Portrait of Elmbury Read online

  The town itself, which straggled along the main road for half a mile or so, consisted of a haphazard assortment of ancient half-timbered houses and shops—some of these leaned across the street towards each other, like old wives gossiping—with later Georgian buildings among them, and the inevitable alleys, dozens of alleys, leading off the main road into the ruinous rabbit-warren of Elmbury’s slums. There were hundreds of acres of these slums. They were scandalous; they were far worse, probably, than many of the slums in London’s East End; but the extraordinary, the almost unbelievable thing about them was that as well as being terrifying they were curiously beautiful. The narrow crooked alleys, fantastical enough by day, at twilight seemed to belong to a Grimm’s fairy tale. By the time the moon had risen their metamorphosis was complete; they had dissolved into a monstrous and yet enchanting dreamland, they had become part of a City of Beautiful Nonsense. The tottering hunchback cottages leaned shoulder-to-shoulder like drunken men; if one of them fell down they’d all collapse in a heap. Their ragged eaves nearly met across the alley, fretting the tattered strip of sky into which crooked chimney-stacks intruded dangerously. Nothing was orderly, nothing rational. The chimneys defied the laws of gravity and even the stout oak beams which were the bones of the cottages were not straight, but bent like elbows—as if a forked tree had once stood there and the cottages had been built around it. One expected that when the doors of the dwellings opened there would emerge not people, but hobgoblins and dwarfs; and often enough there did.

  The alleys nearest the river—and these were the dirtiest and most insanitary of all—often reminded visitors of parts of Venice; and here it was a common sight during the summer season to see a devoted artist squatting at his easel surrounded by cheeky urchins, ferociously painting a row of filthy and exquisite hovels, and chewing antiseptic lozenges like mad.

  “Fields—Flocks—Flowers”

  But the way to see Elmbury as a whole, to see it in all its squalor and all its glory, was to climb to the top of a nearby hill, a little hump like an overgrown haycock, curiously called the Toot. From here you could watch the light changing on the Abbey tower, so that sometimes it seemed as insubstantial as a dream, a grey ghost-tower brooding over the town, and at others, especially at set of sun, it smouldered and shone like a growing affirmation of faith. There are few towers like it in all the world, and one of them is at Caen in Normandy. On a day in June, 1944, I lay upon the forward slope of just such a little eminence as the Toot, and watched Caen burning around its Norman tower; and I thought that but for the geographical accident of our English Channel I might have watched Elmbury burn so.

  From the Toot you could see, too, how clumsily and how untidily the town sprawled about the church: and how the rivers were a recurrent theme running through its history and the lives of its people. Two broad streams joined at Elmbury among a confusion of small brooks. These snaking waterways almost isolated the town even in summer; and when the floods rose in the winter they sometimes cut it off altogether, so that milk was delivered by rowing-boat and people punted through the back streets. At such times the meadows round Elmbury disappeared beneath a huge inland sea; and no doubt it was this annual flooding that made them so fertile and rich. There never was a greener countryside than those few square miles in which Elmbury was set, and what gave it a particularly fat and sumptuous appearance was the size of those river-meadows, which were large and liberal, pasturing fifty beasts apiece and yielding at haytime not one meagre rick but a whole rickyard. The biggest of all was Elmbury’s own field, called the Ham, which lay in the triangle between the confluent rivers and the town. It was something of a legal curiosity, and mixed up in its title-deeds were some of the principles of feudalism, capitalism, distributism, and communism. The hay crop belonged to a number of private owners, including the squire and the Abbey; their boundaries were marked mysteriously by means of little posts. They did not, however, mow their own hay; the Vicar didn’t come down from his vestry with a pitching fork; so the hay crop was sold each year, in little parcels none of which by themselves would have been worth the trouble of mowing. It was bid for by groups of men, little combines, who saw to it that they bought contiguous pieces of sufficient area to make a sizable rick. But while the hay crop was private property, the meadow itself, the soil that grew the hay, belonged to “the burgesses of Elmbury”; these burgesses, the householder, the ironmonger, the draper, the chemist, the doctor, possessed no cows or sheep to graze upon it, so they too each season sold the aftermath by auction and distributed the proceeds, according to an ancient law, among the owners of the houses having a frontage on the main street. Nobody got more than a few shillings for his share; but at least every man, woman and child in Elmbury had the right to walk and play in the field, which gave them a good possessive feeling about it. It was always “our Ham.” In the winter we shot snipe there, and sometimes hares, without let or hindrance. In the spring, when the patches of ladysmocks were silver-white like pools of lingering flood-water, we hunted for plovers’ nests and listened to the whistle of the redshanks and the weird sad cry of the curlews which came to the Ham in breeding-time. In May, when buttercups gilded it, and the grass was as high as your waist, the courting couples used its cover for their amorous games, flattening out neat circles where they had lain, as if they had rotated on their axis, which perhaps they had, so unquiet alas is love.

