Long Summer Day (14 page)

He had no real faith in the power of prayer. Every morning, at Alexis Street Council School, there had been a brief religious service that included a gabbled prayer and on the rare occasions when he attended Sunday School (in order to qualify for the annual treat) the bearded Superintendent prefaced and concluded his address with interminable appeals for Divine guidance and mercy. Ike had remained unimpressed by his appeals. They seemed to him to have even less meaning than the words of the hymns they chanted, yet who could say with certainty whether or not there existed above the bright blue sky an Omnipotent Sunday School Superintendent in a long white nightshirt who might be disposed to extricate a petitioner, providing he made his plea with eyes tightly closed and palms pressed together? He arranged himself in the conventional pose and murmured, swiftly, ‘Lord, get me aht of ’ere quick!
Make
Mr Craddock show up! Amen,’ and when he opened his eyes, and saw a trap speeding down the ribbon of road, he was ripe for wholesale conversion, so much so that, in the act of grabbing his Gladstone bag and leaping on the seat to wave, he did not forget to comment on the despatch of Divine service, saying, breathlessly, ‘Lumme! It
worked
!’

Paul came driving out of the sunset in a fast trot and saw the small figure capering on the platform seat. He had misjudged the time it took to climb the long, winding hill from the Sorrel Valley and seeing relief shining in the child’s pale face he was contrite, saying, ‘I’m sorry, kid, I took too long getting over the moor. It’s six miles and rough going. Have you been waiting long?’

‘No, sir,’ Ikey said politely, for his spirits had been uplifted by the remarkably swift answer to prayer which boded well for an easy solution to future problems, ‘No, Mister, I knew you’d show up sooner or later, I’d have hoofed it on me daisy-roots if I’d known which way ter go!’, and he climbed up and settled himself, gazing round at the countryside with disdain and assurance. The trap, he thought, was a very smart rig, and the bay cob pulling it seemed exceptionally fat, for plump horses were not within his experience. ‘I think you’re going to like it down here,’ Paul said. ‘I do myself, so much that I don’t think I shall ever go back to London! The big house is the other side of the woods, and as you’ll have to find your way about sooner or later I’ll tell you the names of the places we pass on the way. But I expect you’re hungry after that journey. Could you eat a pasty? A home-made one?’

‘Could a duck swim, Mr Craddock!’ said Ikey, and for the next five minutes was silent whilst accounting for the largest and tastiest pasty he had ever seen or heard described and one, he would judge, that would set anybody back twopence in Berstein’s pieshop, in the Old Kent Road.

As they jogged on over the moor Paul outlined what he had in mind for the boy, an apprenticeship in caring for horses and harness under Chivers, the middle-aged groom the Derwents had sent him. He had arranged, he said, for Chivers to teach him the rudiments of horsemanship and tack-room work, and added, ‘You may find the speech of the people down here difficult to understand at first, but don’t forget that they won’t understand you either! Very few of them have ever been within a hundred miles of London, do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Ikey dutifully but privately considered the warning unnecessary, for although he seemed to have travelled a thousand miles since eight o’clock that morning he had not crossed a sea and was therefore still within the confines of the British Isles, where everyone spoke English. As they breasted the slope of the moor, crossed the main highway and dropped down on to the river road, the boy stole a cautious look at his companion, seeing a lean, thoughtful face, with a flicker of kindness in the grey eyes and determination in the small, jutting chin. Ike was well versed in the art of gauging character by a study of adult faces and voices, and concluded at once that here was a soft touch, provided he didn’t overstep the mark. His hunger temporarily satisfied by Mrs Handcock’s enormous pasty he said, with infinite humility:

‘I done a bit o’ trap-driving, Mr Craddock, sir. Would you like me to take the ribbons fer a bit? Just ter make a change for yer?’

‘If you like,’ Paul said, ‘but take her gently, I only bought her yesterday and she might have one or two tricks I don’t know about,’ and they exchanged seats, Ikey clicking his tongue in the fashion of all the best London cabbies. The cob seemed to understand for it broke into a steady trot and Paul, his shyness making way for a kind of conspiratorial affection for the urchin, said, ‘I know your surname is Palfrey. What is your Christian name?’

The boy grinned, shamefacedly. ‘Me proper name’s “Percy”,’ he said, ‘but I ’ates it! I mean, anyone would, wouldn’t they? Everyone back ’ome called me Ikey.’

