Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Read online

  Mr Chittock read two books about shotguns and shooting, and when the licence came through, he drove to Guildford and bought a double-barrelled side-by-side boxlock twelve-bore in Jeffries. It was a St Etienne Robuste, a nice simple gun that would appeal to a farmer rather than a gentleman, had Mr Chittock known it. He told the assistant that he needed it for pigeon shooting, and came away with two boxes of pretty red Eley cartridges, loaded with the usual ounce of number six shot. The forms had been filled in, and Mr Chittock was fully equipped for killing moles.

  Chittock never noticed that the number of new molehills depended upon the day of the week, or that there were none at all on Sundays. After he had cleared them up, he spent hours every day standing on his new green with his new shotgun, waiting for the earth to heave. He stood and waited ’til his legs ached and his mind was numb.

  From time to time Uncle Dick or Mr Joshuah Entincknapp, or sometimes both of them together, would crawl into the ditch and watch him through the bottom of the laurel hedge. If they were together, it was always difficult to suppress their delight. They would nudge each other, saying, ‘Silly bugger, look at that silly bloody bugger, we really got him hobbled, didn’t we?’

  Mr Chittock wondered if his lack of success was anything to do with being too noisy, or even smelling wrong. He took to wearing his unwashed gardening trousers, and bought an old tweed jacket and hat at the White Elephant shop, leaving them on the compost heap overnight. It didn’t work and Mr Chittock continued to spend hours every day, stock-still with his shotgun growing ever heavier on his arm, in a state that approached nearer and nearer to absolute despair, just waiting for the moles.

  One day Uncle Dick was hiding in the ditch, watching Mr Chittock, when Lizzie turned up. She had spotted him somehow, even through the canopy of an oak tree, and she descended noisily on to his shoulder with a small cry of joy. Nowadays she often had a wild rook with her, who kept a safe distance, and this companion settled into the oak above to keep an eye on his betrothed. ‘Bugger off! Bugger off, Lizzie,’ whispered Uncle Dick, fearing discovery, and brushing her legs from beneath him to get her off his shoulder.

  Lizzie protested, but took off into the hawthorn tree above the new green. There she sidled along the branch until she was a few feet away from Mr Chittock as he stood forlornly with his new shotgun, waiting for the moles. She examined him with interest, raising and lowering the feathers on the top of her head from the effort of concentration, and suddenly all those months of Uncle Dick’s assiduous elocution lessons paid off. In the latter’s unmistakable tones, she said, ‘Silly bugger.’

  Royston Chittock looked up abruptly, and the bird repeated ‘Silly bugger’, fluttering her wings and bobbing her tail on account of the extreme intellectual effort.

  Chittock, his heart so full of rage and frustration that he had to take it out on something, raised the new gun, and fired. Nothing happened because he had forgotten to slip the safety catch. No animal likes to have even a stick pointed at it, so Lizzie skipped to another branch and craned her head in agitation. Chittock slipped the safety catch, and fired again, almost at point-blank.

  He had not expected the kick to be so great, and, because the gun had been badly seated in his shoulder, he bruised his cheekbone on the stock. Holding the gun in his left hand, and with his right to his cheek, he looked down at the dying bird, its beak opening and closing, its scarlet blood darkening on the fine grass, its body almost shredded because of the close range of the shot. He was quite unprepared for Uncle Dick’s bursting through the hedge like a berserker.

  Mr Royston Chittock sold his new shotgun and his house with its immaculate green, and moved back to Putney, where he continued to play below his handicap at Wimbledon Park, and the Duke’s and Prince’s Course at Richmond. He tried to forget the humiliation and ridicule that he had incurred in Notwithstanding, as Uncle Dick had denounced him, called him every foul name he could think of, and informed him that there hadn’t been any moles and they’d just been paying him back for being a stuck-up stupid thieving bastard. The interview had ended with Chittock on his hands and knees, as Uncle Dick’s hand clamped the back of his neck and his face was rubbed back and forth in the blood on the green. Then Uncle Dick had picked up the shotgun and fired the second barrel into the beautiful turf, saying, ‘Repair it yourself, pillock.’

