A Little Bit on the Side (5 page)

‘Farce? It was an absolutely bloody disaster,’ said Jim, with a laugh at the memory of it. ‘They were able to get a car from Lochmaddy to within a quarter-mile of the place, but then it was all on foot across land that was absolutely sodden. It was raining when they arrived. It was always bloody raining, and I looked out of the window to see them get out of the car, Celia togged up for the weather and her mother in a tailored suit, high heels and a fancy hat. By the time they got to the house she was soaking, practically knee-deep in mud, and almost in tears.’

‘The next two days hardly bare thinking about,’ said Celia. ‘Jim slept on the floor on cushions, Mummy shared the bed with me, and it rained incessantly. By the third morning she was ready to go home, and by the end of the second winter I was ready to follow her.’

‘So we fled back south to Celia’s parents in Rottingdean while we took stock,’ said Jimmy. ‘From the gorblimey to the sublime, so to speak. Many late nights, a little emotional at times, but at the end of it all they saw that we were determined to have another go at smallholding, and a family compromise was reached. We agreed to make things legal — registry office only though. In return Celia’s Dad agreed to set us up on a smallholding of choice on the understanding that if after three years it hadn’t worked out, we’d return to something more conventional. That was over fifteen years ago, and we’re still here.’

By comparison with the Gillans the Mannings backgrounds could hardly have been more conventional. Kate, like Jimmy, was from a working-class family, but one untroubled by drink or the financial stringencies that afflicted the Gillans, and blessed with a loving and close bond between parents and children. Staunchly supportive of King, Country and Empire, they offered up their prayers in the established church once a week, and contrary to their own best interests, unthinkingly voted Tory, apart from one rogue branch of the family where the aunt was known to be tainted with liberalism.

Courtesy of her own sharp intelligence and a history master of an independent turn of mind, Kate had been able to free herself from most of her family’s prejudices. Some vestigial allegiance to the superstitious mysteries of religion survived even the battering of her university days, but finally wilted and died in the face of Jack’s bred-in-the-bone atheism. As the first member of her family to have progressed to university, however, Kate’s heretical views were received with a tolerance denied the aunt.

Jack, by contrast, sprang from an extended family of the metropolitan middle class, who liked to see themselves as in direct line of descent from Keir Hardie, and had been chattering away in the suburbs of Hampstead long before their likes had become the butt of political satirists. His mother taught history and economics in a flagship comprehensive school, his father lectured in politics at the LSE. Most of his aunts and uncles, if not similarly engaged, were active in local politics or employed within the GLC.

Daily life for Jack could not have been less homely if he’d been living in the offices of Transport House, and family gatherings in mourning or celebration took on the air of the hustings as wine or whisky took hold, and subtle distinctions of policy and meaning were debated ad nauseam. Such was his force-fed diet of politics and working-class solidarity that Jack spewed it all up when he went to university, where he devoted himself to the arts, and eschewed all political associations. His sceptical atheism, which was there by default so to speak, he retained and gradually over-laid it with a thick skin of misanthropy.

The loving and close relationships that Kate had enjoyed within the family were not something of which Jack had much experience, but he would not have said that there was any coldness or lack of feeling, as between Jimmy and his mother. It was just that it was all rather remote: a family of semi-detached relationships was the way Jack would frequently describe it.

Kate returned to hearth, home and family with pleasure, often with Jack who enjoyed the visits to what he called a normal family life as much as she did, but sometimes by herself when school holidays permitted and Jack was committed to the office.

Jack, by contrast, returned to what he called the political bosom of his family only for those special occasions when he could not decently decline an invitation: weddings, funerals, and more recently a family party to celebrate his father’s selection as Prospective Parliamentary Candidate in a by-election for what was considered to be a winnable constituency. Jack’s celebration when it turned out to be losable was, however, a very private affair.

‘Thank God for that,’ he said to Kate. ‘He’s bad enough as it is. Had he taken the seat he’d have been completely unliveable with.’

