Tollesbury Time Forever (5 page)

Oh for a fine bat in my hand and for an umpire to signal the first ball of the day. I sigh now, even as I write these lines on my bedroom wall…

And do you know what I did? I laid myself down where the wicket would have been and I slept for hours. Call it a long held ambition; call it a kind of alternate reality jet-lag. Call it what you like. I slept because I wanted to. There was a simplicity in such an act that marked the moment as profound. My body was upon the earth as the world turned. The sky looked down upon me with, I sensed, approval.

So what do you do after a long day in the field? You have a pint. It was worth a try. I raised myself to my feet and headed optimistically for The King’s Head. I pushed against one of the weather-beaten doors of the pub and it opened smoothly, not a creak in sight. Amazingly, the interior was little different than it is today; at first glance that is. The bar was in the same place and withered beams held up the ceiling. A fire place gaped in the far wall, full of roughly hewn logs. A smiling young barmaid was ready for action and a couple of old men stood huddled and wary in a shadowy corner.

On closer inspection, however, my eye was drawn to the differences, the imperfections, if I can even call them that. Between the ceiling beams was a substance that seemed to be a mixture of dried mud and straw and the floor, basically, was just trodden-in dirt. Lamps, lit by what I presumed to be oil, cast more gloom than illumination and the whole pub smelled like a farmyard. If I had lit a cigarette in there, it would have been like dabbing the most wondrous scent onto the grubbiest of necks.

“Hello, darling. What can I get you?” asked the girl behind the bar. She looked to be about thirteen years old, though I have always been poor at assessing age. I, myself, can range from anything between nineteen and a hundred during the course of a single day.

I had no money, none that I thought she would take, but then I have been in that situation before. As I was thinking of a way of willing her to give me some alcohol, I heard a voice that brought me back to reality. Yes, reality. I recognized it
instantly, for how could I forget it? It was the man from the salt marshes.

“He will have ale.”

So I sat down at the old man’s wooden table by the window, a table whose grain and distress I could have stared at for eternity. I wondered whether it had been made from the same great tree that had provided the beams for the ceiling and, if it had, how sad that they should be so parted, destined just to gaze at each other forever, never to touch. The pale light from the candle in the centre of the table wavered and glowed as if acknowledging my musings. So incandescent and uncertain was that flame, it could have been my own soul at that moment.

The girl brought my drink to me in a stained metal tankard and set it on the table. For a moment I felt like I had an ally - the alcohol, not the girl. I tasted it - the alcohol, not the girl. At first, I almost gagged. The liquid slid down my throat, warm and weak. This surely couldn’t be alcohol. The taste was indescribable. There could have been anything in it - vegetables, wood, leaves - anything at all. Then I realised, it wasn’t about the taste. It was in the sitting down in peace that you got your relief in this place; the antidote to toiling in the fields, hammering at the anvil, dredging the Blackwater for clams and oysters. The ale itself was not the sustenance; the relief came in the act of imbibing, the feel of the tankard against your lips, the subsiding of your thoughts and the way your bones just melded with the earth on the floor and the wood at your elbows.

When this became apparent in my mind, the ale entered my body as would the water of bliss. It clouded my thoughts briefly before seeming to settle them down, slowing them almost. This feeling did not last. For the bark of the old man’s voice dispersed it as a flung stone doth scatter a flock of pigeons.

“Where did you sleep last night?” he asked.

”What is your name?” I countered. My voice sounded weary but fearless.

To my surprise, the old man leaned back in his chair and looked at me, a smile breaking across his leathery face.

”I am Zachariah Leonard,” he said, as if I should have already been aware.

Slightly disconcerted, I supped some more ale.

“Zachariah Leonard?”

He nodded slowly.

“So, last night. Where did you sleep?” he repeated.

“I slept in the churchyard, by the wall.”

“A good choice.”

He appeared to be wearing exactly the same clothes as the previous day. The wayward candlelight, afforded me glimpses of just how dishevelled he really was.

“Yesterday evening,” I said warily, “you seemed as if you had been waiting for me, as if you knew I would turn up. And you were sitting in a place where I always used to sit.”

Zachariah leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, clasping his huge dirty hands together. He peered up at me from under the dark brim of his crooked hat.

“Oh no,” he said. “It is you who has been waiting for me. You have been waiting for me your whole life. That’s the truth, boy.”

It was oh so quiet in there, so quiet.

“But how can that be?” I asked.

“It be, and that is all,” he said in almost a growl.

Zachariah drank a huge glug of ale and noisily banged his tankard back on the table, as if having made a decisive point. He stared across at me and nodded towards my tankard. I was to drink up. I closed my eyes and downed the remainder of the ale, feeling almost immediately as if I had been anaesthetised. Perhaps I had been. He rose and I followed him out into the evening air as if we were chained together. The girl winked at me from behind the bar as I passed her. I looked back over my shoulder and saw she was writing something down on a board. She seemed very pleased with herself indeed.

We walked together back towards the marshes, Zachariah in front and I behind, his crab like gait propelling
him like some devious clockwork toy. And after some time, we arrived at a wooden structure, hidden away amongst some trees and bushes. I hesitate to call it a house. It was literally just four walls, a roof and a door. It looked like it had been plucked from a low budget horror film and placed in the foliage by some mischievous hand. It was close to where we had sat the previous evening though I had not noticed it. So at least he actually lived somewhere. In my eyes, that fact alone made him slightly less ghoulish but no less appalling.

And as I followed Zachariah Leonard into his shack, I felt that my life was about to change forever.

It be, indeed.

Let it be.