  He wrapped Lizzie’s mangled body in a piece of sacking from the back of his Prefect, took it away and buried it sadly on the golf course. He wished he had been able to tell Robert the circumstances of her wonderful linguistic advance, but he judged it better to keep silence and let the youngster think that she had simply disappeared, because birds are like women, and that’s what birds inevitably do.

  THE BROKEN HEART

  ‘THE THING IS, Mr Oak, that there’s so much new money splashing about these days.’

  ‘New money? What’s that then? What’s new about it?’ Obadiah ‘Jack’ Oak hawks up a good gobbet of phlegm, curls his tongue into a blowpipe and ejects it. The projectile describes a graceful arc into the fireplace, where it comes to lie, shining and frothy, on the bed of ash. The young man winces. ‘Well, there are lots of people who have money now who never had it before, and lots of people who did have money who now have so much that they’re just looking desperately for things to spend it on. To invest in. Fine wines, or classic cars for example. That Triumph Herald of yours is probably worth more than a thousand just now.’

  ‘Got it for fifty pound,’ says Jack. ‘It’s clapped out, that is. Not worth nothing.’

  ‘Believe me, there are people who’ll pay a thousand.’

  ‘They’re mad, then,’ replies Jack. Jack has the peasant’s natural reservations about young smart alecs. This one can’t be more than twenty-two years old, he has a new suit, shiny shoes, an elegant haircut, and his hands and nails are so clean that Jack suspects him of being ‘you know, like, one o’ them, like that’, which is his way of saying a homosexual. He also has the accent of someone trying to appear posher than he is. Jack is suspicious of anyone who aims above his station. He has been obdurately and solidly himself since he was young, and cannot conceive of either wanting or trying to become someone else. ‘So what are you then?’ Jack asks again.

  ‘An estate agent,’ repeats the youngster. ‘I work for Slipsters in Haslemere, and I help arrange the sale of properties.’

  ‘An’ you say someone’s offrin’ two hundred thousand for this?’ He looks around his living room, at the flaked and mottled paint, the nicotine-stained ceiling, the missing floorboard and the cobwebbed, rotted window frames. ‘They’re mad then.’ A new suspicion strikes him. ‘Are you ’avin’ me on?’

  ‘No, Mr Oak.’ The young man tries to look suitably grave and trustworthy.

  Jack Oak furrows his brow and says, ‘But I never said this place was for sale.’

  ‘As I explained, Mr Oak, my client saw this house and enquired about its status at the village shop. I mean no offence, but he thought it might have been abandoned. He asked me to approach you and offer you two hundred thousand for it, in case you should consider selling. I know this is a somewhat unusual way of doing things, but he does like it very much.’

  ‘He likes it two hundred thousand’s worth,’ observes Jack Oak.

  It is the late 1980s and Mrs Thatcher has changed the entire consciousness of the country. She has profoundly inconvenienced and confounded the left by winning a popular war against a fascist government. An energised Great Britain has finally come to understand that it is not high talk but money that makes all things possible. Bright young people are making fortunes in the City, and are not ashamed to be thought vulgar or greedy. People who used to put their money in the post office are speculating boldly. The trade unions are rapidly declining. The government is beginning to rake in wonderful tax returns while lowering the rate. The word ‘yuppie’ has come into common currency, and people are playing with other acronyms. The present favourites are ‘dinky’, which means ‘double income, no kids’,
and ‘lombard’, which means ‘lots of money but a real dick’. Socialism is about to be reborn as conservatism with a winsome smile.

  The property-owning democracy is on its way, and the estate agent from Slipsters in Haslemere has pointed out to Jack Oak that just now all the money is going into houses. The prices have rocketed, most particularly in London, and in the south, in those places that are on the commuter routes. Commentators talk of the phenomenon in tones that clearly imply that there is a strong element of insanity in it all. Some Jeremiahs are seeing lemmings everywhere, and predicting a crash. Some people on low fixed incomes are realising that they will never be able to buy. In the countryside young people cannot buy houses in their native villages because weekenders are putting the prices out of reach, and they are leaving for rented accommodation in towns. Village shops and post offices are losing their weekday clientele and closing down. The social fabric of the countryside is distorting. Some people who cannot afford mortgages are buying houses anyway, on the gamble that they’ll recoup their outlay many times over when they sell, and now someone wants to buy Jack Oak’s cottage, because it is ideally situated on the cricket green of a marvellously pretty village on the Portsmouth line to London. It will be fabulous for weekends, it only needs stripping out completely, and a new roof, and an indoor lavatory and a bathroom, and one day it can be resold at a substantial profit, if only Jack Oak will sell. Ever since old Walter died, Jack has been the village’s last peasant, with his lips like kippers, his thick yellow nails, his rolling Surrey accent, his aroma of a thousand types of rustic decay and his eyes as round as dinner plates. He is the seventh generation of his family to occupy the little house on the green, and his daughter, Jessie, is the eighth.

  She has been listening to the young man with careful attention, and, after he goes, leaving a business card that she secretes in her purse, she sets to work on her father. She is the only child of a wife long gone (run off with someone from the travelling fair on the green, so they say), and in the whole world there is no one but his daughter that Jack Oak loves. She comes over and kneels on the floor in front of him, placing her hands on his knees. ‘Da,’ she says, in a wheedling tone of voice that reminds him of his little girl when that was what she was, ‘Da, two hundred thousand!’

  ‘I like this place,’ says Jack. ‘This is where I was born, and this is where I’ll die.’

  ‘But Da, two hundred thousand! We can go west. Somerset, Cornwall. I’ve been there. It’s right nice. We can get a place twice the size and have money over. An’ you don’t work no more, anyway, and I can get a job, I know I can. Two hundred thousand, Da!’

  ‘I don’t know anyone but ’ere.’

  ‘But Da, who’s left here?’

  ‘None to ’ave a drink with,’ agrees her father.

  ‘It’s all goin’ posh. Just think, Da, we’d be set up for life, both of us. No more worries!’

  He looks at her strangely. ‘I ain’t got no worries.’

  ‘Oh Da, you know what I mean!’

  ‘Turn the telly on,’ he says. ‘I wanta watch something.’

  ‘I’ll turn it on if you promise to think about it. Promise?’

  ‘Course I promise. I was goin’ to think about it anyways.’ He rolls himself a thin cigarette and sniffs it before he lights it. He reckons the sniffing is better than the puffing. He thinks about how some people are trying to stop the little boys from fishing in the village pond, in case someone falls in, and how they don’t let you throw sticks into it for your dog any more in case it frightens the ducks. He spits contemptuously into the fire. The place soon won’t be worth living in, that’s for sure.

  So it is that not three months hence Jack and his daughter are completing the melancholy task of dismantling two centuries of settled family life. Into boxes go rabbit snares and mole traps, his father’s pipes, the horseshoe from above the door, glass jars of assorted nails and screws, tobacco tins full of brass washers, a seized-up revolver that his father brought back from the First World War and never handed in, a wooden quiver of African arrows that came back with his grandfather from Tanganyika, tattered Bibles and hymnals, faded photographs and samplers from the walls, and penknives with broken blades. Jessie tries to throw things away, to burn them, saying, ‘But Da, we won’t need this! What do yer want this for, Da?’ and he replies, ‘It’s mine, and I want it, that’s what.’ When she says, ‘But Da, we can get new things now,’ he replies, ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with the old one.’

  Jessie has been having terrible misgivings recently. Her father has even tried to dig up every shrub in the garden so that they can be planted at their new place. He has emptied the contents of the compost heap into sacks, has filled more sacks with the best soil from the vegetable patch. Jessie had been hoping to move out with two days’ hire of a man and van, but all this junk and soil and shrubbery is spoiling her plans, and besides, it’s very embarrassing. The man with the van has taken to smirking. Her father has assumed the air of someone resolutely making businesslike preparations in the face of imminent death. He is saying things like ‘Well, it don’t really matter any more. Don’t reckon I’ll be long for the world any road. Reckon you might as well enjoy the money, that’s what I say, ’cause it won’t be much use to me when I’m dead an’ under.’

  Out of consideration for her father, Jessie has resisted going for the kind of house she really craves, something clean and new on a smart housing estate, and has found a pleasant cottage for next to nothing in the village of Herodsfoot, near Bodmin. She is sure that he could be happy there. The house is very like the one they are leaving, with a decent-sized vegetable patch and a blue front door. It has one more room, and an inside lavatory, and it doesn’t really need much decorating. She has had to take charge of everything, because Jack’s mind goes into a spin when he has to concentrate on things like deeds and contracts. He signs the documents that she places before him, and says, ‘Might be signin’ my life away, for all I knows.’

  On the morning of their leaving Jack hands over the key to the estate agent, and sits in the passenger seat of his Triumph Herald. He looks resolutely forward, at nothing. He is too choked to drive or to speak. He refuses to be unmanned by weeping, and he feels a portion of himself shutting off. Jessie starts the engine and squeezes his hand comfortingly before she puts the car into gear. ‘It’s a sad day, isn’t it, Dad?’ she says, and he does not reply. She has taken lots of photographs of the old house, and plans to frame some of the best ones for the walls of the new one. She combines a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia with a contradictory sense of bright new beginnings. She is optimistic but she feels tears prickling in the corners of her eyes. ‘Goodbye, old home,’ she says, and then starts the car off down Malthouse Lane. They pass the hedging and ditching man, who is examining a freshly excavated workman’s boot. They pass the house where the General used to live, and which is now fitfully occupied at weekends by a couple from London who have already complained about the noise of chickens from over the road, and the crack of shotguns in the Hurst. They want horses banned from parts of the common because they chew up the footpaths, and they want to stop the teenage boys roaring around the tracks on old motorbikes. They want a fence round the village pond so that their child won’t fall in.

  ‘Goodbye, Notwithstanding,’ calls Jessie, waving to the trees on Busses Common. ‘We still love you. Goodbye, you good old place.’ She wipes her eyes on her sleeve, and drives on.

  Two months later Mrs Griffiths is mightily surprised to find Jack Oak standing at his usual post in the village shop, having bought his customary pack of cigarette papers. He hawks up phlegm, and remembers to swallow it.

  ‘Artnoon,’ says Jack, as usual. ‘Turned out nice again. Looks like rain, though.’

  ‘Mr Oak!’ cries Mrs Griffiths. ‘Why, I thought I must have seen a ghost! What brings you back to these parts?’

  ‘Jus’ visitin’,’ says Jack. ‘Jus’ visitin’.’

  Mrs Griffiths says, ‘I thought I saw yo
ur car outside.’ She has improved in recent months. She has become sociable and talkative, has joined the Conservative Association, and collects money for the RSPCA and the donkey refuge. She has tried going to church but is horrified by how undignified and informal the services have become during her many decades of absenteeism, and so she has given up again. She has finally got round to writing a true-life romance, and it has been published by Mills & Boon under the name of Sophia D’Arcy de Vere. She is bursting with pleasure and pride, but can’t think of anyone she’d dare tell, in case they should read it and come across the steamy scenes.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ she asks.

  ‘Back tonight,’ replies Jack. ‘Got nowhere to stay round here no more.’

  ‘How do you like your new house?’ enquires Mrs Griffiths.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Jack, with a shrug.

  ‘It’s nice, is it?’

  ‘’S’all right.’

  ‘Nice people? Have you made friends yet?’

  ‘Ain’t got round to it,’ says Jack.

  ‘Nice village?’

  ‘Nice enough, if you like it.’

  Mrs Griffiths tries a new tack. ‘Have you met the people in your old house? They’re terribly nice. Not here much, though. They’ve made some terrific improvements already.’

  ‘Weren’t nothing wrong with it in the first place,’ says Jack, with an edge of bitterness in his voice. ‘Can’t see what they want to go changing it for. They ain’t got the right.’