(2/20) Village Diary (22 page)

In the afternoon we ad trooped over to the church, bearing our corn bundles, about two bushels of plums, six bulbous marrows and some rather dashing cape gooseberries.

The children love decorating the church and do their part very well. The boys lashed the corn to the pew ends while the girls threaded cape gooseberries through the altar rails, and put a neat little row of plums—with a marrow at regular intervals—along the foot. It all looked very formal' and childlike—and none the less effective for that.

The tranquil atmosphere of the church did much to soothe our nerves, after the excitement of the morning, and we returned much refreshed in spirit, to practise
We plough the fields and scatter
ready for the great day. And so busy were Miss Jackson and I trying to wean our charges from singing:
But it is fed and wor-hor-tered
that it was time to send them home before we knew where we were.

I usually do my washing on Saturday morning and iron, if I've been lucky with the weather, just after tea. With the kitchen door propped open I have a very pleasant view of the garden. I find ironing one of the less objectionable forms of housework, for it is quiet, clean and warm, three attributes which rarely come together in other household activities.

Miss Jackson manages to get home most week-ends, which gives me time to catch up with all the little jobs which a schoolmistress has to leave until then, without bothering over much about Saturday's meals.

This week-end she relieved me of two large vegetable marrows, which, she said, her mother would welcome for jam. The spate of plums has begun to slacken, but marrows—alas!—are arriving in a steady stream at the back door. As Miss Jackson and I can only cope with about half a marrow between us in a week, I can see that I shall have to start digging, under cover of darkness, and inter the unwieldy monsters. To give them away again, in Fairacre itself, might cause the greatest offence, and in any case, every garden seems to boast a fertile heap swarming with flourishing marrows. Oddly enough, the majority of people who grow them in Fairacre say, as they hand them over: 'Funny thing! I don't care for them myself. In fact, none of the family likes them!' But still they plant them. It must be the fascination of seeing such a wonderful return for one small seed, that keeps marrow-growers at their dubious task.

As I ironed, I amused myself by watching a starling at the edge of the garden bed. He was busy detaching the petals from an anemone, conscious that I was watching, and half-afraid, but persisting in his destruction. His iridescent feathers, as smooth and sleek as if oil had been stroked over them, gleamed like chain-mail in the level rays of the sinking sun. Having finished with the anemone, he began to run, squawking, about the lawn, his feet thrown rather high and forward, which gave him a droll, clown-like air. In time, others joined him, and I realized that they had found the remains of Tibby's cornflakes which I had thrown out. Chattering, quarrelling and complaining, they threw themselves energetically into this job of self-nourishment. As suddenly as they had arrived, they checked, and then whirred away over the house.

This short scene, I thought as I pressed handkerchiefs, is typical of the richness that surrounds the country dweller and which contributes to his well-being. As he works, he sees about him other ways of life being pursued at their own tempo—not only animal life, but that of crops and trees, of flowers and insects—all set within the greater cycle of the four seasons. It has a therapeutic value, this awareness of the myriad forms and varied pace of other lives. Man, particularly the town dweller, scurrying to catch up with what he considers the important jobs, which none but he can do, presses himself onward at a crueller pace daily. He scuttles from stone and steel office to and tube-station. If he sees a blade of grass, prising its way between the paving stones, it only registers itself to his overwrought brain as something which should be reported to the corporation. Small wonder that sleeping pills he within reach of so many tousled beds, when man has lost sight of the elementary fact that he must go at his own pace, or face the consequences.

Two other benisons are more generously bestowed in the country—solitude and handling earth. Not to be alone—ever—is one of my ideas of hell, and a day when I have had no solitude at all in which 'to catch up with myself I find mentally, physically and spiritually exhausting.

When one is. alone one is receptive—a ready vessel for the sights, the scents and sounds which pour in through relaxed and animated senses to refresh the inner man.

As for the healing that lies in the garden, let Mr Willet's wise words be heard. 'Proper twizzled up, I was after that row at the Parish Council. I went and earthed up my celery, on my own. That sorted me out a treat!'

While Mrs Pringle has been preserving a dignified silence at her cottage for the past week, Minnie Pringle has called in after school, 'to give us a lick-round,' as she so truly says.

It is convenient for her at the moment, as she spends most of the day at Mrs Annett's, leaves there at half-past three, and arrives here at about ten to four ready for her labours. She then cycles on to Springbourne.

We finish our last lesson of the day, and sing our grace, to the accompaniment of Minnie's clatterings in the lobby as she washes up the dinner things. In theory, Miss Jackson, whose room leads into the kitchen-lobby, switches on the copper at three fifteen, but for three days it slipped her mind and Minnie arrived to find a copper full of cold rain-water, in which swam half a dozen hardy earwigs.

'Good thing you never switched on,' was her comment. 'Think of they poor little dears being boded alive like lobsters!'

Miss Jackson, when I reminded her about the copper, said that her mind was so engaged with the Harvest project in her classroom and in making out a case-history for each child (which she was amazed to find had never been done in Fairacre—despite the strong recommendations of the Perth-Pullinger investigating committee as long ago as 1952), that she very much doubted if she could wrench it from the sort of work for which she imagined she had been trained, in order to deal with a domestic trifle of such a lowly nature.

I said that in that case I would give Ernest the job of walking through her room at three-fifteen each afternoon, and she must put up with the interruption. Various biting retorts, which rose to my lips, I forbore to utter, which made me feel unwontedly virtuous.

We have dusted our own classrooms each morning, and things have gone very smoothly, but with the colder weather coming I can see that we shad have to accept Mrs Pringle's return. Minnie finishes at Mrs Annett's in a week's time, and the tortoise stoves, which have so far remained unlit, will soon be roaring away.

Meanwhile, fired by the accounts from Miss Jackson of the excellent preserve which her mother concocted from the two marrows and at my wits' end to know just what to do with yet another monster which had appeared on the back doorstep, I decided to turn it into marrow jam.

I collected a most delectable mass of ingredients on the kitchen table; lemons, ground ginger, sugar and a small screw of greaseproof paper, which Minnie Pringle had brought from the chemist in Caxley, containing knobbly pale lumps of root ginger.

'It says: "Bruise the ginger,"' I remarked to Miss Jackson, who was busy filling up the copper for her bath. We pored over the recipe together. 'How did your mother do that?'

'Just banged it, I think,' said she vaguely, 'with a rolling-pin, or something.'

I carried my screw of greaseproof paper out on to the back step. There was a cold wind blowing, and I anchored the ginger with a large flint while I found a hammer.

I was busily pounding at my little parcel when Mr Willet arrived, bearing a brown-paper carrier-bag.

'Don't like the way the wind's turned east,' he said, blowing on his fingers. 'Fair shrammed I am, I can tell 'ee. Vicar said would I tell you he won't be able to get over this Friday after all. Got a funeral over at Springbourne.'

I said was it anyone we knew?

'Oh no, no one what matters,' said Mr Willet airily. 'Some old boy from London what only lived there two or three months. Just come to die, so to speak.' He peered down at my little parcel and the large hammer.

'And what are you up to?'

'I'm bruising ginger,' I replied. Busily I unwrapped the folds of greaseproof paper and displayed the flattened contents. I looked at them anxiously.

'Would you say I'd bruised that?' I enquired. Mr Willet broke into a guffaw.

'Bruised it? You've dam' wed pulverized it!' He laughed until he had to lean against the wad for support, while I collected the squashed remains carefully together, out of the wind's harm.

'Ah well!' he said, recovering at last. 'I'd get back to my supper. Steak and kidney pudden my old woman's had on the hob ad day—with a dozen button mushrooms inside it. Proper sharp-set I be—I'd do justice to that!'

I wished him good-bye and accompanied him to the corner of the house.

'Oh!' I said, looking back. 'You've left your carrier-bag.'

'That's ad right,' replied Mr Willet cheerfully. 'It is for you. A marrow!'

This morning, with the wind still in the east, I decided that the school stoves ought to be lit. In theory, they are supposed to wait until October i, but with the vagaries of the British climate we could often do with them in June. Mr Willet has chopped a neat stack of kindling wood, ready for the cold weather, and the coke pile in the playground looms over all.

