Chewing the Cud (15 page)

“You lost a small black-and-white terrier?” “Yes.”

“They've just rung up from the Stoke Gifford Depot. One of their maintenance men spotted it by the side of the
line, above your farm. They've buried it, they said, made a proper grave. Perhaps you'd like to pop down to the depot and identify it?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

I didn't want to see her all broken, of course, but I had to know. And when I'd removed the cross that some kindly railwayman had made from two scraps of wood, and opened up the little mound of clinker and rubble at the edge of the sidings, there she was all right. I always believe — it's the most likely explanation — that she was hunting a fox over the top of the embankment and, being by now rather deaf, did not in her excitement hear the train.

But even all those hundreds of tons of thundering metal had not reduced her, as I so feared, to some pitiful pulp. She had only a bloody nose.

Y
outh may be a stuff that will not endure, but luckily nobody thinks much about that at the time. We were pretty pleased with life, the sort of life we had both always wanted to lead, the kind of work we had always wanted to do. And after work, there was play.

One pleasure was the pub crawl.

“Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think.”

A pint of best bitter cost ten old pennies and the Breathalyzer was a score of years away. Capstan, Gold Flake, Senior Service — three bob for twenty, and we sucked the smoke deep into our lungs without any governmental warning.

There was a crowd of us, much of an age, noisy certainly, foolish probably, happy to drink a bit too much beer on occasion and enjoy one another's company. We were not earnest and intense, we did not wish to set the world to rights. It hurt to think about the immediate past, and we weren't prepared to start fretting about the future.

Myrle and her sister, Pam, were privileged to be driven by me on one such outing. A dozen or more of us had graced with our loud presence the Star, the Rose & Crown, and the Fleur de Lys. Now, last in the convoy of cars, I drove our dung-splattered Land Rover through the narrow winding lanes, next stop the Cross Hands.

Under my masterful hands the steering wheel spun like a dancer, the gears meshed effortlessly, the powerful engine roared. What matter that the others had a head start on us?

The heroes of boyhood possessed me, and it was Captain G. E. T. Eyston's fearless foot that thrust the accelerator pedal flat against the floor. Why worry that the road was shiny with recent rain? Segrave would steer through the skid, or Campbell control it. As for the curves and the corners,
all were subdued and subjugated, nay, positively straightened out, as with deft unerring touch Tazio Nuvolari swung the mighty Maserati onward, ever onward. On his lips a song, his steady eyes raked the road ahead.

“For God's sake!” said Pam.

And Myrle, “Please stop and let me drive.”

“Why, in Heaven's name?”

“You're going to have us all in the ditch.”

Silly frightened girls! “For God's sake” indeed! There was a veritable god at the wheel, a
deus intra machina
!

Suddenly, inexplicably, the approaching left-hand bend became sharper. Like a coiling snake, it seemed to move and tighten upon itself, and before you could say “Enzio Ferrari,” the offside wheels of the Land Rover slid over the grass verge and settled with a giant splash into the deepest of ditches. I stalled the engine. Only the sweet song of running water broke the silence.

In turn we made the forty-five-degree climb out of the nearside door. Last away, as the captain of the ship must always be, I turned to survey her listing and settling, her upperworks leaning tiredly against a stout hedge, the flood tide bubbling beneath her starboard gunwales.

“Go and find a telephone,” said Myrle, tight-lipped.

When the rescuers came, back from the Cross Hands, it was not with a whimper but a bang. Up the lane from their
cars they marched, bearing trays with glasses and bottles at the ready to fortify the castaways, and many hands made light work of righting the stricken craft. Into the ditch they merrily splashed, and perching happily in the thorn hedge, they flipped the Land Rover upright and popped it back upon the road like a Dinky toy. And away we all went with the empties.

Going to the flicks was a weekly event, almost always by ourselves while Gladwyn sat in for us. Once only, while someone else looked after the children, we took him with us. I can't remember if the film was an uproarious comedy. It needn't have been, because many different stimuli would set him off, but I do recall the embarrassment of having every eye in a crowded cinema focused upon us as Gladwyn, more or less continuously, screamed and shrieked with maniacal laughter, the tears coursing down his cheeks.

Once I wrote a musical, in partnership with a doctor friend. I composed most of the tunes and wrote all the lyrics, while Jimmy's main contribution was to play the piano. I can neither read nor write music, so I would sing each new song into a huge old-fashioned tape recorder and then Jimmy would play them. This he could do only in something called three flats, a key in which I found it difficult to sing. So that when we performed a selection of the numbers in front of professionals, as we did on a couple of occasions, hoping to interest them, it must have sounded a bit odd.

The Canutopian
, as I titled it, was the story of a rough-hewn Canadian cousin of a well-to-do English county family. He comes to stay on a visit and falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the house.

Not long before, Julian Slade had had a huge success with
Salad Days
, and our rather simple, naive composition was much of the same kind. Except that Slade succeeded and we failed. Still, we had a lot of fun doing it, tiring as it occasionally was, such as the evening when Jimmy and his wife arrived at Woodlands Farm at 9
P.M
., saying blithely that they had secured for their small children a sitter-in who was willing to hold the fort until 2
A.M
. And

I had to get up to milk at 5:30
A.M.
I still think that a lot of the songs were quite good, and the words weren't bad
either. One of the numbers, I recall, was “Time Is Ours to Spend.” We spent it pleasantly enough.

Twice a year we went to a hunt ball. One was the annual gathering of the beagling folk, exchanging breeches and tweeds and stout boots for formal evening clothes, and the mud of the plowed field for the floor of the Pump Room or the Guildhall.

The other was much grander and took place at the house of that great hunting duke, where gathered all the nimrods of note from Gloucestershire and neighboring counties with their hard-riding, hard-running, or hard-wading wives (fox, hare, or otter — everybody chased something).

The house was in fact not large enough to hold such a field, and the actual dancing was done in a big, cold marquee attached to one side of it. Glimpses were to be had, on the way to the lavatory perhaps, of the duke warming his coattails before his fireside among a select group of cronies in their coats of blue and buff or blue and yellow or pink or green. (Father, incidentally, rated the duke, whom he met through such bodies as the Gloucestershire Society, as slightly superior to Churchill and marginally below the Queen.)

This matter of dress, just after the war, was still of some import. For such a thing as the duke's ball, white ties and
tails were very much the proper thing for men. Some callow youths might come in dinner jackets, one or two even daring to wear a soft shirt. But I by chance possessed the correct garb and so, for a time at least, wore it, though it was not suited to my figure. It shows to its best on tall, slim, long-necked fellows. And the wearing of my particular clothes was made even less fetching by the fact that they had belonged to my great-uncle Sidney.

In cut they were far from fashionable — I dare say he first wore them while Trollope was still alive — and in color a kind of rusty black. But the principal trouble stemmed from the fact that Uncle Sid, though I never set eyes upon him, must by comparison with me have been very tall, extremely narrow-chested, and pot-bellied.

Setting off for either of these annual fandangos was therefore a matter necessitating a particular drill. First, strong safety pins were needed to draw together behind me the spare material of the overlarge waistband; it did not matter that this left the seat of the trousers puckered into a series of vertical creases like the corrugations of a fan, since all was concealed by the overlong tailcoat. Next, a shortish but strong pair of suspenders was essential, to hoist the trousers to maximum height and thus to allow at least the soles of my shoes to escape below the endless trouser legs; this in itself rendered the fly buttons useless
because of altitude and made the passing of water a major undertaking. And last, if I were not to split the ancient cloth of the coat, I needed to make my shoulders no wider than had been Uncle Sid's. This I could do only by rounding my back, keeping my elbows close to one another, and bending always slightly forward, so that all in all I looked like nothing so much as a rather seedy, obsequious footman.

And then there was the problem of transport. The Land Rover is an able vehicle but in its basic early form not ideally designed for use in the depths of winter, when one is tarted up to the nines.

Ours had a canvas hood, which kept out rain but not cold air, and either no heater or one so inadequate as to be unmemorable. Myrle's dress would thus need insulating with several coats and rugs, and Uncle Sid's regalia was covered by a duffle coat and over that a leather jerkin. Gloves and scarves were de rigueur and hot-water bottles not unknown.

The other practical problem was one of cleanliness. The Land Rover had to be swept clear of calf dung or goat pel-lets, and the whole of the inside, front as well since the pedals were always plastered in muck, washed out with disinfectant. All we then needed was a couple of paper chickmeal sacks under our feet, and then it was off to the ball and onto
the floor. The hunched style of dancing that Uncle Sid's suit forced upon me was no doubt taken to be an effort to accommodate my height to Myrle's, and no one ever commented on the slight pungency of disinfectant.

Hunting people are supposedly weatherproof, and bad conditions like a heavy snowfall never seemed to affect the attendance. But on occasion the gods of the elements had a quiet snigger.

One year the roads were sheeted with black ice by the time that the merrymakers drove away from the great duke's house, and as a convoy of twelve cars came, quite circumspectly, down a nearby hill, the fun began.

The leading driver, all his steering, gear changing, and braking availing him naught, eventually came, once gravity had done with him, to a broadside stop at the bottom. Into him bumped the second. Solemnly, inexorably, almost in strict tempo, the remaining ten skated into one another in a weird moonlit ballet.

Car number thirteen was being driven by a gallant and distinguished colonel, whose long service to the British Raj had clearly created the man most fitted to unscramble such a scene of chaos. The ability that had solved great problems of military engineering from Calcutta to Kandahar was not likely to have much trouble sorting out a dozen cars in Old Sodbury.

Carefully he stopped short of the melee. Taking in the situation with one incisive glance, he got out. Masterfully he strode towards the incompetent fools who had been unable to cope with something as simple as a slippery road.

But even as crisp words of command rang out, in tones that had reduced sepoys to sobs and jemadars to jelly, they were drowned by a sudden loud crash as number fourteen smashed the colonel's car to scrap.

Hunt balls, of either persuasion, were on the whole pretty unremarkable. The prevailing characteristic of the dancers was likely to be heartiness, since a good proportion would be what a pair of Gaelic friends always referred to as “honkers”: English persons, that is, usually of the upper-middle classes, given to the public expression of their opinions in very loud voices and not infrequently capable of a fair degree of unthinking condescension towards lesser mortals. Honkers particularly enjoyed such dances as the Posthorn Gallop and when in wine favored such amusements as throwing bread rolls, balancing full glasses on their heads, or for a good laugh, setting the occasional tablecloth on fire. They would holler unself-consciously whenever they viewed another of the species, of either sex, across the floor.