Ulverton Read online

  My dreams around this time were all of skeletons, turning their heads in the chalk and grinning at me with my wife’s face; not the face I married and loved but the late phantasmagoric countenance of advanced dysentery. When the excavations resumed in the middle of the month with Dart, Ernest, the Squire, the new chauffeur Dick Lock, a white-stubbled handyman named Davey Purdue who was almost my age, and Robert Rose – an unpleasantly supercilious young northerner, who had been a footman up at Ulverton House until the loss of the last Chalmers-Lavery in the Titanic disaster – I had half a mind to give the whole thing up. But I persisted, partly for the sake of the exercise and the fresh air, and partly, curious as it may sound, for the sake of our Chief, whose pale complexion now bore small vein-marks of anxiety across the cheeks, but whom Ernest had persuaded nevertheless to continue with the enterprise. My weakness and my strength had always been an abiding sense of loyalty – even to those whom I could otherwise condemn. And as each scrape of the trowel rang off the flints and was taken by the breeze, a new sense of excitement hovered, despite my nostalgia for Marlers’s quiet quips, and Tom’s wheeze, and Terence Brinn’s silly laugh, and Allun’s nonchalant handling of the Squire’s moods. Stumpy Dick Lock was amiable enough, but Rose’s affected superiority and coarse humour cast a blight on those days, so that the golden presence of the Ineffable rarely stirred and rustled.

  About a week after harvest I was walking that same back-path that comes out behind the brick wall of the Manor estate and its effulgent dog-rose, when I glimpsed Cullurne pouring feed into a tin trough. The sheep – an unusual spiral-horned breed the Squire was keen on promulgating – were running towards him and pressed quite happily about his knees as he shook the sack out. The dust hazed him in a copper-coloured aureole as the autumn sun levelled itself through the leaves of the small wood behind. He saw me, and raised his hand in greeting. I thought how clear and simple that life was, how like the ancient shepherds on the slopes of Attica he must look! I walked to the gate, and he came over and leaned on the iron. Flecks of bran nestled in his hair and in his stubble; his jacket was buttonless. He rested a boot on the lower cross-piece. His repose was one of energy held in check, his big arms the calmer for the exertion they were used to.

  ‘Middlin’ weather,’ he said. He sucked on a tooth with a most impressive squeal.

  ‘Very decent weather, I thought,’ said I, putting his caution down to the usual tendency of rural folk to underplay good fortune.

  ‘Drought,’ he replied, without a hint of superciliousness. ‘Ben’t be goin’ to rain agin till November, by my finger.’

  ‘Ah, drought,’ said I, feeling once more the unbridgeable gulf between myself and my surroundings on anything other than aesthetic terms. ‘Of course. Drought.’

  ‘Put the harvest in your pipe an’ smoke her. Malt-rashed. Atermath ben’t hardly wuth gallin the herse-collar vor. Put her in your pipe too. Cheaper nor twist.’

  This being a particularly opaque piece of information, I merely nodded my head, and vowed to join the English Dialect Society forthwith – as I usually vowed when talking to the recently uncompromising Percy Cullurne, or any other provincially-immured inhabitant. Then I remembered a local saying taught me by Marlers, and tried it out, feeling the proverbial coals-to-Newcastle effect, but not willing to let such an extraordinarily suitable slot go unfilled – even though the phrase had struck me as odd, having all the riddling quality of so many rural saws.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ I ventured. ‘Ahem. What be bad for the hay be good for the termites.’

  The effect was unexpected. Cullurne paused a moment, then burst into most uncharacteristic fits of laughter; tears poured from his eyes, and made admirable inroads through the dust and dirt on his cheeks. He slapped the gate, then his knees, and shook his head as the attack subsided, much as he had shaken water from his face in the square. Far from being mortified, I too was affected, and snorted into my fist, my chest heaving in a manner I had not known for months, even years. Eventually I managed to ask him what had been so amiss in my use of local wisdom. Another peal, several repetitions of the saying, each followed by further peals, then a wiping of eyes, a blowing of nose into a greasy rag, a shaking of his head, a brief apology, then the illumination:

  ‘Turmuts! What be good vor the haay be bad vor the turmuts!’

