Happy Ant-Heap (2 page)

Feed him on bread and fat,

Long live our cat.

My only encounter with Sir Henry had happened at an earlier period, at the age of about eleven. His reputation for accessibility encouraged me to trudge up the long drive to his mansion at the top of the hill in the hope of gaining his consent through any intermediary who would talk to me to go bird-nesting on the estate.

I banged on the door, which was opened by his butler, but behind him, to my surprise, came Sir Henry himself, who waved the butler away and took over. Before this I had only seen him at a distance, and now at close quarters I realised he was small and unimpressive compared with, for example, the imposing Jessop, who by my standards put all other local males in the shade. He asked me what I wanted; I told him, and he began his reply, stopped suddenly then broke into a stammer, blinked, then after a silence the words poured out. Where Jessop would have dealt with me in five words, Sir Henry needed fifty. Behind him the room sparkled like an Aladdin’s cave, a tall, willowy girl twirled as if in the arms of a partner to the music of a gramophone, there were flowers everywhere, and for the first time I drew into my nostrils the spiced aroma of wealth.

What surprised me most was that this man who ruled our lives should appear to be pleased to see me. In between the stammer he smiled affably. Bird-nesting was permitted and not only that, he said, but he would have liked to come with me to show me the best places for nests, but unhappily he had to address a meeting of the Primrose League that afternoon. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Come back and see me next week, but make it the morning when there’s less going on.’

When I got back home, my mother asked me if I’d seen any of his lady friends, and I told her about the girl dancing by herself. ‘That’s the one who reads poetry to him,’ she said.

In later years I heard more about these ‘relations’, as the females who surrounded him were known. They came and went. There was the poetry reader, a games mistress who kept him fit, a young nurse who told somebody in a pub that all she did was inspect his urine. He kept several aristocratic ladies living in cottages on the estate with nothing whatever to do with their time but ‘visit’. They were the bugbear of Goat Lane, where the women had too many children and too many household tasks to have time to entertain these uninvited guests with empty chatter. But these visits were a matter of routine, and every house in the village would be visited several times a week; there was no way of escaping these intrusions.

The harassed wives and mothers of Goat Lane had little left to defend but their pride. Callers at the house for any purpose were expected to knock at the front door once or twice, and if there were no response to go away. Sir Henry’s relations avoided this protocol by going straight through the tiny garden, usually littered with rubbish, to the back entrance. A soft tapping on the kitchen window would draw reluctant attention to the smiling face, and the woman of the house would realise that her poverty was on display. Unavoidably the kitchen door would be opened upon washtub smells, a grubby overall, soap-sodden hands, tired eyes and straggling hair. The visitor would be seated resentfully and offered weak, milky tea, while her victim settled with what grace she could muster to inane chit-chat, punctuated with the yowlings of her children.

It was an election that furnished the only instance of open opposition to Sir Henry’s reign. As Conservative candidate he would normally be returned unopposed, but once, and to everyone’s surprise, a most unlikely challenger came on the scene—a Liberal who happened also to be a pleasant young woman. Next a Liberal poster appeared in a Goat Lane window, put up by an old nightwatchman in one of the factories, thought of as weak in the head. At the weekend Sir Henry’s steward called on him to drop a hint that, as in the case of the pheasant-trappers, his tenancy of a tied cottage might be at risk. Any estate worker would have caved in on the spot, but with this the first glimmerings of proletarian solidarity were evident, for although no more Liberal posters went up, several Conservative ones were taken down. For all that, Sir Henry won in a landslide.

Life in the country had undergone much dislocation during the war and had continued to suffer from shortages of every kind for so long after its end, but was beginning to pick up again. Agricultural produce, still in short supply, fetched satisfactory prices. Farmers admitted to not doing so badly after all and could afford small increases in wages. The big houses were taking on staff, and girls brought up in the poverty-stricken democracy of the Lane now became domestics dressed in fashionably old-style uniforms, working fourteen-hour days and learning from butlers such as Jessop how to return short toneless utterances to orders received, ‘Will that be all, madam? Shall I clear away now?’ A better class of car was back on the roads with the appearance of a beribboned Bentley from Brimsdown snuffling softly through the dust of the Lane on its way to a wedding.

