(2/20) Village Diary (8 page)

Amy came to tea and brought her sister, who is staying with her, as wed. She is one of those people—all too common, alas!—who bore one to death with accounts of their important acquaintances. Never was a conversation so sprinkled with lords, ladies, admirals, generals, and what not, until I thought I should be driven to deriving a game about them all, in order to keep my sanity. It could be done with points, I told myself, my glazed eyes on my visitor and a fixed smile on my lips. Two points, say, for peers of the realm and their ladies, and for top-ranking people in the services. One point for friends mentioned, who were working in:

(a) The Foreign Office
(b) Embassies
(c) B.B.C. and
(d) 'Little' shops in Bond Street;

and none, I decided, as I dropped sugar into my guest's cup, for nephews who had just written:

(a) an enchanting collection of obscure verse—published privately,
(b) a powerful novel or
(c) a script for Midland Region.

However, she made a great fuss of dear Tibby, and didn't flinch when he ran cruel claws into her beautiful sheer nylons, so that I forgave her for her harmless delusions of grandeur, and made her a present of a pot of my grapefruit marmalade when she left. How far this generosity was prompted by my guilty conscience I should not like to say.

It has been a real spring day. The wind has turned due west and is as warm and soft as can be. I have a few crocuses out among the clumps of snowdrops, and there are fat buds on the japonica by the wall, which is all most heartening.

Mrs Pringle, to whom I made a blithe comment about the fine weather, did her best to turn the world sour for me.

'See the moon last night? Lying on its back?'

I said that I had. I had noticed it from my landing-window as I went to bed—an upturned silver slice, supporting the shadowy completion of its circle.

'Know what that means?' enquired Mrs Pringle, arms akimbo, and her voice heavy with foreboding.

Mr Willet, who was screwing up the catch on the woodshed door, and had been listening to our conversation, now shouted across:

'Well, you tell us then. Seems you want to!'

'The moon on its back,' said Mrs Pringle, with much emphasis, 'is a sure sign of rain. "Moon on her back, with water in her lap." Ever heard that? You see—we'll have a tempest before night—a proper downpour!'

She looked across to my garden where two pairs of stockings and two tea-towels danced in the breeze.

'You've chose the wrong day for washing,' she added, and returned into the lobby to scour the sink.

Mr Willet puffed out his moustache with disgust.

'Never heard such nonsense,' he said to me, in a carrying whisper, 'real old wives' tale that, about water in its lap. The ignorance! The stuff some of these folk believes, in the twentieth century! Lives in the dark ages some of 'em.'

He screwed another turn or two, grunting with effort. At length he ceased, and wiped his brow with the back of his huge hand. He still looked disgruntled.

'"Moon on her back. Water in her lap,"' he quoted disgustedly. 'A downpour! Lot of nonsense! Why, any fool knows it means a high wind!'

Mrs Partridge called after tea to tell me about great goings-on in the W.I. world. Although I am a member of the Fairacre W.I., I can rarely attend the meetings, as they are held in the afternoon; but Mrs Partridge, who is President, keeps me
au fait
with the news.

Evidently the county as a whole is to stage a pageant. Each Institute, or group of Institutes, will have an historical scene to act, and the whole will tell the story of the people who have lived in this county, through the ages.

'When do we start?' I asked.

'As soon as we've had another meeting,' answered Mrs Partridge.

'No, I mean, at what stage of history do we begin? The Norman Conquest, or the Ice Age, or what?'

'For the life of me,' said Mrs Partridge, much perplexed, 'I don't know, but the County Office will send further particulars, I don't doubt.'

Neither did I, having seen some of the lengthy documents that flutter from that quarter every month.

'Do we choose which scene we like?' I asked. I was mentally casting Mrs Pringle as the seventeenth-century witch who was dumped in the horse-pond somewhere near Beech Green. My tone, I noted with regret, was eager.

'Now I come to think of it,' said Mrs Partridge, closing her eyes the better to 'consecrate,' 'the Drama Committee have drafted out so many scenes, about a dozen, I fancy, and the groups will draw for them. So much fairer, of course. After all, most women will prefer becoming costumes, and would plump for Stuart rimes with all those delicious silks and laces.'

