

‘All ready for you to pick.’

He took up another cowslip. Then, instead of de-flowering it, he put it in his mouth and started reflectively chewing on the pale green stalk.

‘That’s about what I thought,’ he said.

Cuckoos had been calling across the meadows all afternoon and now one flew over the haystack, chased by two more. My Uncle Silas watched them disappear beyond the oak tree with a bleary eye.

‘Fust met her at a fair,’ he said. ‘Allus remember her. In a white muslin dress and a big white straw hat. Trying to win a clock on the hoop-la.’

‘With Ma?’

‘With Ma,’ he said. He seemed to brighten a little, I thought, at the mention of Ma. A sprightlier glint came back to his eye. ‘Ma wur a good looker too, mind you. And only about thirty-five.’

‘Another pear?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She wur more like a big yeller rose. A bit full blown.’

Still chewing at the cowslip stalk, he went on to tell me what a poor mess the girl and her mother were making of the hoop-la and how, pretty soon, he was helping to put this right.

‘In about half hour I’d got ’em a clock and all sorts o’ fancy bits-o’-kit like vases and dolls and mustard-pots and milk jugs and looking glasses and I don’t know what. It wur a warmish day and by the time I’d got ’em loaded well up I started to think it might be a good idea to have a wet or two at The Rose and Crown.’

He laughed for the first time that afternoon and the cowslip fell out of his mouth as if in surprise.

‘You mighta thought I’d suggested stranglin’ the pair on ’em,’ he said. ‘Ma went white with ’orrer. The gal—Arabella her name wur—said “We do not drink, thank you. We have seen enough of that.” And in a lot less time than it takes to git a pint down they wur gone.’

With renewed sadness my Uncle Silas started to de-flower another cowslip.

‘Well, I couldn’t git this ’ere gal outa my mind,’ he said. ‘You know how it gits, boy. They start ’auntin’ on you.’

They lived in a keeper’s cottage on the edge of the wood, the girl and her mother, he went on, and pretty soon he was trying to court her there. He didn’t have all that lot of luck at first and it took him a week or more to find out why, in his own words, ‘they were so darnation ostropolus about a little thing like beer.’

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.

Share your reviews and comments with us via info@bloomsburyreader.com.

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

The moral right of the author is asserted.

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eISBN: 9781448215324

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