Agatha goes to tea with Joan at five o’clock precisely and Joan notices that there is a little piece of bramble in Agatha’s hair, but she doesn’t say anything. They talk about how the village isn’t what it was. There’s no one to run the village shop, and weekenders and commuters are snapping up the houses so that local people, born and bred, can’t afford to live in their own community. The girls’ cricket team is up to full complement, but the men’s is two players short, and Agatha says that she’d play in it herself if she were younger. ‘I used to bowl an awfully good googly.
‘Did you know that Polly Wantage used to play for England?’
‘Gracious,’ says Joan, ‘did she?’ Joan is surprised that one can live in a village for so many years, and yet know others so slenderly.
‘She was quite the spin bowler,’ says Agatha. ‘Wonderful leg break.’
Joan tries to imagine Polly playing cricket but she sees Polly only as she is now, apparelled like a man, in plus fours, hairy tweed jacket and deerstalker hat, prowling the woods in unrelenting pursuit of squirrels. The children say that she eats them, but this has never been proved. Polly lives in a large house in the woods at the end of a muddy track that is almost impassable in winter. She shares it with her lifelong companion, a secretive woman who wears fine dresses and lorgnettes and is rumoured to be an artist, but hardly anyone has ever seen her. Everybody suspects that Polly and her companion might be more than friends, but nobody has said so openly. Polly once scored a century against Australia. She is the kind of character who belongs to this soil and these people, in the same manner that the bracken belongs on Busses Common, and it is unwarranted for others to pry into details.
Agatha goes home and calls her menagerie. ‘Chuffy chuffy chuffy chuffy!’ She arranges the bowls about the floor, on top of the newspaper, and decides that she will spend the evening knitting another grey cardigan. Agatha is not fat, but she has pendulous breasts and can’t be bothered with brassieres. She knits vast and shapeless grey cardigans that she mistakenly thinks will disguise their fascinating motion, and she wears each one until it disintegrates. She sits in her armchair in the living room, with the windows open so that she can hear the linnets sing, and her needles click together. ‘Shoo shoo,’ she says to the cats who come to tug at her wool.
Outside in the Hurst, Polly Wantage is shooting squirrels. The twelve-bore cracks, the dogs of the village are set to barking, and Agatha hears the little pellets pattering down through the leaves like the first drops of rain. Agatha deprecates this slaughter of innocent creatures, and she tuts about it to herself, but she pardons it because she thinks that Polly Wantage must be slightly dotty.
At eight o’clock Agatha decides to have supper, and goes to make a pot of tea. She arranges four digestive biscuits on a plate, which she will eat slowly in order to make them last.
She feels a sharp ache in her left arm, and then a blow from a sledgehammer seems to strike her from within. She gasps and falls to her knees. She has never known such bone-breaking pain in her whole life, and she is bewildered, breathless and astonished. She puts her hands to the floor and crawls a little way, but then lets herself collapse slowly sideways among the animals’ dishes. She smells newsprint, mud, Kitekat and Chappie, and closes her eyes in agony and resignation.
Peace descends upon her like a mother’s hand, and she has the feeling that she is flying away over the fields. Below is the stumpy tower of St Peter’s Church on the hill, and, twenty miles away, the sparkling angel on the summit of Guildford Cathedral flashes a scintilla of golden light. She is higher than the rooks, and finds herself in a vast and empty space. She looks about expectantly, thinking that someone is coming to meet her, but there is no one at all. Not even her father, who spent his life behind a newspaper and a pall of pipe smoke, nor even her mother, who lived her life as if it were a penance.
There is no one to meet Miss Agatha Feakes. But then she looks down and sees that there are hundreds of animals; there are cats and rabbits, goats and hens, guinea pigs and dogs. She is shocked to realise that she knows all their names, all their likes and dislikes, all their whimsies. It strikes her as wondrous that her life must have been so abundant in affection.
She is about to pick up the first rabbit that she had when she was six years old, but she becomes aware that someone is coalescing out of the light. He is tall and slim, he is dressed in RAF service dress, and he has his peaked cap under his right arm. On the left breast of his tunic he wears the purple and white diagonal stripes of the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the red and white diagonal stripes of the Air Force Cross. She is about to shake hands, but he leans forward and kisses her softly on the cheek. Surprised, she puts her hand to her cheek, and smells Sunlight Soap, brilliantine and eau de cologne. Casually he removes the morning’s brambles from her hair, and says, ‘Hello, old thing.’
‘Alec?’ she asks, incredulous. ‘Alec?’
Flight Lieutenant Alec Montrose raises a quizzical eyebrow and runs an elegant forefinger along his thin black moustache. He smiles, and Agatha’s lips tremble at the memory. ‘When I heard you’d been killed,’ she says, ‘I was most awfully upset. I cried buckets and buckets, for weeks and weeks. I wrapped the ring in tissue and I put it in my jewellery box, and every now and then I take it out and look.’
Alec bends down and places his cap rakishly on the head of a sleeping Labrador. When he straightens up he puts his right hand on her left hip, and says, ‘My dance, I think.’ Out in the ether Victor Sylvester’s band strikes up their favourite tune. He draws her close and she lays her head on his shoulder. It is as if he is taking away all the accumulated weariness of life; it empties out of her like water from a jug.
