Haweswater (6 page)

In 1936 the village of Mardale consisted mostly of tenant farmers, as it had for a few hundred years, and the land surrounding it was devoted to the grazing of sheep, cattle and mountain ponies, a little agriculture where the soil was deep enough and rich on the slopes beneath the farmhouses. The villagers lived quietly, independently from the rest of the county, almost separate from the world, save for a weekend trip into town, to the cinema, the dancehall, a Tuesday excursion to the market. Or a visit from an adventurous explorer, a climber, the odd geological surveyor, a meteorologist, studying rainfall charts. The farmers were hard-working men, eking a hard living from the land, wholly dependent on the outcome of their husbandry. On Sundays they visited the church with their wives and in the week their children went to the small, blue-walled school, where they were taught to read and write, arithmetic and a little Latin. Although these were not a people bound by the mountains on the horizon, they were conscious of their landscape in a way that led them to live by it and from it.

The buildings of the village were squat, stout and tucked into woody enclaves, designed to withstand the ravages of the seasons, the rough, unpredictable weather common to this part of the country. There was an inn at the south end of the village called the Dun Bull which advertised in the Midland papers for boarders and occasionally received them. At the Dun Bull Inn gatherings took place, the shepherd’s meet, the Mardale Hunt, evening assemblies where old men sang ballads with their rough, low voices softening like the air in spring. The inn was as much a centre for congregating as the church. And it stood almost opposite St Patrick’s
church on the other side of the main, mucky, wheel-rutted road.

Ella Lightburn would not set foot inside the inn; indeed, she would cross over to the other side of the street when she passed by it. Though she had delivered the placenta of Janet’s birth in its snowbound doorway, there was no endearment. A place of ill intent, she called it, certainly not suitable for women, not even for men, come to it. Hers was an inflexible faith which ruled out liquor of any kind as a sin, even though she was aware that the parish vicar, Reverend Wood, himself imbibed a jar or two on Tuesday and Thursday evenings as a reward if the preparation of his Sunday sermon was going well. And sometimes as a consolation if it wasn’t. It was said that Ella complained more about the grimy state of the copper pans hung over the fireplace, and the dust on the woodwork, than the moral state of the souls who frequented the Dun Bull, though how she reached these informed conclusions without first-hand experience remains a mystery. Samuel Lightburn was not so much a stickler in such matters, either divine or hygienic. He kept a tankard hung on the wall behind the bar from which he always took his ale and, as his wife visited the church often, so he propped up the bar of the Bull regularly, with his soft cap left like the wing of a bird on the counter beside his pint.

The Dun Bull Inn stood next to a small hill that was covered loosely with ash trees. It stood a little higher than the church, the tower of which was only twenty-nine and a half feet tall, excluding the spire. It was the newest of the buildings in the area, constructed in 1865 from Pennine granite and the traditional Westmorland blue slate. A tennis court had been built next to it at the turn of the century on the whim of a previous owner, the flat shale of which now provided straggling tourists with a decent car-parking facility. Tennis was a neglected sport in Mardale. Over the main entrance of the establishment hung a painted sign sporting an enormous brown bull of prize-winning proportions, and not unlike the
agricultural monstrosities found depicted in the eighteenth-century wing of the National Gallery. For sixty years the Dun Bull had been host to farmers, travellers and tourists, now furnishing them with ale and spirits and terrible pies made with meat of uncertain origin. The present publican was a large and bawdy Scotsman with huge, herniated testicles, whose name was Jake McGill. He was rotund and bearded, with small, bright, brown eyes and a wicked sense of humour.

Jake, as he told the tale himself, had left his homeland in the dead of one misty spring night in 1929, to escape from an enraged wife. The reason for her rage was never fully explained, but locals guessed at unfair play on his behalf. He arrived in the quiet blue-green valley a few weeks after becoming a fugitive, with the intention of lying low for a spell in the borderlands before catching the Maryport steamer to Ireland, only to discover that the Dun Bull had been without a landlord for over a year. So he stayed on, because he felt he was needed to take care of the poor, dry unfortunates there. A calling, he said. Within three months he had imported a good quantity of ferociously rough whisky into the valley, which his cousin brought down from the last of the illegal Lowland distilleries and which proved fiery enough to strip a man’s stomach lining after two fingers, taken quickly. The whisky was undisputedly revolting but rapidly acquired novelty value, as the two public houses in the adjacent villages of Bampton and Bampton Grange were licensed to sell only beer. Thus the Dun Bull, tucked into the isolated north-west English countryside, was, for a time, home to some of the most potent whisky in the whole of the British Isles.

Jake McGill was not a culinary master, but he would wake each morning at seven and rise with the discipline of a drill sergeant (indeed, it was rumoured that he had some form of loose military training) and then spend two hours in the kitchen, engaged in the surreptitious preparation of his pies, before he opened the Dun Bull’s doors to the public at one.

Within two years his pies had achieved legendary status throughout Westmorland, and arguably Cumberland also, for sending cattle lame if they stepped on one, or bunging up a man for a week, should he have the misfortune to consume a whole one. Jake also created his own beer-like concoction in his spare time, outside in a shoddy greenhouse behind the inn, which he offered to his customers at the truly magnificently low price of a halfpenny a pot. It was termed, simply, ‘Brew’.

The proprietor had a live-in girl called Jenny Wade, who stayed at the Bull on the pretext of cleaning for him. She helped out in the bar on busy nights and she cooked breakfast for any guests who might be staying at the inn during the warmer seasons. Dutifully, she warned them against the pies, all the while complimenting Jake as she tested their thick pastry crusts and soggy intestines herself. And when his testicles were not too painfully swollen, she encouraged Jake, in many ways, to forget about the Wretched Woman Harpy who had plagued his past life. She encouraged him to re-examine the various advantages of womankind through her plump and warm self.