At this time of recovery and renewal the first shoot on a pre-war scale took place over Sir Henry’s land. It was organised in a precisely planned fashion by Sir Henry and landowning friends, all of them military men and accustomed to dealing with bodies of men in warlike situations. First came the long front line of beaters followed by twenty-four guns on a half-mile front. Birds with no experience of such a disturbance scuffled aimlessly through the trees and fell an easy prey to the lady pickers-up with their dogs and the small steel hammers known as priests with which remnants of life would be deftly extinguished.

So successful was this pheasant holocaust that it was judged to have been almost worth waiting for. Champagne kept for such an event flowed in abundance, and the euphoria generated gave birth to the idea that an equivalent event—a fair of some sort—should be organised for the village. It was a project enthusiastically backed by Sir Henry himself, who despite his tyrannical outbursts remained a boy at heart and was noted for a passion for fairs. Until precluded by the disciplines of war, these had been held in his grounds on every possible excuse.

It was the brilliant idea of Canon Carr-Smith that Empire Day—24 May—should be chosen for this popular occasion on which a good time for all could be linked to pride in the possession of an empire which, leaving out the emptiness of the seas, now covered one-sixth of the globe. By this time I was in my last term at Enfield Grammar School, where the art mistress had produced a huge map in which these overseas territories stood out in brilliant scarlet among the extremely dull colours of those left in the possession of foreigners. This formed the background to the assembly-hall stage from which local dignitaries addressed us on imperial topics on the eve of the great day.

The fair held at Forty Hill was to outclass all previous entertainments of the kind. On the night before, the village had been full of the iron noises of tractor engines crashing through the potholes, and by mid-morning on the twenty-fourth a great, garish encampment, so alien in this rustic setting, covered the summit of the hill and spread aggressively through the grey-green monochrome of hedgerows and fields. It was peopled by gypsies with fierce, handsome faces, flashing eyes and shrieking voices from whom the locals drew nervously away. At the entrance each child was presented with a Union Jack, but after a few perfunctory waves, these were tossed into the bushes.

Blocking access to swings, roundabouts, coconut shies, hoopla stalls, fortune-tellers and gypsy boxers who could defeat local challengers with ease was a large tent bearing over its entrance the sign
PEOPLES OF THE EMPIRE
. Into this the villagers were firmly directed and here they were faced by a row of dark-complexioned men lined up on a platform, all in colourful—sometimes astonishing—garments, most baring their teeth in efforts to smile. Placards at their feet denoted their place of origin. Some of them had feathers stuck to bare chests, others wore tasselled loincloths, turbans or coolie straw hats, and carried clubs and spears. (In fact they were Lascars recruited from Bombay and shipped over to work on the London Docks, where they had been tracked down by Sir Henry’s agent and fitted out by a theatrical costumier to play their part.) The children giggled nervously at the sight, and a few of the younger ones showed signs of alarm. We were told to clap and we did, and the ‘people of the Empire’ bowed gracefully or waved.

Beyond this bottleneck the fair was in vigorous action, and those who finally escaped joined others who had bypassed imperialistic propaganda by better knowledge of the geography of the grounds. Life in Goat Lane was a matter of leaden repetition, and the whole village, apart from the bedridden and a sprinkling of misanthropists, was here for that tiny taste of excess that would encourage them to tackle survival with a new burst of energy.

The fair organs ground out their music, and the steam engines blew their exultant whistles. Despite the blatant cheating that went on, some of the cleverer villagers, whooping their triumph, won on the games. At first, inexplicably, the latest in roundabouts brought specially from its place of manufacture was not in use, with access to its grinning, wide-eyed horses debarred by a rope. A dozen of the elderly estate workers wearing ceremonial collars and ties lingered in its vicinity, and shortly the lights came on, a preliminary gurgling started in the organ pipes, a woman’s face appeared in the window of the little ticket office, the rope was removed and it was clear that action was about to begin. Two men approached carrying an armchair, which they placed with its back to the roundabout, and with that Sir Henry came on the scene and took his seat in the chair. He was wearing his decorations and a grey bowler with a strong curve in its brim. By this time the old men had formed a line and now they moved forward one at a time to take Sir Henry’s right hand in a gentle squeeze and mutter a greeting suited to the moment. Sir Henry smiled and stuttered his thanks, then turned away to climb the steps of the roundabout, hoist himself up on a horse and begin his solitary ride. The crowd applauded, Sir Henry raised his hat, the roundabout began its rotation, while the organ wheezed into ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, still the anthem of moments such as this.