  But in June the lovers’ hiding-places were laid bare, and those same lovers, probably, were toiling and sweating on the wagons, bringing in the hay. Three big rickyards grew up like little towns. Then, while the quick-growing aftermath painted the field green again, and the ochreous sheep or the white-faced Hereford cattle were turned out to graze on it—then the Ham became more than ever Elmbury’s playground. Cricket pitches, on which the ball broke unpredictably, made brown scars on the turf. From the banks of the river jutted out numberless fishing-rods; little boys with willow-wands conjured up minnows, bigger boys dapped with houseflies for bleak, middle-aged tradesmen perched sedately on wicker creels legering for bream, while the more energetic ones, swift of eye and wrist, fished for roach, and the more adventurous wandered here and there, carrying a jar of minnows, live-baiting for perch. The “gentry,” possessing more expensive tools, threw big hackled flies over flopping chub. And the very old, and the very stupid, content with the mere dregs of angling, heaved enormous lobworms impaled upon enormous hooks into the deepest and stillest backwaters and then went to sleep until Fate, in the guise of a shiny yellow eel, accepted at last their unheroic challenge.

  Meanwhile along the towpath, on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons paraded those who were not immediately concerned with fish: shopkeepers and their wives taking the same leisurely stroll they had been accustomed to take, maybe, for twenty years; mothers wheeling their babies out for an airing; boys and girls “walking out” prior to courtship; and so on. But even these would pause now and then to watch the motionless or the gently-bobbing float. “Caught owt, Willum?” “Nobbut daddy-ruffs and tiddlers.” “Wants a fresh o’ rain, like as not.” “Maybe. But maybe there’s tempest hanging about somewheres.”

  Fishermen always have the same excuses.

  A Vision of Piers Plowman

  I have devoted rather a lot of space to the Ham because it was part of the life as well as the landscape of Elmbury. I have called it the town’s playground; by which I mean a very different thing from a playing-field. A playing-field associates itself with serious and organised games and sedate tennis-courts and terrible bouncing gym-mistresses teaching people how to keep fit. We had none of that nonsense. But Elmbury used its Ham for real “play”—all sorts of play, from catching tiddlers to poaching salmon, from birds’ nesting to tumbling wenches in the hay.

  And so, if you had climbed to the top of the Toot on a summer evening, you would have had the vision of Piers Plowman; which he had when he stood upon a higher hill not very far from Elmbury. You would have seen “a fair field full of folk” stretched out bel
ow. It was a very fair field indeed, with the townsfolk going to and fro upon it in the calm of evening; with the silver rivers ribboned all round it, the tumbling weir with small withy-grown islands in mid-stream, the old mill above its placid millpool, and behind it the great Abbey rising up, massive and solid as England’s history, and yet as airy-light as a dream.

  But I must insist that Elmbury, although beautiful, was not a beauty-spot; for that implies, I think, a rather sterilised sort of beauty, unspoiled, preserved, and sacrosanct; whereas in Elmbury beauty and ugliness grew up side by side and merged into a single entity, indivisible and unique, in which you could no more easily separate and distinguish those two qualities than you could winnow out the good and evil in the heart of man.

