Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Louis De Bernières

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Wilderness

  Archie and the Birds

  Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers

  Archie and the Woman

  The Girt Pike

  The Auspicious Meeting of the First Two Members of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet

  Mrs Mac

  Colonel Barkwell, Troodos and the Fish

  All My Everlasting Love

  The Devil and Bessie Maunderfield

  The Auspicious Meeting of the Third Member of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet with the First Two

  Footprint in the Snow

  The Happy Death of the General

  Rabbit

  This Beautiful House

  Talking to George

  The Auspicious Meeting of the First Member of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet with the Fourth

  Silly Bugger (1)

  Silly Bugger (2)

  The Broken Heart

  The Death of Miss Agatha Feakes

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Welcome to the village of Notwithstanding where a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether, a spiritualist lives in a cottage with the ghost of her husband, and people think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. Based on de Bernières’ recollections of the village he grew up in, Notwithstanding is a funny and moving depiction of a charming vanished England.

  About the Author

  Louis de Bernières’ works include seven novels, a short story collection and a radio play. His 2008 novel, The Partisan’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and his most recent work, Notwithstanding: English Village Stories, was published in 2009. An international best-seller, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Novel in 2004.

  Also by Louis De Bernières

  The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts

  Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

  The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

  Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World

  Birds Without Wings

  Red Dog

  A Partisan’s Daughter

  This book is dedicated to my children, Robin and Sophie. May they take their village with them wherever they go.

  LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

  Notwithstanding

  Stories from an English Village

  Wilderness

  There is a wilderness where once I lived

  Whose every inch I knew and loved.

  I roamed there as a dreaming boy

  Before reality began;

  I walked there still, remembering,

  As I grew up beyond a man.

  Sweet little in that wilderness I knew

  Of God’s indifference and of lovers’ pain.

  Too young to suffer, I remember

  Longer summers, deeper slumbers,

  Better laughter, warmer rain.

  ARCHIE AND THE BIRDS

  ‘I’M NOT IN. Over,’ I told my mother, sighing as I held the walkie-talkie in my right hand and with my left continued painstakingly to stick small seeds to the outside of my living-room window.

  ‘When will you be back? Over,’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Over,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re back soon,’ she said, reprovingly. ‘This is the third time I’ve walkie-talked and you haven’t been there. How am I supposed to talk with my own son if he’s never there? Over.’

  ‘But, Mother, I was here. I was busy. And now we are talking. Over.’

  ‘What’s keeping you so occupied, anyway? Over.’

  ‘I’m sticking seeds to the living-room window, Mother. Over.’

  There was a pause for thought, and then my mother said, ‘Well, at least you’re keeping out of mischief. I’ll buzz you later. Over.’

  ‘Roger, wilco, over and out,’ I said.

  I placed the walkie-talkie on the window ledge, and continued to stick the seeds to the window. It was extremely tedious, and, as I had been at it since breakfast time, I was beginning to find the whole task irksome. I should have been out painting and decorating and bringing in some cash. I even wondered whether this palaver was worth it. Some of the seeds were exceedingly small, and I kept dropping them into the flower bed. I had heard that a lot of the ones in bird food are actually hemp, and I worried that perhaps in the spring these would germinate. If the village bobby happened to pass by, I might get into serious trouble and cause a scandal in the village. So I was spending an undue amount of time on my knees on the damp lawn, looking for the seeds that I had dropped. No doubt many would be found by mice, but then the cat would probably jump on them and I would feel guilty about having lured them to their deaths.

  That was the least of my worries. In fact, my whole life was turning into a series of irritating little problems, each of which required altogether too much time to deal with. In this instance it ultimately occurred to me that the sensible thing would be to cover the window with glue, and then just fling the seeds at it in the hope that most of them would stick. I tried this plan out, and it worked quite admirably. I stood back and contemplated my good work, whereupon the walkie-talkie crackled again.

  ‘Mother to Archie-master. Are you back yet? Over,’ demanded my mother. ‘Only I just heard from the priest that you were late at Mass last Sunday, and caused a stir when you came in. Over.’

  ‘I am back, Mother, obviously, and I would have been on time if I hadn’t been late. I had to take Archie out before he did his business on the carpet. Over.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then. Only it’s a bad thing to get a reputation for lateness. It reflects badly. Over.’

  ‘So it does,’ I said. ‘But let me point out that you didn’t go to Mass at all. You were in bed with a magazine and your head full of curlers. Over.’

  I went back indoors and into the living room. The smears on the glass looked horrible from the inside, and the seeds somehow didn’t look right. I realised that I should have arranged them in some kind of artistic pattern. I could have made them into a portrait of a cockerel, or even a nice parsnip, but now it was too late. The walkie-talkie buzzed again. ‘Mother to Archie-master. So why would you be sticking seeds on the windows? Over.’

  ‘Mother,’ I said, a little wearily, ‘why can’t you just come out of the kitchen and talk to me without using the walkie-talkie? I’m only in the living room. Have you lost the use of your legs? Over.’

  ‘I’m making a cake and getting lunch. Bangers and mash and baked beans. It’ll be ten minutes. I’ll give you a buzz. Over and out.’

  I sat in my armchair and waited to see what the response to the seeds would be. I realised that I could not expect results right away, but nonetheless I was extremely curious. While I waited for lunch I reflected upon the chain of events that had led me to adopt this desperate measure.

  It had begun with the dog, a black retriever. The gypsy who sold it to us took advantage of our ignorance, saying that it was a golden retriever, and that it would turn gold later. All golden retriever puppies were black at first. He was obviously expecting us to fall in love with the dog, so that by the time we found out we’d been sold a pup, we wouldn’t be wanting a refund. He was right, that was exactly what happened, only we got revenge by giving him a rotten rooster and
telling him it was pheasant, well hung.

  My mother wanted to call the dog Sooty, but the cat had already laid claim to that name, and we didn’t fancy the confusion, so we called him Archibald Scott-Moncrieff instead, or Archie for short.

  Archie was a lollopy friendly dog, and when he was very small he developed a predilection for shoelaces. You couldn’t take a step without finding him fastened to your foot. We took to wearing slip-ons, and he just transferred his attentions to the kitchen trolley, biting at the wheels whenever my mother moved it about the house, and yipping at it incessantly when it wasn’t being wheeled anywhere. We realised that we had acquired a dog with a terrible flair for obsession, and we decided to take his mind off the trolley. I brought him out in the fields with a walking stick and taught him to retrieve.

  He was altogether the natural retrieving dog, and soon I was out there with a nine-iron and a golf ball, practising day and night for the pitch-and-putt competition, with Archie flying back and forth between the legs of the cows, my Penfold Commando in his jaws. I tried to train him to put the ball back on the tee, but his nose got in the way of his eyes, and he missed. He had a soft mouth and never put a single mark on the ball, and I had such good practice that soon enough I could hit the ball high and straight, and land it on any cow I chose. I could have given Christie O’Connor a match, and I would have won the competition but for a run of bad luck in the putting.

  The trouble was that Archie wouldn’t stop retrieving, and in his spare time he filled the house with junk. We’d be watching the goggle-box in the evening, as Archie rushed in and out with his tennis ball. We’d leave the front door open and throw the ball out of the living-room window, whereupon Archie would fly into the hallway, out of the front door and into the darkness. Through the window would come wafting the sound of Archie galumphing and crashing and snuffling in the shrubs, and soon enough he’d be back with his ball drenched in saliva, dropping it at our feet, looking up at us with liquid brown eyes full of pleading, and then one of us would go soft and throw the ball out again, saying ‘Bloody dog’ as we did so.

  When we couldn’t take any more, Archie just went out and fetched things that hadn’t even been thrown. That’s how my mother found her gardening gloves again, and that’s how one evening we were presented with a frog, a log, a baby rabbit and a marrow that needed picking. One day Archie shattered the rake by trying to charge through the front door with the handle horizontal in his mouth. The only thing that Archie didn’t retrieve was the cat, because Sooty wouldn’t cooperate, and fluffed herself up into a chimney brush if ever he tried. Just as we were Catholics, in fact the only other Catholic family in Notwithstanding (everyone else being Anglican except for the brothers at the garage who didn’t drink), retrieving was the nearest that Archie got to having a religion, and since we’d always practised toleration, we felt that we had to put up with his chosen way of life.

  When Archie was about two years old he came in with a blackbird, but we paid no attention. The bird was dead, and we thought that he must have found it somewhere. But then the next day he came in with a song thrush and a starling, and we became suspicious.

  In our village strange things happen from time to time. To this day we still talk about the time when Mrs Mac’s sister went round telling us she’d heard on the radio that from now on the rain was going to fall upward, and sure enough it did. We sat watching it out of our windows, and it looked to us as if the drops in the puddles were actually little bursts of water heading skyward. We became anxious about the village pond emptying out, but it never did, and eventually Mrs Mac’s sister confessed that she’d heard the radio item on 1 April. Even so, most of us were convinced by lengthy observation that in fact the rain had been falling upward, and we had some good arguments about it, for and against, until Sir Edward explained that it was a perceptual illusion caused by the well-known effects of intellectual confusion upon the eyesight under conditions of simple Galilean relativity, whatever that is. After that, the rain fell downward once more, and normality was restored.

  Anyway, after Archie had brought in a pigeon, a linnet, a greenfinch, and a woodcock, we began to realise that his retrieving had gone too far, and it wasn’t until I took to sitting in the living room after lunch that I discovered the cause of his success in retrieving dead birds that no one had shot. I was reading the Sporting Times one afternoon, when there was a fierce thump on the window. I looked up, startled, to see a robin sliding down it, leaving a thick trail of blood behind on the glass. A few minutes later Archie brought the little bird in, and, as usual, because it would be a shame to see it go to waste, I put it in Sooty’s bowl. Two more birds committed suicide by crashing into the window that very same evening.