If pressed further on his political roots and allegiances, he was inclined to entertain his audience with a falsetto RP version of Alex Glasgow’s
Oh My Daddy is a Left-Wing Intellectual,
and maintain that his own views were much too far to the left to bear categorising ‘So far,’ he would say, ‘That I’m in danger of going full circle, and then Christ knows where I’d end up.’

A week or so after their evening with the Gillans, as the frosts eased towards the end of February, the snow arrived, driven in by a biting easterly that sucked the heat from the house, rattled the tiles on the roof, and then roared its way westward towards Barlow and the Welsh hills beyond. Across the common on the exposed heights the road was the one clear feature, a black scar scoured clear of snow by an unrelenting wind which piled it high in grotesque mounds around the stands of gorse, or dumped it waist-high in the deep and narrow lanes that led to and from the hill.

From early afternoon, and throughout the night snow had fallen heavily, and in the morning, as Jack forced open the doors of the barn he had little expectation of getting very far on his daily journey to work. But even in the half-light before dawn the local farmers had been out and at work with their tractor ploughs. They had flocks out on the hill that needed feed and attention, and cutting a passage through the drifts that lay deep in the narrow lanes they carried the hay to their beleaguered livestock. It proved to be the hazards on the main roads, not the by-ways of the hill, that delayed Jack’s arrival at his desk.

The beginning of April marked the start of the thaw and the first of two events which began to allay the locals’ suspicions of Jack’s trade, and ease them into a comfortable working relationship with the village community.

A bright spring day with blustery squalls racing in from the west spilling shower after shower on the upper reaches of the hill was just beginning to fade when Kate gave Jack a shout from the kitchen, which looked out to the road.

‘I think we’re going to get a visit from the vicar. He’s stopped at the gate, and I can see him struggling with that catch I’ve been asking you to fix for a couple of months. Do pop out and give him a hand…. No, it’s OK he’s made it and heading for the front door.’

‘What the hell would the vicar want with me, if that’s not an inappropriate association of ideas?’ replied Jack.

‘Never mind that. Go to the door and let him in. I’ve got my hands full at the moment......and be civil; he looks a nice old chap.’

Anticipating the ring on the bell, Jack had the door open just as the Rev Breakwell lifted his hand, which Jack took the opportunity to grasp and shake. Hearing their conversation at the door extending beyond the mere formalities, Kate called through from the kitchen.

‘Don’t stand talking in the hall. Come into the kitchen where it’s cosy.’

They both soon realised that the vicar’s mission was purely social and not proselytising. Offered the choice of a cup of tea or whisky he chose the latter, and they settled down around the table to hear what he had to say.

He’d seen Jack from time to time in the Barton Shepherd and out on the fields, he said, and understood from Mr Gillan that they hadn’t exactly been welcomed into the community with open arms. He was unhappy about that, and felt that as they were within his parish he should remedy things with his own welcome, whatever their beliefs might be.

‘So you know Jimmy and Celia then?’ asked Jack, rather puzzled that there should have been any intimacy between Jimmy and the local representative of any church.

‘Indeed I do: wonderful couple. Very interesting life they’ve had. I went there first of all to take painting lessons from Celia, and inevitably got talking to Jimmy. We’ve had some very stimulating discussions.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Jack with a smile, wondering just which variety of the Church of England’s eclectic range of vicars he had on his hands.

‘Well, as I said, I simply wanted to extend to you the welcome in which my parishioners appear to have been rather deficient. As far as I know you are the first professional commuter to venture out here into the sticks, if I can put it that way, but I don’t suppose you will be the last, and as we are both specialists in our own way I thought we should make contact.’

‘You heard from Jimmy I suppose?’

‘Oh no! I knew who you were and your occupation long before you moved in.’

‘Hilda Genner?’ asked Jack.

‘No names, no pack-drill, as they say.’

‘Secrets of the confessional perhaps — well I have them too, so I know what it’s like.’