  Inevitably the merriment was resumed, at my picturing of a termite as somehow inextricably countering hay, instead of the common and water-loving turnip, and by the end of this session I was feeling quite weak, but astoundingly well, as if I had walked the downs twice over without a break in my stride.

  ‘It was Marlers who taught me that,’ I said. ‘I evidently misheard him. Well I do miss him, you know. I miss all of them. Don’t you?’

  Cullurne wiped his eyes and grunted. He sucked on his tooth. He sniffed.

  ‘Silly buggers,’ was all he murmured.

  We did not notice the horse even when it had rounded the corner for, as the gate was well tucked into the hedgerow, it had remained half-hidden by the tall bobbing splash-red of mallow and knapweed along the wayside. I was halfway through an observation upon the sterling qualities of young Jimmy Tuck, and the apparent mental collapse of his widowed mother subsequent to his death, when I looked up and saw the bristly face of the Squire just as he was pulling on the reins to stop. I felt a cloud of dust settle grittily in my open mouth, and shut it. He glared at me for a moment then glanced not at Cullurne but at a point about two feet above his head.

  ‘See about the fence at the bottom of Brambleberry Piece,’ he snapped. (Not quite a true reportage: the name of the field was codified by familiarity into ‘Bram’s’, but I have over the years since joined the two nomenclatures of our village – the official and the non-official – and must take the opportunity to show off my research.)

  The Squire then looked back at me with what I can only describe as small eyes, switched at the horse with his crop as though he rather wished my flank were under it, and left us once more in a swirl of dust, thudding into a gallop as the track meandered onto the open downland. Bluebottles clamped themselves without a moment’s hesitation on the fresh dung. Cullurne shrugged at my raised eyebrows.

  ‘Best see ’bout ut then,’ he said.

  ‘Well, he was to the point.’ Cullurne nodded and walked off, touching his brow. I watched him for a moment, then turned and left that spot myself; left the foolish nuzzling of the sheep in their feed, the finches scrabbling about the hedgerow, the gold disc of the sun filtering through a thousand leaves as it sank – left that particular place enjoined on that particular evening, in which two forces came together for a moment, bristled, and departed; as if all that is irreconcilable lay not in the far-off thump and whistle and wet of the Aisne, but there, in that golden, English dusk, that glimpse of Attica!

  It was, I think, at the beginning of the following week, when I had shoved a ladder into the branches of my apple-tree and was twirling the russets easily off their stems of an evening, that Lock, assigned to a corner of the (by now) vast digging area, clambered up the stepped side of the site and thrust something at Ernest, who almost fell off his canvas stool in fright, for the object in question was a dagger. The Squire, relieving himself against a nearby elm, had scarcely buttoned himself back into decency when Ernest’s excited shriek brought him hurtling back. Lock’s eyes were wide in his small face as he pointed out the exact spot in which the dagger had lain. It was, Ernest stated, of bronze or copper, with a simple triangular blade and a pointed tang to which a wooden hilt would have been tied by twine.

  We were each assigned a tiny area and given a brush, of the sort used in watercolour painting – except for Dart, who was told to wield his trowel as far as possible from the rest of us. It was a tedious business, especially as it had rained unexpectedly (though Cullurne’s prediction was to come true) and the soil was wet, gathering into small clods with each stroke. Ernest joined us and it was he, fortunately, who first revealed the hump which stroke by strok
e, hour by hour, turned inexorably into the cranium of a buried ancient. I fancied we were painting it into life, and had difficulty in grasping the extraordinary truth of that long sleep – though but a moment in comparison with the aeons of buried Time those rolling chalk hills were witness to, the millions and millions of submerged years my feet compressed each time I walked that turf, the unimaginably lengthy accumulations of centuries that saw the slow sinking of microscopic sea-creatures and the slow rising of their bodily memorial: the same that marked my knees bone-white as I kneeled to my task within the opened barrow. The ancient White Horse, which lay then shrouded in a tangle of bramble on the scarp below us, was but a second old in comparison with the flesh it had once been cut from. The tesserae of the past – Bronze-Age, Roman, mediaeval – thrown up by the coulter are as infant toys to the booming venerableness of the chalk that cradles them. And we – who are we to flail and clamour, to batter and slay, when all that surrounds us tells us of our insignificance, of our infinitesimal capacities, of our inevitable anonymity in the eternal reaches of Time?

