The meeting, taking place just before harvest, was attended by the whole village. In those days, as now, long evenings in cramped cottages (or on its back-door step in the summer) were eagerly broken. The piano’s wrong notes grow increasingly intrusive, the gramophone loses its appeal with its frozen repertoire, and the crystal set had not yet appeared to while away useless hours upon, fiddling with a cat’s whisker! The same greasy cards snap dully on the same dark tables, the same brass ring swoops to clink against the same worn horn, while the clay-pipes and the gallon jugs have to be filled in the proverbial sweat of hay-prickled brows — and the songs and recitations cannot always be paying. Come the end of the summer months the whole village (though now there are rumours of electrification) crouches in a paraffin-flickering tedium — for books have not yet dispensed their eternal treasures in the majority of our homes. Staring into the fire links us, surely, with our primitive ancestors, for no other occupation was then, or is now, so heavily resorted to.
A small podium had been erected in the middle of the square, with a bleached Union Jack (our Women’s Institute has it now) draped across the front. Three chairs and a table occupied most of the dais, and when the Squire, the Vicar, and a militarily uniformed gentleman stepped up together, there was a brief toppling of furniture. The local photographer was hopping about attempting to keep a space in front of him clear of the crowd, and the local constable was ingratiating himself with a second uniformed gentleman. Three rows of chairs were positioned at one side for the higher echelons of the village, rather like boxes in the theatre, and perceiving myself to be one of this division I sat down. Children were tugging at skirts, hoops were clattering, a group of men in smocks were guffawing, and the church bell proceeded to join in with the quarter. The elders were gathered on benches before the New Inn, and they nodded and talked all the way through the booming nonsense of the first uniformed gentleman; while the crowd, I am sorry to say, gawped most impressively.
Feeling a thirst come on in the warm dusk, I glanced towards the inn as if a mere glance would appease, and saw, with an unwarranted jolt of the soul, the Manor’s under-gardener leaning against the oak that grows outside that establishment, and shelters it, with a jug in one hand and a tankard in the other. Something about him puzzled me, and when the Vicar rose in turn and declaimed his own piping version of nonsense, I realised what it was: Percy Cullurne was watching, not the contents of the podium, but something above and beyond it. Turning surreptitiously about in my chair, I saw what it was: a house-martin busy in its nest in the eaves of the Post Office, flashing that tell-tale white patch as it swooped and scurried. I fancied I saw a smile upon the face of Percy Cullurne, but he was just too far the other side of the square for me to be absolutely certain.
When the Vicar had sat down to desultory applause, the Squire stood up and I forced myself to listen. I was keen to know how the Chief would handle his mission. During the week or so of the excavation, I had grown quite fond of him. One cannot help but grow fond of men with whom one is in physical concord, with whom a simple labour is being undertaken, an end met, and with whom few words serve. This is the other side of that useless and ghastly custom called War: companionship forged harder than iron in the heat of battle, in the slow fire of wounds and deprivation. I fancy, too, that those old men outside the ale-house, in almost permanent agonies from various rheumatic complaints brought on by their lifelong exposure to cold and wet, some crippled by the sheer weight of the work they had endured and mastered, had an unspoken bond amongst themselves, that thrilled more to silence than words, and might be recalled next time the reader enters an ale-house in the country, and thinks himself in the company of dumb idiots.
The Squire was sporting a white blazer and trousers, with a gold watch hanging lustrously from his white waistcoat. The crowd were mostly in their Sunday best, so that the scene resembled an old sombre painting of, say, St Michael before a host of sinners. Nothing about the Squire betokened a military demeanour: his shape was that of a William pear, his pince-nez sported a red silk ribbon, his hair was mounted above his head in two polished waves either side of a deep trough, each wave ending in a small curl over the forehead. His hands were small and his feet likewise, but they were the only dapper parts: there was a general air of dissipation about him, most especially in the creamy pallor of his face, which blurred the edge of neatness and admonished his attempts at moral heartiness. His vigorous fury spluttered with an element of indignation, lacking the cool deadliness of the true autocrat. He struggled against himself as much as his perceived enemies, but without that essential intelligence that might have allowed him to grow in stature and self-knowledge. In short, he was the model of an English country gentleman of those pre-war years — and he was (almost) never hateful.
The first part of his speech was a comfortable rug woven from the fleece of that familiar flock, consisting of Native Spot, Bosom of the Hills, Lord Nelson, Rich and Happy England, and Admiral Rodney — the last mainly on account of some blood shared with the weaver. The second part of the speech began to snap and flap a little, holding aloft Valour, Enterprise, Sacrifice, Boadicea, Heroic Zeal, and sundry other gilded sentiments, taking their shine from their proximity to Barbarous Foe, Tyrannical Ambition, and The Hun. The Destruction of Frederikshald was slowly unrolled as anecdote, at which point some of the listeners evidently grew weary of defences being staunch and resistances being vigorous — the fate of a Norwegian town in 1716 holding no immediate interest for them — and began to talk amongst themselves. The Squire saw this, and two small spots of red rose in his cheeks. Frederikshald was abandoned mid-cannon, there was a splutter and an adjustment of the pince-nez, but the foolhardy few — particularly the group of fellows in smocks, from whom a guffaw was to be heard now and again — continued to brandish their lucifers above the exceedingly dry tinder of the Squire’s wrath.
The Vicar coughed, the Major scowled, I lowered my head, a louder guffaw sounded, there was a brief silence. Having head thus lowered, and eyes fixed firmly on the ground, with all the comfort of a chap sheltering beneath an ammunition lorry, I was mightily surprised to hear, instead of an explosion, a long ‘Ooooo’ from all about me, rather as if a flock of giant doves had winged happily into the square, and nested amongst us. Looking up, I saw a most remarkable sight: the Squire was holding aloft a large curved sword, polished to a mirror, which flashed the evening sun across our eyes and caused me to blink hurriedly. In the other hand he was holding its tasselled crimson scabbard, from which it had evidently just been drawn. Where this magnificent weapon (identified by the frumpy lady on my right as a cavalryman’s sabre) had emerged from I cannot say, but it transformed the Squire thoroughly, as if its magical properties of Valour, Enterprise, Sacrifice and Heroic Zeal had trickled down into his arm, and then his chest, and so on, and filled his whole otherwise unremarkable frame.
He then opened his mouth and delivered a single sentence, which had neither the Valours nor the Zeals about it, but was memorable for its simple earnestness. In its own small way it could have jostled in some Heavenly Mausoleum for Oratory with Queen Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury (‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman …’ et cetera), which were it not for dusty schoolrooms I would now probably find as invigorating as the oaken-hearted soldiery were reported to have done. The secret of the Squire’s earnestness, however, was in its straightforward childishness — perhaps boyishness would be a kinder term. He transformed the essential boyishness of all these abstract sentiments into something touchable and felt. He caught the nursery mood of the country in this microcosm of place, and moved our hearts; for we saw the little boy in him and so felt the little boy in us; each small hand enclosed in a firm grasp that was History bidding us from above to come.