Portrait of Elmbury (28 page)

Late that night he died.

His death marked the end of a phase in the life of Elmbury; for almost at once that queer little company who had sat night after night in the Swan began to break up, the oddly-assorted fellowship ended, as if it had been only he who had held it together. For a long time his chair in the corner remained empty; nobody liked to sit in it; and gradually the “regulars” ceased to be regular. Badger Brown stayed in his own village, Johnnie Johnson joined a club where he could play billiards, Mr. Benjamin paid more frequent visits to his little business in Birmingham, Wilfrid Jakes the old gardener fell ill with lumbago and kept to his house. Soon Miss Benedict herself left; for the bar was altering its character, her new customers demanded new drinks with strange names which she had never heard of, motorists were more frequent and they scandalised her by bringing their
womenfolk into the bar, “commercials” refused to be frightened away, one Saturday evening there was an invasion of paper-hatted women, part of an outing, who demanded fourteen Guinnesses and look snappy, miss, or the charry will leave us behind. Miss Benedict looked snappy all right; the thought that the charry might indeed leave them behind made her serve the Guinnesses with frantic haste, although they were frothy and difficult to pour out. But that night she gave in her notice; and Mr. Rendcombe, the only one of her old customers who remained faithful to her, saw her burst into tears. When the last “commercial” had taken his leave, our little Miss Prunes-and-Prisms caught the old man's arm and suddenly broke down. Perhaps he was the only man who had ever seen her cry; the only man who had ever looked behind her stern and schoolmistressy façade. We may be sure he patted her on the shoulder and said: “There, there, my dear. … Times change. We get old, and things aren't what they were. Thinning us out, we old ones … thinning us out.”

Mr. Chorlton and I, when we met for a drink, now went to the Shakespeare, which was a warm and cheerful pub peopled by no ghosts and with no empty chairs in the corner. Effie and Millie still reigned there as co-equals, dividing their long bar by means of the beer-engine in the middle, so that Effie held sway over the territory north of it while Millie was queen of the south. The darts board still hung in the same place, and it was the same dart board, with the worn patches near the treble twenty and the treble nineteen. The picture of the landlord as a Royal and Ancient Buffalo still hung over the fireplace, flanked by notices about forthcoming meetings of the Cricket Club, the Football Club, the Conservative Association, the Labour Party, and the Flying Club (which flew not aeroplanes but racing pigeons).

If the Swan, in its heyday, was representative of one aspect of Elmbury, the Shakespeare was typical of another. It was a kind of club too, but less esoteric than the Swan. I could never
quite define, or even decide in my own mind, what held the Swan fellowship together; unless it were a conglomerate consisting of weather-lore, interest in civil affairs, guns and fishing-rods, recollections of hearing the chimes at midnight, plus something else which was quite undefinable. But it is easy enough to say what common interests were shared by the customers of the Shakespeare: horses, cricket, football, motor-bikes, and girls. It was the meeting-place of the young limbs from the country round Elmbury; in some respects it was more a country pub than a town pub. The farmers' sons filled it on market-days, on Friday mornings when they came to draw the wages from the bank, and in the evenings before a dance or after a cricket-match. Mr. Sparrow, as perky, as cheeky and as prospective as the bird his namesake, used to call there every day on behalf of Mr. Benjamin for betting-slips. Before he entered, and when he came out, his little head would waggle from side to side on his long thin neck as he looked about him anxiously for the patrolling policeman.

The cricket club held its annual meetings at the Shakespeare; and every year the notice over the fireplace was in similar terms:
There will be a meeting next Friday at eight o'clock to discuss plans for cricket next season and ways of raising money to wipe out the club's debt of £29 4s. 11d
. We were always confronted with this dreadful deficit in the accounts and Mr. Jeffs, who owned our cricket field, always forgave us the. rent, grumbling nevertheless, “Them as wants cricket ought to pay for it.” Usually we decided to make somebody else pay for it; and so we arranged a Rummage Sale or a dance. But the mysterious deficit always appeared again next year, and Mr. Jeffs, still grumbling, had to guarantee our overdraft at the bank.

