Cryers Hill (23 page)

'W
ALLY WALLFLOWER, YOU
ugly bugga, this is your last chance to marry me.'

She said it five days before her fifteenth birthday in the middle of the cornfield, far from the lane, surrounded by men who worked for her father, some of whom had guns to shoot the rabbits as they fled from the corn.

'I'd like to think about it.'

The harvest holidays were hot and dry and went on for a hundred years, though you never got any older. Everyone helped at harvest time unless they were infirm or insane. At school they lined up and shrieked 'Gather in the Sheaves' to a piano accompaniment, before bolting as hard as they could go for the fields. This was Walter's last schoolboy harvest, as by St Matthew's Day he would be working as an office boy in Wycombe, and happy too to miss the winter grind of sugar-beeting. Harvest in the shires was no small thing. A lad who was willing was allowed to do a man's work and find himself treated like a man too, and if you worked hard you might even get paid something. It was a time to grow up and taste your first beer and your first tobacco and work until your back broke.

The teams of horses, two to each binder, have already started in the cornfield after the hand-reapers, who began yesterday. A straggly troupe are hanging on the gate: Ernest Wright is by Walter's elbow and Eddie Redrup next to him with Bertie King, who is yawning great wide groans. Edna Stevens, Betsy Newell and Mary Hatt are making daisy chains while they wait for Mrs Hatt and Mrs Stevens to arrive with breakfast in the cart. Eddie is smoking a lumpy cigarette and boasting about his mole traps and all the rookeries his father shot in spring. Walter takes his fag off him and puts it between his own teeth. 'Cooked rook stinks,' he says.

'Twerp, we don't eat 'em,' Eddie replies.

Some of these boys would habitually raid birds' nests. They would stamp on any baby birds, especially sparrows, which they earned money from as they were a pest to farmers, along with pigeons. Rats too they killed with catapults for the farmers, a penny or maybe tuppence per tail. As a matter of fact they killed anything they could, whether it was a pest to farmers or not. Killing was natural to country boys in 1931.

No sign of Charles Sankey from Lyme Regis. He will be on God's business. God's business my hat! This is what Walter's mother said. Walter waited for her proverb to follow. 'Him and that Perfect man. One bush can never hide two thieves.'

Walter swings his legs over the gate and thinks, if harvest is not God's business, then whose is it?

'Get down off that gate sharp!'

A scythesman in waistcoat and cap finishes opening up the standing corn in the awkward corners where the binder cannot go. He leans slightly and swings his sickle. From Walter's position, the scythesman's progress suggests a lonely raftsman adrift on a high yellow sea. Naturally Walter does not have his notebook to write that down. In his notebook he collects interesting facts, remarkable observations, and amusements. He is susceptible to remarkable observations: he suspects he was born like it. He forgets to carry his notebook most days. He reckons all his best observations are blowing across Buckinghamshire with the corn stubble. He looks at Mary Hatt in her beret, daisy chains around her neck. Worrisome Wally Wallflower Woebetide you When you go. That's what she says to him these days, as if she's turned gypsy.

The scythesmen, horsemen, all the harvest men seem to possess unknowable wisdoms about unimaginable things. Things Walter does not have in his notebook. He watches the men working, talking, making their quick remarks and asides. He studies them for information, hoping to catch something that will release their secret code, help him understand. He catches one of them saying, 'She said, I'll give you a go in a minute, and I said a minute's too long!' And they all laugh. What is funny about that? It is perplexing, as horses and dogs appear to understand them perfectly well.

Compared to these unfathomably skilled workers, Walter feels he and the others are no more than a pile of idiots. This was borne out when George Rouse smashed his leg riding on the hay elevator, while his brother fell off a wheat stack, hit his head and fell asleep for a month. Another time little Sidney Wood lost one and a half fingers in the feed-masher.

A man called Bailey arrives with his son; the corners of Bailey's mouth are flecked with white. They are on hard times and he has lost whatever job he thought he had. They have walked from Winchmore Hill looking for harvest work. Another family have walked from Beamond End. They stand away from everyone else, and the father wears his cap down to hide his eyes and does not speak a word. Walter wonders if he is a farmer gone to nothing.

