South Riding (4 page)

It may seem to you that in my pattern I have laid greater emphasis upon human affliction than you might consider typical or necessary. But when I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies—poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part in it righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting, and this corporate action is at least based upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature — we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.

Therefore I dedicate this story, such as it is, to you, who have fought so valiant a fight for human happiness. I am conscious of the defects, the clumsiness and limitations of my novel. At least let me record one perfect thing; the proud delight which it has meant to me to be the daughter of Alice Holtby.

“
Take what you want,” said God. “Take it—and pay for it.
”

Old Spanish Proverb

Quoted in “This Was My World” by Viscountess Rhondda

“
The quarterly session of the South Riding County Council was held yesterday in Flintonbridge County Hall. Alderman General the Honourable Sir Ronald Tarkington, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., took the chair. The meeting adjourned for one minute’s silence in respectful memory of the late Alderman Farrow; then the Cold Harbour Division proceeded to the election of his successor
. . . .”

Extract from the ‘Kingsport Chronicle’ June, 1932

Y
OUNG
L
OVELL
B
ROWN
, taking his place for the first time in the Press Gallery of the South Riding County Hall at Flintonbridge, was prepared to be impressed by everything. A romantic and inexperienced young man, he yet knew that local government has considerable importance in its effect on human life. He peered down into the greenish gloom and saw a sombre octagonal room, lit from three lofty leaded windows, beyond which tall chestnut trees screened the dim wet June day. He saw below him bald heads, grey heads, brown heads, black heads, above oddly foreshortened bodies, moving like fish in an aquarium tank. He saw the semi-circle of desks facing the chairman’s panoplied throne; he saw the stuffed horsehair seats, the blotting paper, the quill pens, the bundles of printed documents on the clerk’s table, the polished fire dogs in the empty grates, the frosted glass tulips shading the unignited gas jets, the gleaming inkwells.

His heart beat, and his eyes dilated. Here, he told himself, was the source of reputations, of sanatoria, bridges, feuds, scandals, of remedies for broken ambitions or foot and mouth disease, of bans on sex novels in public libraries, of educational scholarships, blighted hopes and drainage systems. Local government was an epitome of national government. Here was World Tragedy in embryo. Here gallant Labour, with nothing to lose but its chains, would fight entrenched and armoured Capital. Here the progressive, greedy and immoral towns would exploit the pure, honest, elemental and unprogressive country. Here Corruption could be studied and exposed, oppression denounced, and lethargy indicted.

Lovell Brown knew himself to be on the eve of an initiation. To-day would open a new chapter in British journalism. “Do you remember when Brown started those articles of his on Local Government?” people would say fifty years hence. “By jove! That was an eye-opener. That was something new.”

Syd Mail, Lovell’s predecessor on the
Kingsport Chronicle
, had come with him to put him wise during his first visit to the Council. Mail had been promoted to the Combine’s Sheffield paper. Mail was a man of the world. He sprawled sideways on the hard bench running through the little enclosed Reporter’s Gallery, known as the Horse Box, and muttered information to his colleague and pupil with the inaudible fluency of an experienced convict.

“That’s Carne of Maythorpe—big chap in tweeds just come in. He’ll be next Alderman, they say, instead of Farrow, but don’t you believe it. That’s Snaith—grey suit, horn-rimmed spectacles, by the chairman’s desk. He’ll have had something to say about Carne.”

Lovell saw Carne, a big heavy handsome unhappy-looking man. Under a thatch of thick black hair his white face was not unlike that on photographs of Mussolini, except for its finedrawn sensitive mouth with down-turned corners. He bore little resemblance to Lovell’s notion of a sporting farmer, which was what, by a county-wide reputation, Carne was known to be.

Alderman Snaith, supposed to be the richest member of the Council, a dapper grey little mouse of a man, was more like the secret subtle capitalist of tradition.