‘Why?’

‘I dunno why, Mr Craddock, sir.’

‘Very well,’ Paul said, ‘it’s “Ikey” from now on,’ and he wondered if the name had been suggested by the boy’s long, slightly curved nose, unusual in a boy from the South Bank where, Paul recalled, every other urchin’s nose was snub.

II

P
aul Craddock was to remember the long, blazing summer of 1902 as one of the happiest and busiest of his life. From early July, until the leaves of the avenue chestnuts began to fall, he was called upon to face an endless variety of problems, and to suffer not a few frustrations, but his spirits remained as unclouded as the weather. It was a joy to watch his home growing up around him under the ceaseless sawing and hammering of Eph Morgan’s shock brigade, and to feel the pulse of a domain that seemed to him, admittedly a prejudiced witness, to be stirring after years of hibernation. He was fortunate during all this time to have two such sponsors as Rudd and Mrs Handcock, the resident housekeeper, for both made no secret of their liking for him, were ready to go to any lengths to help him adjust himself to the rhythm of country life, and also to mediate between a rank amateur and the people of the Valley. He was thus able to meet all the tenantry and their employees during this period, as well as most of the professional craftsmen and the few private residents in and about Coombe Bay, but he soon realised that conquest of the community as a whole was not something he could take for granted, simply because he had acquired Shallowford by a banker’s draft. By August, when he had been living at the lodge for seven weeks, the Shallowford folk had sorted themselves into three groups. There were those like Rose and Claire Derwent, and Farmer Willoughby who openly proclaimed their relief that the estate was in the hands of an earnest if inexperienced young man; those like Arabella Codsall and Tamer Potter, who were somewhat fussed by his enthusiasm, and grumbled in private about city gentlemen who were prone to run before they could walk; and a third group of neutrals, like the Irish Doctor O’Keefe, Parson Bull, the head gardener, Horace Handcock, and some of the small tradesmen in Coombe Bay with whom Paul found it difficult to establish a close personal contact.

Some goodwill had to be purchased, as when Paul took Rudd’s advice and gave Sam Potter the post of estate forester with a cottage at the far end of Shallowford Mere, Sam was grateful for both accommodation and post. He had lately married, and his wife Joannie was pregnant, and with winter coming on life promised to be bleak in the crowded family dell. Rudd reasoned that, with brother Sam drawing regular pay from the enemy’s purse, brother Smut’s poaching might be confined to robbing other people’s coverts, east and west of Shallowford. Paul also won over the dour Edward Derwent, by buying in a small cliff pasture on the extreme eastern border and incorporating it into the High Coombe domain without an increase of rent, but in any case his relations with the Derwent clan, as with the amiable Pitts family, at Hermitage, were fairly cordial from the very beginning. Rose Derwent found him a good groom and a sturdy cob for his trap and her pretty sister Claire gave him plenty of frank advice regarding his approaches to the women of the Valley. ‘You have to pay each and everyone of them the compliment of pretending they are equals of the men,’ she told him, when he came grumbling of Arabella Codsall’s importunities one day. ‘It’s a pure fiction, of course, except in Arabella’s case, but it’s Heads-I-win-Tails-You-Lose for you because the women are flattered and their menfolk regard your approach as proof that they have married wives with good sense!’ There and then Paul decided that Claire Derwent herself had more sense in her head than one could reasonably expect to find in a pretty girl of nineteen, but he was very careful not to discriminate between her and her sister Rose, for he soon discovered that Rose had a very warm heart, would go out of her way to help anyone and nursed no jealousy whatever in respect of her handsome sister.

In the immediate area of the big house Mrs Handcock was his major-domo. Her immense weight did very little to reduce her mobility and she bustled breathlessly to and from her quarters in the domestic wing ministering to him and Rudd and engaging a troop of local girls to take service at Shallowford as soon as the renovations were finished. At first Paul had the greatest difficulty in understanding Mrs Handcock’s brogue, the broadest in the Valley not excluding Tamer Potter’s, and would shake his head when she pounded into the parlour to ask if he would be available ‘to-zee-thicky-Lowry-maid-us-was-thinking-o’-taakin’-on-till-us-zees’-ow-’er-shaapes!’

In the meantime the house was nearing the step of habitability, for Eph Morgan, the Welsh expatriate from Coombe Bay, had moved in the day after the sale and had since recruited a horde of local craftsmen on a sub-contract basis, setting them re-roofing, re-plastering, and papering according to the demands of Rudd’s survey. The agent acted as architect but paid Paul the compliment of consulting him on important details. A bathroom was added, a passage cut through from kitchen to dining-room to ensure that meals were no longer served cold, joists in several floors were ripped out and replaced, every room upstairs was repapered with a cheerful floral pattern, new storage water tanks were installed in the loft, and Sir George Lovell’s dark-room was fitted up as an estate office. Paul spent a great deal of his time watching the builders at work and Ephraim Morgan, their sponsor, intrigued him. He was a very small man, hardly more than five feet in height, but with a huge, round head that gave him the appearance of an intelligent gnome. He had first come into the district as a railway engineer and had decided, when the line was built, that he could earn a better living in Devon than his native Wales. Yet, like all Welshmen, he cherished a fiery patriotism for the Principality and was a great admirer of Lloyd George, concerning whom he would deliver long, rhapsodic speeches in his sing-song voice while the men stood around grinning and sometimes throwing a sly comment as fuel to the Welshman’s fire. Eph Morgan had two principal hates, The Brummagers (represented by his arch-enemy Joe Chamberlain) and The Brewers, whom he declared the mainstay of the Tory Party and he saw his hero Lloyd George as a dauntless St George ambushing both from morning to night. Paul gathered, however, that Morgan was an exception as regards his interest in radical politics, for all the farmers, and most of their hired men, were tepid Conservatives, who had followed the Lovell lead at the polling booth for generations without devoting a thought to topical issues like Irish Home Rule, Welsh Disestablishment, or the legacies of the South African War like the concentration camp scandal and the importation of Chinese labour into the mines. They were content to plod peacefully along the well-beaten paths of rural forefathers, looking to the gentry to govern and to the owner of the big house to keep their premises in repair, promote country sports and occasional social activities like the annual harvest supper and Empire Day celebrations. Notwithstanding the activities of prominent local dissenters like Farmer Willoughby, of Deepdene, and Eph Morgan, the established church had the local community well in hand. Parson Bull was not only feared but genuinely respected in the district. Rudd introduced them after Matins one Sunday morning, and Bull struck Paul as a man at least a century behind the times. He treated all his parishioners, rich and poor, with impatience and showed little traditional deference to his patron, the Squire. Rudd said that Bull’s consuming interest was hunting and that he was an ecclesiastical parody of Surtees’ Jorrocks, inasmuch as he hibernated in the summer and came alive when cubbing began, in the last week of September. Then, Rudd promised, Paul would see the real Parson Bull astride an enormous seventeen-hand skewbald roaring his way across country and threatening whiplash and hellfire to anyone who blocked his approach to a jumpable fence. ‘He’s a frightful old tyrant and makes nonsense of the Sermon on the Mount,’ he said, ‘but he’s so Old English that one can’t help paying him grudging respect. You’ve got half the gift of his living but that won’t mellow his approach to you, as you probably noticed. They say that even the Bishop goes in fear of him and he’s scared so many curates into resigning that now he doesn’t have one but simply goes through the motions of taking a monthly service in outlying churches over the river.’

Doctor O’Keefe, on whom Paul called for a routine check of his wound, was equally offhand, and the reek of whisky in his surgery went some way towards explaining the speed with which the doctor drove his gig around the district. He asked Paul one or two questions about the war, glared at his knee, then warned him that ‘he would have his hands full with a damned shambles like Shallowford’, but they struck no sparks, and Paul left feeling the doctor lacked the saving grace of Parson Bull, who was at any rate a rumbustious character. Rudd said that O’Keefe had not always been surly and uncommunicative but had become misanthropic after his wife’s death from tuberculosis some years ago. He had always been very fond of Irish whisky (‘the landlord of The Raven kept a special stock for him’) and had turned to the bottle for solace. His wife had been a beautiful woman and the story was that they had been very attached to one another. ‘They’ve got a daughter somewhere,’ Rudd added, ‘a bonny girl she was, who ran off soon after her mother’s death and is nursing or teaching up the country. If she stayed she might have pulled the doctor through but it isn’t a job I should have relished, and I daresay she’ll keep clear of him until he floats into the grave.’