'I'll light these 'ere for you each morning,' volunteered Mr Willet, 'until her ladyship turns up again. Fancy it won't be long now. Heard her telling my old woman yesterday that it was hard times for the unemployed and she wouldn't be going to the Whist Drive this week. It's a Fur and Feather too—so she must be hard pressed to miss that!'

Sure enough, in the evening, I found Mrs Pringle at my front door, her face set in a series of down-turned arcs, which made her look like a disgruntled tortoise.

'Come in,' I said politely, and settled her in the armchair by the fire. She looked at the flames with disgust.

'Fancy having a fire as early as this!' was her comment. 'Some has money to burn, seemingly!' I let this charitable remark go by, and asked if there was anything I could do for her.

'I've made up my mind to come back,' announced Mrs Pringle majestically. I was on the point of answering that no one wanted her back, but prudence restrained me. After ad, Minnie would be leaving on Friday, and the school must have a cleaner. And funnily enough, though the wicked old woman before me drove me quite mad at times with her sulks and her downright rudeness—yet somehow, I had a soft spot for her. It had cost her something, I could see, to pocket her pride this evening and offer to come again—even if it were to suit herself in the long run. For never before had our 'little upsets,' as the Vicar cads them, had quite such personal point as this one, and never before had I been quite so fierce with her.

'Minnie will be here until Friday,' I pointed out. 'She came to help us over a difficult patch, so I can't turn her away immediately.'

'Suits me,' said she, rising with some difficulty from the depths of the chair. 'I'd be along Monday.' I noticed, with some amusement, that there was no word of apology. What was past was now past, I supposed.

She hung her black shiny shopping bag, from which she is never parted, over her arm, and stumped towards the door.

On the doorstep she turned. Her face was grimmer than ever.

'I see them chimneys smoking today,' she said, jerking her head towards the school. 'I don't let no one else meddle with my stoves—even if they has been lit days before the Office gives the word. We'd be needing a new tin of blacklead, and a new blacklead brush. Mine's worn right down to the board. I'd bring 'em with me Monday—and the bill.'

She fished inside the black bag, withdrew a paper one and pressed it upon me. Before I could find words, she had trudged off to the gate.

'See you Monday!' she boomed threateningly, and vanished round the bend of the lane.

When I opened the paper bag I found six brown eggs, double-yokers to a man, and with the bloom of that day's laying on them.

It was Mrs Pringle's peace-offering and silent apology.

Michaelmas Fair at Caxley, is an enormous affair, held in the market-place, where it causes the greatest disturbance possible and utter confusion to normal traffic conditions. The inhabitants of Caxley and the surrounding countryside curse roundly about the noise and the congestion, but look forward to its advent as soon as the dahhas are out, and would be the first to fight, with jealous pride, if anything were done to stop its coming.

'Livens things up a bit!' remarked the girl in Budd's knitwear department to me, as I chose a twin-set. She stood by the window gazing bright-eyed at the swarthy men who were erecting helter-skelters and swing-boats. Customers reckon to take second place in the shops overlooking the fair-ground, and no one would be so pernickety as to complain about inattention from the staff. We all face the simple fact that if you want whole-hearted and devoted service in the choice of purchases, then to choose to shop in Fair Week is asking for trouble.

The children have talked of nothing else, and the infants' room which is the scene of Miss Jackson's fair-ground project is a jumble of stalls with trays of plasticine toffee-apples, candy-doss made of dyed cotton-wool, and a table laid out with a model fair with roundabouts, switch-backs and all, contrived from cardboard and paper. It is the joy of the whole school; and my class have to be routed out from there at playtimes, as they stand entranced—and full of suggestions for further delights—forgetting to drink their milk, eat their elevenses, cad at the lavatory, find their handkerchiefs and generally do ad the things that very properly should be done at play-time.

It was their delight in this project that first gave me the idea of taking a party of children to the Michaelmas Fair this year.

'Most of them will go with their parents or with "Caxley aunties,"' I told Miss Jackson, as we sipped our tea in the school-house, 'and I don't think we can take the real babies—those who have just entered—it's too big a responsibility. But would you be willing to help me with those that are left? Probably eight or ten of them?'