Читать книгу England have my Bones - T. H. White - Страница 12

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Sunday. Fishing illegal. I was woken at 4 a.m. by two blackbirds, singing like angels, and worked at another book. Now that some of yesterday’s horror has worn off I can record a story of Macdonald’s which amused me. It was about a short-sighted gentleman who was a bad fisherman, but he enjoyed it. Macdonald swears that he once fished the whole of the Mill Pool with his fly caught in the knee of his plus-fours. “He could hear the line splashing into the water,” says Macdonald, “and that keepit him happy.” “But why didn’t you tell him?” I asked. “Ah,” says Macdonald, putting his finger by the side of his nose, “ ’twas safest there.”

The post office is still cosmopolitan, but it has a nice double bed. All the beds in Scotland seem to be double, and a good thing too. But they are too short. Mine has two pots that live underneath it, side by side and upside down. It is a cosy, connubial and egg-like relationship.

When I am the Laird of Craigenkillie, I propose to be a wicked laird. If not eating the children of my tenants in the shape of a were-wolf, I shall hunt the tenants themselves across the moors, with black mastiffs. It will make very little difference to them in any case: their life is already insupportable. I shall be ninety years old, my nose will meet my chin, and I shall hunt my hounds out of a bath-chair drawn by Shetland ponies. I shall have to wear a huntsman’s cap, a plaid shawl, and an ear-trumpet: and I shall wave an ebony walking stick with silver knobs.

The small farmer who has the field opposite the Mill Pool ploughs it with a cow and a horse together. The bored and pansified gait with which the cow walks is indescribable.

This evening I felt a twinge for the Shire. Jimmy Warm is sitting over a fire in the tap-room of the Crown, whilst I am writing this. I must send him a small part of my bliss here, if I can: a salmon perhaps would do.

Space is an arbitrary division, as strange as time. The Crown is as near to me, if I choose to think of it, as the earliest history of the Shire is in time. I can be close to them, and write about them, even in Scotland: especially on a Scots Sunday. Thinking this, I fell to wanting to write about the Shire: about its many-leaved, thick-trunked presence, five hundred miles away; about the derivation of its name, nowadays considered unsound, from an ancient word which meant a “beech”; about its various, unimportant little alumni—the saint who cherished a pet swan which now adorns the town hall, the other holy man who distinguished himself by putting the devil in a boot, the two Lollards who were burnt at Shireham, and the mysterious executioner of Charles the First. All these things, however, must wait until I am back at home: or for another dull, unfishable Sunday.