Love Among the Bookshelves Page 3

  He completed his first novel, The Two Sisters, while he was working in a warehouse on a wage of £1 a week. His publisher’s letter of acceptance addressed him as ‘Dear Miss Bates’—they couldn’t believe that a work of such sensitivity could possibly be that of a man.

  Bates found his true fulfilment as a writer with the coming of World War II. He was the first writer ever to be commissioned in the Armed Forces, in his case the RAF, solely in order to produce short stories, and he eventually became a squadron leader. The products of these war years were bestsellers, Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), as well as the very moving Flying Officer X stories which set out, with exquisite pictorial simplicity, what it was actually like to be a bomber or fighter pilot.

  Later in the war, Bates visited Burma, Japan and India, experiences which resulted in the novels The Purple Plain (1947), The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and The Scarlet Sword (1950). They turned him into an international figure.

  But it was Bates’s short stories, not his novels, that influenced me as I was growing up and trying out my own wings as a story writer. The bucolic humour of his My Uncle Silas stories, his lyrical tales of the English countryside, stories about Alexander or the boy in ‘Great Uncle Crow’, or passionate love stories such as The Triple Echo . . . Over six hundred short stories flowed from his pen, and they can be found in collections such as The Watercress Girl and Other Stories, Sugar for the Horse and The Wild Cherry Tree. Bates’s inheritance from Chekhov and the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century is clearly apparent in his novellas and short stories.

  David Garnett, in a famous review, compared a typical H.E. Bates story to a Renoir painting: ‘His sensitivity to beauty and to character is astonishing; it is, I think, greater than the sensibility of any other living English writer; and because of it, his work always reminds me of the painting of Renoir. His best stories have the extreme delicacy and tenderness of Renoir’s paint, and do not impress by their strength so much as by their fragility.’

  Other writers who had something in common with Bates, and whom I greatly admired, were Walter de la Mare, with his empathy for nature, and Rumer Godden, with her tender portrayals of India in The River (filmed in 1951 by Jean Renoir, son of the artist Claude Renoir), Black Narcissus and Kingfishers Catch Fire.

  From The Best of H.E. Bates (1944, 1980)

  Great Uncle Crow

  Once in the summertime, when the water lilies were in bloom and the wheat was new in ear, his grandfather took him on a long walk up the river, to see his Uncle Crow. He had heard so much of Uncle Crow, so much that was wonderful and to be marvelled at, and for such a long time, that he knew him to be, even before that, the most remarkable fisherman in the world.

  ‘Masterpiece of a man, your Uncle Crow,’ his grandfather said. ‘He could git a clothes line any day and tie a brick on it and a mossel of cake and go out and catch a pike as long as your arm.’

  When he asked what kind of cake his grandfather seemed irritated and said it was just like a boy to ask questions of that sort.

  ‘Any kind o’ cake,’ he said. ‘Plum cake. Does it matter? Caraway cake. Christmas cake if you like. Anything. I shouldn’t wonder if he could catch a pretty fair pike with a cold baked tater.’

  ‘Only a pike?’

  ‘Times,’ his grandfather said, ‘I’ve seen him sittin’ on the bank on a sweltering hot day like a furnace, when nobody was gittin’ a bite not even off a bloodsucker. And there your Uncle Crow’d be a-pullin’ ’em out by the dozen, like a man shellin’ harvest beans.’

  ‘And how does he come to be my Uncle Crow,’ he said, ‘if my mother hasn’t got a brother? Nor my father.’

  ‘Well,’ his grandfather said, ‘he’s really your mother’s own cousin, if everybody had their rights. But all on us call him Uncle Crow.’

  ‘And where does he live?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ his grandfather said. ‘All by himself. In a little titty bit of a house, by the river.’

  The little bit of a house, when he first saw it, surprised him very much. It was not at all unlike a black tarred boat that had either slipped down a slope and stuck there on its way to launching or one that had been washed up and left there in a flood. The roof of brown tiles had a warp in it and the sides were mostly built, he thought, of tarred beer-barrels.

  The two windows with their tiny panes were about as large as chessboards and Uncle Crow had nailed underneath each of them a sill of sheet tin that was still a brilliant blue, each with the words ‘Backache Pills’ in white lettering on it, upside down.

  On all sides of the house grew tall feathered reeds. They enveloped it like gigantic whispering corn. Some distance beyond the great reeds the river went past in a broad slow arc, on magnificent, kingly currents, full of long white islands of water lilies, as big as china breakfast cups, shining and yellow hearted in the sun.

  He thought, on the whole, that that place, the river with the water lilies, the little titty bit of a house, and the great forest of reeds talking between soft brown beards, was the nicest place he had ever seen.

  ‘Anybody about?’ his grandfather called. ‘Crow!—anybody at home?’

  The door of the house was partly open, but at first there was no answer. His grandfather pushed open the door still farther with his foot. The reeds whispered down by the river and were answered, in the house, by a sound like the creak of bed springs.

  ‘Who is’t?’

  ‘It’s me, Crow,’ his grandfather called. ‘Lukey. Brought the boy over to have a look at you.’

  A big, gangling, red-faced man with rusty hair came to the door. His trousers were black and very tight. His eyes were a smeary vivid blue, the same colour as the stripes of his shirt, and his trousers were kept up by a leather belt with brass escutcheons on it, like those on horses’ harness.

  ‘Thought very like you’d be out a-pikin’,’ his grandfather said.

  ‘Too hot. How’s Lukey boy? Ain’t seed y’ lately, Lukey boy.’

  His lips were thick and very pink and wet, like cow’s lips. He made a wonderful, erupting, jolly sound somewhat between a belch and a laugh.

  ‘Comin’ in a minute?’

  In the one room of the house was an iron bed with an old red check horse-rug spread over it and a stone copper in one corner and a bare wooden table with dirty plates and cups and a tin kettle on it. Two osier baskets and a scythe stood in another corner.

  Uncle Crow stretched himself full length on the bed as if he was very tired. He put his knees in the air. His belly was tight as a bladder of lard in his black trousers, which were mossy green on the knees and seat.

  ‘How’s the fishin’?’ his grandfather said. ‘I bin tellin’ the boy—’

  Uncle Crow belched deeply. From where the sun struck full on the tarred wall of the house there was a hot whiff of baking tar. But when Uncle Crow belched there was a smell like the smell of yeast in the air.

  ‘It ain’t bin all that much of a summer yit,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘Ain’t had the rain.’

  ‘Not like that summer you catched the big ’un down at Archer’s Mill. I recollect you a-tellin’ on me—’

  ‘Too hot and dry by half,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘Gits in your gullet like chaff.’

  ‘You recollect that summer?’ his grandfather said. ‘Nobody else a-fetching on ’em out only you—’

  ‘Have a drop o’ neck-oil,’ Uncle Crow said.

  The boy wondered what neck-oil was and presently, to his surprise, Uncle Crow and his grandfather were drinking it. It came out of a dark-green bottle and it was a clear, bright amber, like cold tea, in the two glasses.

  ‘The medder were yeller with ’em,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘Yeller as a guinea.’

  He smacked his lips with a marvellously juicy, fruity sound. The boy’s grandfather gazed at the neck-oil and said he thought it would be a

  corker if it was kept a yea
r or two, but Uncle Crow said, ‘Trouble is, Lukey boy, it’s a terrible job to keep it. You start tastin’ on it to see if it’ll keep and then you taste on it again and you go

  on tastin’ on it until they ain’t a drop left as ’ll keep.’

  Uncle Crow laughed so much that the bed springs cackled underneath his bouncing trousers.

  ‘Why is it called neck-oil?’ the boy said.

  ‘Boy,’ Uncle Crow said, ‘when you git older, when you git growed up, you know what’ll happen to your gullet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’ll git sort o’ rusted up inside. Like a old gutter pipe. So’s you can’t swaller very easy. Rusty as old Harry it’ll git. You know that, boy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it will. I’m tellin’, on y’. And you know what y’ got to do then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Every now and then you gotta git a drop o’ neck-oil down it. So’s to ease it. A drop o’ neck-oil every once in a while—that’s what you gotta do to keep the rust out.’

  The boy was still contemplating the curious prospect of his neck rusting up inside in later years when Uncle Crow said, ‘Boy, you go outside and jis’ round the corner you’ll see a bucket. You bring handful o’ cresses out on it. I’ll bet you’re hungry, ain’t you?’

  ‘A little bit.’

  He found the watercress in the bucket, cool in the shadow of the little house, and when he got back inside with them Uncle Crow said:

  ‘Now you put the cresses on that there plate there and then put your nose inside that there basin and see what’s inside. What is’t, eh?’

  ‘Eggs.’

  ‘Ought to be fourteen on ’em. Four apiece and two over. What sort are they, boy?’

  ‘Moorhens’.’

  ‘You got a knowin’ boy here, Lukey,’ Uncle Crow said. He dropped his scaly red lid of one eye like an old cockerel going to sleep. He took another drop of neck-oil and gave another fruity, juicy laugh as he heaved his body from the bed. ‘A very knowin’ boy.’

  Presently he was carving slices of thick brown bread with a great horn-handled shut-knife and pasting each slice with summery golden butter. Now and then he took another drink of neck-oil and once he said:

  ‘You get the salt pot, boy, and empty a bit out on that there saucer, so’s we can all dip in.’

  Uncle Crow slapped the last slice of bread on to the buttered pile and then said:

  ‘Boy, you take that there jug there and go a step or two up the path and dip yourself a drop o’ spring water. You’ll see it. It comes out of a little bit of a wall, jist by a doddle-willer.’

  When the boy got back with the jug of spring water Uncle Crow was opening another bottle of neck-oil and his grandfather was saying, ‘God a-mussy man, goo steady. You’ll have me agooin’ one way and another—’

  ‘Man alive,’ Uncle Crow said, ‘and what’s wrong with that?’

  Then the watercress, the salt, the moorhens’ eggs, the spring water, and the neck-oil were all ready. The moorhens’ eggs were hard-boiled. Uncle Crow lay on the bed and cracked them with his teeth, just like big brown nuts, and said he thought the watercress was just about as nice and tender as a young lady.

  ‘I’m sorry we ain’t got the gold plate out though. I had it out a-Sunday.’ He closed his old cockerel-lidded eye again and licked his tongue backwards and forwards across his lips and dipped another peeled egg in salt. ‘You know what I had for my dinner a-Sunday, boy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pussycat on a gold plate. Roasted with broad beans and new taters. Did you ever heerd talk of anybody eatin’ a roasted pussycat, boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s a hare.’

  ‘You got a very knowin’ boy here, Lukey,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘A very knowin’ boy.’

  Then he screwed up a big dark-green bouquet of watercress and dipped it in salt until it was entirely frosted and then crammed it in one neat wholesale bite into his soft pink mouth.

  ‘But not on a gold plate?’ he said.

  He had to admit that.

  ‘No, not on a gold plate,’ he said.

  All that time he thought the fresh watercress, the moorhens’ eggs, the brown bread and butter and the spring water were the most delicious, wonderful things he had ever eaten in the world. He felt that only one thing was missing. It was that whenever his grandfather spoke of fishing Uncle Crow simply took another draught of neck-oil.

  ‘When are you goin’ to take us fishing?’ he said.

  ‘You ’et up that there egg,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘That’s the last one. You ’et that there egg up and I’ll tell you what.’

  ‘What about gooin’ as far as that big deep hole where the chub lay?’ grandfather said. ‘Up by the back brook—’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, boy,’ Uncle Crow said, ‘you git your grandfather to bring you over September time, of a morning, afore the steam’s off the winders. Mushroomin’ time. You come over and we’ll have a bit o’ bacon and mushroom for breakfast and then set into the pike. You see, boy, it ain’t the pikin’ season now. It’s too hot. Too bright. It’s too bright of afternoon, and they ain’t a-bitin’.’

  He took a long, rich swig of neck-oil.

  ‘Ain’t that it, Lukey? That’s the time, ain’t it, mushroom time?’

  ‘Thass it,’ his grandfather said.

  ‘Tot out,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘Drink up. My throat’s jist easin’ orf a bit.’

  He gave another wonderful belching laugh and told the boy to be sure to finish up the last of the watercress and the bread and butter. The little room was rich with the smell of neck-oil, and the tarry sun-baked odour of the beer-barrels that formed its walls. And through the door came, always, the sound of reeds talking in their beards, and the scent of summer meadows drifting in from beyond the great curl of the river with its kingly currents and its islands of full-blown lilies, white and yellow in the sun.

  ‘I see the wheat’s in ear,’ his grandfather said. ‘Ain’t that the time for tench, when the wheat’s in ear?’

  ‘Mushroom time,’ Uncle Crow said. ‘That’s the time. You git mushroom time here, and I’ll fetch you a tench out as big as a cricket bat.’

  He fixed the boy with an eye of wonderful watery, glassy blue and licked his lips with a lazy tongue, and said:

  ‘You know what colour a tench is, boy?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘The colour of the neck-oil.’

  ‘Lukey,’ Uncle Crow said, ‘you got a very knowin’ boy here. A very knowin’ boy.’

  After that, when there were no more cresses or moorhens’ eggs, or bread and butter to eat, and his grandfather said he’d get hung if he touched another drop of neck-oil, he and his grandfather walked home across the meadows.

  ‘What work does Uncle Crow do?’ he said.

  ‘Uncle Crow? Work? — well, he ain’t — Uncle Crow? Well, he works, but he ain’t what you’d call a reg’lar worker—’

  All the way home he could hear the reeds talking in their beards. He could see the water lilies that reminded him so much of the gold and white inside the moorhens’ eggs. He could hear the happy sound of Uncle Crow laughing and sucking at the neck-oil, and crunching the fresh salty cresses into his mouth in the tarry little room.

  He felt happy, too, and the sun was a gold plate in the sky.

  3

  Schooldays, Rule Days

  Although I was a good football goalkeeper (not too much running around), I found most games rather boring. Cricket was one of them. Especially, when one had to turn up at the ‘nets’ in order to bowl endless overs at an important player who was there simply to practise his shots. And then to sit around for the better part of the day, waiting for a chance to bat, and then to b
e given out LBW (Leg before Wicket) by an umpire (i.e., teacher) who hated you anyway and was just waiting for a chance to get even . . . and so, before we went out to field, or in the process of running after a ball that refused to slow down, I would get a cramp in one of my legs (sometimes genuine) and leave the field, retiring to the dormitory where I would enjoy an hour or two of refreshing sleep while the rest of the team slipped and stumbled about on the stony outfield.

  No grass in our school ‘flats’ or playing fields. As a goalkeeper, I lost a considerable amount of skin from my knees and elbows; even so, it was better than chasing cricket balls.

  Elsewhere, I think I have mentioned my antipathy to running races. Why bother to come first when, with less effort, you can come in last and be none the worse for it? There is no law against coming in last. Those marathon runs took us through the town’s outskirts, and along the way were numerous vendors selling roasted corn, or peanuts, or hot pakoras. Those of us who were not desirous of winning medals (they were made of tin, anyway) would stop for refreshment (making sure the teacher on duty was out of sight) and bring up the rear of the race while the poor winner, looking famished and quite exhausted, would have to wait patiently for the school dinner—usually rubbery chapattis and a curry made of undercooked potatoes and stringy ‘French’ beans: more string than beans.

  Running wasn’t my forte, but I wasn’t too bad at the shot-put, and could throw that iron ball a considerable distance. The teacher who had been our cricket coach and umpire made the mistake of standing too close to me, and I dropped the shot (quite accidentally) on his toes, rendering him unfit for duty for a few days.

  ‘Sorry, sir!’ I said. ‘It slipped.’

  But he wasn’t the forgiving type; when the boxing tournaments came around, he put me in the ring with the school’s ‘most scientific’ boxer. Not being of a scientific bent, I threw science to the winds and used my famous headbutt to good effect. Why box for three rounds when everything can be settled in one?