A Month in the Country (2 page)

When the train stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me. Back down the platform someone was calling despairingly, ‘Oxgodby … Oxgodby.' No-one offered a hand, so I climbed back into the compartment, stumbling over ankles and feet to get at the fish-bass (on the rack) and my folding camp-bed (under the seat). If this was a fair sample of northerners, then this was enemy country so I wasn't too careful where I put my boots. I heard one chap draw in his breath and another grunt: neither spoke.

Then the guard whistled, the train jerked forward a couple of paces – and stopped. This was enough to goad the old man in the nearside corner to half-lower his window. ‘Thoo's ga-ing ti git rare an' soaaked reet doon ti thi skin, maister,' he said and shut the window in my face. Then the engine blew up a splendid plume of steam and shuffled off, a row of faces staring woodenly at me. And I was alone on the platform, arranging my pack, taking a last look at a map, pushing it into my topcoat pocket, levering it out again to spill my ticket on the stationmaster's boots, wishing I'd sewn on two missing buttons, hoping that it would stop raining until I had a roof over my head.

A youngish girl, her face flattened against a window-pane, stared at me from the stationmaster's house. It must have been my coat which interested her; it was pre-War, about 1907 I should imagine, wonderful material, the real stuff, thick herring-bone tweed. It reached down to my ankles; its original owner must have been a well-to-do giant.

I saw that I was going to get very wet; my soles were letting in water already. The stationmaster stepped back into his lamp-room and said something, but I didn't follow his dialect. He seemed to understand this.
‘I said that you could borrow my umbrella,' he repeated in tolerable English.

‘Where I'm going to isn't too far,' I said. ‘… According to the map, that is.'

The folk up there have an invincible curiosity. ‘Where would that be?' he asked.

‘The church,' I said. ‘I expect I shall dry out when I get there.'

‘Come on in and have your tea first,' he countered.

‘I've arranged to meet the Vicar,' I said.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘I'm Chapel. All the same, if you want for ought, send me word. I say, I hope it's there.'

He seemed to know why I'd come.

Then I set off half-heartedly, as best I could sheltering my spare clothes (which were in the straw fish-bass) under my coat. The lane was where the map had said it ought to be. And there was the single building; it turned out to be a dilapidated farmhouse, its bit of front garden sulking behind a rusting cast-iron fence. A dog, an Airedale, dragged on its chain, howled half-heartedly and ran for shelter again. After that, there was a couple of hen-huts collapsing amongst nettles in the decaying orchard. The rain made a channel from my trilby down my neck and one handle of the fish-bass gave way. Then I turned the corner of a high hedge and was in an open pasture. And there was the church.

It was an off-the-peg job: evidently there had been no medieval wool boom in these parts. This had been starveling country, every stone an extortion. The short chancel had an unusually shallow pitched roof; it must have been added a good hundred years after the main building (which had a steep pitch flattening into aisles). The tower was squat. Don't get the wrong impression; all in all, it was pleasant-enough looking and, when I came closer, I saw that the masonry had been fettled up very nicely – limestone ashlar not rubble. Even between the buttresses it had been beautifully cut with only a hint of mortar and, near-enough drowning as I was, I silently applauded the masons. The stone itself – just a tinge of pale yellow in it, magnesium – it must have been quarried near Tadcaster and ferried up the rivers. Don't let the detail irritate you: even in those far-off days I thought rather highly of myself as a stone-fancier.

The graveyard wall was in good repair, although, surprisingly, the narrow gate's sneck was smashed and it was held-to by a loop of binder twine. There were some good eighteenth-century headstones, their lichen-stained cherubs, hour-glasses and death's heads almost hidden by rank grass, nettle patches and fool's parsley. I glimpsed two or three spikes of a family grave overwhelmed by briars: a grey cat peered out, glared hostilely at me and was gone. Heaven knows what else was living there: nowadays, it would have been a listed wildlife sanctuary.

The rain-gutters and down-pipes – I couldn't help myself: I had to see if they were coping. So I threshed around the building. Not a gusher anywhere, not a trace of wash on the walls! Damp's the doom of wall-paintings. If there'd even been one green wall, I might as well have turned around there and then and let myself be washed back to the station.

So I came back to the little porch, its stone sitting-slabs polished by five hundred years rubbing by backsides of funeral parties faint from incense or remorse.

I twisted the ring handle and pushed the door open. It squealed – a warning I was to be grateful for during the next few weeks. And there I was. By and large, it was what I'd guessed it might be – a stone-slabbed floor, three squat pillars on each side of the nave, two low aisles and, beyond, a chancel (as much as I could see of it) strenuously re-organized by some Tractarian incumbent. The roof was a good sound job; it might have been a ship's bottom wrong way up. And it looked as though there might be some interesting bosses. But, of course, it's the smell of places, always the smell, which makes an immediate impression – and this smell was damp hassocks.

The scaffolding, as I'd been told by letter, was rigged up, filling the chancel's arch. There even was a ladder roped to it and this I immediately climbed. Much can be said against the Revd. J. G. Keach. Alas, yes. But, when he stands at the Judgement Seat, this also must be said in extenuation – he was businesslike, Lord. And, in Englishmen, this is a rare virtue. We could have done with a few depot supply-majors like him in France. He had said that the scaffold would be ready and it was. He had said that, if I arrived on the quarter-past seven train, he would meet me in the church at seven-thirty. And he did.

And that was how I first saw him, his precise businesslike letters made flesh, standing in the doorway below me, seeing by wet footprints that I had come. Like a tracker-dog he looked along their trail to the foot of the ladder and then up it.