  My mother and I discussed the possibility that the local birds were suffering from depression. We knew that sometimes in the human population a kind of self-destructive hysteria can sweep through – the last time it happened in Notwithstanding was in the eighteenth century when the calendar was adjusted and everyone thought they’d been deprived of several days of life. Somehow this didn’t make sense with respect to birds, so we were forced to conclude that it must be a spontaneous collective amnesia about windows.

  That’s why I stuck birdseed to the glass, to teach them all about windows again, and, though I say it myself, it did work wonderfully. We had dozens of birds of all kinds flapping against the window, picking off the seeds, and the sparrows and tits learned to hover like hummingbirds while they pecked. My mother and I were quite chuffed to have contributed to bird evolution, especially when they also realised by experience to keep out of Sooty’s reach. She only got two or three before they learned.

  Nonetheless, it drove us barmy to see Sooty trying to get at the birds, leaping up and down with a mad expression on her face as though she were on an invisible and uncontrollable pogo stick. On top of that, the repeated sound of her claws dragging down the windows was worse than the scritch of a teacher’s fingernail on the blackboard, so we moved the television into the other room, and Archie went back to fetching everything except birds.

  OBADIAH OAK, MRS GRIFFITHS AND THE CAROL SINGERS

  MRS GRIFFITHS GOES to the shop and stands next to Obadiah Oak, her nose wrinkled in distaste. Obadiah, known to all as Jack, lives with his daughter by the cricket green, in a cottage that has been handed down in his family for seven generations. Jack is the village’s last peasant, and he and his house smell of two hundred years of peasant life; he exudes the aromas of wet leather and horse manure, costive dogs, turnips, rainwater and cabbage water, sausages, verdigris, woollen socks, Leicester cheese, fish guts, fraying curtains, mice under the stairs, mud on the carpet and woodlice behind the pipes, but most of all he reeks of six decades of neglected hygiene. Jack is considered a ‘character’, with his teeth like tombstones, his stubble like a filecard, his lips like kippers, his rolling Surrey accent and his eyes as round as plates, but newcomers avoid him if they can. They moved here in search of picture-postcard England, and are uncomfortable with a real countryman who knows how to wring the neck of a chicken and has no compunction about drowning kittens in a bucket. Jack is an anachronism, but he does not know it, and he is standing in the village shop because he has nothing to do, and not many to talk with. Every day he comes in and buys cigarette papers, so that by now he must have a roomful of them, and he engages the shop assistant in a dilatory conversation about the weather, punctuating his remarks with hawking. He used to spit it out, but nowadays he swallows it, having been roundly told off one afternoon by the squirrel-shooting Polly Wantage.

  ‘Artnoon,’ he says to Mrs Griffiths. ‘Turned out nice again. Looks like rain though.’

  ‘Getting chilly,’ replies Mrs Griffiths crisply, hoping to avoid a prolonged conversation.

  ‘Time o’ year,’ says Jack, ‘what wi’ Christmas on the doorstep. Going away?’

  ‘Staying at home. I usually do.’

  ‘Come and eat wi’ us?’ says Jack, knowing that she will refuse,
because everyone always does. He does not in truth want to have Mrs Griffiths round for Christmas dinner, but he has always been the kind of man who tries to do his bit, the sort of fellow who will offer his sturdy back to a child who wants to climb a tree to fetch down conkers.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly,’ says Mrs Griffiths shortly, without even thanking him. But Jack is not offended; he has a sense of his place in the world, and a sensible man expects snooty people to be snooty.

  ‘Happy Christmas, then,’ he says, and he touches the rim of his sagging hat. He leaves the shop and strolls home, directly across the middle of the cricket pitch. He has been asked not to, but cannot see the point of being tender in the winter about a pitch that is mangled every weekend of the summer.

  Mrs Griffiths exchanges resigned glances with Mrs Davidson, whose turn it is to man the shop. It makes no profit any more; no one would buy it from the previous owner, and now it is run on a cooperative and voluntary basis by those ladies who have time on their hands.

  ‘I don’t know why someone doesn’t tell that man to wash,’ says Mrs Griffiths, crossly. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ says Mrs Davidson. ‘Polly Wantage told him once, you know, after she stopped him from spitting, and what he said to her was unrepeatable.’

  Mrs Griffiths’ eyes widen with a kind of horrified delight. Strong language is so far outside her world that when she overhears it, it is as exotic as Bengal tigers.

  Mrs Griffiths buys a big box of Christmas cards because she wants Mrs Davidson to think that she has lots of friends and relations. She will send a card to the vicar and the doctor, and she will drop one through the letter boxes of the more respectable people in the village, so that they will send one back, and then, should anyone call round and glance at her cards, it will be clear that she is well connected and respected. She also buys mincemeat and ready-made frozen shortcrust pastry, because tonight she is going to make mince pies for the carol singers.