Portrait of Elmbury (30 page)

“Mychers, hedge creepers, fylloks and luskes,
    That all the somer keep dytches and buskes,
Lawtryng, and wandryng, fro place to place,
    And wyll not worke but the bypaths trace
And lyve with haws, and hunt the blakbery,
    And wyth hedge brekyng make themself mery …

I don't know what a ‘fyllok' is, nor yet a ‘lusk' but I bet Pistol is both. Yet the absurd disreputable creature is not without a sense of what is proper; he has a profound though inarticulate belief in the dignity of man. Early in the war, when an A.R.P. warden brought him a gas-mask to try on, he protested hotly. ‘No, thank 'ee, sir! No thank 'ee! No gas-maskses for me! I woan't put un on, I tell 'ee! If so be as Hitler drops gas on us, and it's come my time to die, I'll die natural!”

“That's about all our news, except that the Council is very disturbed because some earnest statistician has discovered that Elmbury contains 1509 houses of which only 248 possess baths. Maybe I am growing old and apathetic; but the disclosure scarcely moves me. Mr. Rendcombe, however, made a headline of it; he thrives and flourishes, though he compares the present war unfavourably with its predecessors. Mr. Benjamin also is still with us, but he has recently lost his little business in Birmingham and this has broken his heart. He creeps about mournfully, a sad semitic shadow. Sparrow, on the other hand, is chirpy as usual: in mysterious ways he is making a fortune out of the Americans.

“Yes; we have thousands of Americans in the district; and thousands more are streaming through every day down the main road with a rumble and a roar louder than that of the charabancs on Bank Holidays. Their impact upon Elmbury has produced interesting results, but good ones, on the whole, both for them and us. Recently a battalion of Negro soldiers arrived, to the great delight of some of our silly little wenches who were soon to be seen ‘walking-out' with them. The people who were most shocked by this were, of course, the Americans themselves; and the local American commander called a meeting of all the ‘public
and religious bodies' in Elmbury—the Town Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the Parochial Church Council, the Nonconformists, the District Visitors, the Salvation Army, the Mothers' Union, you know the sort of thing—and apologised very politely for the presence of the coloured troops who had come to fight in our war. ‘You're an ancient, peaceful town,' he said, ‘and you've got a tradition hundreds of years old; we shall very deeply regret it if things happen which seem to do violence to that tradition.' We honestly didn't know what he meant, and we all felt vaguely uncomfortable. He went on: ‘You may wish to make certain local regulations and if so we shall give you every help to enforce them. You may wish, for example, to put the public houses out of bounds to the coloured men; and of course you wouldn't like to see them dancing with white girls, so the dance halls can be put out of bounds as well.”

“Well, there was a rather long silence, and then suddenly the meeting (which was representative, mind you, of all that is most prim and pious in Elmbury) did a very astonishing thing. Speaker after speaker got up and said that if any dances were held in Elmbury the coloured men would be as welcome as the white. Mr. Patterson the fishmonger who's a Rechabite or something frightful of that kind said that drink was an Evil, but if public houses existed no man must be barred from them except by his own conscience, etc., etc. Little Mr. Brunswick, who is Methody and strait-laced, said that he didn't much hold with dances but he supposed that black soldiers had as much right as anybody else to attend them. Even the Chairwoman of the Moral Welfare Committee, while she deplored all manner of goings-on, declared stoutly that she would have no part in differentiating between black and white. ‘No, Colonel,' she said. ‘I'm sorry. But you spoke of our ancient tradition. Well, there it is. We don't do things like that in England.'

“I was never so proud of Elmbury as I was then.

“And of course—in the good American phrase—we can take it. We are old enough and wise enough and adaptable enough. So one sees the unusual sight of a great chocolate-coloured coon grinning behind his pint with our locals in the Shakespeare, or
playing darts for Elmbury against Brensham, while the white chaps from Virginia and Alabama and South Carolina, somewhat disapproving, take themselves off to the seclusion of the Swan. On the whole, it works pretty well; for there's plenty of natural courtesy on both sides. I suppose we shall pay for our broad-mindedness with a few coffee-coloured bastards, but if so, what of it? A spot of miscegynation never did any harm. It gives what's called heterosis vigour to the race—which incidentally my magpie moths sadly lack. Mr. Sparrow, by the way, supports this view. Discussing the problem the other day, ‘Nothing like a good mongrel,' he said. ‘I've got cross-bred pullets and they're the best layers I ever had, I'll go t'ell if they 'ent.'

“But seriously: these little invasions, by black or white, won't hurt us. We can absorb and we can assimilate, and we can keep our queer unique ‘Elmbury' character. (After all, we've absorbed and assimilated Mr. Benjamin, and his race is the most indigestible in the world!)

“But we
must
keep our character. I, who am hardly ever serious, am deadly serious about this. I want to say something to you—something that I feel is important—about this Elmbury from which in the nature of things I must shortly depart and to which, if the news is as good as it seems, I hope you and Michael and the rest of you will before very long return.