The floor of the Dun Bull was uncarpeted, which was probably a blessing as it became a seabed for the tides of filth and mud brought in from the fields and farms. The odour of manure was never quite absent from its lower rooms. It had cavernous ceilings with dark wooden beams and most of its corners were lost in deep shadows. There was a variety of fox heads on the wall with fur of ranging colour, from blonde-amber to mahogany. They were the trophies of successful Mardale hunts, their jaws set in a last violent expression of defence against the hounds. A flail and a hoe were mounted above the entrance doorway, for no particular reason, and a set of huge copper pans was hung over the fireplace, spilling a dull copper light into the room when the setting sun found the right angle into the building before disappearing behind the mountains. The Dun Bull’s interior was not dissimilar to
many other drinking establishments of the region. Its punters, in Jake’s opinion, however, were not lacking in originality, they were altogether a little rarer.

Across the road stood St Patrick’s, a beautiful, ancient church, built at the end of the fifteenth century on sacred ground, where a tall, mossy Celtic cross had already stood for centuries. Upon the building of the church in 1499, the cross was incorporated into the graveyard and there it remained, older than even the two yew trees which backed up against the drystone wall circling the headstones within the graveyard. The building was tiny and dense, with enough room for only a handful of worshippers.

Inside, the church was cool and gave off the scent of the damp stone floor and polished wood. At the altar end was a blue and red stained-glass window, depicting Christ ascending, which let in a small amount of coloured light and which the Bishop of Carlisle had praised highly on his visit to the diocese in 1922. The hassocks were well worn and the prayer books a little tatty. The hymn board had a 3 immovably stuck in its first row, and consequently the initial hymn of any service was limited to a choice from those in the three-hundreds.

Under the front row of pews there were some elaborate and irreligious carvings. Medieval dragons, gargoyles and various other non-Christian motifs had been cut into the underside of the benches by a skilled, if renegade, atheist. They were strangely out of place in the sacrosanct setting, but could not be removed owing to their artistic merit and the age of the wooden structures themselves, and they had been mentioned at length in C. H. Simion’s
Ecclesiastical Wooden
Sculptures
of 1888, in which they were described as ‘fascinating and not a little compelling’.

Unlike the Bull, the church was kept spotlessly clean. There were fresh flowers next to the altar from the meadows in the
summer, holly wreaths from the trees by the lake in winter, pussy-willow in the springtime. October saw harvest festival and the steps leading up to the altar were adorned with fruit and vegetables, plaited wheat and loaves of bread fashioned into autumnal reliefs. The children gathered mushrooms and left them in baskets around the pulpit. The pulpit itself never gathered dust for more than a day or two before it was whisked away and the eagle lectern always shone a deep brassy gold. Ella was as meticulous in her cleaning duties as she was in her faith.

Reverend Wood, a small, rodent-mouthed man, ministered the church, giving sermons on Sunday mornings and holding prayer meetings on Wednesday nights. He had been part of the community for five years and had never quite adapted to the quiet, sullen village, missing the bustle of the town, a larger, better-dressed congregation, more refined jokes. And although the catchment area for the church in Mardale was somewhat larger than the twenty-eight families of the village, including as it did the high shepherd’s cottages up on the moors, along the path from the dale to Kentmere and the surrounding Naddle forest, those twenty-eight families and the remoter flock were in the habit of rather sloppy attendance, and the Reverend found that, particularly in lambing season, many of them missed the Sunday sermon for weeks on end. In truth, he found it difficult to be inspired here. Though he arrived with visions of introducing a rather more elaborate style of worship, perhaps a statue or two or even a little incense, his keenness soon departed with the rapid realization that his congregation was just as eager to preserve their ‘low church’, with its minimal ceremony and paraphernalia. His lectures were consequently a little subdued, a little uninventive and dull; he was known often to recycle a sermon and Ella Lightburn considered him ineffective and banal. She would rather have had her minister promising fire and damnation, pointing a crooked finger at them all and issuing warnings dire enough to make them swallow with discomfort,
to flush with heat or shiver with cold, depending on disposition. A servant of God with the ability to create a shimmering congregational silence, during which many would reach for their hassock underneath the pew. Instead, she cleaned the church vigorously and listened weekly to the Mole drone on, bookishly, dispassionately, never raising his voice a decibel. She never missed a service, nor a prayer meeting, not even when infected with shingles, with bronchitis, with a crippling, inflamed bunion. She had even been known to pressure the Reverend off his own sickbed when it looked like he might be thinking of not conducting the ten o’clock service that week in February, afflicted as he was with a nasty cold.

– I trust you’ll be fit fer duty by Sunday, vicar.

Reverend Wood stood shivering and wrapped in a blanket by the door of his cottage (not even a vicarage provided for him in the miserable parish!) and cradling a large brandy in one hand. It was eleven thirty in the morning. Ella was insistent.

– ‘Twoud be a shame to let down yer flock, let them wander the fells in certain danger.

– Well now, Mrs Lightburn, this cold is a stinker. It could have me knocked out a week or more.

The Reverend sneezed for emphasis, thinking that he had never before met a flock more able to care for itself.

And Ella turned abruptly and strode away up the stony path to Whelter Farm, her breath frosting above her, leaving the vicar to his brandy and thoughts of a long weekend in bed with a good book. She returned an hour later, however, with a pan of foul, oily broth, tasting vaguely of chicken, as the Reverend soon found out, and with some strict instructions.

– Remember, no more brandy, vicar, it thins the blood badly in this cold, not to mention thinning the spirit! And no milk. And no bread.