  Missed Opportunities

  Like wrecks out of a receding tide, the ruins of Elmbury’s industries rose up among its slums: a disused flour-mill, rat-run warehouses, a derelict shirt-and-collar factory, and what was left of an establishment which once made mustard.

  Three or four industries precariously survived: a big modern flour-mill, a maltster’s, a collection of sheds and wharves and slipways where ancient craftsmen who loved their trade built boats of all kinds from canoes to river-steamers. But these concerns were not nearly sufficient to provide a living for a population of five thousand people. The town had known better days; for trade, which once came by river, now followed the railway, and the industrial prosperity of one nearby city, and the social prosperity of another, made a sharp contrast with Elmbury’s backwardness. This was supposed to be the fault of a previous generation of Elmburians, who cold-shouldered the railway until the main-line had gone elsewhere and who, finding spring-waters of remarkable nastiness almost at their front-doors, failed to exploit them until half the fashionable world was curing its gout ten miles away. So Elmbury slumbered beside a branch line of the railway, and the ridiculous building which it pretentiously called “The Spa” saw no Beau Brummells, fell into disuse, and finally became a farm-house, keeping its name “The Spa Farm,” long after the majority of the people had forgotten why it was called so.

  Odd-Job Man’s Delight

  But for their obstinacy, then, but for the short-sightedness of those ancient Elmbury Die-Hards, the place might have been either blackened by belching chimneys or blighted by the withering presence of decrepit colonels drawing out their last meaningless days. Miraculously preserved from both disasters, the little town muddled along contentedly enough in its own haphazard way; and although I suppose a very high percentage of the population must have been technically “unemployed” there was much less poverty and very much less distress than you would find in similar circumstances in an industrial town. The city-dweller, when he is out of work, is generally helpless; there are few “odd-jobs” to be had, even if he were adaptable enough to be capable of doing them. But in the country and in the country-town it is different; and Elmbury was an odd-job man’s paradise. The farmers in the neighbourhood needed casual labour for a dozen seasonal jobs, haymaking, harvest, fruit-picking, turnip-pulling and what not; a man could earn a few shillings and a quart of cider almost any day he’d a mind to. There was drovering, and there was timber-felling, and there was rick-cutting; thatching, ditch-cleaning, and hedging. Many of the Elmbury men could turn their hands to skilled and semiskilled jobs such as these. But there were more individualist odd jobs too. In those days; if a man knew something about bird-lime and decoys and clap-nets he could catch a dozen linnets or goldfinches on Brockeridge Common in a morning, and be ten shillings the richer when he had caged and sold them. Even the poorest people bred dogs or canaries or pigeons or rabbits in the backyards of their cottages; many worked allotments and kept chickens or pigs as well. Others got their living out of the river, building boats, netting salmon, cutting osiers, dredging sand, setting putcheons for eels. Almost every man and boy, as we have seen, was a devoted fisherman, but almost every one was a still more devoted poacher. There were other ways of catching salmon beside the legitimate nets or the rods of the rich; and there were plenty of people willing to pay half a sovereign for a clean-run fish, no questions asked or answered.

  So that was how many of the Elmbury men lived. In the spring they’d do a bit of salmon fishing, fair or foul, hay-making in June; drovering on Saturday (a walk to the neighbouring market and a drunk in the pubs afterwards); plum-picking now and then—but this rather as a favour—for a farmer who was known to be free with his cider; illegal forays after mushrooms on misty September mornings; a few days’ beating when Squire shot his pheasants: blackberrying; eel-catching at the first autumn flood; and the winter spent variously in building a new punt for sale or hire, caulking an old one, mending the salmon nets, pottering up the river after duck (or perhaps an otter whose skin would be worth a pound), ferreting for rabbits, poaching occasional pheasants, collecting betting-slips for a bookie, or any one of a score of pleasant, profitable, and adventurous ways.