'I rather fancy the Plantagenets,' I replied, wondering if Mrs Moffat could run me up a wimple. Really the whole project had endless possibilities for fun.

'Ah! now that
is
a good idea,' agreed Mrs Partridge. 'I've always had a feeling that I could wear long plaits with pearls entwined.'

We went off into a quiet reverie about wimples and plaits, until Tibby (name still evades me) brought us to earth by jumping through the window, knocking over a jar of catkins
en route.

'Well, dear,' said Mrs Partridge, rising to her feet, and Incoming her usual bustling self, 'that's how it is. The children, of course, will take part. It is to be held on a Saturday, in the grounds of Branscombe Castle; and I'll cad an evening meeting for one day next week. We shad know then which scene we're to do and can arrange rehearsals and so on.'

'When is it to be?' I asked. Mrs Partridge spoke patiently, as to a tiresome child.

'I've told you, dear. One evening next week.'

I began to feel that Fairacre's vicar's wife and its schoolteacher might easily go on the halls in the near future as a pair of cross-talk comedians, Partridge and Read.

'No, no! The pageant. When does it come off at Branscombe Castle?'

'Oh, I'm sorry. In August, I understand.'

'Supposing it rains?'

'My dear,' said Mrs Partridge, with the utmost firmness, 'it will not rain! You should know by now, dear, that if one starts to take rain into consideration in village life—well—there just wouldn't be any village life!'

When she had gone I pondered over this direction of village activities which Mrs Partridge does so well. It is interesting to be living in this transition period between local, and in Fairacre's case enlightened, squirearchy, and whatever communal form may evolve in a village which is, perforce, part of a welfare state.

The older people, like Miss Clare and Mrs Pringle, shake their heads sadly over the departure of 'the good old days,' when the gentry did so much for the village, sparing neither advice nor practical and financial help. They looked to the families in the three or four large houses, not only for employment, but for guidance in matters spiritual and temporal; and now that death or the cold hand of poverty has removed this help, the older generation seems rudderless, and at times resentful, for the stability has gone from their lives.

'Why, when my father was working as gardener, up at the Hall,' said Mrs Pringle, one day, 'he broke a leg, falling out of the apple tree in the kitchen garden. And for all the weeks he lay up in our front room, regular as clockwork there came a basket of groceries sent down from the Hall kitchen. That's what I call being looked after.'

In vain was it to point out that an all-embracing state insurance has superseded this earlier happy relationship.

'All forms and stamps,' snorted Mrs Pringle, unimpressed, 'and some jumped-up jack-in-office in Caxley telling you how to get back what's been taken from you! Give me the old days!' It is the personal touch that these older people miss so sorely, the discussion of problems over a fireside, the confession, perhaps, of follies come home to roost, and the comfort of friendly advice and practical guidance. To have to board a bus, and sit, perplexed, as it rattles six miles into Caxley, to find an answer to one's personal problems at an office or a bureau or a clinic, comes hard to these people; and to be passed from the supercilious young lady in the outer office, from hand to hand, until the right person is encountered, means that the older countryman, more often than not, arrives even more tongue-tied than usual. How much simpler it all was, he will think dazedly, as he stares at the ledgers and typewriters and the man who waits with sheaves of forms in front of him, when he walked round to the kitchen door at the Hall, with his troubles, confident that he'd be home again within half an hour, with his course set plain before him.

As Miss Clare put it: 'I know it's a great comfort, dear, to feel that one will never starve, and that sickness and madness and death itself are looked after. For an old woman in my position, the welfare state is a blessing. This national health scheme, for instance, has taken a great load off my mind. But I miss the warmth of sympathy—foolish perhaps, but there it is. It did both of us good—the one who told his trouble, and the one who tried to help—for, I suppose, we were both united in overcoming a problem and in sympathy with each other.'

I suggested that the present system might eventually be better. After all, advice from the Hall might be bad as well as good, depending on the mentality and disposition of the owner at any given time.