Walter likes to be around the working horses, masked in their leather blinkers, jangling, creaking in their harness. He likes to touch their hot, damp necks and feel their giant bony heads searching his pockets for apples. 'Warkon gowarn,' the horseman says, and his hands and voice are quick and he knows exactly what must happen and Walter wishes he were a ploughman, just for today, and could drive his chariot up and down till dark.

Walter walks away with Eddie's smoke. It tastes good. He watches the sails on the binders turning like miniature windmills and the horses climbing, and far down the field, between the distant hedgerows by the giant oaks, he sees a black bowler gliding. Man of God, my hat. By the end of the day that bowler will be covered in straw.

The way it was done was you all had to go after the binder and gather the corn sheaves into stooks, six sheaves per stook, grain at the top, butts on the ground. If you hadn't done stooking before you got your arms scratched, even while the straw was still green. Everybody did it, men and girls. Mary was fast and efficient and made remarks about the other helpers as she went; personal comments about this one, that one: 'No help but hindrance. Dear me – look at
her.'

Walter was picked to do rabbits. It was not a girl's job. You arrived with your stick and you hit the rabbits as they ran out from the standing corn as the binders approached – bashed them on the head. Any injured ones were finished off when they were gathered up. Fetched a reasonable price when you had as many as this, 6d or even up to a shilling each, which added up of course. By this stage the field would be running with them, and all the lads would be bringing their sticks down over and over as if they were hand-threshing. Thump thump thump. Rabbit heads broke surprisingly easily. You lost count of how many you had done. Some froze with panic and waited while you did them. Walter found he couldn't ignore the corn dust and clatter of the binders and the raw burn of the sun on his neck, but after a while he stopped seeing the pulp from the burst heads. You just kept bringing your stick down. Those who escaped the sticks would run into the guns. Walter didn't know Sankey had arranged to be a gun. How has he managed it? The other guns are farm men and Mary's brothers, Joseph and Clem. It is true he is a good shot, but to have someone who is neither family nor employee enjoying himself in this way? He has finagled himself. Walter feels childishly jealous. The guns are in a potentially dangerous corner; there are stookers, lads, horses and ploughmen moving continually about. A gun must shoot away from the corn as the rabbits flee for their burrows without killing any person or working horse.

'Keeping you busy, Walt?' Sankey has become sardonic with a .410 on his arm. He addresses the head carter differently. 'Sorry to be late. I've been up Langley's at Spurlands End.' It is a given there will be nothing more said. William Fountain's family have farmed at Langley's for years. He had taken it over as a young man, but the farm had been in trouble like so many others, and last month he went bankrupt. Yesterday he hanged himself in the feed barn.

Walter notices Sankey's walk is different. It is something, he thinks, a godly man who shoots like a demon.

Walter is behind the south hedge relieving himself when Mary appears, startling him. She says nothing at all, but walks deliberately up, takes hold of his face and kisses him on the mouth. Her mouth and fingers are hot and sticky and she tastes of salt and something sour. Walter thinks some girls might be put off by the rabbit blood on his shirt. He listens to the guns popping. He thinks about the pounding his own head will receive if they are seen by anyone.

'There now,' she says. 'Huh. Daft bugga.' He watches her go and he thinks there is not enough room in his notebook for this particular subject.

As the light begins to fade they stop work. The air cools, darkens mauve, and the clouds of midges bring swifts and swallows diving from a pink-lit sky. It will be the same again tomorrow and the next day. There is a stooked field of wheat ready for carting tomorrow; but the church bell must ring three times before they cart today's oats for ricking, else they'll not be ready. Only God knows how many dry days are left. Nobody wants to hear the rainbird sing at this time of year. A storm now would be disastrous.

Grub is always good on harvest nights and mothers' curfews do not exist. There is stewed pork and broad beans or rabbit pie with salt pork, cheese pudding, cherry cake, cherry pie and beer that was brewed in March, as well as cowslip or rhubarb wine. The harvest men clash mugs and begin slowly to change shape. By the end of the night they are bendy as if they had no bones at all, but by next morning they are completely upright again, quick and efficient on their usual skeletons, teasing their fellows about their bonelessness the night before.

