Читать книгу Coronation Chicken - Nigel Barley - Страница 4

They gave the children their commemorative Coronation mugs at the end of school assembly months before the event. This was definitely a mistake. They were glazed a nasty, serviceable, cream colour with a picture of Princess Elizabeth and the motif, ER II, stamped on top but nothing disguised the cheap and brittle ceramic that chipped and shattered at the slightest knock.

‘Keep them safe, dear children,’ the headmistress had urged. ‘When you are as old as I am, these will be rare collectors' items and may be the only things of value that you own – those of you who are left alive, that is.’ Her words were drowned by a crash and a wail as one of the girls swept hers unwittingly off the desk. By the end of the day, their rarity had increased by thirty per cent.

The mugs were an uncomfortable form. The size suggested they were made for the drinking of Ovaltine, but the hoop-handled shape evoked stoops of ale. Jack knew there was only one place for such precious and useless things - the front room.

Jack had learned that part of being respectable was having a front room. It was the kept-up public face of the house. It was 'having standards.’ The Arkwrights were Northerners who lived at the edge of the village and so were clearly not respectable, had no standards and were considered 'common.’ Having no special front room, they had a room they just lived in the way horses lived in a stable.

For it was the essence of Jack’s front room that no one used it. Kitchens and bedrooms were practical places but a front room was just too good to use, was simply to look at like a picture that you put carefully in a glass frame. It was there to be dusted once a day and furiously polished once a week, the knicknacks rubbed up with soft dusters made, aptly, of old knickers. When honoured visitors came - the sort who could actually set their foot on the front step - they were received in the front room. The vicar, the doctor, the teacher, itchy young men in suits being questioned on the honourability of their intentions and the splendour of their prospects, these were the sort of people who got to sit in a front room. Also the dead. Jack's Granny Scoggins had set her heart on being laid out here in her coffin on two trestles across the fireplace, complete with gladioli in vases, before being finally screwed down.

It had a tiled fireplace, of course, with all the impedimenta of tongs, shovels and brushes that were often polished but never saw action and the black-leaded grate itself would be lit only once in a blue moon. So whenever the sweep came, he was driven briskly through to the practical chimneys of the back of the house as the front room did not need his attentions. Here, even the chimney was pure. It confirmed the British conviction that beauty and function are opposites.

Jack’s respectability was appropriately couched in terms of florid, easily-dirtied chairs with hand-embroidered anti-macassars, spread round a rug as if waiting for world leaders to drop in and negotiate an East-West peace treaty. Stalin would sit there by the firescreen with his head resting on needlepoint lupins - except, of course, that he was freshly dead - Eisenhower over by the table with the yellow daisies and Churchill on the sofa. There were stiff-necked chairs pushed back against the wall for the footmen to sit on and vases and cut glass geegaws that smashed if you just looked at them in the wrong tone of voice. The mantlepiece was crowded with china dogs that stared at three china ducks effortfully taking off over on the far wall, heading for a storm-tossed galleon of plaster and a lighthouse of brass. The alcove on each side of the fireplace had pictures of elegant women with jacked-up bosoms standing looking out from even grander and more impractical front rooms that were used even less than Jack's. The floor should have been polished wood but Mum and Dad scored extra points here. They had chic glossy lino with the pattern of polished boards printed on it. When he was still crawling and lino could not be got for love nor money as part of the sacrifice made to bring Germany to its knees, they had bought thick, green lino paint and lavishly sloshed it on the floor. With all solvents reserved for core industry not domestic luxury, it refused to dry. For two whole weeks the family crept stickily over it like giant bluebottles over flypaper as it captured and ambered down crumbs, cat hairs and footprints. Then one night they had the doctor out and he incautiously set down his bag in the front room. When he tried to leave, the paint had gone off - just like that - and there was no parting the bag from the floor. He had taken a whole bottle of his best surgical spirit to sponge himself free and left in a huff. You could still see the mark.

The high altar, and Jack's great joy, was the sideboard, a huge, bow-legged thing of blond wood. Its top bore further proofs of respectability, Mum and Dad's wedding photos, arranged in a careful semi-circle. They stood somewhere outside a register office in old-fashioned clothes, looking implausibly young. Under arms raised in Nazi salutes but really throwing confetti, Dad's manly hand gripped hers but far too near the camera so that he looked somehow deformed like that crab that only has one big pincher. Then there were the pictures of the children as babies, all in frocks - boys too - against wishy-washy backgrounds and some of Dad in uniform, leaning on jeeps or with arms round the bony necks of toothy comrades. Official pictures of the world were always in shades of grey, conveying a fundamental truth about the lack of colour in ordinary life. Cameras were rare so people mostly had to just remember things. Yet Jack understood that memories also became soft and worn, just like photographs, from too much rough handling.

Each object, once introduced into the front room, became fixed and unquestionable. It was here the single Coronation mug to survive the walk back from school would find its place. Being useless - indeed unusable - but an ornate formal communication, it fitted right in next to the silverish trophy of a girl showing her knickers that Susan had won in the school sports for high jump. A space stood ready for his own school certificates, a recognition perhaps that academic learning too was a sort of impractical embroidery on life.

The drawers and cupboard were full of even greater treasures, a rich lifemulch to be excavated in layers. Pictures of boozy Uncle Fred were tucked safely away here out of sight. There was Dad's army stuff, pay books, King's Regulations, discharge papers, more pictures in uniform showing bleak and windswept camps, three medals wonkily mounted on a single bar and wrapped in oily cardboard stamped 'On His Majesty's Service.’ Dad could never see them without speaking bitterly of the military. ‘Three years in the army and what did I learn? I'll tell you son. How to swear, how to cheat at cards and how to get drunk.’ Only later would Jack realise that these were actually useful skills in life.

There was a stapled, cardboard box of bullets, beautiful smooth things, each a tumbling jewel of brass, copper and lead. Jack and Tom had stolen one and set it off with a hammer on the allotments. It had whizzed off, struck one of the buckets protecting the rhubarb and ricocheted back howling over their heads. When they fingered the dent in the bucket with terrified fingers it was hot.

Best of all was the water-stained book Dad was issued just before hitting the Normandy beaches. It had a cover of red oilcloth, dog-eared and dished from being carried in his battledress top pocket. Jack always read slowly through all the stuff about groundsheets and ordinance and being financially responsible for your equipment and being fined one-and-six for negligence but his thoughts were for the last section, putting off getting there, like you might dawdle home from school on a hot day thinking of the cold drink you could have when you walked through the door or telling a joke where you put off the punchline till people screamed at you. At the back was a page dramatically headed 'Women' that consisted of a single sentence. Jack read it in his head in a haw-haw officer's voice. ‘Always remember,’ it warned, twirling its moustache man-to-man fashion, ‘that Jerry was here before you.’

***

‘He was there all right,’ said Mum. ‘Bold as brass, Eadie. Dick Moore. His bike was outside Eva Frick's all night. Just like that. Right out loud. It's disgusting.’ She licked her lips tastily. ‘Who'd have thought? Dick Moore and Eva Frick carrying on. Chalk and cheese if ever there was. You can be sure he got more than his bicycle clips off.’ She nodded contentedly, enjoying the way her newly-permed brown hair bobbed when she shook her head. Eadie had just finished the task of transformation with a box of Richard Hudnut and the very latest curlers and papers.

Eva Frick was Weylands's only Scarlet Woman. She was divorced, which made her virtually unique in itself, plied an unladylike soldering iron in the aircraft factory and had been seen smoking in the street while pushing a pram in slacks. She lived with a pack of feral daughters of addled paternity that roamed Weylands like lionesses. Her high point had been the war. With growing years her scarlet had faded to the subdued pink of her gins so that the original red remained only in her inappropriately loud lipsticks and she had begun to be redeemed, to take on a muted glow as one who had 'seen life.’

Eadie nodded too but dowdily. The dowdiness was a sort of expression of mourning for the wartime loss of her husband. ‘She was never what you'd call - sniff - respectable.’

‘Respectable?’ Mum shrieked. ‘You remember just before D-Day? There were no Americans for miles round here but you'd always find some at Vera's. Spam and fags stacked on the sideboard. No better than she should be.’

‘Him too,’ prompted Eadie, gathering her cardigan over her bosom like a breastplate of virtue. ‘Dick I mean. But you know...He's sort of gone up in my estimation. That Eva Frick's no soft option and I always thought Dick was... well...the other way.’ The two women fell silent. Their eyes swivelled like the well-oiled guns of an old battleship, sighting on Jack.

He knew what they were talking about. Everyone in Weylands knew. Eccentricities were tolerated up to a point. Weylands was sufficiently aware of its country heritage to need a 'touched' resident and Dick Moore had explored various avenues of self-expression over the years. When young he had not done very much and had continued successfully in that line ever since. After renouncing his trade as army barber, he had taken to haunting the more remote footpaths in a long overcoat, beneath which he was naked, and here, with a flapping gesture, he invited all passers-by of either sex to inspect his person without fear or favour. Perhaps it was a habit acquired in army medicals. There was no sexual terrorism in this, the whole thing was done gravely in tones of the strictest formality. Then there had been one or two ambiguous attempts to entice boys off into the woods to show them a great surprise. Nothing much had come of any of this either. Their greatest upset lay in not finding the Teddy Bears' Picnic they had been strongly led to expect. Delicacy forbade the involvement of the police because it would involve clarifying things that were better left vague and putting into language ideas for which no acceptable words existed in Weylands. Finally, some of the men had gone round to see him and, the next day, he sported a black eye while PC Puddephat turned a blind one. Now in his forties, Dick could be seen most days, always down at heel in a greasy Prince of Wales check with a bright yellow comb in his top pocket, wheeling newspapers round in a wheelchair or cycling aimlessly on his bike with more newspapers on a sort of trailer. No one knew what he did with the papers or where he got them from. The more generous would assume he was engaged in some public-spirited work of 'salvage.’ On summer days, he would be seen, sitting by the paddling pool in the rec., staring off into space.

‘I don't mind,’ said one citizen, ‘as long as he keeps his hands where I can see them.’

‘Jack,’ said Mum. ‘Why don't you go and play outside, love? Get some air.’

‘Alright.’ He picked up the yellow, toy car he had been pretending to push around the floor, and went obediently to the back door, parodying the behaviour of a perfect child.

‘There's a good boy,’ remarked Eadie with surprise.

He smiled angelically, unlatched the door to go out. As the wind stirred his hair, there was a soft breaking of another sort of wind behind him, Tom. It didn't matter. He would hear what they said anyway from Tom.

A strange sort of modesty was invoked in some Weylands households. Lavatories were decently tucked away at the bottom of the yard, filthy things to have inside. Yet pre-school children were permitted to use chamber pots anywhere about the house, only, should a neighbour come by, a large cloth would be simply dropped over them as they sat, defining them out of existence - and gossip would continue.

Jack had now reached the age of prudery but still recalled the privileged luxury of such bowel movements, enveloped in a balloon of large-meshed muslin tenting his own rich gases, a spectator on an unseeing world like a harem lady in one of his travel books, peering through a carved screen. Today, the gases would be fighting with the ammonia of the Richard Hudnut. It was often here that Jack did basic fieldwork, pencilled in gross markers, major fault lines to be fine drawn later, running across the mental map he was quietly sketching of the extraordinary world he lived in. Now he relied on Tom to be his listening post and his ears would be twirling like tape recorders.

‘Eadie,’ said Mum stirring in derationed but still precious sugar. ‘I was ever so sorry about you losing your Bill that year. Who'd have thought it? A big strapping lad like your husband, dying of shock when they bombed the dairies. But you're still a young woman. You and Bill never had time to get children. Are you sure you won't marry again? You won't go short on offers. A woman needs a man for the allotment.’

‘Oh no.’ Eadie shook her head and pouted. ‘I couldn’t go through that again, the shame and everything. When they took him to the hospital, you see, he was wearing one of my old vests.’

There was a silence. Mum slurped tea and digested the remark. The fear of being found without underwear or with grubby undies haunted her everyday nightmares.

‘There’s no shame in that,’ she lied. ‘But you remember that Eva Moody’s husband, when he passed on? That was a different kettle of fish altogether.’

Eadie was stung, a gleam came into her eye. Her voice dropped to a shocked whisper. ‘She had him buried by the Co-op. The Co-op! Like she was buying a three-piece suite! They did a good job, mind, with all the cold meats thrown in free.’

‘Yes, Eadie.’ Mum nodded with relish. ‘But the real point is she got a divi on her own husband's funeral. It's not decent. It's...It's like cannibalism. Disgusting.’

‘Disgusting!’

They sighed happily and stirred their tea. They could talk for hours about the things that left them speechless.

***

The first thing Jack always noticed about Granny's room was the net curtains. Being upstairs, there was no need for them. No one, after all, could look in. But, of course, they were there so that she could look out from behind a veil, like that harem lady. They cut down the amount of light but that too was part of being inside and shielded from the nakedness of public exposure. When Jack had asked her about the gloom, she replied. ‘I likes to retain me mystery.’

The bed was the centre of everything, large and broken-backed with a multiplicity of sheets and blankets and a patchwork quilt, all built up like the layers of wallpaper on the wall. The springs creaked and zithered to the touch and actually getting into it and under the covers was like unwrapping a corseted Edwardian lady. Round about lay various objects of need, a tortoiseshell hairbrush and mirror, hairpins nesting like biddies in a hairnet, a candlestick and matches 'just in case.’ The four brass knobs at head and foot were removable, unscrewing to provide a hiding place for concealed savings and small treasures. Underfoot was a green mat with flowery swirls.

‘That's a magic carpet, Jack. You be careful how you tread on that. You could end up in Baghdad.’ Baghdad, Persia - it was always on the radio news as part of The Baghdad Pact or perhaps The Bag Dad Packed.

‘Come off it, gran. It's got a label on the back says 'Axminster.' Nothing from a British factory could possibly be magic.

The radio was a large, two-handled box covered in simulated snakeskin with knobs of clearest plastic and a handle on top that offered a false sense of portability. Previously housed in some vampy boudoir, it had been snapped up by Granny Scoggins at the Boy Scout jumble sale to stand on a chair by the bed and was turned on most of the time. If you twisted the dial, there were other voices, largely Frogs gabbling like turkeys or phlegmish Dutch. Its dial was a map of a discarded world, Hilversum, Toulouse, Nice. From London, begowned or dinner-suited announcers spoke out with the hand-etched, imperial authority of the BBC voice, direct from the front room of the nation. He had seen their picture in the paper. To wear a dinner jacket on the radio was a kind of seriousness or perhaps merely showed that its intellectual level was that of dinner-party chatter, or a pep talk to the troops.

The Light Programme laid down the bare bones of the day - Mrs. Dale's Diary, Music While You Work, Workers' Playtime, Listen With Mother, Woman's Hour, Children's Hour, In Town Tonight, the collective public space in which England lived. Entertainment harked back to the works canteen concert, itself drawing on the older tradition of the music hall. They even had performers of blessed innocence who made a living out of doing farmyard impressions of geese and chickens over the hot machinery. On the whole it was a cosy enough space, full of Mothers' Union concern and Brains Trust wisdom with a belief in the inevitability of progress. The most vicious coercion existed but invisibly, concealed in the unshakeable smugness of its own self-image, and phrased itself in action in gentle terms of doing things to you 'for your own good.’ The British way was quite obviously the best and only way. When the radio broke down, Granny took it to be mended by the Italian – somehow left over from the war - at the end of the street who stroked women's hands as he handed change, considering herself safe, at her great age, from his advances. She returned appalled, pointed to a small metal plaque on the back.

‘Of course, the radio doesn't work,’ she said, with the outrage of one shabbily deceived. ‘Turns out it's not even English made. It’s foreign.’

Yet the only escape for the young was to foreign-made Radio Luxembourg, like a party held in a house where parents had forbidden it. On a good night, it was possible to decrypt the sounds of anti-authoritarian jollity with constant delicate retuning like a radio-operator in the Resistance. On a bad night, pop music echoed full of hiss and the rhythmic risings and fallings of some dank sea cave, cross-cut with slicing atmospherics. They didn't want you to listen at all of course and most said it was deliberately jammed, for Radio Luxembourg offered a tackily glamorous world more unsettling than the BBC and with all the unimaginable possibilities of a broadcast from outer space, a world without rationing and beyond petty regulation where you could do things just because they sounded like fun. At regular intervals, Horace Bachelor told you how to win the pools from K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M - though no one seemed to ask why he bothered with pennies made from the wireless if he knew this great secret - and the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake beckoned with still-forbidden casino pleasures. There were advertisements and jingles and – best of all - no National Anthem at the end to send you gloomily to sleep and assure bad dreams.

Underneath the bed, under its dangling gills, was the chamber pot into which granny eased herself at night, white, hugely handled and inside was Hitler's face, scowling up, much stained. Mr Churchill, they told her rather huffily, was unavailable in this form though she had looked far and wide.

Like Queen Mary, granny had clearly never been properly young. The few pictures on the mantlepiece showed an uneasy girl mostly at banner-waving political demonstrations - Support the Miners, Second Front Now - looking off beyond the camera, someone yet to reach the age they had been designed for. She had spent the interim waiting for the Revolution that had been announced and was inevitably to come and fallen prey to grandad whom Jack had never met, dead before he was born.

The Queen Mother was the nation's official mother, the new Queen its sweetheart. There was an awkward and unnecessary duplication with Princess Margaret that promised trouble - in fairy stories, after all, sisters were always wicked sisters. But Granny Scoggins was a natural grandmother, giving her the same sort of official status, and in recognition her name had become a title. Even Dad, who called her 'Mum' to her face, referred to her as 'Granny Scoggins.’

Granny Scoggins's great pride was her penmanship. She had taught herself to read and write and developed a pernickety, 19th-century hand of finest copperplate that had qualified her to write up the Co-op accounts every year. She wrote regularly to the Prime Minister to offer advice and rebuke and always received a gracious answer of studied incomprehension from a civil servant called Hodge that began, ‘The Prime Minister has instructed me to write to you and express his thanks for your recent communication...’ She was a confirmed comparer of marriage dates and birth dates among the upper classes and wrote off to point out any discrepancy to the families of those involved. Experience had gradually led her to see the value of remaining anonymous and in old age she developed a considerable correspondence, one-way and unsigned, with some of the finest houses in the land. Mum had tried to throttle back on these activities but Granny knew a trick worth three of that.

‘You cycle down the road and post a letter for me, young Jack, and keep your cakehole shut,’ she'd say. ‘There’s sixpence in it for you.’

He always looked forward to such errands since she gave him the postage and a letter that he could throw away in the sure knowledge that no further enquiries would ever be made. The money went on Spangles for his cake hole. She never sealed the letters to save postage and he struggled to make sense of their contents.

‘You ought to stick them down, Gran,’ he urged in a fit of cupidity, ‘even if it costs a bit more.’

‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I've got to save the money for my old age.’

Her furniture had been chosen with an eye neither to utility nor beauty but because the individual pieces were bargains at the auction sales she liked to visit. Each was a minor victory over the capitalist process, a slave redeemed from the market. An auction list was to her like a form sheet. She would go through it, pencilstublicking, marking down good bets and on viewing day Jack would be sent off to hunt through the heaps of piled up what-nots, exploded coaching chairs and lines of gloomy pianos to find the good prospect she had picked out. She would assess and value, check limbs and joints, weigh the likely opposition and take her seat at the sale with the assured aplomb of a major purchaser.

‘This one 'ere. This one 'ere,’ the dramatically ravaged and nicotine-patinated assistant chanting his chorus and holding up or pointing out the lots between gasps of smoke, a pack of twenty peeping out from the top pocket of his work jacket. Everyone seemed to have a fag in their mouth in those days. Granny Scoggins particularly liked to snatch a good piece from the filter-tip chomping jaws of a dealer, grimly raising her bid by a shilling a time, irritating the caller, making them work for it, no surplus value there, till they threw up their hands and either raised by a pound or walked away muttering. Her trophies were crammed round the walls, under the posters showing Soviet heroes snarling in Cyrillic script, an unrecognised bow-fronted chest of drawers of the 18th century – Jack had slept as a baby in one of those drawers - a Victorian prie-dieu with claw-feet, a bearskin rug with missing teeth and a crumbling plaster head, even a metal hospital trolley in chipped cream enamel - piled up year after year as if in storage.

‘Why don't you sort them out, gran, and get rid of stuff you never use?’

‘I will. I will,’ irritably, ‘when I work out where I'm going to settle down.’

On the dresser she had a volume of photos even older, in tones of hushed sepia, set like statues in gold-rimmed alcoves scooped into thick, cream paper. She would point to flat-chested women in pudding-basin haircuts.

‘Look. That's what we used to wear. Your Auntie Mabel got the back of the hairbrush for doing the Charleston in the parlour with a sailor. She was a flapper.’

Jack could hardly believe it when, years later, he found out she had bought the album too at a jumble sale and simply adopted the abandoned pictures as her own vanished past, as you might take in a stray cat.

***

Jack’s school had begun as a large private house of some pretension, raised up by a successful manufacturer of gas mantles, his income securely protected for life with a hedge of patents, whose builder had a taste for adding on expensive extras like bay windows and fretwork gables. Once it had even had a name and a weathered inscription over the door lintel still read La Belle Époque. The bottom had fallen out of the gas mantle business and it was here that now lay the headmistress's office and living quarters. Being in a house, made the whole school seem a mere temporary wartime billet and justified the eccentricity of its arrangements. It was here that health workers in acts of state benefaction and control groped boys' testicles, patted budding breasts, held up fingers to be counted while the nit nurse – Nitty Nora - lifted greasy hair with a pencil probing for infestation. Jack wasn't impressed by the nit nurse. For years she missed Tony Wrigley's lice. Should get her own eyes tested. The bugs were so at home that, in sunny weather, they crawled out to bask on his forehead like seals on rocks. As a party trick, he would comb them out on the desk, spear them on the nib of his pen and drown them in the inkwell. It was only when other parents refused to let their children sit beside him that something was finally done about it and he stank the class out with rank coal tar. Oddly, he had never been mocked. To the children, he was a figure of awe.

The first joke every Weylands child learned was to call La Belle Époque 'The Belly Poke.’ Over the years the house had not maintained its decorative elements. So it had a weathervane, porch and gazebo but the first no longer moved, the second had no roof and the third had no floor as well as no place in the children's vocabulary and was given over to brambles as Nature’s way of forbidding climbing. In the spirit of utility Britain, the gardens had been crisscrossed with lumpy tarmac paths by the erratic sprayers of the Department of Works. Sour, craggy men, do-it-for-you-private expressions on their faces, they had taken bitter pleasure in their work like the Romans imposing straight lines on the curvaceous English landscape. Between the paths, the gardening club's rose bushes clung to an undernourished and poisoned semi-life, their only protection the terrible penalties with which the children were threatened for unauthorised stepping off the tarmac.

Around The Belly Poke had accreted a series of meaner structures, as the post-war demographic bulge passed through the school system like a goat down the body of a boa constrictor. There was a large hall of ecclesiastical feel but built of those cheap municipal bricks with the raised herringbone pattern that they used for clinics, council houses and other shoddy dispensaries of State charity and that crumbled to the touch. There was an outside toilet block where the pipes froze and burst every winter but which was ideal for felonious pursuits. Some of the older boys could pee over the wall into the bit where the girls skipped but throwing water over in your hands was just as good and made them scream. Jack saw the competitive peeing as not distinct in kind from any other athletic pursuit, running, jumping and throwing things. A concrete canteen, bolted together with rusted iron clamps, was haunted by ghosts of boiled cabbage and prunes. The fifth form dwelt apart and exclusive in a separate modern prefab of brieze blocks and metal windows that offered an alluring taste of the perks of maturity.

In short, it looked the way a school should look, ramshackle, serviceable, territorially diverse, was immediately identifiable as such and could in fact be nothing else. The authorities tried to humanise the blank playgrounds with a policy that combined kindness and parsimony. A painter turned up and painted large bullseye patterns on the outside walls of the hall before the puzzled eyes of the children. The idea was that they would amuse themselves by throwing balls at these targets. But disorderly ball games were strictly banned on school premises and anyway the children would not have used the bullseyes, being primly shocked and baffled by this unsuitable and punishable graffiti.

Across the way was the war memorial. The First World War had led to the erection of a yeoman redbrick version of the cenotaph with bronze name tablet and garland-brandishing goddess of peace whose leaves corroded and dropped over the years so that she now seemed to invite to a game of deck quoits. The Second War, being a sort of sequel to the First, was economically accommodated by putting up an extension to one side so that the original structure was now lopsided like a one-armed veteran but the older and least mature members of the village still raised their hats to it as they passed. Children avoided that by not wearing their caps until out of its range and to climb on it carried a rumoured threat of the death penalty.

Since school was a thing of good works, it fell largely within the female domain like church-going and midwifery. Some of the teachers were married but since only charladies on the wireless could use plain 'Missus' as a form of address, they were all called 'Miss' in class, spinsterhood thrust upon them out of politesse. The headmistress, Miss Dappleforth, known to generations as ‘Dora Duckweed’, was as short as her patience, ancient and frightening with hair-sprouting warts – one on her chin had two black hairs exactly like the feelers of an insect - blue veins and a penchant for tweeds and sensible shoes. These she repaired herself with iron brads so she combined the tread of an Aldershot drill sergeant with the smell of old leather and Yardley's lavender. She spat when she talked.

‘Don't spray it, say it,’ the children chanted under their breaths. If they didn't dare say the words, just humming the rhythm and pitch of the refrain was good enough. ‘Da-daa-da. Daa-da.’

Nature had compensated Miss Dappleforth for her other frailties by making her profoundly deaf so she wore a hearing aid, a large bakelite box hung round her neck, its huge earpiece coloured bright pink to make it inconspicuous against her grey skin. In the buzz and rumble of crowded rooms, often the only word she picked up was her own name which led to a paranoid belief people were talking about her behind her back.

On Thursday afternoons, by ancient convention, she gathered together with three other ladies to sit in a circle and saw out Haydn string quartets. As arthritis stiffened their hands, playing became more difficult and less satisfactory, paining the joints and so the ears. Nowadays, they still met and sat in a circle in the same places as before and still gripped their instruments but now just to listen in close harmony to gramophone recordings of Haydn string quartets. Sometimes Miss Dappleforth preferred to turn her hearing aid off and hear them just in her head.

Lesbianism was in those days a purely literary possibility of London fringe groups who betrayed themselves by also practising nudism and alpine rambling, so local rumour invented for her instead a great heroic love tragically lost in the trenches of the Somme. It went without saying that her great age reduced any passion to either tragedy or comedy. In the godless but deeply superstitious world of the children, this explained the dedication with which she put on black and hung a dead fox around her neck every Sunday to wobble to church on her bicycle, attending both services, with a large hymnal in the basket before her like a loaf of bread. She had been appointed to her post from outside the town some thirty years before and local people felt she was starting to get the hang of it and might well stay. Familiarity bred content.

In Jack’s school, the other members of staff were less substantial without being flighty, for the word 'teacher' still evoked great respect and overtones of dedication and had none of the implications of semi-literate sociologese and moral dubiety it would later acquire. There was always at least one male teacher, however, for it was obscurely felt that one master was obviously 'needed' amongst all those women, like a steadying white officer amongst unreliable colonial troops, to stiffen the backbone. Not surprisingly, these men often turned out to be made of poorer stuff than the women and constant re-postings alone preserved the male mystique. Several masters had disappeared quite suddenly in mid-week. One had openly chased lady teachers with a quite unreasonable optimism which had not passed unnoticed among the slum-wisdom of some pupils. Schoolboy folklore credited him with an enormous penis so that when he walked past a radiator one of them would always go, ‘Drrrr!’, the sound of a stick being run along railings. Another was sensationally crushed on his motorbike in Weyland's only major motoring accident, an event as rare as being struck by lightning and just as needful of moral explanation. He had been seen - shockingly for a man of learning - in the pub. Worse, in the village it was known that he had misused the advantages of his education for mere barroom wit. On one occasion he had pointed at his pint and asked the barmaid before a hushed audience. ‘Can you get a vodka in that love? You can? Then why don't you fill it up with beer you silly cow?’ His demise seemed only fitting at a time when films unanimously clung to the trite message that wickedness was atoned for by death.

After the crash, one of Jack's exercise books was returned to him from the squashed paniers, corrected in the dead man's hand but with a glamorous tyre track across its cover and just a suggestion of what might be blood in one corner. It was like a letter from beyond the grave. Mum, unaware of the terrible administrative consequences, dumped it with finality in the salvage bin. ‘It's not decent, morbid, giving a boy a thing like that. You can tell them I said so.’ He knew they'd kill him at school.

***

Jack felt that, for a man of the cloth, the Rev. Maclehose was a relatively godly person. Unlike the curate, he had not embraced that modern version of the Church of England that saw itself solely in terms of social work and the dispensing of soup instead of unpalatable moral direction. Instead, he clung to embarrassing residues of theology and ritual - even including a belief in God as an ancient man with a grey beard - that had the comforting virtue of familiarity for older villagers. For the curate, Man was good and all bad things therefore came from the Devil. God made little, green apples but the stomach ache they caused could only be from the Prince of Darkness. Jack found the notion of a world without a looming judgmental presence that cast down guilt, shame and thunderbolts confusing, since it contradicted everything he knew about life but, if it turned out that there was no Judgement Day of hellfire and damnation, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world and he gradually formed an idea of religion as a sort of deliberate incoherence. For Reverend Maclehose, God was good and so he sent bad Mankind bad things as deserved punishment for sin but he sometimes wondered what he had done to deserve his own curate. Such principles were the evocative objects - the equivalent of red pillar boxes, Victorian pennies and digestive biscuits - of his theological experience. His church was a place of sonorous organs and flower arrangements, hand-embroidered hangings and vestments, the warming glow of polished wood, brass and stone that his flock already knew from the saloon bar as the signs of a refuge from an unhappy world. And the Reverend Maclehose embraced joyfully his role of providing cosy ceremonial accompaniments for the major life-cycle rituals, a sort of loud-voiced MC of their lives. Many were baptised, most were married and almost all were buried at his hands. In the end, he won them all, adequate proof of the rightness of his calling.

He was a tall, somewhat funereal man whose height was diluted by a stoop and perfectly, almost aggressively, bald. A mixture of vanity and deafness - the result of a wartime stint as chaplain to a gunnery regiment - led him to wear those glasses that had a deaf aid concealed in the chunky frames. Many a parishioner had been intimidated by his slipping them on and glaring, the better to hear what they were saying. When he and Miss Dappleforth got within a stone's shot of each other, the air pinged and howled with static interference and feedback.

Except for the war, he had been made to lie down mainly in green parishes, encountering the curate’s devil mostly in his well-dressed and relatively urbane forms, cushioned by adequate Easter offerings and the possession of a large Victorian vicarage. He saw the world as basically a good place where the Church of England could indeed be defined as the Conservative Party at prayer and where things were to be made better and better by keeping them just the way they were. The face of evil was to be seen most clearly in any form of change. Every year when he was on retreat in a house run by nuns in Weymouth, the curate would run riot about the church, putting up large, hand-painted signs of evangelical tenor, lettered in orange. ‘Jesus - the rock that does not roll’ or ‘Despite inflation, the wages of sin is still death’ or ‘Jesus - not just a Christmas presence’ or ‘Noah's company stayed afloat when the whole world went into liquidation.’ As soon as the Rev. Maclehose returned they were plucked down again and obliterated. It was as much the vulgar, bright colours as the message that troubled him.

It was his unrecognised misfortune to have two Scottie dogs, one black, one white, just like in the Dewar's whisky advertisements. He called them Whisky and Soda and thought himself waggish. Soda was the white one of course. The alternative had been to call them Warp and Woof. They were joyful, frisky dogs and ranged at will over the vicarage garden, rooting and fetching sticks in the shrubberies and bamboo thickets. At night, he would call them in and, after supper, it was like the warmth of old port to him to see them as they lay chubby and wet-jowled, snoring by his fireside. He thumbed his pipe with Three Nuns tobacco and rejoiced in the benison of nature's foison. The word 'dog' he noted, occurred eighteen times in the Bible, the word 'cat' not at all.

‘He drinks,’ said the parishioners. ‘He's a bugger for his scotch. You can hear him every night shouting for it, regular as clockwork. '”Whisky! Soda!” over and over again.’

Many of the parishioners also drank. But Jack realised that vicars were somehow not real people, more costumed bit-players, and it was the recognised role of religious specialists to act out ‘Austere Virtuous Life’ on behalf of the secular laity, just as the Royal Family were expected to mime a model of ‘Domestic Bliss’ that their subjects no longer practised themselves. Yet tippling was acknowledged as a kiss-my-ring Catholic pursuit, the whisky priest a character who had wandered in from another play, so that here it bore overtones of popery and was therefore unacceptable.

‘It ought not to be allowed,’ Mum tutted, only half aware she was impersonating Mr. Growser from the wireless. ‘I don't know how his housekeeper puts up with it. Of course, he's very sly. You never catch him having a nip. I wonder what he does with the empties.’

Purchases of spirits, except at Christmas, were always carefully monitored in the village shop. There was no anonymous supermarket where they could be made. So the Reverend must be deliberately channelling his trade outside to the detriment of the local economy. Now that showed a downright lack of fellow feeling. In Weylands, thrift often lay behind the condemnation of vice so that wives disapproved of husbands' adultery largely on the grounds of 'wasting money.'

In his innocence, the Rev. Maclehose was unaware of these doubts of his flock, indeed, he even seemed to sense a quickening of their miraculous faith in the close attention they all paid nowadays as he sipped the communion wine as if expecting a bolt of divine lightning. Every week, he swung himself up into the Sunday lectern with a stiffness that suggested less old age than the conscious burden of his own authority and the weight of their sin and sometimes stumbled on the worn top step which led some of the congregation to smirk at inner knowledge. Occasionally, he cursed passionately under his breath, ‘Oh bread and butter!’ or on a bad day, ‘Oh, armholes!’ and fixed them with an acid stare and let it roll slowly, corroding their smirks, over them, as if looking for a known suspect who might be able to assist him with his enquiries. It was a bit of business that never failed. Guilt was the fuel that primed the pump of Weylands people. Today, his eye rested on Jack, sitting in the choirstalls, surpliced and beruffed, a vision of innocence. Jack blushed. Religion was still mainly a social act in Weylands and it was no impediment to choristry that he had never been baptised. Mum and Dad, had omitted it not as a defiant statement of their agnosticism but more because baptism was seen as some fine-tuning of the ritual apparatus, a technicality that had yet to be mastered outside the middle class or a poetic elaboration that went beyond the dingy, utilitarian symbolism of the state and was therefore just showing off. In the army, on church parade, the men were ordered to sort themselves into ‘Normal C of E, Catholics and Fancy Buggers.’ People who held christenings, with silver spoons, cakes and embroidered smocks, were Very Fancy Buggers.

‘According to the ten commandments,’ roared the vicar, stoking up their fires of guilt, ‘you're all damned! Listen to the list of your sins.’ He breathed in, suggesting the length of the list that now had to be read. ‘Heathendom, idolatry, swearing, scorning the Sabbath, contempt for parents, killing, adultery...’

He looked up and glared. Someone was creeping from the church, face averted - Dick Moore.

‘Just remembered where he left his bike,’ came a stage whisper, followed by titters.

’..stealing, bearing false witness...’

There came a rhythmic squeak. He looked up again in outrage. Now, someone fat was creeping out after him in creaking shoes. With the sun shining in his eyes, he could not quite see who it was.

***