  But there in our barrow the present peeled back into sufficient ancientness to make every man around me thrill to the sight. The Squire bent down with his mouth open, his pince-nez crooked, his hair stuck upright – the almost comic embodiment of boyish excitement – as the brushes unveiled the eye-sockets, then the nose cavity, and finally the grin of those broken teeth and their slung jaw: as if the face of some horror had broken a calm sea’s surface and rested there. Within a week the outline of the complete skeleton had been sketched, as it were, into view – my own contribution being the right hand and the knees upon which the scattered knuckles rested. From the rim of the barrow, a man’s height above it, the body resembled that of a foetus, legs tucked up towards the chin – except that the head was curiously swivelled round, staring up at the indifferent passage of the clouds.

  Walking home one evening that same week, I saw a group of children running excitedly to the low wall that fronted one part of the square, and which penned in a few pigs belonging to several of the villagers – one of whom was Percy Cullurne. I heard the children’s chant before I saw the object of their mockery, and with a shock unravelled the uneven chorus into its component parts:

  ‘Bid-at-ome, bid-at-ome, bid-at-ome Yeller!

  His body en’t o’ steel

  But o’ pigeon’s muck an’ feather!’

  I was already aware that ‘Yeller’ referred to Percy Cullurne, but the appended verse, repeated vociferously, was new to me. A study should be made of the genesis of these types of incidental or topical verses, as indicating a remarkable degree of creative unanimity, since the progenitor is never to be tracked down, for he almost certainly doesn’t exist. Scraps of popular local rhymes, deeply sunk into every village child’s otherwise unbookish mind, are often found in these new-fashioned and temporary verses, suggesting that the core is adapted and re-used again and again – raided virtually spontaneously. In the above example, the imagery has strong echoes of our Christmas-Tide ‘Mummers’ play about it – ‘muck’ having been substituted for ‘milk’ – although if they had been familiar with their Shakespeare they might have kept with the latter! Recently, with the increased use of our great poets in even the village schools, fragments of Kipling and Walter de la Mare have been spotted, though in a context our educators would no doubt look upon in an unfavourable light.

  Here, however, in the still-remote country, these town-bred educators might see, all about them, old things put to new and unlikely uses: each summer I have seen the children make their camps beside the river out of old iron bedsteads threaded with reeds, and sods piled on the top and sides, and an old iron pot glowing through the night, so that sometimes I have felt back in the days when our ancient warrior was flesh and blood, polishing his sword before a smoking hut. I have seen a waggon wheel become a merry-go-round (of sorts) twirled on its hub, while a rusty plough-wheel has served as a champion hoop, kicking up the dust down the Fogbourne Road for a good half-mile before burying itself in the hedgerow not three feet from me, shedding clouds of Old Man’s Beard upon my own. I have stood upon many a peg-rug woven from a lifetime’s worn-out garments, warming my hands in as pleasant a fug of reminiscence and tobacco as any London drawing-room might provide. And as for the bits and pieces to be found reincarnated in the humble cottage garden! – digression’s confined space dictates I must mention only the most memorable (and perhaps tragic) instance, in which I discovered over fifty irreplaceable glass-plate negatives nestling amongst the weeds of a neighbour’s ragged patch. Apparently the previous occupant, an old labourer named Jo Perry (a rather tiresome, rambling fellow according to Mrs Holland, who employed him in his latter years as a handyman and gardener, and who was left the sum of his worldly goods) had used them as cloches for his cabbages. Sadly, most of them were ruined, scoured clean by unnumbered seasons. The few that survived include a fine study of our former blacksmith’s shop (now a garage for motor-car repairs); a remarkable portrait of an old peasant woman of the last century; and a candid study of the village schoolmaster of some seventy years ago, which sparked memories and thereby spawned a book [No Dead Men, No Tales, 1919] for which I was accused of libel by our local doctor – but that little episode must await its proper turn. Suffice to say that each negative, once developed, showed the degree of loss occasioned by this otherwise resourceful adaptation – though none could say with certainty who the masterly progenitor was (see also Chapter VII).