Walter and Sankey walk home draped in rabbits. It is dark but the moon curves over the great field, silvering the crop over. Clouds drift, veiling the stars, silent as icebergs. Sankey's shoulders are all fur as though he is Mrs Disraeli from the big house. Walt watches the soft heads swinging on his back. He is fuzzy with drink. He can feel beer bubbles gurgling inside him. His own rabbits are heavy to carry ungutted. His hands are sticky with blood and as he walks their skulls bump against his legs. He has two for his mother. She will say, 'Not on my clean table.' He will have to leave them in the sink and she will say, 'Don't walk on my floor.'

Something ghostly flaps over the lower field. A barn owl hunting leisurely up the boundary hedge. 'Who?' it asks, a quaver in its question. This – like a coin in the slot of a penny marionette – jerks Sankey into the first verse of 'Gather the Reapers Home'.

Walter is not afraid of nocturnal shrieks; you hear cries at night from snares and gin traps and again in the early morning. Walter doesn't care for trapping, but he is keen to shoot. Sankey is odd about teaching him, coy. Walter reckons Sankey's relationship with God is more complicated than most. His singing is beginning to get on Walter's nerves.

Just past the war memorial they bid one another goodnight. At seventeen Walter is the same height as Sankey but finds himself struggling to lift his chin high enough to make eye contact. He hears Sankey laugh. 'Look out whose bed you fall into!' Walter opens his mouth to reply, but catches sight of something over Sankey's shoulder instead. He looks again. A man is it, standing there in the shadow of the houses?

'Thrust in thy sickle and reap,' says Sankey, 'for the harvest of the earth is ripe.'

Standing alone beside the ditch. A man in uniform is it? Is he waiting there?

'See the soldier, Sank?'

'Walt, Walt, Walt. The harvest is truly plenteous; but the labourers are few!'

Walter is afraid. 'I see him, behind. See, Sank? Look.'

Sankey places a hand on Walter's shoulder. His singing is soft and as high as a boy's: Throw out the lifeline across the dark wave, there is a brother whom someone should save.'

Take a look there!' Walter hisses.

Sankey winks at his friend as he turns. He blocks Walter's view, so that Walter has to step around him. It is not possible, thinks young Walter Brown, it is too peculiar, this. He looks again and sees that the soldier is gone. There is only the dark tree with the moon in its branches. There is nobody there at all.

Walter suspected that inspiration was eluding him. It was necessary to pin a poem down as they were flighty things. Walter narrowed his eye at the sky, the weather, the girls in the bakery; all conspired against him. Whenever he felt himself assailed by doubt he returned to the volumes of poetry written by other people. He noted that the esteemed William H. Davies had written a poem entitled 'The Rainbow', whose first line went:
Rainbows are lovely things.
He felt his confidence returning at this. Here was something he could have written himself. It was the other poets, the geniuses, particularly the B brigade: the Brookes, Brownings, Burnses, Byrons, these were the ones you had to watch out for, these were the fellers who made you feel a fool with their hollows, heights and haywains, their naked crags and solitary hills. It is this mob who will crush you with their cache of shadowy banks, leaf-blown churchyards, stippled rivers, icicled minarets, lighted moons, close-wrapped fogs and blaz'd twilights. Take the wind from your sails before you even get started.

Of all the Romantic poets, Walter thought he loved Shelley the best. He couldn't say why. For his dreamer's heart perhaps. Walter suspected he and Percy Shelley were made of the same fibre. He would have liked to have shaken his hand: 'Mr Shelley, how do you do, sir. Walter Brown.' With dreaming must come faraway lands, because that was the way of dreams. A kind of transport, dreaming was. Besides, a writer, a poet, must travel to see and know the world of which he writes, surely. A poet could not remain all his life in the south-east of England. He might
return
to the south-east of England, but that is different. Truly, Walter told himself, if he was ever going to write anything of note, he would have to cross an ocean, perhaps two. He would have to devise his own heartfelt notions, and set them down, well lettered, for the cogitation of others. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Walter Brown filled two notebooks with his poetry. He loved to feel their weight, as though the poems themselves had made the notebooks heavier. And the words did have weight, he knew that, and characters all their own. Sometimes the words could be bidden and sometimes not. Walter did not understand how this worked, he only knew that on some days he opened a notebook and no words would come. Other days they came slowly, grudgingly, in the wrong order. It occurred to Walter that a poet who wished to write of home would do so better if he simply left. He opened his notebook and tried again: