The Wooden Shepherdess

  In Smi’ford Street the crowd poured back and forth to-and-from the shouting hucksters and naphtha flares of the market stalls beyond, in a throng so dense that the trams despairingly clanged their bells and slowed to a snail’s-pace—shouldering people out of their way like a steamer shouldering waves. In that market, food that wouldn’t keep over the holidays sold tonight for next-to-nothing; but Nellie hadn’t the courage to face those boisterous crowds.... From the narrow alley of Ironmonger Row came the smell of frying at Fishy Moore’s, but the queue reached out to the Bull Ring.... So Nellie turned into darker and even narrower streets where the crowd was a little less dense, though even here she steered well clear of the doors of the raucous pubs not to risk colliding with someone propelled from within.

  Here too there were tempting smells: the frying of faggots and fish, and along the curb potatoes were baking and chestnuts roasting on buckets of glowing coke. But Nellie contented herself in the end with a penn’orth of groats for Syl, a paper of chips and a screw of tea for herself. Since tomorrow was Christmas Day, she did half think of joining a queue for two-penn’orth of bacon-ends; but the fifteen bob in her purse had to last for at least another couple of weeks. Already she owed the doctor five bob, and he still had to keep an eye on the baby’s infected ears.

  The chips were nearly all gone by the time that Nellie got home. The house was dark; but she paused on the doorstep, and strained her ears for the click of needles (the invalid earned her living by knitting, yet never used lamps being much too afraid of a fire). But silence, tonight.... So she must be asleep—thank God, for her tongue only ceased with her needles and Nellie was longing for bed!

  She tiptoed round the bed to her stairs, and found that someone had left a jam-jar on one of them. Striking a match, she saw it contained a tiny portion of tongue with a sprig of holly on top; and she burst into tears.

  For Nellie’s new neighbors were like that, in Slaughter-house Yard. The butcher pitched tongues and trotters and hocks in the brine-tub just inside his slaughterhouse door: somebody called him away by ringing his shop-bell, somebody else kept watch. They never took much, for fear Old Skinflint found out—which made even less when you came to share it all round.

  18

  Coventry’s Christmas morning, and everyone woken by bells who hadn’t been woken already by children....

  The bed-ridden woman downstairs told Nellie that Norah it was who’d reminded the cutters-up of the newcomer (Norah, the ten-year-old red-head who more or less ruled the Yard). Norah had downright insisted the widow be given a portion too, since fair is fair—and besides, her baby was ill. Then Norah had brought Nellie’s round last night with the dropsical woman’s own portion, while Nellie was out; and stuffing the mouth of the jar with a sprig of Christmas holly had also been Norah’s idea, to save it from cats.

  Norah was always the one with ideas.... Didn’t Nellie agree that at Christmas whoever goes short little children got to get toys? But toys cost money; and few of their Dads just now had regular jobs, which had left it up to their older brothers and sisters somehow to raise the money themselves. None of those scatter-wit boys could think of anything better than barkin’ (carols); and even the girls thought only of buying those twopenny bundles of snippings the dressmakers sold, to make into clothes for dolls. But Norah’d had teams out roaming the country for holly, and other teams raiding the graves for withered floral crosses and wreaths: then even the youngest had helped strip the frames, and Norah’s father (who’d used to work for a florist’s) had shown the bigger ones how to wire on the holly and turn out proper professional Christmas crosses and wreaths they could sell to the shops.

  This morning from end to end of the Yard there’d be plenty of bleeding thumbs, but never an empty stocking....

  The speaker was propped on an old brass bed that was cock-eyed because of a broken castor, with both her balloons in their hangar (the blankets were raised on a cage). She wore her sparse gray locks in permanent curlers to keep them away from her bloodshot eyes, for fear these missed some happening outside her window. The drooling lips had still got plenty to say about Norah—the duckie who carried her weekly parcel of knitting round to the pawnshop and did her shopping, the little sweetheart who emptied her slops (but none too often, to judge by the smell).

  The needles clicked in time with the tongue, and Nellie for once was willing to listen: for Syl had screamed all night and now he was sleeping.