‘So I imagine, but changing the subject, have you decided what you are going to do with the land? The grass is already beginning to green up a little, and on this side of the hill it will soon need grazing.’

‘Well I’ve got my veg plot going and fruit cage up, and I’ll probably fence off an acre or so around the quarry as a wild life reserve, but we can’t quite make up our minds about the rest. We don’t want to start something in complete ignorance, so we went to basic husbandry evening classes during the winter, but we’re not sure whether to run some livestock of our own, or ask the neighbours if they would like to use the land: if only I can get a chance to have a few words with them, that is.’

Half-an-hour, another glass of whisky and much desultory chat later, the vicar at last decided it was time to leave. At the door he paused for a moment before speaking.

‘Would it be rude of me to ask whether despite your beliefs, or rather lack of them, you sometimes attend a church service?’

‘Not at all, and we do, but only as social occasions: family weddings, funerals — that sort of thing.’

‘May I ask then that you do a little socialising this coming Sunday and slip in at the back for the morning service at St Matthew’s. I’ll say no more now..... Lovely moon coming up. Thanks for the whisky.’

‘Well that was a rum affair,’ said Jack, pouring himself a final whisky, and propping his backside up against the bar on the Aga.

‘Intriguing though,’ said Kate. ‘Are you going?’

‘Absolutely. Wouldn’t miss it for worlds, far too mysterious.’

St Matthew’s in Barton, a plain and undistinguished early Victorian structure, had not featured in the Mannings’ early Borders excursions, but the view from its churchyard more than compensated for the building’s failings. They didn’t hurry to get to the church on the Sunday following the visit from the vicar. Jack thought it best to leave their arrival until the last possible minute, and so the churchyard was deserted when they walked up the drive and pushed open the door just as the last notes of an organ voluntary faded away and died.

Despite their best efforts to slip in quietly in the ensuing silence, Jack could not prevent a perverse door latch from snapping to with a loud metallic ‘clack’ that turned the heads of half the congregation, to be followed by the rest when their names were whispered around. Surprised to find themselves in a church almost full to capacity, they slipped into the end of the pew nearest to the door, only to find themselves sitting alongside Jimmy and Celia.

‘You too!’ whispered Jimmy. ‘Any idea what this is about? Larry Breakwell called in for a chat last night and suggested I should come, but said no more. Most of the hill seems to be here. What on earth is the old boy up to?’

They sat in silent non-participation through a hymn, a prayer, another hymn and a reading, before the Rev Breakwell made his way into the low pulpit and faced his flock. He made no comment and expressed no surprise at the unique sight of his church full to the back pew, but throughout his address directed himself to the rows towards the front, as though the rest were empty, which they frequently were. It was unfortunate perhaps that he looked a little too often at poor old Ada Sutton, who left the church feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the thought that his remarks had been aimed particularly at her.

‘This morning, in a departure from the usual pattern of my sermons I will be taking not one, but three texts, my first being from the Weymouth New Testament, the Gospel of St Luke Chapter 18 Verse 13:

“But the tax-gatherer, standing far back …”’

Here he paused as the heads of the curious turned once again to sneak a look at the late arrivals, and there was a restrained murmur of surprise from his audience.

‘But the tax-gatherer, standing far back would not so much as lift his eyes to Heaven, but kept beating his breast and saying, "O God, be reconciled to me, sinner that I am.”’

Here he paused again briefly as a few smiles were suppressed and the whispers died away.

‘My second is from Weymouth, Book of Romans Chapter 13, Verse 6:

“Why, this is really the reason you pay taxes; for tax-gatherers are ministers of God, devoting their energies to this very work.”’

He paused again, but this time there was no response as his congregation waited silently for the third text.

‘Finally from the Revised Standard Version of the Gospel of St Matthew Chapter 9, Verses 9 to 13, I turn to the Lord’s calling of St Matthew, a tax collector, to be one of his disciples:

“And as He sat at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ But when He heard it, He said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’”