“There’s Alderman East just come in,” muttered Syd Mail. “Vice-chairman. Eighty-four. Deaf as a post.”

Snaith detached himself from a gossiping group and made for the vice-chairman.

“Are they friends—East and Snaith?” asked Lovell.

“Friends? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Snaith’s any man’s friend, except when it suits him. He’s clever. Sharp as a sack of monkeys and knows how to make himself indispensable to authority. A dark horse. Ah! There’s Mrs. Beddows.”

“Oh, I know
her
!” cried Lovell with enthusiasm, then blushed to realise that he had been overheard.

Alderman Mrs. Beddows halted, looked up at the gallery, recognised him and gave a smiling gesture of salutation. She was a plump sturdy little woman, whose rounded features looked as though they had been battered blunt by wear and weather in sixty years or more of hard experience. But so cheerful, so lively, so frank was the intelligence which beamed benevolently from her bright spaniel-coloured eyes, that sometimes she looked as young as the girl she still, in her secret dreams, felt herself to be. Her clothes were a compromise between her spiritual and chronological ages. She wore to-day a dignified and beautifully designed black gown of heavy dull material; but she had crowned this by a velvet toque plastered with purple pansies. She carried a large bag embroidered with raffia work and had pinned on to her rounded bosom the first crimson rose out of her husband’s garden. Actually, she was seventy-two years old, a farmer’s daughter, and had lived in the South Riding all her life.

She was talking about clothes now, in a clear carrying Yorkshire voice, unaffectedly accented.

“Now there’s the nice young man I saw at the Lord Mayor’s reception!” she cried, waving to the embarrassed Lovell. “I told him that if he wrote in his paper again: ‘Alderman Mrs. Beddows looked well in her usual navy,’ I’d have him sacked. It’s not navy anyway. It’s black crepe. Chloe brought it from Paris. Lovely material, isn’t it? But he said he didn’t do the dresses, so I had to chase all over the building hunting for Gloriana or whatever that young woman calls herself, to see she got it right. I always send Chloe the bits out of the papers with my dresses in them. Then she can’t say I never wear anything but my old red velvet, not that I really fancy all these blacks she buys me. I like a bit of colour myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.”

“I see you’ve got off with Mrs. B. already,” said the fat man from the
Yorkshire Record
, wriggling his massive thighs over the narrow plank of the bench. “Good for you, Brown.”

“Heard her latest?” asked Mail. “The travelling secretary of a birth control society called to ask for her support as Alderman. Mrs. B. replied ‘I’ve had five children already, and I was seventy-two last birthday. Aren’t you a bit late in the day for me? Try Councillor Saxon.’ ”

Smothered guffaws shook the bench, for Councillor Saxon, after fifty-two years of childless married life, had suddenly lost heart and virtue to a blonde in a tobacconist’s kiosk on Kingsport Station and found himself at seventy-four the proud but embarrassed father of a son. The whole South Riding, apart from Mrs. Saxon, appeared aware of his achievement. Most of the South Riding, whatever its outward disapproval, was delighted. It enjoyed all unusual feats of procreation.

Lovell did not yet know that more than half the anecdotes repeated about Mrs. Beddows were apocryphal. She was a portent; she was a mascot; she was the first woman alderman in the South Riding and therefore she must be a character. If she did not utter witticisms, they must be invented for her. Her naturally racy tongue was credited with malice and ribaldry quite foreign to a nature fundamentally decorous, comfortable and kind. She enjoyed her popularity, however, and appreciated its power, and though she was frequently shocked by the repartee accredited to her, did little to contradict it, and, half-consciously, played up to its inventors.

Lovell had not made up his mind whether he should become a worshipper or iconoclast. This was a day of momentous decisions. He stared and blushed. He was determined to accept nothing, not even Mrs. Beddows’ popularity, without question.

But his speculations were cut short by the entry of the Chairman. Alderman General the Honourable Sir Ronald Tarkington, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., of Lissell Grange was a fine figure of a man and a fine man for any figure. His chairmanship of the South Riding County Council was the most successful in its history. The fact that his speeches were almost wholly inaudible in no way detracted from their popularity, for never in his life had he uttered an unexpected sentiment, and what he said could be noted down before he spoke it almost as easily as afterwards. A soldier, a Yorkshireman, a sportsman and a gentleman, believing quite sincerely in the divine right of landowners to govern their own country, his diligence, honesty and knowledge of the intricacies of procedure made him a trusted and invaluable administrator. His unfeigned pleasure in killing the correct animals at their orthodox seasons made him an affectionately respected neighbour. Few doubted that he was the right person to guide the deliberations of those whose business it was to decide whether necessitous children should be provided with meals at school, whether the county librarian should be paid mileage allowance for his car, or whether ex-gratia payments should be made to Leet of Kyle Hillock in compensation for damage done by flooding.

Lovell Brown had made up his mind about him all right. Landowners were wicked, selfish and retrogressive. Their political influence was a remnant of Feudalism. Russia knew how to deal with them.

But the chairman’s entry imposed some order upon the Councillors. Their groups dispersed and filled the semi-circle of seats.

Sir Ronald rose and mumbled. He drew the Councillors to their feet.

“Prayers?” breathed Lovell.

“Farrow,” muttered Mail sideways. “Dead.”

They stood.

Perhaps, thought Lovell, the ghost of the dead alderman hovered above the virgin fields of rose-pink blotting-paper, the quill pens, the horsehair, the sporting tweeds, the gents’ lightweight suitings, the bored, amused, restless or sorrowful thoughts of the mourners. Farrow had been a quiet little man, his public interest largely confined to the disposal of rural refuse, but he must, thought Lovell, have had some private life. Generously his imagination bestowed upon Farrow a gipsy mistress, three illegitimate children, a conscience racked by knowledge of secret pilfering from the parish funds, and a blighted ambition as an amateur actor. After all, people don’t just live and die as elementary school children, ratepayers and alderman, he reasoned. Even he, at twenty-two, had had Experiences. . . .

The silence was over. The Councillors sat down. The ghost of Alderman Farrow passed, officially, out of the Hall for ever. The Cold Harbour Division proceeded to consider the nomination of his successor. The alderman is dead; long live the alderman.

“It’s a foregone conclusion surely,” said the
Yorkshire Record
man, as seven or eight Councillors pushed their way out against their colleagues’ knees and made for a door.

“That so? Who?” asked Mail, the cynic. Too clever by half, thought Lovell.

“Carne, of course.”

“Carne?” If there had been a spittoon, Mail would have spat.

“Gryson told me.”

“Oh, Gryson! Army and county stick together.”

“Carne’s not county.”

“Lord Sedgmire’s son-in-law?”

“Runaway match.
And
she’s in an asylum.”

“Private mental home, you mean. At Harrogate. He pays ten guineas a week, they say—not counting extras.”

“It would have been cheaper to divorce her when she was carrying on with young Lord Knaresborough.”

“They say there was nothing in that. The kid’s supposed to be his anyway,
and
queer.”

“Mental?”

“Tenpence halfpenny in the shilling. Midge’s never gone to school.”

“They’re taking a darn long time.”

“Division. You’ll see. Peacock will nominate Astell.”

“Astell? The socialist chap? But he’s T.B. isn’t he?”

“A corpse would be good enough to beat Carne if Snaith’s got his knife into him. They say he loves him like a weasel loves a rabbit. Besides, Carne’s failing, and they don’t like to county-court an alderman.”

“Failing?”

“Have you seen Maythorpe? Crumbling to pieces over their heads. He lent the garden and drawing-room for that Conservative feast last year. Always sucking up to the gentry, is Carne. Big drawing-room with painted ceiling, gilt and plaster flaking down on every one’s best hats. Huge candelabra, no candles. Stables full, though. He can’t resist a good horse.”