In the arms of Alec Montrose, Agatha waltzes and whirls away on lightened feet, and, far below, the village in which she was born and nourished, and into whose soil her body will melt away, prepares itself for the night.
AFTERWORD
There was a long period during which I persuaded myself into believing that my childhood was a rural idyll. Upon reflection I realised that in fact I spent the greater part of my youth at boarding schools. My public school was admittedly in beautiful countryside, and I spent much time working for a local farmer, or walking on the local estate and sunbathing naked in its bracken when I should have been doing sports. The estate had a gibbet, hung with the ragged corpses of multitudes of vermin, and this is presumably how its gamekeepers proved their worth. I did partially fail to grow up middle class because I had exclusively working-class jobs at first, but all this is not quite the same as growing up wearing smocks and clogs, surrounded by geese and dozens of siblings, fetching pails of warm milk, and eating dishes made of the green and chewy parts of wild animals.
My village in southern Surrey was many years past the era of rural idyll. The centuries of ‘idyll’ were in any case a period of ignorance, disease, servitude, bone-numbing cold, relentless hard work, perinatal death and extreme penury. People died not of old age, but of being worn out. The idyllic moments must have been all the more precious, and all the more memorable, for their rarity. What was really special about those times was that everyone knew everyone else. Villages were proper communities, with all that that entails in terms of social support. These days, although a small core of sociable and helpful types is always to be found, village families often live in complete isolation from each other, buttonholed by their television and computer screens, and getting in their cars to go and see their friends elsewhere. There are people in villages today who don’t know their neighbours at all, and would rather go shopping than to the village fete. Psychologically speaking, they are townies.
The villages of these islands were transformed progressively by the mechanisation of farming, rural de-industrialisation, the train, the bicycle and the motor car. In our village we no longer had just a few families who had intermarried for generations. The youngsters grew up and left, as I did, and families moved in not least because it was on the Portsmouth line to London.
Every morning bowler-hatted, pinstriped gentlemen with their furled umbrellas strode to the station up New Road, all of them looking like Major Thompson. In the early 1950s my village won the Best Kept Village competition, a sure sign that it was no longer a functioning place of work, but had become simply a lovely spot to live in. The lord of the manor wasn’t some bluff old gentleman with a hunter and two Labradors, but an expert on Handel. There was no farrier, no blacksmith, no limeburner, no wheelwright, no cartwright, no bodger making chair parts in the woods. The butchers, bakers, grocers, cobblers, confectioners and saddlers had all gone. There was a Malthouse Lane, but the malthouse had become a farm. You still found hops growing in the hedgerows. No one kept a pig in their yard with the intention of cutting its throat in the autumn, and no one was obliged to live off rabbits. Poachers no longer poached out of necessity, because you could get very cheap chicken in the new Godalming Waitrose. The glass trade that had made nearby Chiddingfold world-famous had long since collapsed, on a whim of King James I. In Chilworth the vast gunpowder factories had disappeared after the Great War, and the ironmakers had vanished some time in the late eighteenth century, although there is plenty of ironstone left. The only specialist manufacturers in the area made walking sticks. I remember just two old men who had the proper Surrey accent, which has probably gone altogether by now. They used the strong postvocalic R that you still find in Dorset. There was ‘for’ard’ for ‘forward’, ‘to’n’ for ‘to him or them’, ‘hosses’ for ‘horses’, ‘they’ for ‘them’, ‘twas’ for ‘it was’, ‘mos’ for ‘most’, ‘ye’ for ‘you’ in the accusative, ‘they was’ for ‘they were’, ‘ha’ for ‘had’ when using the pluperfect. There were a few dialect words still left, and, according to Eric Parker, ‘Joe Bassetts’ had been the name for cockchafer grubs. I imagine that the dialect never was studied systematically, and is now almost lost for ever. At the beginning of the twentieth century, George Bourne noted down the speech of his gardener, Bettesworth, and anyone who is curious to know how Surrey spoke should take a look at his Bettesworth Book, and Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer. I worked for some months with a gardener who talked exactly like him.
There was a coal merchant and a brick factory. There was still a village shop, and a village pond, and a cricket green. There was still a rectory with a proper rector in it. There was still a pub, whose ceiling was decorated with a collection of chamber pots, and which to this day advertises its fare as ‘warm beer, lousy food’. They had a dog called Beulah, who had rounded canine teeth because his hobby was collecting large pebbles. Most reassuringly, there was still an affable village policeman who got about on a bicycle, and a permanently suntanned village postman who kept his boots polished like the old soldier he was and wore clips around the bottom of his trousers.