The Shakespeare was also the headquarters of the Darts League. Darts playing would have been unthinkable at the Swan; it was customary, it was traditional, in the Shakespeare, where Millie could get you a double top with one dart out of three almost any time, and Effie had been known more than once to put three darts running in the treble nineteen.

And there was another thing you could do at the Shakespeare which you would never dream of doing at the Swan. You could
sing. There was a piano in the corner, and both girls were capable of strumming out, perhaps a bit clumsily, almost any tune you asked for from
Mademoiselle from Armentieres
to
Billy Boy
. Indeed, such was the Shakespeare's renown for singing that men from Adam's Norton (where, as you will remember, the people sang like crickets all day long) would often visit it when they were in Elmbury. In particular there was a merry and chirruping fellow called Tommy Dove, whose curious trade was that of a gelder: he travelled about the countryside castrating horses, cattle, sheep and pigs. He brought from Adam's Norton a good tenor voice and a wonderful assortment of old songs, some of them so old and traditional that they were almost unintelligible. His favourite was the strangest song of all, which belonged to Adam's Norton and was sung to the best of my belief nowhere else in the kingdom. I never knew what it was about; but its chorus went like this:

“The prickolye bush,
  The prickolye bush,
  The prickolye bush so sore.
  If ever I get out of the prickolye bush
  I'll never get in it no more.”

Certainly the Shakespeare was very different from the Swan! But it was a pleasant little pub and it was not unimportant in the life of Elmbury.

It was about this time that a little tragedy occurred at Adam's Norton; and the story is worth telling as an example of the enormous difference in outlook between the city and the countryside.

The landlord of the Adam's Norton pub—the Salutation Inn, the pub with the crooked chimney—was a kindly old man and a great songster, and he'd been there for twenty-five years. He
was in the habit of obliging a few of the Birmingham fishermen with a drink about half-past six on Sunday, which was half an hour before legal opening time. The village policeman knew of this, and shut his eyes to it, being aware that the train to Birmingham left at five past seven and the fishermen wouldn't get a drink otherwise.

But one day a policeman from Birmingham, being off duty, came down with the fishermen for a day by the river; and at half-past six they brought him up to the pub. He waited till the first round of drinks had been bought and paid for, slipped out quietly, and called the village policeman, who was having a quiet sit-down by the fire.

The village policeman protested. “You've no call to interfere. You don't know the village. It's a decent, quiet, well-conducted pub.” “If I show you my warrant,” said the Birmingham man, “you've got to come and you've got to make a case of it, or I'll have you out of your job.” He didn't even give Constable Roberts time to put on his boots. The poor man came along reluctantly in his carpet slippers, and took everybody's name, and even carried away a sample of the beer in a bottle; because the Birmingham bobby made him do that too.

So there was a charge against the landlord of “selling drinks outside permitted hours,” and he lost his licence, and had to leave the pub; although the magistrates were privately sympathetic with him and would have dismissed the case if they had dared. He died six months later, of a broken heart, it's said; and the new landlord of the crooked little pub didn't sing and didn't approve of singing, for fear it would get him into trouble with the police. Adam's Norton, that had been so merry, became as silent as the grave. The people there no longer holler the old merry tunes with the absurd, irrelevant, traditional words.

“They shut their doors in the evening; and they know no songs.”

But the extraordinary thing about the incident is this: the Birmingham policeman really thought he was being “smart” in making what he'd probably have called “a good cop” when he was off duty; and quite a lot of his Birmingham friends thought
he was smart too. They told us that although he wasn't a very nice fellow they expected he'd go far. But we were shocked; not so much angry as shocked; and we regarded him, not as wicked exactly, but as worse than wicked: as a sort of diseased creature whom we must shun lest he infect us. Because of his wanton, stupid, childish action we can't ever feel friendly towards the Birmingham fishermen any more; and more than ever we feel that we have nothing in common with the cities, where men think it's clever to do things like that.

The local point-to-point was held in March, and Jerry rode his last race on Demon; the old horse broke a blood-vessel and had to be shot. You can see his picture if ever you go to the Shakespeare; it is on the wall between the Midnight Steeplechase and the Royal and Ancient Buffalo: a faded photograph of a great raw-boned horse with huge shoulders and tremendous haunches, and Jerry, lean and graceful, upon his back sitting as easily as if he were in his armchair before the great fire at Hill Farm.

With the spring came more trippers, more prosperity and, following the prosperity, more Chain Stores. Elmbury already had two of these; and now two more bought shops in the town. Each one brought ruin to two or three of our little tradesmen who couldn't compete with the huge organisation, the ingenious advertising, and the ruthless price-cutting of these million-pound concerns, these nation-wide butchers, grocers, fishmongers, haberdashers and whatnot. Mr. Patterson, the fishmonger, who had been trading in Elmbury for thirty years, was compelled to shut up shop in April; for Elmbury being far from a port, he lived precariously at the end of long lines of communication, and he couldn't compete with the well-organised combine. In May Mr. Brunswick went out of business too; and his opposition, Ye Olde Vyllage Shoppe, celebrated the occasion by a big advertising campaign to get more customers, filling the windows with summer
frocks at “half-prices” and cheap slogans such as “Spend the rent and let the landlord wait.” Elmbury, goodness knows, held landlords in no great affection; but this piece of silly slick vulgarity, with its implied invitation to poor people to get themselves into trouble for the sake of a new dress, roused even our slow tempers and provoked Mr. Chorlton, in the Council chamber, to speak of“millionaires without morals who corrupt and cheapen whatever they touch.” The little tradesmen in the Council, who had never loved and often feared him, discovered in him a Daniel come to judgment, recognised him as their champion, and rose in their seats and cheered.

But Mr. Chorlton, these days, was not often roused to anger. He was getting old, and he confessed that as each year passed there seemed fewer things worth getting angry about. Instead, like the Greek philosophers whom he loved, he mocked with gentle and mocking laughter at a world which appeared to him increasingly absurd. I visited him in the spring, on a day in mid-May when a sudden chilly wind was scattering the apple petals over his lawn. He looked out of the window and quoted A. E. Housman:

“There's one more spring to scant our mortal lot,
  One season ruined of its little store.
  May will be fine next year, as like as not,
  Oh aye. But then we shall be
sixty
-four”

“Sixty-four,” he repeated. “You begin to count the springs then; though the delights they bring with them are ever less sharp. There was a time when each May presented me with at least half a dozen days which were so exquisitely beautiful that they were scarcely bearable; now they don't hurt so much. If the years dull your pleasure they also deaden your pain. I'm no longer visited with that divine frenzy of the spring night when one
feels an inescapable compulsion to make love or get drunk or write a poem. On the other hand I no longer feel it is in the least tragic or even very regrettable that I can no longer do these things. I merely experience a mild disappointment that May hasn't brought me a milk-white magpie moth this year!”

“How's the breed going?” I asked; and he led me to the cabinet in the corner, pulled out a drawer, and showed me his long rows of delicate moths, arranged in order from the darkest to the lightest, so that those in the last row were practically snow-white, as white and satin-smooth as plum-blossom, save for the faintest speckling which blemished each, a few black freckles, the scantiest dusting of grey.

“You see, I'm getting near it,” he said. “But even in moths which produce two generations a year the path to perfection is long and hard. How about man, who reproduces himself perhaps once in twenty-five years?”

I laughed:

“And you know what you're breeding for in moths! You happen to want an immaculate one. In mankind you don't know if you want a Tarzan or a motor-mechanic or a Newton or a Keats; or a Ginger Rogers.”

“Indeed.” Mr. Chorlton nodded. “But there is a greater difficulty. My moths have a God. Oh yes, they have. He has smudges of cigar-ash on his waistcoat and he drinks too much port, but he is God nevertheless; he is omnipotent as far as they are concerned. Each generation he picks out with his rather shaky fingers the whitest, the most worthy, and in His temple— that jam jar in the corner—he places them together, where in obedience to the God's wishes they mate. So there is a reasonable expectation—since offspring tend to vary within narrow limits on each side of the parental mean—that their progeny will contain a certain number of yet whiter examples, fit candidates for the priesthood. Understand?”