Portrait of Elmbury (29 page)

“Yes.”

“Well, mankind may or may not have a God; but he's either incapable of practising selection, or too disinterested to do so. Therefore man does the selection himself; and a nice mess he
makes of it. Double Alley, bless its heart, breeds at a rate approaching that of rabbits. You and I, for various social reasons, don't breed at all. Likewise an able fellow out of Double Alley, who gets on, learns a trade, marries a decent wife and saves a bit of money, has perhaps one or two children; he wants to give them a good schooling and a better chance than he had, so he doesn't have any more. His nitwit brother, who's too lazy to work, remains in his pigstye, marries a slut, who may indeed be diseased or moronic, and proceeds to have no less than twelve equally anti-social children to multiply by twelve the mess he's made. A mad world, my master. And since it seems to me to be utterly beyond my power, or anybody else's, to remedy”—Mr. Chorlton chuckled—“can you blame me if I devote my declining years to Mr. Cockburn's excellent vintages, the Greek crossword in the
Sunday Times
, and the amusing exercise of trying to breed
Abraxas grossulariata
ab
lacticolor?”

Soon it was Festival time and once more—but surely, we thought, this must be for the last time?—we lit the floodlights in the churchyard and let them gild against the July night our huge incomparable backcloth of stone. Little Tobias triumphed over the demon Asmoday and watched the serving-man who had helped him throughout his long journey change to a shining angel before our eyes. Out of the shadows of the dark funereal yews a youth, naked save for a blood-red loincloth, ran breathless into a pool of cold white light to tell in Milton's imperishable words the story of the death of Samson. And, in the play
Everyman
, from the very rooftop of the great church towering above the heads of the audience God spoke to a terrible shadow that shone with the faint green dreadful light of corruption and rose, it seemed, out of the very tomb:
Where are thou, Death, thou dreadful messenger?

So, in a dozen evenings of brief and breath-taking beauty, another Festival ended; and we suddenly became familiar, some
of us for the first time, with the name of a place called Sudeten-land. Would God indeed call his dreadful messenger this autumn? No: it seemed we were to be granted another reprieve. There occurred what sentimentalists were only too willing to call the miracle of Munich; though why there should be anything miraculous in a doddering old statesman sacrificing his country's honour for the sake of a few months of uncertain peace was not very clear.

We were told that in London the Munich Agreement was the signal for dinner-parties and celebrations; that the hotels and restaurants sold more champagne on that night than they had sold for years; and even that bands of young men roamed the streets until the small hours singing patriotic songs such as
Rule Britannia
.

I don't know if this was true. I was in Elmbury at the time and I can only speak for Elmbury. I can affirm that we didn't have any inclination to celebrate in the Shakespeare or the Swan. I remember Millie, pouring out a pint while she listened to the wireless and saying: “Well, I calls it a bloody shame, I does, reely.” I remember Mr. Chorlton telling me: “I believe that history will write down that remark about ' Peace in our Time' as the most inane statement ever made by a British Prime Minister.” And I remember Jerry, on that evening of Munich, deciding that when war came he would sell Hill Farm and join up with his friends. It would be tough on Dorrie, he said, but she would understand; he couldn't just stay behind and make money. …

No; London folks that night may have been merry and mad: but in Elmbury we knew better. The pub was soon empty; and we went soberly back to our houses, for very shame.

The last fantastic months went by. We made plans for the future with a sense of horrible unreality: as if we were citizens of a sick world which nevertheless was possessed by a kind of
spes
phthisica
, a frantic feverish hope against hope that the inevitable wouldn't happen after all. We held our annual cricket meeting —it was about the time when the Germans marched into Prague —and sought ways and means as usual to wipe out our usual deficit. We needed a new mower, and I remember old Mr. Jeffs, in the chair, muttering: “Them as wants mowers ought to pay for 'em,” but a few minutes later offering to buy us the mower all the same. After the meeting we went into the bar and listened to the news. There was nothing new, save the usual vague talk of negotiations and mobilisations going on simultaneously; but the sense of crisis persisted, we were aware, as countrymen can smell the approaching rain, of the vast storm brewing. I heard Mr. Jeffs, who'd fought against the Boers and who'd lost his two sons in the Great War, say briefly and finally: “We'll have to stop un next time. We'll have to cry Halt.” There was a murmur of approval; and Jerry said sombrely: “Aye. We'll have to go, I reckon.” “Yes,” said Mr. Jeffs. “You wouldn't hang back, Jerry; nor the rest of you neither. You'd have to go.” I knew then, more sure than if a Cabinet Minister had whispered it to me, that we should be at war within six months. For that was the temper of England; and old Mr. Jeffs spoke for England, though he knew well what was the cost of war in sons.

“Soldiers and guns!
 Soldiers and guns!
 These for your daughters, and those for your sons!
 What if your children be comely or tall?
 When soldiers and guns come, down they will fall!”

ERIC LINKLATER.

We had one season's cricket nevertheless, and we had one more Festival, lit the great lamps for the last time before the black-out, and then it was September.

I stood, in strangely-assorted company, on the pavement outside the Anchor Inn and watched the Territorials march away with young Michael at their head. Mr. Chorlton was there, Mr.
Jeffs, and Mr. Rendcombe; Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Sparrow; Millie and Effie; Pistol, Nym and Bardolph, who had come back from the Spanish war minus an arm.

I counted the columns of three as they went by. There were nearly ninety men. Not bad for Elmbury! I half-wished I were going with them; but I should be leaving by a later train to join my Fleet Air Arm squadron.

Mr. Rendcombe said:

“I stood here and watched them go off to the Boer War; and in August, 1914; and now again. Three times in a man's life is too much.”

I waved Mike good-bye. He shouted: “This'll be livelier than goose-shooting!”

“Good luck!” I shouted.

“Good luck!” he waved back.

I remembered sitting in the Tudor House window-seat and watching the soldiers march off on that day in 1917. I remembered Black Sal pirouetting after them and Double Alley cheering them as they went by. I remembered Mr. Jeffs—a larger, more substantial Mr. Jeffs—on the same morning quarrelling with the old vicar about Tithes—was it the same morning or did memory telescope the two events into one? I couldn't be sure; but I heard him mutter now, as he stood at my side: “Them as wants wars ought to fight in 'em,” and I remembered that he had paid this grimmer, inescapable tithe which we pay each generation to our own folly and the world's.

Farmers' sons, tradesmens' sons, poachers' sons, the khaki files went by. Pistol, Bardolph and Nym came stiffly to attention beside me. Millie and Effie were crying, and sharing the same inadequate white handkerchief. Mr. Chorlton quoted grimly: “ ‘War for his meals loves dainty food'—Aeschylus.”

Then suddenly the soldiers started to sing. It was the same song, the same foolish simple parody, as their predecessors had sung in 1917. Perhaps the same bittersweet Elmbury humour stirred them; perhaps some of them remembered their fathers singing it as they stood, ill-clad guttersnipes, at the mouth of the alley.

“Farewell—Double Alley,”

they sang,

“Good-bye—Ulmbree Cross!”

and round the corner into Station Street swung the last of the files, so beautifully in step, so perfectly dressed by the-right, so purposeful and yet so gay, that it broke your heart to see them go.

I am writing this in Normandy, in a once-pleasant little village which before our bombers visited it must have looked very much like any one of those dozen little villages which lie in a ring round Elmbury. Away to my left about the great cathedral of Caen burns a town which may for all I know have looked like Elmbury itself. The church tower reminds me sharply of Elmbury Abbey.

In the field where I sit a peasant who might by his appearance belong to Brensham or Tirley is doing exactly what any of our peasants would do in similar circumstances: he is trying to remove a bomb-splinter from the hindquarters of his cow and cursing, in a slow, sombre, hopeless monotone, the kicking beast, the Boches, the British, and the war.

We have just received our first mail since we left England; and I have got a long letter from Mr. Chorlton. It contains the latest news of Elmbury; it brings the portrait up to date. So here it is:

“It is D-Day at last,” writes Mr. Chorlton, “and even I, who loathe the wireless, have switched it on a dozen times and even I, who am not accustomed to praying, have breathed a prayer to whatever gods there be that you may fare well.

“It has been a little D-day for me also, for there emerged this morning, and slowly spread out before my unbelieving eyes its immaculate wings, my milk-white unspotted
lacticolor
. She is very beautiful. There is not a speck nor a blemish upon her. She is white as driven snow.

“Mars, and you his servants, have robbed me of most of my triumph. Even a doddering old fool of over seventy who is now cynical about almost everything cannot be expected to feel that a little moth is very important on a day like this.

“Still, I have done it. And it took ten years! I am satisfied, and since my own time for pupation, or at any rate going to earth, cannot be far off, I can say ‘Nunc dimittis.'

“Meanwhile you may like to hear the latest news of Elmbury.

“The town looks much the same and so far it hasn't had a bomb on it, although Double Alley gives the impression that it has been the target for a block-buster. We have torn down all the filthy hovels and after the war we propose to make a little park there, or at any rate a green space with a few trees. Black Sal would laugh. Perhaps she will haunt it. She would be an alarming ghost, I think, to the pure-minded and hygienic citizens of 1950.

“Outside the town there are bigger changes, and I'm sorry to say that the aircraft factory which now sprawls for miles has recently engulfed the Colonel's farm. All the trees he so lovingly planted are down, and he has no longer any memorial; unless he was, as you once suggested to me, Protean, and lives on in the rain, the wind, and the grass.

“His chair is still in the same corner of the Swan bar but the new generation is not shy of sitting in it. The Swan no longer stands for what it used to (whatever that was: I was never quite sure). Frippits and flibbertigibbets behind the bar serve beer to American G.I.s—when there isn't any whisky.

“Millie and Effie have gone into the A.T.S. where they no doubt encourage the troops as they did our young farmers. They'll be back after the war, I bet, to re-establish their matriarchy in the Shakespeare.

“Further down the street Mr. Parfitt's shop looks very dusty and unprosperous. Mr. Parfitt himself is old and infirm. He haunts his premises hungrily like an old unsuccessful spider whose inept web fails to catch a warier generation of flies. He ought to be able to make something out of the Americans, but he hasn't the spirit to try. The only thing in his window, bait for the archæologists and folk-lorists who come here no more, is obviously a toasting fork labelled ' Ancient Eel-spear circa 1700.'

“Our soldiers, as you know, have done great deeds since you and I and the rest of us watched them march away on that lovely
morning in September: a morning which seems so long ago that it is already almost lost in its own September mists. Outside Dunkirk they fought a savage rearguard action and young Michael got the M.C. for using his Bren Gun carrier as if it were a tank. Then they went out to Egypt and marched from Alamein to Naples. Doubtless they are now on the path to Rome. Michael writes to me from time to time telling me of the various snipe, geese, hares, etc., which he has killed; but it appears he has slain a great many Germans too. Sometimes in his letters I get the impression of the Colonel's shadow on the page, and seem to hear a faint whispering echo of his laughter.

“Jerry, of course, went into the Yeomanry, who were converted to what I think are called cavalry tanks. He was killed in Tunisia; and with him three of the others who rode that crazy Midnight Steeplechase from Brensham to Elmbury Cross long ago. Thus ‘history repeats itself' (what a silly phrase!): they died as their fathers died; and the people who make the next war will have to look elsewhere for the sacrificial stuff, for we have no more. Whole families have ceased to exist, the breed is wiped out.

“Mr. Jeffs went back to Hill Farm to manage it for Jerry; but the strain and the shock of Jerry's death was too much for him and last autumn he died in harness, worn out (as he told me a little time before he died) by filling up endless forms which he didn't understand for the benefit of the clerks and the 'jacks in offices' whom he so heartily hated.

“Pistol, Bardolph and Nym (old soldiers never die) are in the Home Guard, which gives them better opportunities for poaching than they have ever had before. But I must not traduce them. There was a time, when we were expecting the Germans to arrive any day, when the sight of Pistol's sinister spidery figure, sloping down the hedgerow, and Bardolph's red face behind a tommy-gun, gave me a kind of comfort. I should have feared them had I been a German soldier! Yesterday I saw them all three engaged in some furtive business at the corner of Dogleg Spinney and last night by chance I found an old rhyme that exactly describes them: