Pasterne is arguably the prettiest village in the Hambleden Valley. Skirmett, Frieth, Fingest, and Ibstone all have their attractions as does Hambleden itself, and Turville is surmounted by a delightful windmill perched on a hilltop, a rarity indeed in the Chilterns, but Pasterne most conforms to a picture-postcard village. There is the large green, immaculately trimmed, known as Pasterne Pound, with carefully preserved oak stocks, and a dozen brick-and-flint cottages grouped round the green, just as if some Edwardian watercolourist had placed them there for a painting. The village pond is a fine example too, kept fresh by a spring, with white ducks and mallards and occasionally a nesting pair of swans. Postcards on sale in the village stores-cum-post office sell well in the summer months, particularly those featuring the pond and the rather eccentrically placed Norman church, which appears to have turned its back on Pasterne due to its being the sole relic of an even earlier settlement. But people in picture-postcard villages live lives much the same as the rest of us.
Another popular view of the village shows a northern aspect of the Pound with Daniel Patchin’s butcher shop centrally placed, together with his Pound Cottage and the copse which hides Lord Benningworth’s manor house. Patchin’s shop was originally an Elizabethan cottage; it has been a good deal refurbished over the centuries, but the exterior, apart from the small shop window, must appear much as it did originally with its massive black oak beams and the plaster walls that are freshly whitewashed each year. The name Daniel Patchin is in large white italic letters on the black facade, together with the trade description FAMILY BUTCHER in smaller capitals.
Patchin’s ancient establishment and the post office stores are the only village shops. Both are attractive and “quaint,” looking rather like the toy shops favoured by children of less-sophisticated epochs. And Patchin’s shop too is a model one, for he is fanatical about personal cleanliness and hygiene: he wears a fresh apron twice a day, and the washbasin at the rear of the shop is much used but kept spotless, as are the display area and the large bench where Patchin works, “looking more like a surgeon than a butcher,” as Lord Benningworth once described him to some friends. Patchin’s shop window always has a sparse display: a brace of pheasants, which he may well have shot himself, a hare, a local chicken or two, and one specimen of the prime meat he has for sale. Inside the shop there is a similarly small amount of meat on show: very likely just a side of Scotch beef hanging up with a Welsh shoulder of lamb. Under the impeccable refrigerated display counter there will be some of the famous Patchin sausages. Anything else that is required Daniel Patchin will have to fetch from the large cold room which takes up most of the rear portion of the shop.
The same shop when run by Daniel’s father Gabriel was well known throughout the Chilterns in the 1930s, as was Reuben Patchin’s before that. Daniel Patchin has an equally enviable reputation. Though the population of the village is not large enough to support such a thriving business, and Lord Benningworth who owns most of the village and the surrounding land is against more houses being built locally, callers come regularly from High Wycombe, Henley, and Marlow for their meat. The Patchin sausages are still made exactly as detailed in Reuben’s 1912 recipe, with generous amounts of pork, herbs, spices and freshly ground black pepper; they bear no resemblance at all to the products churned out in factories, and they attract customers from as far away as Slough and Oxford.
Daniel Patchin, a quiet, sometimes taciturn, man, is widely respected. He seems to live for his work and is busy throughout a long day for five-and-a-half days each week. Wednesday is early closing, and that afternoon he devotes either to fishing or shooting according to the season. When he returned from the Korean war, Daniel Patchin came to an amicable unwritten agreement with Lord Benningworth that on Sundays he would act as an unpaid forester for the estate, keeping Benningworth’s copses and woodland in good order, felling all diseased trees and clearing undergrowth, in return for which service he was allowed to keep all the timber he wanted. Every Sunday is devoted to this occupation, and Patchin has a woodyard at the back of his cottage where villagers can purchase logs and firewood.
The Patchin family has lived in Pasterne for centuries, but the Benningworth connection with the locality is even more ancient: Lord Benningworth can trace his ancestry back in this country to a Baron Will de Benningworth in 1220, and there are stone effigies of another Benningworth knight and his Lady installed in the church in 1290. The churchyard also houses many Patchin graves, but the earliest is dated 1695 with the epitaph:
Occasionally in an evening Daniel Patchin may stroll round the churchyard eyeing the graves, particularly those of his own family. He likes those epitaphs which hint of un-Christian attitudes, for he has a cynical, mordant sense of humour; he is not a churchgoer. During his army service in Korea he found out that human life there was as cheap as that of turkeys at Christmas, and he adopted a stoic’s attitude to life and death. Serving as an infantryman he was awarded the Military Medal for his bravery in hand-to-hand fighting and won the nickname “pig-sticker” from his comrades for his skill with the bayonet.
Daniel Patchin leads a very quiet life, devoted to work and country pursuits, including gardening in the evenings. Lord Benningworth will sometimes stroll to the edge of his copse with a friend to point out Patchin’s garden with its fine rose beds and lines of potatoes, peas, and beans as straight as guardsmen on parade. Patchin’s wife Angela is ten years younger than him and before the marriage was known as a pretty, jolly, and slightly flighty girl in Skirmett, where she was brought up in a large farming family. The Patchins have no children, as Angela proved to be barren, and over the ten years of marriage she has taken on the Patchin family’s traits of seriousness and quiet outward mildness. She is a natural blonde with very fair, clear skin who blushes easily: any compliment from Benningworth’s son and heir before he left to work in America would always make her change colour. She works behind the till in a cubiclelike office in the shop on Patchin’s busiest days, always on Friday and Saturday, and occasionally on Thursday. Patchin employs a boy who makes himself generally useful on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings; otherwise he does all the work himself. He is a stocky man with massive muscles, enormously strong. Behind the shop there is a large shed which was used for all the slaughtering for the business up till about twenty years ago, and that is where Patchin dispatches local poultry and scores of turkeys and geese at Christmas.
It was on a glorious late May afternoon that Daniel Patchin first became suspicious of his wife. It was a Monday, and at lunch she had said that she would go for a walk in the afternoon. Returning at five, she looked in at the shop to ask if he would like a cup of tea. He nodded and asked if she had enjoyed the walk. She hesitated, and he looked up from the mincing machine to see that she had blushed and was nervously fiddling with the buttons on her blouse as if to make sure they were all fastened. It would be difficult to imagine a more observant man than Daniel Patchin: his whole life both at work and during his time away from the shop had sharpened his perceptions. He had made a lifetime study of his customers and of nature; it was his sole inactive hobby. The slightest change in a pensioner’s expression, even the movement of an eye, was enough to tell Patchin that he was proffering a too-expensive piece of meat; the faintest ripple at the end of a roach “swim” caught his notice, as did the sound of a twig snapping. When she did not reply about the obvious pleasures of a country walk on a perfect May afternoon, Patchin covered his wife’s loss for words with a quick comment about an old woman who always called in for broth bones on a Monday.