  Although she was undisputed leader of all twenty-seven walking kids who belonged in the court, it was strange (the Balloon Woman said) that even Norah couldn’t do nothing with Brian—the poor little scrannel! For Brian came from elsewhere, in spite of he spent all day in our Yard if he could (and if somebody left a latrine unlocked might doss on the seat all night), since he loved dumb beasts so much he could never tear himself away from the slaughterhouse....

  Brian must have a home and family somewhere; and Nellie asked where he came from. But nobody knew: he had just appeared in the Yard as if from thin air, that day when a mad bull chased the butcher up into the rafters. There in the roof was the roosting butcher yelling for help; and when every-one ran, there on the ground was this unknown six-year-old dragging a bucket of water across to the bull—and standing stroking its nose while it drank. Brian had haunted that gloomy shed ever since, loving the beasts and giving the butcher what help a little boy could with the killing and flaying and carving the carcasses.

  Caked as he always was in blood and dung (for no power on earth could induce him to wash), you’d hardly have been surprised if the other children had shunned him—especially Norah, who made such a thing about cleanliness! Watching the Yard from your window however you saw it was just the other way round: it was Brian himself who wouldn’t have any truck with the others. He never ventured far from the slaughterhouse door, and bolted inside it if Norah so much as looked at him....

  Nellie had noticed this too: it was almost as if that Temple of Death with its blood and darkness and stink was the only place in the world where a boy felt safe.... But the sight of that lone little ghoul caressing the beasts he meant to help kill fair gave Nellie the creeps: thank heavens at least on Christmas morning he couldn’t be there, with the whole crib empty and closed—neither oxen, nor child.

  Now Nellie couldn’t escape if she would, for she’d lent her hands for winding a new skein of wool and the winder was taking her time. But the latter had turned from the subject of Norah and Brian to talk about Norah and Rita’s Dad....

  For Rita Maxwell’s Dad was one of the Yard’s (and there-fore of Norah’s) knottiest problems: feeding his whippets on raw eggs whipped up with port—as of course he had to, to win—apparently left him unable to feed the Maxwell family too. Even the weeks when he won he never told anyone just how much—and mostly wouldn’t come home till the money was gone.

  The pawnshop of course was the Poor Man’s Bank, where chattels acquired in prosperous times could support their owners when times grew worse (till when, those chairs could be sat on and tables be eaten off: something you couldn’t have done with a savings-account). You’d expect the Maxwells in-and-out of the pawnshop? But no, the Balloon-woman said—and added that Norah surprisingly sided with Rita’s Mum, when Mum chose hunger for all of them rather than part with her overstuffed sofa or Rita’s christening-mug. For more money passed through the old bugger’s pockets, urged Norah, than anyone else’s down Yard: he got to be brought to his senses, and merely putting that off by stripping their home to the bare walls and floors would be rotten weak-minded....

  Now things had come to a head. Last Saturday everyone knew the old bugger had won: yet he’d once again left them with not one penny-piece in the house when he vanished. With Christmas coming and all, Rita’d run sobbing to Norah to try and persuade her Mum just this once.... But Norah’d a better idea, and she told her friend: “You leave that sofa and mug where they are! What you and your Mum got to do is to rub his nose in it proper by pledging his Sunday suit.”
br />   Finally Norah had won; the suit had been pawned, and now the whole Yard was agog because last night late the old bugger come home after all....

  A sudden wail from above told Nellie the baby had woken. She dropped the rest of the skein on the bed and slipped from the room; but she’d barely got back upstairs when a row broke out in the Maxwells’ house so prodigious it brought the whole Yard to their windows. Nellie had just reached hers when the Maxwells’ door flew open and out shot Rita, narrowly missed by a flying boot as she fled into Norah’s house in floods of tears....

  In no time the story was all round the Yard. This morning that unpredictable Dad had got out of bed in a proper Christmassy mood; and after his bacon-and-eggs in a kitchen filled with the smell of that prime bit of beef in the oven, “Dad send me upstairs ...” gulps Rita, still barely able to speak. And then it comes out with a rush: “I’m to look in his Sunday suit and fetch him a Five Pound Note for me Mum, as a Present!”

