Village Centenary (17 page)

But it was the small personal memories that I cherished as we took our drives around the countryside which Dolly knew so well.

'That was where old Mrs Johns lived,' she said as we passed a tumbledown cottage with a collapsed roof of thatch. 'She wore a bustle, you know, till the end of her life. A funny little soul, who kept that place spotless.'

'Ernie White was killed in that field,' she commented. 'A tractor tipped over and pinned the poor soul there for hours. People said it was a judgement for doing away with the horses.'

She sighed.

'And that's where Emily's Edgar lived. She should have been there by rights, but he married his nurse, you know, and my dear Emily never got over it, brave face though she showed to the world.'

She showed me where she and Emily tobogganned as children, where she took her pupils to collect hazel nuts and frogspawn, and then holly to decorate St. Patrick's church at Christmas time. It was borne in upon me how closely the seasons were woven into the fabric of the country child's life in those days. They were out so much more than today's children. They walked everywhere. No school buses whisked them past beds of violets, wild strawberries, sprays of luscious blackberries, all known and treasured by their grandparents.

One afternoon, I invited Mrs Austen to tea and it was a rare treat for me to listen to the war-time reminiscences of evacuee and teacher at Fairacre School in the early forties.

'Everything was so different from our home and school at New Cross in south London,' said Mrs Austen. 'For one thing, I was used to an enormous three-storey building with infants on the ground floor, big girls on the next, and boys at the top. It was lovely to be mixed up together, such
a few
of us it seemed, in a dear little school like Fairacre's.'

'You certainly settled down wonderfully,' commented Miss Clare.

'I think I found the biggest differences, though, at Mrs Pratt's, where we were billeted. She couldn't have been kinder, and I kept in touch with her until she died, but there were some things which shook me as a child. No flush lavatory for one. And lighting lamps and candles, instead of switching on the electric light. I dreaded having to go down the garden to the privy in the dark. Mrs Pratt used to light a hurricane lamp for me, but it cast such shadows I was even more terrified.'

'Was there no commode in your bedroom?' enquired Miss Clare with concern.

'Well, yes - but I hated using it. It seemed so
wrong
to me. I'd never met such a thing, you see. And another thing that appalled me was the number of flies everywhere, and all taken for granted. At home, in London, my mother bustled a stray fly away as if it were poisonous - which it was, I always thought - but Mrs Pratt even had a paper ball hung up near the ceiling and called it the flies' playground.'

'We had one too, I remember,' said Miss Clare.

'There was another ball on the mantelpiece made of silver paper. We all collected every scrap of tin foil and it was carefully wrapped round the ball. It was an enormous weight. I can't think what happened to it eventually.'

'It went to the hospital in Caxley,' Miss Clare told her. 'Still does, I believe, but now they like it flat.'

'I was very fond of Mrs Pratt,' said Mrs Austen, 'but frightened of her old mother who lived down the road. Do you remember that little boy -1 forget his name - who lived with her?'

'I do indeed,' said Dolly. 'He was called Stephen, a foster-child, and really old Mrs Hall had no business to have him. She was far too frail and suffered from tuberculosis, and in any case much too ancient to take care of a young child. But it was difficult to find homes for those orphans, and I suppose the local authority thought it was suitable. In any case, the Halls needed the maintenance money, but I was glad when that child was moved elsewhere.'

'So was I! I used to collect him to bring him along to school, and the smell in that house was ghastly. And the poor old thing was always coughing. She used to crouch on the rag rug in front of the fire with the ash pan pulled out, and spit horribly into the hot ashes. Sometimes she had no breath to speak to me, but just gazed at me with those watery blue eyes and motioned me to take Stephen out of the way. I did too, as quickly as I could.'

'He went into the army eventually,' Dolly told her, 'and did very well. I still hear from him at Christmas, dear boy.'

Her voice was warm with affection. Were there any of her pupils, I wondered, who failed to kindle a spark of remembered happiness in their old teacher? Even the malefactors, dealt with sternly in their youth, were now seen through the rosy haze of time. And why not?

I took Dolly back to her cottage with the greatest reluctance, I had enjoyed her serene company so much. But she insisted that she had a number of little household jobs to do, and some bottles of fruit to prepare for the store cupboard, so that I left her looking happy in her shining kitchen with the cat for company.

