Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Read online

  Mrs Griffiths has always hated the carol singers, even though they are the children of the better families. They arrive with their guitars and their recorders, and every year they sing the same two songs, ‘Silent Night’ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. They collect for the NSPCC, and Mrs Griffiths would really rather give money to the RSPCA; at least animals cannot be blamed for anything, and do not grow up to be thieves and yobs. Mrs Griffiths secretly resents the way in which the carol singers are so young and bright-eyed, so full of high laughter, so full of the future, and previously she has always turned out the lights when she heard them coming, so that she does not have to go out and listen to them, or give them money, or make mince pies and hot punch as everyone else does. The carol singers have always sung to her closed door and doused lights, and have then departed.

  But things have changed. Mrs Griffiths lost her husband in the spring, and is slowly realising that at last the time has come when she has to make an effort to get on with people. She did not love her husband, he was boring and inconsequential, and she had not even loved him when they married. After he died, she felt merely a sense of relief, conjoined with the bitterness of a freedom that has come too late. Sometimes she wonders whether she has ever loved anyone at all, and certainly she has never loved anyone as they do on the television late at night, with all those heaving backsides. But, even though her husband was a cipher, nowadays Mrs Griffiths feels a certain emptiness, a certain need to reach out, a certain need to be reborn. Tonight she will make mince pies and punch, she will leave the lights on, she will come out and listen, and she will tell the children that their music is wonderful. She will ignore the fact that they know only one verse of ‘Silent Night’, their guitars are out of tune and their recorders too shrill, and she will wish them a happy Christmas even though they are beautiful and still have a chance in life.

  Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum. ‘After they’ve been,’ she thinks, ‘I will write all my cards, and then I’ll draw a hot bath and read.’ Since her husband died, Mrs Griffiths has taken to reading true-life romances that one can order six at a time from a special club. She has read so many that she thinks she could probably write one herself.

  It grows very dark, and three hours pass. Mrs Griffiths goes often to her door, and opens it, to see if she can hear the carol singers coming. The night is very cold; there is a frosty wind, but she does not think that it is going to rain. They will be here before long.

  Mrs Griffiths sits in her wooden chair and thinks about what she should say to the children; does ‘Merry Christmas’ sound better than ‘Happy Christmas’? Does ‘Thank you so much for coming’ sound too formal? The young are not very formal these days. During the time when everyone was going on about the Beatles, the youngsters kept saying ‘groovy’, but that was probably not very ‘with it’ any more. She is not even sure if ‘with it’ is ‘with it’ these days. She experiments with ‘Groovy Christmas’, but decides against it.

  Mrs Griffiths hears ‘Silent Night’ in the distance. The children are singing to the gypsies in their scrapyard, causing the Alsatians to howl. Now they are singing to the Davidsons, and now they are singing to the baroque musicologist, and now they are singing to smelly Jack Oak. Mrs Griffiths listens very hard for the squeak of her garden gate and the experimental chords of the guitarists. She knows that, in between the houses, the children bray out songs from pop groups with silly names and working-class accents.

  The children arrive at the garden gate, and the tall, lanky one says, ‘What about this one?’

  ‘Not worth it,’ says the other guitarist, who is proud of the fact that he is going to get a shaving kit for Christmas. He strokes his invisible moustache with a nail-bitten forefinger.

  ‘She’s an old skinflint,’ says the blonde girl who will be beautiful when she loses her puppy fat.

  ‘Her husband died,’ says the dark, sensitive girl with the brown eyes.

  ‘It won’t do any harm, will it?’ asks the blonde girl.

  ‘There’s no point,’ says the lanky boy, ‘she just turns off the lights as soon as she hears us coming. Every year it’s the same, don’t you remember? She’s an old ratbag.’

  ‘Mum told us not to leave her out,’ says the blonde.

  ‘Who’s going to tell Mum?’ demands her brother. ‘Let’s go and do the Armstrongs.’

  Mrs Griffiths sits on her wooden chair and hears ‘Silent Night’ coming from next door. At first she feels a livid pang of anger, and one or two of those vehement forbidden words spring to her mind, but not to her lips. She is indignant, and thinks, ‘How dare they miss me out. They always come here. Why am I the one to miss out?’ She looks at her inviting heap of mince pies and her steaming bowl of punch, and thinks, ‘I did all this for them.’ She wants to go outside and shout insults at them, but she cannot think of anything that would not sound ridiculous and undignified.

  Alongside her anger and frustration, Mrs Griffiths abruptly feels more tired and forlorn than she has ever felt in her life, and she begins to cry for the first time since she was a child. She is surprised by large tears that well up in her eyes and slide down the sides of her nose, rolling down her hands and wrists, and into her sleeves. She had not remembered that tears could be so warm. She tastes one, in order to be reminded of their saltiness, and finds it comforting. She thinks, ‘Perhaps I should get a cat,’ and fetches some kitchen roll so that she can blow her nose.

  Mrs Griffiths begins to write her cards. One for the vicar, one for the doctor, one for the people in the mansion, one for the Conservative councillor. She gets up from her chair and, without really thinking about it, eats a mince pie and takes a glass of punch. She had forgotten how good they can be, and she feels the punch igniting her insides. The sensuality of it shocks and seduces her, and she takes another glass.

  Mrs Griffiths cries some more, but this time it is partly for pleasure, for the pleasure of the hot briny water, and the sheer self-indulgence. A rebellious whim creeps up on her. She glances around as if to check that she is truly alone in the house, and then she stands up and shouts, ‘Bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody.’ She adds, ‘Bloody children, bloody bloody.’ She attempts ‘bollocks’ but merely embarrasses herself and tries ‘bugger’ instead. She drinks more punch and says, ‘Bloody bugger.’ She writes a card to the gypsies who own the scrapyard, and to the water-board man who had an illegitimate child by a Swedish barmaid, and to the people who own the pub and vote Labour. She eats two mince pies at once, cramming them into her mouth, one on top of the other, and the crumbs and the sugar settle on to the front of her cardigan. She fetches a biscuit tin, and puts into it six of the remaining pies. She presses down the lid and ventures out into the night.

  When she returns she finishes off the punch, and then heaves herself upstairs with the aid of the banisters.

  She is beginning to feel distinctly ill, and heads for her bed with the unconscious but unswerving instinct of a homing pigeon. She reminds herself to draw the curtains so that no one will be able to pry and spy, and then she undresses with difficulty, and throws her clothes on to the floor with all the perverse but justified devilment of one who has been brought up not to, and has never tried it before. She extinguishes the light and crawls into bed, but every time that she closes her eyes she begins to feel seasick. Her eyes glitter in the dark like those of a small girl, the years are briefly annulled, and she remembers how to feel frightened when an owl hoots outside.

  At eleven thirty, fetid Jack Oak opens his front door to put the cat out and spots a biscuit tin by the door scraper. He picks it up, curious, and takes it back inside. ‘Look what some’un left,’ he says to his daughter, who
is just as unkempt as he is, but smells more sweetly.

  ‘Well, open it,’ she says.

  Jack prises off the lid with his thick yellow nails, and inside he finds six mince pies, and an envelope. Jack almost never gets Christmas cards. He feels a leap of excitement and pleasure in his belly, and hands the card to his daughter to read. It says: ‘To dear Mr Obadiah Oak and daughter, a very Happy Christmas and New Year, from Marjorie Griffiths.’

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ says Jack, and his daughter says, ‘Now there’s a turn-up for the books.’ Jack puts the card on the mantelpiece, crams a whole mince pie into his mouth, and delves among the clutter for a pencil and the box of yellowing cards that he bought from the village shop fifteen years ago.

  ARCHIE AND THE WOMAN

  ‘MOTHER TO ARCHIE-MASTER, come in please. Over.’

  ‘I’m digging potatoes,’ I said to my mother, sighing as I held the walkie-talkie to my ear with my right hand, and gave up turning the heavy ochre clay. I thrust the spade into the ground. ‘What do you want now? Can’t it wait ’til lunchtime? Over.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you urgently,’ she replied, ‘while I remembered. Over.’

  ‘Well, what is it? Over.’

  There was a long pause, and then she said, ‘Bless me, I’ve forgotten what it was. Over.’

  ‘Tell me at lunchtime then, when you’ve remembered. What’s for lunch? Over.’

  ‘Steak and kidney pie with mashed neeps with a fried egg on top. It’ll be half an hour. I’ll be ringing you when it’s ready. Over and out.’

  I looked at the walkie-talkie. ‘Bloody thing,’ I said to myself, and hooked it on to the trellis. It had been a curse ever since my mother gave it to me for Christmas, because it meant that she could get hold of me wherever I was. Nowadays she did not even see fit to come the fifty yards to the vegetable patch, and I could clearly see her through the kitchen window, putting the walkie-talkie down and wiping the steam from her spectacles. If I left the gadget in the house, then she would roundly accuse me of ingratitude, and of a lack of respect for her poor old legs. Sometimes I just switched it off, and pretended that the batteries had run out.

  ‘What was it then?’ I asked her, as I pierced the yolk of my egg and watched the thick yellow goo trickle down the sides of a pyramid of mashed turnip.

  She put down her knife and fork, and looked into her notebook, a small black one, with ruled lines and a red spine. In it she kept remarks and reminders that were to be addressed specifically to me. I used to call it ‘Mother’s Book of Complaints’.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve decided that it’s about time you got married.’

  I was aghast. I was so stricken by aghastness, or aghastitude, that my mind went quite blank, like a balloon that had suddenly popped on a briar. I paused with a forkful of mash in mid-delivery, and my mouth agape. ‘What on earth for?’ I demanded eventually. ‘I’m only forty-two.’

  ‘Even so,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, come off it. What would I want with being married?’

  ‘It’s not you I’m thinking of,’ she replied, ‘it’s me. I need some company about the place. You’re always out and about. When you’re not painting and decorating or gardening, you’re out playing golf. And I can’t imagine you looking after me in my old age, so you’ll have to get a wife.’

  ‘You’re only seventy-five,’ I said, ‘it’ll be donkey’s years before you’ll be going gaga.’

  Naturally I didn’t take my mother seriously. When my dear father was dying in his bed, he had called me in to give me his final blessing, and, as I knelt beside him with the palm of his hand on the crown of my head, he had said, ‘Now, son, you’ve got to promise me something.’

  ‘Father, of course I will,’ I had said. He closed his eyes, as if to marshal his final strength, and he said, ‘Son, promise me faithfully that you’ll never take your mother seriously. I never have. And try not to get married.’

  ‘I swear it,’ I spluttered (for the tears were making speech difficult), and with that his breathing stopped. There was a horrible rattling from his throat, and my mother, who had been standing there all the while, said fondly, ‘The poor old sod.’

  As the years have succeeded one another, I have increasingly appreciated my father’s wisdom. The fact is that Mother gets curious fancies that fly into her brain one day, and fly out of it the next, such as the time when she started to make cabbage wine because she had conceived the notion that it was good for the pancreas. Of course, it was undrinkable, and so she gave it away at Christmas time as presents for folk in the village that she didn’t think highly of. She sold some at the WI fete, and most people poured it straight on the compost after a single sip.

  However, this idea that I should be getting married rankled in my mind like a bur in a woolly sock. It seemed a fine idea to have someone to share a bed with. I hadn’t had a decent pillow fight for twenty years. And apart from that, a man needs a female, other than his mother, to rub along with.

  The problem was, of course, that I had to find some women to meet with, so that I would have an idea of what there was in the offing.

  I ruled out an advertisement in the lonely hearts; I hated to tell lies, and an honest description of myself would have put off all but the desperate. I wasn’t so desperate that I would have taken someone else who was.