'Yes,' agreed Miss Clare, 'in the long run, I think each man will think out his own problems; but it is going to take him a very long time to realize that the machinery for coping with those personal problems is set up by his own hands. We in a village, my dear, can understand a smallcommunity government—it's not much more than a family affair and we ad appreciate our relationship. But when it comes to a nation—with ministries and councils and departments taking the place of the parish clerk and parish priest and squire—well, naturally, we're a little out of our depth, just at the moment!'

***

I had a wasted morning in Caxley trying to buy a lightweight coat for the summer.

As I was roaming round the coat department at Williams's, which styles itself 'Caxley's leading store,' followed by an assistant staggering under an armful of coats already rejected by me, I bumped into Amy.

'You look a wreck!' she said truthfully but unkindly.

'I
am
a wreck!' I replied simply, and went on to ted her of my hopeless quest.

'My dear, we are of the race of Lost Women,' said Amy dramatically. The wilting assistant stopped to listen to any more interesting disclosures. 'Clothes there are-beautiful clothes, magnificent clothes, inspired clothes—for those with thirty-six- or even thirty-eight-inch hips! For the forty-four inches and over there is a good range of comfortable garments, obviously designed by kind-hearted men who take pity on large problem-women. But for us, dear, for you and me—for you, with your forty-two hip measurement—' (she gave me no rime to protest that I was only forty. Amy, in full spate, brooks no interruption).

'And for me,' she continued, 'with my forty—well, thirty-nine really, but I prefer to be comfortable—what do we get?'

She waved a hand at the departing assistant who was returning a dozen or so coats to their show-case.

'Nothing?' I ventured.

'Nothing!' agreed Amy emphatically. Suddenly, her eye became fixed intently on my red frock that Mrs Moffat had made me.

'Turn round,' she commanded. 'Hmph! A zip right down to the waist, eh? That accounts for the fit. And that panel over the midriff is cut on the cross, I see. Who made it?'

I told her that Mrs Moffat designed and made it.

Amy continued to prowl round me, occasionally peering more closely at a particularly interesting seam. She even started to undo the zip 'to see how the back was faced,' until I protested.

'She's a marvel,' announced Amy, at length. Now Amy knows about clothes, and is an expert needlewoman as well as an astute buyer of really beautiful garments.

'Do you think she'd make for me?' she asked.

I said that I would ask her. I had to go for a fitting in the afternoon for two cotton frocks that she was making.

'But I'm having them buttoned down the front,' I told Amy. 'You can't believe how difficult it is for a woman living alone to cope with a zip down the back.'

'What you want,' said Amy, 'is a husband,' and without pausing to take breath added, 'How's Mr Mawne?'

I suggested, a trifle tartly, that coffee might restore both of us to our senses, and the question remained unanswered.

I had been invited to stay to tea at Mrs Moffat's bungalow after my fittings. I found Mrs Finch-Edwards, as handsome and exuberant as when she had taken charge in the infants' room over a year ago, sitting in the trim little drawing-room, while her baby daughter kicked fat legs on the rug at her feet.

She was an adorable baby, chubby and good-tempered, and Mrs Finch-Edwards had had her christened Althea.

'And she sleeps right through the night!' Mrs Finch-Edwards assured us. 'My hubby and I don't hear one squeak from six till six the next morning!'

'You just don't know how lucky you are,' Mrs Moffat answered, as she poured tea. 'Now Linda—' and the conversation became a duet compounded of such phrases as gripe-water, dreadful dummies, picking up, lying on the right side, kapok pillows, down pillows, no pillows—until it was enough to turn an old maid silly.

Mrs Moffat said that she would be delighted to make dresses for Amy, and I explained that, as she now lived at Bent, just the other side of Caxley and drove her own car, she could come whenever it was convenient for Mrs Moffat to have her. Mrs Finch-Edwards and Mrs Moffat, I know, have high hopes of opening a shop one day, showing dresses that they have designed and made. In time they hope to have a substantial business, with a workroom of first-class sewing girls, while they attend to the designing and organization. They should make a success of such a venture, I feel sure, for they are both energetic, ambitious and particularly gifted at this type of work.

'I've made several children's frocks for that new shop in Caxley,' Mrs Finch-Edwards told me, 'but of course I can't do much while Althea's so young—but just wait!'