I went on to Bent to lunch with Amy. I found her house as welcoming and beautiful as Dolly Clare's, although three times the size, of course.

'How do you manage to keep it so immaculate?' I cried. 'I've never seen a speck of dust or one dead flower in this place, all the years I've visited here.'

'Elementary organisation,' said Amy. 'You too could have an immaculate house if you planned your routine.'

'You remind me of those advertisements, Amy. "You too can have a beautiful bust".'

'I liked the one about piano-playing in our youth. "You too can be a concert pianist", or something like that.'

'Better than that! "My friends used to laugh when I sat down at the piano". Remember?'

'Mine still do,' said Amy. 'It must be lovely to have a talent of some sort.'

'How's the autobiography?'

'Oh dear, oh dear! I was afraid you'd ask! I'm stuck at myself aged eight, and all I can remember are idiotic things like tying reef knots as a Brownie, and my father cranking up our first family car, and having to help him fix canvas and mica side curtains to it when it rained. I don't think it's very stirring stuff, not a bit like some of these successful memoirs where the authors remember all sorts of psychological hook-ups and traumatic experiences when they found the cat having kittens in the laundry basket. I wonder why they can do it, and I can't?'

'Probably because you have a much more normal mind,' I assured her, 'And anyway, who's to know they didn't make it all up?'

'I never thought of that!'

'Frankly, I should shelve it for a week or two, and go back to it when you feel like it. Anyway, the weather's too good to stick about indoors pushing the pen.'

'I believe you're right. I've hardly been into Caxley at all since starting the book. Incidentally, I saw your young teacher there the last time I was shopping.'

'Our Miss Briggs? I wonder what she was doing in Caxley? I thought she was at home, in one of those spas - Droitwich or Buxton or somewhere up north. Malvern perhaps.'

'Malvern's
west,
dear. She was with a young man, and they appeared to be very affectionate.'

'Well, I'm blowed! Perhaps she came back to collect something, and brought her young man with her from Harrogate or whatever. It was during the holidays, I take it, that you saw her?'

'Yes, the beginning of last week.'

'Well, I'm glad to hear she's found an interest at last. It may liven her up. Mr Willet calls her "a fair old lump of a girl", and I don't think one can better that description.'

'Poor thing!' said Amy. 'Anyway, she looked quite animated and pretty in the High Street.'

'Ah! The transformation wrought by love! I must try it some time.'

'I wish you would,' said Amy forcefully, returning to a well-worn theme, 'but aren't you leaving it rather late?'

Trust old friends to tell you the unpalatable truth!

Mrs Pringle arrived 'to bottom' me as she elegantly terms performing the house cleaning. Sometimes she only has time 'to put me to rights,' and that is bad enough. 'To be bottomed' involves taking down curtains and pictures, pulling out a heavy Welsh dresser and generally creating mayhem. I try and make myself scarce when threatened with bottoming, but on this occasion there was no escape as I was expecting the lawn mower to be returned from the repairer's and wanted to pay him.

Halfway through the dire proceedings I was allowed to pick my way through displaced furniture piled in the kitchen to put on the kettle for a restorative cup of tea.

Mrs Pringle, militant in a flowered overall with the sleeves rolled up to expose wrestler's forearms, had a fanatical look in her eyes.

'You seen the top of that dresser of yours?' she asked.

'No. What's wrong with it?'

'Wrong with it?'
echoed Mrs Pringle triumphantly. 'It's got two inches of dust on it as you could grow potatoes in.'

'Oh, come ...' I began weakly.

'And what's more, down the back, was a letter unopened and dated months ago.'

'Good heavens! Where is it?'

Mrs Pringle handed me an envelope. The address was handwritten, and I recognised it as Lucy Clayton's writing. She had been at college, with Amy and me, and I cordially detested her.

'No one that matters,' I said with some relief, and made the tea.

We took it into the garden. The sight of my house I found upsetting.

'Well, I must say it's a treat to breathe a bit of clean air after all that dust and filth,' announced Mrs Pringle, stirring her tea. 'You heard about Mrs Partridge?'