  I thought about how one meets people in my village, and very soon realised that of course it was because of the dogs. Almost everyone had one, and most took their animals out every day, to stretch their legs and take a gander at what Mother Nature was doing to the common land or the Hurst. There was a regular ritual about all this, for if one met another dog, it was obligatory to pat it on the head, ruffle its ears, unclamp it from one’s leg, and discuss its virtues with the owner while the latter performed the same ritual with one’s own dog. First came the enquiry as to the dog’s breed, which was usually a matter of some doubt, then followed anecdotes intended to illustrate its irresistible appeal, its great intelligence and its extraordinary powers of intuition. Then came news of its health problems, and the fact that garlic pearls in its food had been working miracles. Naturally, one could while away many hours in doggy conversations in the process of taking a long walk, and one could come back at dusk and say, ‘I’m sorry I took so long, I got caught by Mrs John the Gardener, and she just wouldn’t stop going on about that bloody mutt of hers. I’ll dig the new potatoes and bring in the coal tomorrow,’ and my mother would tut, and say something like, ‘It was that woman’s dog that put Sir Edward’s Labrador bitch in the family way.’

  I think I might have told you about our dog. He was a great big fool of a hound. We called him Archibald Scott-Moncrieff, which soon got shortened to Archie. He was a black retriever who took his vocation seriously. At one time Archie got delusions of grandeur, and came back from walks with fifteen-foot branches of oak in his maw. Then he would get stuck at the gate.

  All this retrieving gave me a humorous notion, and so it was that one day at lunch I said to my mother, ‘Mother, do you think it would be a fine idea to train Archie to retrieve eligible spinsters?’

  My mother looked up from slurping her soup, and eyed me. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have my doubts.’

  ‘Why’s that, then?’

  ‘Because a dog’s “eligible” might be a funny thing, and not to your satisfaction, I should think. He’d want her to smell of lady dogs.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ I said.

  ‘No harm in having a try, then,’ she observed, ‘but don’t hang any washing on it.’

  Of course, the difficulty wasn’t with the idea, but with the execution. How does one train a dog to retrieve women who are specifically good-looking, intelligent, amenable, amusing, playful but faithful, fond of housework, and prepared to put up with my mother? The only way to do this would have been to identify such women myself, and work out a system of rewards for Archie whenever he got hold of one by the sleeve and dragged her in my direction. Clearly, if I had to fi
nd such women in order to train the dog, then I might as well just do the finding myself, and leave Archie out of it.

  I decided to train him to find golf balls instead, and that’s why I have five carrier bags of them in the cupboard under the stairs. I took him to the local nine-holer, which was a rough-hewn business designed by an aristocrat who used to own the big house. The course was like a First World War battlefield, in that it was sloppy with mud, and cratered with water-filled holes, there were rabbit scrapes all over the greens, and sheep browsing the rough. One par three was so constructed that you had to play your tee shot over the roof of the great house. The windows had to have steel shutters over them on playing days. If you muffed your shot, it might ricochet back over your head, and plop into the pond behind the tee, or you might have to go and chip your way round the house, avoiding the peacocks and the statues of naked girls with no arms. The best I ever did that hole was a birdie two, and the worst was forty-eight, if you don’t count the ball that got stuck in the gob of the gargoyle on the west wing.

  I soon found that no amount of training could get Archie to distinguish between a lost ball and one that was still in play. It was very embarrassing when he raced away on to another fairway, and came back with someone’s perfectly placed drive, or their ball that was just about to roll into the hole for an eagle. Eventually I had to tie Archie to my golf bag, so that I could catch up with him when he tried to hare away after another illegitimate target. Sometimes he would fly off into the woods on the trail of a wild shot, and then get lost altogether, when his attention was distracted by a roe deer. Once he chased a deer all the way to Chiddingfold, and was spotted by one of the teetotalling brothers from the garage, who brought him back to Mother in the cab of his tow truck.

  One day, as I was hacking up the first and someone else was coming down the third, Archie slipped his leash and scampered away with his ears flapping behind him. Off he lolloped, and before I knew it, he was back with a nice Dunlop 65, American size, all covered with slobber, which he deposited at my feet. ‘Good boy,’ I said, since he was so pleased with himself, and I didn’t therefore have the heart to tell him off. I picked the ball up, wiped the dribble off on to my trousers, and began to walk towards its owner, who was striding towards me.