  To return to the scene, on that mild October day of 1914: there in the pig-pen, as I had surmised, stood Percy Cullurne, indifferent to the metrical taunt of the village urchins. He was scattering straw across the churned, stinking mud, and when I shouted at the children and made for them with my doughty Indian walking cane, he looked up only for a moment, returning to his sows as the chanters scattered in squeals and giggles. One of them threw a pebble vaguely in my direction, but the force of gravity sufficiently enfeebled it to close its parabola with a ‘ping’ on the handle of the village pump. I felt a sudden darkness of mood close over me, and felt quite incapable of conversation. Or perhaps I was embarrassed, somehow, by the humiliation of the man. I walked away without a word or a glance. Hardly had I returned to my cottage and slumped into my chair when a feeling of shame rose within me: Cullurne had felt neither humiliation nor oppression, I was sure. That is the true power: to recognise that it is one’s beholders that impose these things upon one, and that the soul remains uncorrupted, untouched.

  Perhaps there was some deep connection working, for ‘Wipers’ had begun a day previously, and Mrs Trevick received the news soon after that her husband had been killed in action. I have done some research since then: it was at about the same time as I was crossing the square that a burst of machine-gun fire cut Marlers Trevick in two, almost upon enemy lines. His unit was all but wiped out in those few, terrible minutes. It was from roughly that day that Percy Cullurne’s nickname changed from ‘Yeller’ to ‘Bidatome’. I never heard the chant again. ‘Bidatome’ he bears still, if somewhat worn by use and laziness to ‘Bid’m’. But even ‘Bid’m’ reminds us of its origin, much as an old coin reminds us of some great monarch, though the head be almost smoothed away.

  As Ypres claimed man after man who had stood shoulder to shoulder on that August evening, and November came in cold and wet, a terrible nightmarish atmosphere descended upon Ulverton – so that it seemed, at times, as if I never truly woke up out of my own night horrors, but walked the streets of the damned. Few of those young men would be returning after all, to seed the land and bring the next harvest in, to hand on their qualities, to keep the heart of the village pumping strong. Cullurne kept a silence that even I could not break. Up on the downs, brushing without a word at the burial site, we would hear the bell tolling in long, slow arcs of sound, and the Squire would whiten as we paused, wondering again – who?

  One afternoon young Sidney Bint came running up the track towards us, soon after we had heard the b
ell once more. He panted upon the rim.

  ‘Well?’ snapped the Squire. His eyes, I noticed, were full of fear.

  The lad took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s Mr Allun, sir.’

  ‘Allun?’

  ‘He’s back.’

  ‘They’ve sent him back? Was that the tolling?’

  ‘Reverend axt as to make an apology, sir. ’E’s not dead, sir.’

  The Squire closed his eyes.

  ‘Thank God,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and see him.’

  The boy shifted from foot to foot. I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. He stared for a moment at the skeleton, although he had seen it some days before, when he had brought the news of Herbert Daye’s death (the young man who had made my bookshelves too small) from ‘injuries received’ and so forth. The Squire was climbing the ladder, and Lock was looking slightly piqued, as if Allun was likely to slip on his chauffeur’s gloves immediately.

  I think I had guessed what the boy was going to say.

  ‘’E’s got no arms, sir.’

  The Squire paused on the rim, feet still resting on the ladder, hands ready to push him onto the level. I remember his back against the sky, his drooping shoulders, his bowed head. He looked colossal, the very figure of utter and deep weariness. Dart laughed.

  Allun put a brave face on it. He had been handling a grenade, a German stick type, attempting to pick the thing up and hurl it back. He lost one arm immediately and, as he put it, ‘thought as how it would miss the gear-stick, look’. His other arm developed gangrene in the flesh-wound. He was terribly thin, stranded amongst his automobile mementoes in the estate cottage, his wooden prostheses lying weirdly across the table while his stumps ‘took a bit of a rest, look’.

  Soon afterwards we spent our last afternoon on the downs: the weather was blowing cold and the soil was hardening with the sharp night frosts of late November. We had dug right round the skeleton, and it was lifted by means of a pulley and our hands onto the side. Wrapped in canvas, the body of the ancient was placed on cushions in a cart, and then, at a nod from the Squire, taken slowly down the track, the great iron-tyred rims circling through the ruts and over flints so cautiously we could count the spokes … eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve. The number the war eventually claimed from our village. The Squire followed the bier down like a mourner.