Such entertainments had to be paid for, although prices, subsidised by Sir Henry, were low. No charge was made for teas, and there was a bun fight for the children, also free. This could have been the last survivor anywhere of a traditional revel providing for the young a joyful escape from plain food and much amusement for those who looked on.

The bun fight at Forty Hill was held in the stable yard, where three trestle-tables had been lined up for children momentarily released from disciplines that would imprison them again at the end of the day. Bun fight was an accurate description of what was to happen. The buns brought up from the bakery in large wicker baskets were tipped out on the table tops, and the children scrambled and pretended to fight for them. Sir Henry and several landowning friends invited to be present found these scuffles picturesque and were ready with their cameras. I remembered a previous occasion when the then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who had been at Harrow with Sir Henry, had turned up to applaud the maintenance of a custom so deeply rooted in our history. This year the feeling among the organisers was that, due to the dispirited quality of the times, the thing was calming down. The children fought each other on the table tops as tradition demanded, and cheeks were scratched and hair pulled, but it was a tame affair, and no blood flowed.

The women of the Primrose League who had inspired such antipathy among the housewives of Goat Lane were present. They made neat piles of the remnants of demolished buns before clearing them away and smilingly righted mugs that had been knocked over, refilling them with lemonade made from crystals of citric acid.

Jesus said of the poor ‘they are always with you’. In Forty Hill it was the rich who were rarely out of sight.

1996

T
HE SIGNING OF THE
armistice that put Italy out of the war was announced from the Municipality of Naples at 6.30 p.m. on 8 September 1943 to a large but remarkably inert crowd assembled in expectation of the news. The ringing of hand-bells on occasions of public rejoicing had been ordered by the fascist state. This was left to a minor functionary, who did so in a lackadaisical fashion, and an attempt at spontaneous dancing in a nearby side-street soon petered out. Maresciallo de Lucca of the
carabinieri
listened to the announcement and to the dispirited murmurings of the crowd and recorded their reactions in his notes in shorthand of a kind used by the police, which in this case took the form of four letters: PVDP, translatable as ‘No acclamation. Cries of give us bread.’ He returned to his office in the Piazza Dante, and in a matter of minutes a telephone call from the
carabinieri
colonel commanding the area came through. He ordered de Lucca to leave immediately for the area south of Salerno, remove the files from a list of police stations and return with them to Naples. In addition he was to visit the shrine of San Gennaro at Santa Maria della Fossa, take possession of the sacred relics comprising several finger bones of the martyr and arrange for them to be placed in safe keeping in Naples.

De Lucca found the order baffling; nevertheless, he dashed off in his car, emptied the police stations listed of all records of their transactions, then sped on to Santa Maria, where he arrived on the scene too late, for the caretaker had deserted his post and thieves had already decamped with the precious relics. Turning back for Naples, he heard a warning come through on his car radio of a total curfew on all forms of travel. Remembering old friends who were staying in their holiday cottage on the beach at Paestum, he went there to ask for a bed, and spent the last hours of the day in pleasant company, playing cards and discussing theories of perpetual motion, in which all were interested. They were late to bed, and at dawn de Lucca got up, left the others asleep and went down to the beach a few hundred yards away, in the hope of being able to collect shellfish among the half-submerged rocks. Despite the brilliance of the morning, his eye was caught by what seemed a low sash of mist extending from one end of the horizon to the other. For the time of year the mist was exceptionally dense, giving an impression almost of solidity, and studying it more intently it seemed that indistinct objects were forming in it. Within minutes these vague shapes took on edge and solidity, until they become identifiable as ships.