“I see about me a changing world. I had almost said a dissolving and disintegrating world. I'm no prophet, and I can't predict the future of Europe and of England; but I think it's going to be for a time a strange and uncomfortable future. In the end your generation may save its bacon by some sort of internationalism, probably on communist lines. I've got no quarrel with that.

“But meanwhile I visualise a period of something very like anarchy. I may be wrong; I hope I'm wrong. But if I'm right it may be that the remedy—the temporary remedy—will lie not so much in internationalism as in lots of tiny nationalisms. Parochialism, in fact; the little low plant may survive when the great tree is swept away by the wind.

“Parochialism, unlike nationalism, never caused people to
go to war. The men of Dykeham think they catch bigger fish than anybody else, and the men of Brensham think the Dykeham folks are a lot of liars. But they don't try to settle the question by bashing each other on the head, and are never likely to. Therefore, I think that the smaller the ‘nationalism' is, the nearer it comes to internationalism. England, as a whole, finds it difficult to understand Russia, as a whole; but Brensham village can much more easily understand a village in Russia. For example, we can perfectly understand the men of two adjacent riverside villages on the Don or the Dnieper arguing over their vodka about their respective catches of sturgeon.

“Very well; if Parochialism in some sort survives, Elmbury may survive and the entity that is Elmbury life, the idea of the small, intimate, closely-interrelated community—when the great winds of the world have swept kings from their thrones, dictators from their seats and scattered like chaff the fortunes of the great financiers and the great banks.

“Now I believe that if this is so Elmbury and all the other country towns like it will have a big part to play in the evolution of England. It seems to me that we—as an American soldier kindly put it to me the other day—‘have something.' It's not all good: Double Alley is an example of how bad it can be. But the best of Elmbury, I think, is something pretty important and something which the world would be much poorer for losing. We are, in our way, a rather highly civilised community. We have achieved quite a sensible sort of relationship among ourselves. We have evolved in a great many hundreds of years a way of life which seems to me a good way.

“It may be, therefore, that the country towns and villages will be for a period the repositories (like the monasteries in the Dark Ages) of a certain way of life, a certain sort of culture, while the great cities go mad. It sounds fantastic, but I believe it is possible. It may be that they will be the model, the rough prototype, from which a new sort of community will evolve. For, mind you, I don't want to restore the
status quo ante bellum
. Change there will certainly be, and evolution, and perhaps revolution. I merely suggest that the pattern of our English country life has
been, perhaps, as good as fallible men could make it and that you and those who come after you might take that pattern as a rough guide and try to devise something better.

“But of course I may be completely wrong. We know enough about evolution now to realise that old dame Nature (or God if you feel that way about it) is experimental and somewhat capricious. Evolution doesn't march along a nice straight course. A promising line is developed (e.g. the social insects, the bees and ants) and suddenly it comes to a dead end. Nature gets sick of it and tries another way. Often she contrives something which is in its way quite perfect, something as gorgeous as a bird of paradise, as fantastic as a platypus, as monstrous as a whale, as ingenious as a humming-bird, but for some reason it fails to fit in with her mysterious purposes and she drops it like a hot cake.

“Communities seem to evolve and develop in much the same fashion and with just as many false starts and dead-ends. Byzantium left us little but the reflection of its architecture, Egypt little but its tombs, the Incas nothing but broken temples nearly overwhelmed by the green devouring jungle. Athens was perfect of its kind; but it led nowhere. Islam was vigorous and all-conquering and set the Mediterranean afire with its white and searing flame; but it suddenly faded away.

“It may be that in a comparable but much smaller way the kind of English life and tradition which I have conveniently labelled ‘Elmbury' is a dead end, sterile already, an offshoot which looked promising but which hasn't come to anything after all.

“I don't believe that; but if so, so be it. It was good while it lasted. It was merry and sane and comic and fantastic; and from certain aspects—most of all perhaps from the aspect of an old man who is soon to leave it—it looked very, very fair. As my American friend said, ‘It had something.' I am glad to have belonged to it, to have been part of it.

“FUIMUS TROES; FUIT ILIUM.”

THE END

¹
One not tied to a brewery.

¹
To-day, of course, Jerry uses a combined harvester.

¹
Squitch—couch-grass.

¹
Agricultural wages at this time for a 52-hour week were 30s.

¹
Years ago, the “Mop” was a hiring-fair, at which farmers hired their labourers and masters their servants. A carter would carry a whip to identify himself, a wagoner would wear straw in his cap as a mark of his trade. But that ended long ago; and now the Fair is given over entirely to fun.

¹
In which case they voted as Liberals, i.e. against liberty.

To
ERIC LINKLATER
with love

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © The Estate of John Moore 1995

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ISBN: 9781448204250
eISBN: 9781448203666

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