My eyes adjusted to the gloom; though it took my nose a little longer. There were no windows, though a ragged hole in the roof seemed to serve as a chimney of sorts. Zachariah Leonard lit a small fire in a dirty grate against the back wall and a make-shift flue directed the emerging smoke into the darkening sky. I soon found myself feeling warm and light-headed.

My host, if I may call him that, sat on the floor and leaned against the wall to the left of the fire. I could not tell if his eyes were open or closed, whether he was awake or asleep. Had I not seen him walk in and slump down, I would have assumed he was nothing but a pile of rotten clothes; a pile of clothes, as I saw now, puffing upon a pipe.

I could hear the sound of my own breathing as my lungs became accustomed to the density of the atmosphere; tobacco, sweat and dirt merging with the all-consuming gloom. This was where the working man was born. This was where he first came kicking and screaming to life, obdurate, burning and at odds with the world. It was as raw a place as I had ever experienced and it both shook and thrilled me in turns.

I slid my back down the coarse wooden wall by the door and stretched my legs out before me, crossing my feet. If only I had a cowboy hat to push down slightly upon my brow and a good old cigar to light. Thus, we sat opposite one another, the length of the shack between us. I put my hands on the floor
and felt what seemed to be dirt, or perhaps it was sand. The light from the fire edged into the darkness, lighting the inside of the shack like a stage; for surely, that is what it was.

“Now, listen, boy,” said Zachariah, eventually. His voice was a low, menacing simmer. “It starts here. This is where it starts and this is how it starts.”

He took a drag of his pipe, blurted out the smoke and coughed. No smoke-rings here, I thought; and definitely no singing about gold.

“These is hard times, boy,” he continued, “hard times for every man, woman and child in this land. Gone are the days when you reaped what you sowed. There are people we will never meet who dictate our every move. They say they speak for us but they will never speak to us. Them that fought the French now fight their own masters and they will never win, for you cannot fight what you cannot see, boy and that’s a fact, a damnable fact. You cannot fight what you cannot see. A man is guaranteed nothing, not comfort or friendship or money or love. The harder he works for these things, the farther away they be. That is the sadness of it all.”

He spoke slowly and with an underlying anger that seemed only to be quelled by my presence. Had I not been there to listen to him, I fear he would have destroyed everything before him. Zachariah Leonard was undoubtedly a violent man. I was glad I was by the door and I glanced briefly over my left shoulder just to remind myself of that fact. It brought some measure of relief, but if truth be told, not a great deal.

“Comfort; friendship; money and love.” He spoke these words with intense gravity, pausing between each one, being sure I heard them. “You know of these things, these taunts, these abominations?”

I nodded, though I am not sure whether he could see my response through the darkness. But he continued anyway.

“Let us take first, ‘comfort’. Look around you. I felt your disgust when you entered here, I saw you draw breath and I saw you grimace. Yet this is my home. This is my comfort. I have straw for a bed and a roof to protect me from the rain.
There is little light as I am sure you have noticed. But for what reason should I want light? Why should I want to see? I am safe here. I am comfortable. It belongs to me and no other. It is in the feeling, you understand? Any fool can see. A dolt has eyes the same as a wise man. It takes a deeper man to feel.”

I wasn’t sure where this was going, so I just listened. I felt that one word from me, however innocent, may have led to an eruption of anger from the man who smouldered across the other side of the shack, an eruption from which I surely would not survive. It was the sheer eloquence of this almost bestial being that perhaps scared me the most. He was like no-one I had ever met before.

“Then, ‘friendship’,” he went on. “Friendship.” He said this word with such contempt it would not have been at all surprising had it hit me full in the face. He spat into the fire. His phlegm sizzled in the heat of the flames like the cracking of a whip. “Friendship,” he said once more.

“No man can be a friend with another until he is a friend to himself. He who suffers self-hatred will hate others ten-fold. Take it from me, boy. Hatred is the most natural emotion of the lonely. It is not sadness. When man is alone, he may pity himself for a time, but that pity will soon turn to hatred, a hatred of those that have what he has not – a foot in the door of the world. And from hatred comes violence and from violence comes murder. That is a man alone, I tell you. When the only way a man can deal with another man is to kill him, then that man will be a friend to no-one for as long as he lives, except perhaps the devil himself. The need for friendship and the hatred of mankind is the great debate that goes on in the head of the lonely man.”

I sat rapt and attentive, acutely aware that he may have been talking about me as opposed to himself.

“And so we come to money – the greatest killer of them all. It grabs you and sucks the life out of you. It breaks you in half and destroys every feeling you ever had. It makes beautiful women ugly and puts a knife in the hand of a man of peace. It will take back twice what it has given you and it will put you in the ground without your soul. If it takes hold of you,
it will break you. Listen not to what they say about money for it will corrupt your sleep and burden you with irons from which you will never escape. It is a creation of the rich man, the tool with which the Sir and the Lord will taunt the peasant and the serf. Be not seduced by it boy and be not taunted by it. They say it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Do not listen to that claptrap. There is no heaven save what is around us, no heaven save what is within us. Mark me boy and mark me well. The love of money is not the root of all evil; it is money itself that is evil.”

I held my breath. I listened for life outside. There was not a sound.

No Heaven.

Zachariah Leonard sucked upon his pipe, as if he were drawing energy from it in order to continue. I was becoming lost in the flames of the fire, intoxicated by his voice. It was as if I were being addressed not by a man but by a mountain.

“And lastly, we have love,” he said, such sadness now breaking over him. “It is your turn, boy, for I cannot speak of it.”

He bowed his head. His talking had taken a lot out of him it seemed. Maybe he wasn’t one used to discussion. For all I knew, he had never spoken to anyone but me before; except perhaps to order ale.