  Now the men who lived in this casual way—and there were several hundred of them out of our population of five thousand— possessed two advantages which were rare enough then and which are almost priceless to-day; they were independent of employers; and they were not conditioned to believe in the popular fallacy, that work in itself is a virtue. They worked when they wanted to work; and their work was fun. They were, in fact, a sort of privileged class; and their privilege was one which nowadays only a few great artists have. It was fortunate for Elmbury that its population included these few hundred truly free men; they acted as a leaven upon the whole community.

  Their independence of employers gave them a vivid individuality. In those days, when sweated labour in the big industrial districts was sapping the vitality of whole populations and turning millions into rather inefficient robots, the men in the country towns were able to preserve their intelligence, their humour, and their pride. They still believed in a vague undefined something which they called their “rights”; and for all their poverty, for all the dirt and squalor in which many of them lived, they actually believed that they exercised some rights. They may have called themselves, variously, Conservatives, Radicals and Socialists; but I think really they were the last true Liberals. They believed in Freedom without defining it; but they thought it was something to do with saying You-be-damned to all tyrants, great and small.

  English Eccentrics

  It is not surprising that out of such a fertile soil should blossom strange and fantastical characters. These rich and rare ones, who for all their oddity are somehow essentially and exclusively English, seem always to sport and flourish most freely in the atmosphere of the small and ancient towns which lie close to England’s heart. “ ’Tis summat in the air as breeds ’em,” said old Fred Pullin, when I asked him why we had so many queer characters in Elmbury. He was a bit of a curiosity himself, now I come to think of it, that doddering old coachman who had driven my grandfather to his wedding and who followed my father to his grave. He had a remarkably ugly wife who bore the unusual name of Abigail, and when Abigail died old Fred promptly courted and married another one, although at that time he must have been well past sixty.

  “It was something in the air that bred them,” and so, in common with many another old-fashioned market town, we had our minor Falstaffs (one in particular who regularly drank twelve pints of beer at a sitting and once ate a whole leg of lamb at a single meal)—our Pistols, Bardolphs and Nyms, our Mistress Quicklys, our Mr. Justice Shallow. For of course Shakespeare didn’t invent these; they were his for the picking, familiar weeds in Stratford streets; and Elmbury in 1913, apart from a few trifling differences in such matters as drainage, was much the same sort of place as Stratford in 1600. Our little Falstaff was possessed of huge appetites and a vast belly, and was boastful and lecherous and cunning and cowardly yet withal had a twinkle in his watery blue eyes; he only needed a Shakespeare to breathe the immortal spirit into him, and he would have been Old Jack to the life.

  We had also our rich eccentrics, lesser John M
yttons whose crazy equestrian feats are remembered still (“Those are the double gates that his lordship jumped one day when his fox crossed the railway”)—squires who built strange edifices which are known still as their Follies—cranks who indulged extraordinary hobbies, such as letting loose wild animals in their grounds and surprising their neighbours with antelopes and flamingos. And among humbler folk we had a gallery of merry rascals, scallywags, drunkards and ne’er-do-weels straight from Dickens and Surtees; while as it were at the extreme end of the mental spectrum there were our genuine lunatics such as Black Sal dressed all in sable topped with her great flopping black bonnet, and Poor Tom who thought he had Heaven’s commandment to empty the river and who might have been seen almost any day happily baling it out with a leaky bucket.

  It is true, of course, that one remembers the freakish and forgets the commonplace; and Elmbury was neither Bedlam nor a scene out of Henry the Fourth, but a quiet respectable country town in the streets of which during a morning walk you would have encountered plenty of stolid petit bourgeois and prosperous tradesmen who fitted in with the popular conception of small-town dwellers; aspidistra-loving, unenterprising and dull. Yet even some of these had their heroic hours, when they played boisterous pranks upon each other at municipal elections, painting each other’s houses with politically odious colours, Tory Blue or Liberal Scarlet, and indulging in school-boyish practical jokes of the kind that are out of fashion nowadays.