‘Good evening, Mr Birkin,' he said, and I climbed down. He was four or five years older than me, maybe thirty, a tall but not a strong-looking man, neatly turned-out, pale-eyed, a cold, cooped-up look about him and, long after he must have become used to my face-twitch, he still talked to someone behind my left shoulder.

He went straight to business. ‘About your living in the bell-chamber. I am by no means terribly enthusiastic; well, put it this way, the idea doesn't appeal to me. Surely I made it quite clear in our correspondence that Mossop must ring the bell each Sunday and that the rope passes through a hole in the floor. I hoped that you would make other arrangements – lodgings or a room at the Shepherds' Arms.'

I muttered something about money.

‘The stove,' I said. ‘What about the stove? You didn't say one way or the other. Can I use it? The rain … like today …' My stammer put him off for a moment or two.

‘It wasn't in the contract,' he hedged, somehow managing to imply that neither were my stammer and face-twitch. ‘There was no mention of the stove initially. We have to think about
our
expenses, too, you know. You stated that you would be bringing a primus stove. In your first letter. This one.' He took it from a pocket and pushed it at me. ‘Halfway down the second page.'

‘I might set something afire,' I countered, feeling rather pleased with myself; people don't realize that a stammerer has more time to deal with awkward questions, and I chased this up with, ‘And don't forget the Insurance. It's what they term, Using a building for Unnatural Activities. Meths and paraffin … ancient timber … tinder-dry … sure-fire reason for putting up the premium. I had an uncle who was an insurance-collector …'

Unnatural Activities told on him. Unnatural Activities are bad enough in London but what they got up to in the country – and up here in the North on top of that! And it's well known that Sin is blown up twice life-size when reporting to the clergy.

‘Oh, alright,' he said irritably. ‘I suppose you can use it if you say you must.' Then, like all people who give in too easily, he began to grub up a few restrictive clauses to recover face. ‘But you must see that it's left in an Acceptable State on Sundays, and, naturally at all times, you will remember that this is a Consecrated Place? You
are
a Churchman?'

Oh yes, I told him, he could rely on me. I saw him considering a possible ambiguity here, wondering what precisely he could rely on me for. From his expression – the worst. I didn't look like a Churchman. Indeed I looked like an Unsuitable Person likely to indulge in Unnatural Activities who, against his advice, had been unnecessarily hired to uncover a wall-painting he didn't want to see, and the sooner I got it done and buzzed off back to sin-stricken London the better.

‘It's very unusual,' I said.

‘Oh?'

‘This stove,' I said. ‘It's unusual.'

‘Hopelessly out of date,' he said. ‘I'm going to have it out before winter. I have a catalogue which illustrates a newly patented device with a twin boiler. Each boiler is enclosed in a water-jacket, thus ensuring a steady dependable outflow of heat. And it is guaranteed noiseless.'

He sounded a different man glibly boasting about that stove, even though it was no nearer Oxgodby than a catalogue's page.

‘This one either is excessively hot, on occasions, red-hot (in point of fact) or else just keeping itself and no-one else warm.' And he gave it a resentful little kick. They glowered at one another like ancient enemies.

He may well have said much more but I didn't hear him because I was examining the stove with great attention. Some mechanical things fascinate me. Until that day, chiefly clocks or anything run by clockwork. I'd not considered the possibilities of coke stoves. There seemed to be several knobs and toggles for which I could see no purpose: plainly, this damned big monster was going to provide me with several pleasurably instructive hours learning its foibles, and I hoped that he wouldn't manage to get it out until after I'd gone. Anyway, I gave the place he'd unfairly struck a propitiatory rub. Properly coaxed along and with the sympathetic cooperation of Mossop (whoever he might be), it might have been employed with devastating effect to drive home a sermon on Hellfire and the Bottomless Pit.

It had a largish oval escutcheon wreathed in cast-iron roses announcing that
BANKDAM-CROWTHER
LTD
. of Green Lane, Walsall had manufactured it under Patent 7564B. Well now, that
was
a pedigree to conjure with! More than a pedigree – a dynasty … Bankdam-Crowther, the Hapsburgs of the stove world! God knows what had happened to Bankdam, but I recalled reading in the
Daily Mail
that Crowther had cut his throat before jumping from Bridlington Pier to make an absolutely dead-sure end. Nothing at all to do with his stoves: it was women and horses he didn't understand. So they didn't make the many more. Shocking loss to those parts of the world that need warming by coke. In fact, the last one I'd seen was at Ypres. After a direct shell burst, the church had collapsed in on itself. But not the good old Bankdam-Crowther! Marvellous tribute to the British workman!

The rain rattled on the roof. ‘What is it you actually object to?' I asked.

‘It rumbles,' he said impatiently, ‘… and disturbs the prayers and hymns: empty-headed children seem to find it funny. And then there's the blow-back and, when this … well, blows back, it erupts. Smoke, sparks, ash … yes, ash, it showers ash on the congregation. I have had several complaints. During evensong on January 15th this year, some even fell on the choir during the anthem. Not merely ash! Ashes! I've had an expert from York to look at it. He charged us a guinea and said it wouldn't give us any more trouble. But within the month it was at it again. Just now it seems to have settled down; I know you can be relied on not to interfere with it.'

Plainly he knew that he couldn't rely on me at all. I looked thoroughly unreliable; my topcoat betrayed me. There was my face, the left side, too. Like his Bankdam-Crowther it worked spasmodically. People like the Revd. J. G. Keach brought it on badly. It began at my left eyebrow and worked down to my mouth. I'd caught it at Passchendaele and wasn't the only one either. The medics said it might work off given time. Vinny going off hadn't helped.

No, I told him, he could rely on me and put on what I believed to be a reliable look. As one side of my face was being jerked in another and unreliable direction, I must have looked frightening because he gave the stove another kick – an embarrassed one.