In one corner of the green was a scrapyard and travelling fair run by a family who were referred to as ‘the gypsies’. There was a time when it was proposed to set up another gypsy site at a place called Cuckoo Corner, and our gypsies joined in the protest against it, on the grounds that the new gypsies would probably be a lower class of gypsy who would give them all a bad name. Ours had a small pack of genial Alsatians that were almost unrecognisable as any breed because of their caking of mud and oil. Without the scrapyard I would never have managed to keep my Morris Minor going. They had a cleaning machine so powerful that it took the paint off my motorcycle. At the top of the hill was a school for delicate children. It was run by nuns whose suicidal driving was widely notorious. It had originally been built as a private house by a famous astronomer, who added an observatory, and was the first person in the village to have a car. There were still some small farms. One year I worked on the potato harvest, driving a tractor and trailer alongside the harvester. I had an accident with it, of course. I once helped to dismantle a chicken battery, and fell into the fragrant slurry pit at one end. My shoes were not allowed in the house thereafter, and neither were my trousers after I had worked on a pig farm.
Below the convent was common land, containing a sandpit which must have been the remains of a small quarry and steep paths which were ideal for tobogganing. I have lovely memories of racing my mother and the dog down the hill, whooping with delight. My mother had huge furry mittens that I used to press to my cheek, and sometimes she went out on our walks with a trowel and a small sack so that she could collect the horse droppings for her roses. In those days the common was deep in flourishing bracken, which was ideal for hideouts. It was also ideal for courting couples, but it has now been reverted to heath by a new generation of eco-purists. Beyond, through a pinewood, was Sweetwater Lake, ringed by rhododendrons, still and silent, where I poached in vain for the rumoured trout, until I was caught by Colonel Redhead, who let me off because I had a proper fishing rod and hadn’t broken off any branches. Behind the gypsies’ scrapyard, extending all the way to Chiddingfold, was the Hurst, a very old wood full of mysterious pools and hummocks. It had a disused road that reminded me of Kipling’s poem, except that it has never disappeared.
And now I begin to realise why, despite my better judgement, I cannot help looking back on it all as a rural idyll. The old social structure had gone, along with the old trades, but the countryside was intact. Because we had an inflexible family rule that the dog must be walked daily, I was out in the woods and fields every single day that I was at home. I discovered all sorts of secret places that will remain secret. I know where the bluebells and kingcups are. There is a sandpit where, infected yet baulked by the spirit of Wordsworth, I wrote my first bad poems while the dog sighed with boredom next to me. The Hurst was muddy and bewildering, but I got to know every inch of it. I know where the wild strawberries are.
Initially I decided to call this village Notwithstanding because for a long time I felt that it had not withstood. I was quite wrong about that. I had been disgusted by someone telling me not to throw sticks into the pond for the dog because it might frighten the ducks, and by some newcomer protesting about the calling of cockerels in the morning, and so I had begun to think that all was lost.
However, there really are one or two old families left. The village still looks exactly the same; there is still the Cricket Green Stores, a pond, a school, a pub, a disused pound, a village hall, cricket on the green. The cricketers still wear whites. The villagers planted trees to celebrate the millennium, the same as every other village. After all these years of accumulating the stories herein, I have grown fond of the name. It reminds me of the strange names of other English villages, and, after all, anyone who wishes to know the real name can work it out.
What has not withstood is the population. Most of the people I knew are dead, because I was young then.
I was at a salon du livre in Pau a few years ago, when I met a French artist called Jacques. He told me that he adored Britain, because it was so exotic. I was dumbfounded and asked him what he meant. He replied that if he went to Germany, or France, or Belgium, or Holland, they all seemed the same. But ‘La Grande Bretagne, c’est un asile immense.’ On reflection I realised that I had set so many of my novels and stories abroad, because custom had prevented me from seeing how exotic my own country is. Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations. We have a very flexible conception of normality. We are rigid and formal in some ways, but we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough. We are not so tolerant of small ones. Woe betide you if you hold your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree.
I began to write these stories, only to be flummoxed by Tim Pears, who, in 1993, and very much under the influence of the same Latin American writers who had influenced me, published In the Place of Fallen Leaves. It is a beautiful book, set in the English countryside, which will one day be considered a classic. I wrote to him saying something like ‘A pox upon you, varlet, you’ve written the book I was just about to write’, and he replied, ‘I’ll keep England if
you keep abroad.’ In the front of my copy he wrote: ‘To Louis, fortunately busy abroad.’ I have stuck to this agreement until now, and I hope that Tim forgives me for breaking it at last. His book obliged me to approach mine differently, but I hope that it is worthy to be somewhere near his on the shelf.
These days I live in a village in Norfolk, a place where there was only recently a man who lived in the woods with his animals. There is someone else who is a crack shot with a shotgun even though he has only one arm. This village is closer to its past. The dialect and accent just about survive. The names on the graves and war memorials are the names of families who still live here. I hope that one day my son and daughter will feel the same way about their childhood village in Norfolk as I do about mine in Surrey. In these stories I celebrate the quirky people I remember: the belligerent spinsters, the naked generals, the fudge-makers, the people who talked to spiders. I have not written what did happen, but what might or could or should have happened, and at one point I have ventured into a more distant past. Some of the stories I heard turned out to be false, as village rumours often are, but I kept them anyway. The moment I began to write I found that my instinct for fiction rapidly overwhelmed my respect for the truth, so that this village might be any village at all. Either way, the literary truth lies not in the details, but in the flavour.