Читать книгу The Heart of England - Edward Thomas - Страница 10

Table of Contents

For a mile, alongside a bright high-road, runs a twelve-foot strip of grass and clover and buttercups, with cinquefoil’s golden embroidery in the turf at the edge. Little circular heaps of silver wood ash mark the cold fires of tramps, here and there. Here also they sleep in the sun, in summer and autumn, and in winter lean in the dense hedge that keeps the north wind away. The hedge is rich and high, of thorn overgrown by traveller’s joy and bryony; and at its feet, stitchwort, campions, vetchlings and bird’s-foot trefoil grow luxuriantly.

This is no man’s garden. Every one who is nobody sits there with a special satisfaction, watching the swift, addle-faced motorist, the horseman, the farmer, the tradesman, the publican, go by; for here he is secure as in the grave, and even as there free—if he can—to laugh or scoff or wonder or weep at the world.

As I was trying to persuade some buoyant bryony strands with snaky heads to return to the hedge from which they had wandered into danger, a tramp came up.

“Have you seen my old woman?” he asked.

“Not know her? She is the cursedest, foulest-mouthed old woman in the country, fond of too much drink, and she has just been spending the winter in prison—she prefers it to the workhouse which I have just left. But she just suits me. There is no one like her. They often tell me to take another instead of her, but I never will. …

“I don’t know that you would like to see her. She is not a beauty, and she is not dressed up well. She is as crooked as an oak branch, and she has one leg longer than the other, and as to her face I could make a better one myself with a handful of dirt. She drags as she walks, what with keeping up with me all these years. You may know her, because she is always smoking. She cannot eat; she lives on tobacco and beer. …

“Oh, I see you are one of these antiquarian gents. If you would really like to see her. …

“Well, if you are curious, how would you like to hear of the murder I did twenty years ago? I tell it to everybody, and they don’t seem to believe me, so I will tell it to you. …

“I spent a night in the workhouse and when I got out in the afternoon I was so hungry that I could have eaten the master, if he hadn’t been the ugliest fellow I ever saw, like a fancy potato. Walking didn’t cure my appetite, and all that day and night I didn’t have a bite. Perhaps I got a bit queer and I went on walking until I got near to Binoll in Wiltshire where I was born. That is a fine country. My old woman and I have slept in violets there many a time in April. When I got there early in the morning on the second day I thought I would go into a copse I knew and pick some bluebells there, partly for old remembrance sake and partly to make a penny or two in Swindon, but I didn’t much care what. Well, as I was picking them—God! how everything did smell and I felt like a little boy, I was enjoying it so, and putting my hand into all the nests and feeling the warm eggs—Lord! what a fool I be—I thought I would go to sleep. There was such a nice bit of moon in the sky, with the rim of the cup of it uppermost, which means that it keeps the rain from falling, but if it is upside down it lets the water out and you may know it will rain. There was a regular old-fashioned English thrush saying: ‘Bit, bit, slingdirt, slingdirt, belcher, belcher, belcher,’ and I went on picking the flowers. All of a sudden I saw two fellows sitting just outside the wood with their backs to me. One of them was a big fellow and we passed the time of day and he said he had done a job lately and was not in a hurry to do any more. The other was a little white-faced man such as I can’t away with, and he said he was looking for a job and trying to get his strength up a bit. The big fellow motioned to me, meaning that the other had got money about him; so I agreed, and nodded, and he stepped back and hit the little fellow a good blow on the head. I threw away the flowers and we dragged him into the wood. He had ten shillings on him and we took half each. He looked very bad, so the other fellow said: ‘We had better put him away,’ and I said; ‘Yes, he may be in awful pain, such a white-faced fellow as he is.’ So we knocked the life out of him, and the other fellow went off Marlborough way and I went into Swindon and had such a dinner as I hadn’t had for weeks, rabbit and new potatoes and a bit of curry. … Did you ever hear about that?

“Get on my mind? Why, I never meant the fellow any harm and I filled my belly.

“Can you tell me where there is a lone road where I can make a bit of fire? I don’t like the dust and noise of these motor cars.” …

Away he went, halting a little, and yet, from behind, having an absurd resemblance to a child, which his cheerfulness reinforced.

Later in the evening, I found him just awakened from his first sleep, near a dead fire that had been no bigger than a pigeon’s nest.

“What a country this is,” he said indignantly, but with good humour.

“There are not enough sticks in this wood to warm the only man who wants them. I suppose they use all the firing to keep the pheasants warm. Hark at them! If I was a rich man I wouldn’t keep such birds. …

“England is not such a place as it was when I was a young man. It is not half the size for one thing. Why, when I was a young man, you could go up a lane with a long dog or two and pick up a bit of supper and firing and nothing said. The country seemed to belong to me in those days, but now I might as well be in Africa. I am worse off than the labourers now, except that I have got more sense than they have, singing their silly old songs, like this.” Then he sang with perhaps mock sentimentality a frail little peasant song, full of the smallness of lonely, small lives:—

“Mary, come into the field

To work along of I,

Digging up mangold wurzels,

For they be a-growing high.

Dig ’em up by the roots,

Dig ’em up by the roots,

Put in your spade,

Don’t be afraid,

Dig ’em up by the roots.

Our master is a hard one,

He pays us very small;

And if we stop a moment

We hear his voice to call—

‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.

We work all day together,

Till all the light is past;

And only going homewards

Do we join hands at last.

‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.

For many years we’ve been sweethearts

And worked the fields along,

And sometimes even now

Mary will sing the old song—

‘Dig ’em up by the roots,’ etc.

“What is that to the song about ‘the swift and silly doe’ my old father used to sing to us, or about ‘Gentle Jenny’ the mare that threw the fellow that wasn’t going to pay for her hire. No, there is no room in England now for toe-rags like me and you; if you wanted to, you couldn’t sleep on Bearsted Green to-night.”

Later in the year, on August Bank holiday, I found him at an inn, where a farm bailiff was treating the labourers to much ale. The landlord had a young relative down from London, who sang a song in the bar about a skylark who was to take a message to his mother in heaven. At this the tramp melted a little: the pale face of the singer and the high shrill voice made an entrance somewhere, and he tried to join in the song. But towards evening he was to be found sticking pins through his cheek and ears and into his arms, and offering, for a small sum, to stick them into any part whatsoever; or, lying on his back and twisting his head back—the muscles in his throat croaking all the time like frogs—to pick up with his teeth a penny that lay on the floor. The bailiff had caught him. He did odd jobs about the farm, and lived in a forgotten cottage, too far away from anywhere to keep pigs in. But he slept in the cottage only on one or two nights in the seven. During the rest of the week he was to be found at night under the edge of a copse, beside a little fire, reminding himself of the old, roomy England which he used to know.