  The way of a leader is hard. Once the news got around, those Christmas stockings were all forgotten and Norah’s name in the Yard was mud. She ought to have guessed Our Rita was such a gormless sap she’d never have gone through the pockets.

  19

  But back to Christmas at Mellton. For Polly, this turned out a heavenly Christmas after all: she had woken at five with her shyness all gone in the night so had crept into bed with Augustine to share her stocking, and found herself loving the new Augustine as much as the old one. But Gilbert could hardly be finding it heavenly—Gilbert, that little Jack Horner gloomily chewing his thumbful of Dead Sea fruit.

  For Gilbert had pinned all his Liberal hopes on the coming election; and then when it came it had ended in three-out-of-four of last time’s Liberal seats in Parliament lost. With Asquith their leader himself gone down to a Labour opponent at Paisley, and Gilbert’s own “safe” Liberal seat only saved by thirty-two votes, a fat lot of hope he had now of a place on the Treasury Bench in any foreseeable Liberal ministry!

  How had this disaster occurred? This Christmas morning he started racking his brains as soon as he woke. Since we had put Labour in office and only we could eject them, we’d held the Joker—the choice of a Dissolution issue entirely to suit ourselves; and what better choice—what rottener wicket for Labour to bat on and better for Liberal bowlers—than choosing MacDonald’s Russian Loan, which was stealing the Tories’ anti-Bolshevik thunder as well? We had only to ram home the criminal folly of putting in Russian pockets the gold we would put in the pocket of Britain’s own workless at home, and.... Why, even without that last-minute-kick-in-the-crutch of the Red Letter Scare this should have seen Labour down for the count, and the Liberal Cause triumphant.

  Instead we were now outnumbered three to one even by Labour—and ten to one by the Tories.... For Fate had snatched our Joker out of our hands, on its very way to the table: that was the dire effect of Labour’s premature fall in the tea-cup storm over Communist Campbell’s arrest and release.... The premature Dissolution this caused had meant that the crucial Russian Debate never even took place, and had left us lugging the Loan stone-cold to the hustings instead of fiery-hot from the parliamentary anvil.

  As Gilbert crept out of bed he couldn’t help harking back to MacDonald’s strangely asinine moves throughout the whole Campbell Affair: first charging the man with incitement to mutiny, then withdrawing the charge in a way which stank to high heaven and really had left the Tories no choice but proposing a vote of No Confidence.... But then a new idea came to Gilbert, so bizarre it made him cut himself shaving: if Campbell hadn’t existed, would Ramsay have had to invent him? In short, had all this just been a diabolical trick to duck the Russian Debate? To cheat the gallows by cutting his own throat himself the night before in the death-cell, by means of that Censure Motion the Tories had never intended to press? Then.... Why, even that typical Ramsayish huff which had forced a last-minute vote.... Then even that huff was a fake.

  Dabbing his cheek with styptic, Gilbert hurried to get to breakfast before the young men arrived: for he wanted to try out his novel idea of Ramsay-the-Machiavel on Mary in private, because if true (so he pointed out as he cracked his egg) it unmasked a wholly unethical cowardly cunning which must put Ramsay for ever beyond the pale in the eyes of a man of principle. Mary shrugged her shoulders. She had certainly thought the House’s proceedings on Campbell Night a trifle Alice-in-Wonderland, even by Mother-of-Parliaments standards—and that’s saying something! For in with the “Ayes” for the Vote of Censure had trooped the Government’s own supporters, while both other Parties in panic revoked and had voted solid against it—indeed they’d have foiled the Government’s suicide-bid by sheer weight of numbers, had Simon’s amendment not given the death-wish a second chance.... But had the whole Campbell Affair, she wondered, really been cooked up by Ramsay right from the start as Gilbert supposed? Probably Ramsay himself didn’t know the answer, because (as Jeremy said so often they called it “Jeremy’s Law”) the “Idealist Statesman’s essential gift is a righteous right hand blissfully unaware what his crooked subliminal left is up to.” In short, political life is as full of unconscious meanings and motivations as poetry....

  Meanwhile Gilbert had moved on to other election themes: the festering state of the Party’s “Reunion,” with both sides worn to gangrenous sores wherever Lloyd George and the Party Machine came in contact: “No Trespassing” boards signed “D.L.G.” all over Liberal Wales, and a tourniquet clapped on the vital flow from the little man’s moneybags.

  Mary said something.... True (agreed Gilbert), what mattered was less the hopeless seats we’d allowed to go by default than the possible seats we had fought and so dismally lost; but how could Party morale survive when Lloyd George’s refusal to cough up the cost of a candidate left so many with no one to work for and vote for?

  “Are you listening, dear?” said Gilbert; and Mary said Yes, she was.... But can’t Gilbert see (she was thinking) what locking his moneybags means is that Lloyd George is running no risk of winning elections so long as Asquith survives? That brought to her mind John Simon’s story: how, after the previous election, Gilbert Murray had wanted Asquith himself to take office with Labour support, instead of the other way round.... Ah, but that would mean “finding a niche for Our Little Friend,” which was something which Asquith refused to even discuss.... So Asquith too would be taking good care no risk of winning was run so long as that meant high office for D.L.G.; and two such leaders, only agreed in their common desire for defeat, were only too likely to get their way!

  “Are you listening, dear?” Gilbert asked her again; and Mary again said she was.... So the Liberal Party was doomed, she decided: when one of them died in the end it would be too late. She studied her husband’s face. What would Gilbert do, when he found that his leaders themselves had condemned him to forty years in the wilderness? Oust them for somebody new—but for whom?

  Or else ... But no, for surely Gilbert would never abandon his Party! After all Gilbert was Liberal born and bred. Three centuries back an earlier Roundhead Gilbert had bought the Mellton estates from their bankrupt Cavalier owners, and ever since then the Chase had sent to the House its Whig and later its Liberal squires.... All the same, she couldn’t quite get out of her mind another of Jeremy’s nastier dicta (said apropos Winston Churchill lately leaving the Liberal Party—ostensibly rather than have to support the Socialist Party in office): “No, the Man of Principle never deserts his Party: he brands the Party itself for deserting him and his principles.”

  Then the door opened and in came Augustine’s charming friend, an American young Mr. Fairfax intrigued by kippers but thankful to find that this elegant British home had coffee to offer at breakfast as well as tea.

  A young Mr. Fairfax, too, who felt it a privilege being the Christmas guest of an eminent British Statesman. He’d always been taught to hold the British House of Commons in high regard, all American politics being so crooked.

  20

  Paris called him
, and Anthony wasn’t intending to stop on in England long; but above all else in England he wanted to hunt.

  From a card pinned up in the hall he learned that a Boxing Day Meet would be held at Tottersdown Abbey, and privately hoped that Mary would offer to lend him a mount. But Mary advised him to wait, since Boxing Day Meets were never for serious hunting but more for working off Christmas dinners and half the county followed on foot (privately Mary preferred to keep him under her eye if she took him out, which could hardly be done in a Boxing Day scrum).

  So Mary hacked to the Meet alone with a groom. But Anthony wanted to witness it all the same, and persuaded Augustine to tramp there with him over the downs (while Polly most unwillingly stopped at home).

  On the way, Augustine described the Abbey—the house they were going to see—as “a fake-Victorian mansion, though really built in the Middle Ages.” After the Dissolution, he said, a motley succession of secular owners had kept on trying to fake the Abbey to look up to date; and because of its elephantine size, each spent so much that the next generation had had to sell it—which started the tale of an Abbot’s Curse. One of the earliest hid its barbaric old Gothic front behind a Renaissance colonnade: then a Georgian lowered the pitch of the roofs, and a Regency owner clad acres of stonework in stucco he painted to look like stone. But no one had total success till the late-Victorian Henry Struthers who covered the stucco in ivy, added a vast Gothic-revival porch with arrow-slits, hid the Georgian roofs behind gargoyles and battlements, stained-glassed a number of windows—and lo, today from top to toe it looked a completely Victorian edifice!

  “All the genuine monkish stonework and carving appears convincingly imitation, seen in the context of Struthers; and even the ruined Chantry looks utterly bogus, apparently built round a vaguely Florentine fountain and planted with Wellingtonias.”