'No. What's happened?'

'She had to go to hospital, poor soul.'

I was genuinely shocked. I am devoted to our vicar's wife, and the thought of her in hospital was even more upsetting than the chaos in my house.

'When did she go?'

'Last Saturday.'

'And it's Wednesday today! I am sorry. What is it, do you know?'

'Bees. The vicar's bees.'

'But she wouldn't need to be three, 1 mean four, days in hospital with a bee sting, surely?'

'Who said she was?'

'What?'

'In hospital for four days. All I said was that she went in Saturday. She come out Saturday too.'

Mrs Pringle took a long draught of tea and looked complacent. She has brought irritating her listeners to a fine art, I'll give her that.

'Well, go on. Tell me it all from the beginning.'

'Mrs Partridge told me herself as she was simply up the garden picking some nice sprigs of parsley to make parsley sauce for a nice bit of fresh haddock she'd got from that nice fishmonger in Caxley...'

Who probably had a nice shop, I thought impatiently.

'
Miles
away from the hive, she said, when one of the nasty things came and bit her by the eye, and she swelled up awful. Couldn't see out of that eye in a quarter of an hour, and the other not much better, and the vicar looking everywhere for his glasses to read how big a dose of some bee medicine you had to take if bitten - as she had been, of course - and worried to death all the time, in case it was fatal. It can be, you know. My old uncle was never right after being set on by bees, and he died soon after.'

'Really? How dreadful!'

'Mind you, he was ninety-four,' Mrs Pringle admitted, 'but we all said as it was the bee stings as hastened his end. I told the vicar about it.'

Job's comforter, as ever, was my private comment.

'Anyway, she took these tablets, and the vicar got out the car and took her into Caxley Cottage Hospital, and her head was fair swimming by the time she got there. She reckoned it was the medicine. The doctor said it could have been, and give her something to help, and some ointment. She come straight back and went to bed, poor thing, and you can still see where its fangs went into her.'

She heaved herself to her feet.

'Well, I'd best get on. No rest for the wicked, my mother used to say.'

She surveyed my reclining form with a sour expression.

'Though that don't always seem to fit the case, come to think of it.'

After she had returned to the fray, I opened Lucy's letter. It was dated February 12th, which showed how long it had been collecting the dust at the back of the dresser.

In it Lucy informed me that Mr and Mrs Ambrose B. Edelstein and their two grown-up children were to be in England for three months. They came from - here an illegible place name, possibly Minnesota, Minever or even Minnehaha - where they took a keen interest in Education, and the Professor had several degrees in the subject. They were such a nice family - I thought of Mrs Pringle - and would be fascinated by a glimpse of Fairacre School, so she had taken the liberty of giving them my telephone number, and they would be ringing me to arrange a convenient day to visit. No need to put them up, or get them meals, as they were planning to stop in Caxley, but she was sure I would enjoy having them in school for a day just letting them have a free rein talking to the children and looking through their work.

She was ever my affectionate Lucy, and added a postscript saying that there was absolutely no need for me to feel that I must reply. I breathed a sigh of relief for mercies received, calculated that the Edelsteins had now been safely back in Minniewhatsit for several months, and fell into a blissful sleep.

Mrs Pringle and the lawnmower man brought me back to earth, half an hour later, and life began anew.

My Norfolk holiday was a great success. There is something about the bracing salty air of that magnificent county, with its massive skies and pellucid light, which is wonderfully restorative. In the summer, that is. I have only once experienced really wintry weather in that area, and hope never to again. Such piercing cold, straight from the steppes of Russia, it seemed, had an intensity never met with in Fairacre, even though we are always telling each other that we live in a cold spot.

On the way to stay with my old friend, and on my return journey, I spent a few hours in Cambridge, so dear to me, and renewed my delight with walks along the Backs, Parker's Piece and Midsummer Common. August is not the best month to see Cambridge, or any other place for that matter, for the trees and grass begin to look worn and shabby, the first glory of summer has gone, and the true fire and radiance of autumn has not begun. But to my devoted eye, there was beauty enough and to spare, and I hung over Clare Bridge and watched the scattered yellow willow leaves floating gently beneath me with the same rapture which I felt in my youth.