After the Battle of the Marne, which raged through the first and second week of September, and in which our county regiment was not involved, the Germans dug in at the Aisne and trench warfare began. It was around then that my depressions returned. That week of enforced inaction though a spell of unusually hot weather, joined with a certain emptiness about the village heart, and the sight of a small girl outside the village shop weeping for her father ‘as goed off to fight on my birthday, an’ med never come back!’ — these played on my nerves, already as much frayed as my skin was by the many years of tropical sun. A colonial servant is instantly recognisable by his bleached and desiccated hair, his prematurely lined face, the hand-shake from repeated bouts of fever, and frequently (not, I am happy to add, in my case) the redolence of alcoholic addiction. His wife will be a mirror image, if wispier throughout, and with eyes dazed by monsoon-boredom and the company of dolts. Dark moods are an occupational hazard, even more so when these husks return to their mother-country, and find her erring on the side of dampness rather than coolness, as well as changed for the worse — always changed for the worse. The great wheels of the Empire, though in my opinion faltering now, grind her servants as effectively as they do her coffee-beans, but with far less substance to the end product. They are somehow emptied of anything but a kind of bitter regret, as if true happiness had only just eluded them in the middle of blinding squares or on the netted verandahs. How much happier that man who remains in his birthplace, and does not take the horizon as his gate to contentment!
My dreams around this time were all of skeletons, turning their heads in the chalk and grinning at me with my wife’s face; not the face I married and loved but the late phantasmagoric countenance of advanced dysentery. When the excavations resumed in the middle of the month with Dart, Ernest, the Squire, the new chauffeur Dick Lock, a white-stubbled handyman named Davey Purdue who was almost my age, and Robert Rose — an unpleasantly supercilious young northerner, who had been a footman up at Ulverton House until the loss of the last Chalmers-Lavery in the Titanic disaster — I had half a mind to give the whole thing up. But I persisted, partly for the sake of the exercise and the fresh air, and partly, curious as it may sound, for the sake of our Chief, whose pale complexion now bore small vein-marks of anxiety across the cheeks, but whom Ernest had persuaded nevertheless to continue with the enterprise. My weakness and my strength had always been an abiding sense of loyalty — even to those whom I could otherwise condemn. And as each scrape of the trowel rang off the flints and was taken by the breeze, a new sense of excitement hovered, despite my nostalgia for Marlers’s quiet quips, and Tom’s wheeze, and Terence Brinn’s silly laugh, and Allun’s nonchalant handling of the Squire’s moods. Stumpy Dick Lock was amiable enough, but Rose’s affected superiority and coarse humour cast a blight on those days, so that the golden presence of the Ineffable rarely stirred and rustled.
About a week after harvest I was walking that same back-path that comes out behind the brick wall of the Manor estate and its effulgent dog-rose, when I glimpsed Cullurne pouring feed into a tin trough. The sheep — an unusual spiral-horned breed the Squire was keen on promulgating — were running towards him and pressed quite happily about his knees as he shook the sack out. The dust hazed him in a copper-coloured aureole as the autumn sun levelled itself through the leaves of the small wood behind. He saw me, and raised his hand in greeting. I thought how clear and simple that life was, how like the ancient shepherds on the slopes of Attica he must look! I walked to the gate, and he came over and leaned on the iron. Flecks of bran nestled in his hair and in his stubble; his jacket was buttonless. He rested a boot on the lower cross-piece. His repose was one of energy held in check, his big arms the calmer for the exertion they were used to.
‘Middlin’ weather,’ he said. He sucked on a tooth with a most impressive squeal.
‘Very decent weather, I thought,’ said I, putting his caution down to the usual tendency of rural folk to underplay good fortune.
‘Drought,’ he replied, without a hint of superciliousness. ‘Ben’t be goin’ to rain agin till November, by my finger.’
‘Ah, drought,’ said I, feeling once more the unbridgeable gulf between myself and my surroundings on anything other than aesthetic terms. ‘Of course. Drought.’
‘Put the harvest in your pipe an’ smoke her. Malt-rashed. Atermath ben’t hardly wuth gallin the herse-collar vor. Put her in your pipe too. Cheaper nor twist.’
This being a particularly opaque piece of information, I merely nodded my head, and vowed to join the English Dialect Society forthwith — as I usually vowed when talking to the recently uncompromising Percy Cullurne, or any other provincially-immured inhabitant. Then I remembered a local saying taught me by Marlers, and tried it out, feeling the proverbial coals-to-Newcastle effect, but not willing to let such an extraordinarily suitable slot go unfilled — even though the phrase had struck me as odd, having all the riddling quality of so many rural saws.
‘Yes indeed,’ I ventured. ‘Ahem. What be bad for the hay be good for the termites.’
The effect was unexpected. Cullurne paused a moment, then burst into most uncharacteristic fits of laughter; tears poured from his eyes, and made admirable inroads through the dust and dirt on his cheeks. He slapped the gate, then his knees, and shook his head as the attack subsided, much as he had shaken water from his face in the square. Far from being mortified, I too was affected, and snorted into my fist, my chest heaving in a manner I had not known for months, even years. Eventually I managed to ask him what had been so amiss in my use of local wisdom. Another peal, several repetitions of the saying, each followed by further peals, then a wiping of eyes, a blowing of nose into a greasy rag, a shaking of his head, a brief apology, then the illumination:
‘Turmuts! What be good vor the haay be bad vor the turmuts!’
Inevitably the merriment was resumed, at my picturing of a termite as somehow inextricably countering hay, instead of the common and water-loving turnip, and by the end of this session I was feeling quite weak, but astoundingly well, as if I had walked the downs twice over without a break in my stride.
‘It was Marlers who taught me that,’ I said. ‘I evidently misheard him. Well I do miss him, you know. I miss all of them. Don’t you?’
Cullurne wiped his eyes and grunted. He sucked on his tooth. He sniffed.
‘Silly buggers,’ was all he murmured.
We did not notice the horse even when it had rounded the corner for, as the gate was well tucked into the hedgerow, it had remained half-hidden by the tall bobbing splash-red of mallow and knapweed along the wayside. I was halfway through an observation upon the sterling qualities of young Jimmy Tuck, and the apparent mental collapse of his widowed mother subsequent to his death, when I looked up and saw the bristly face of the Squire just as he was pulling on the reins to stop. I felt a cloud of dust settle grittily in my open mouth, and shut it. He glared at me for a moment then glanced not at Cullurne but at a point about two feet above his head.
‘See about the fence at the bottom of Brambleberry Piece,’ he snapped. (Not quite a true reportage: the name of the field was codified by familiarity into ‘Bram’s’, but I have over the years since joined the two nomenclatures of our village — the official and the non-official — and must take the opportunity to show off my research.)
The Squire then looked back at me with what I can only describe as small eyes, switched at the horse with his crop as though he rather wished my flank were under it, and left us once more in a swirl of dust, thudding into a gallop as the track meandered onto the open downland. Bluebottles clamped themselves without a moment’s hesitation on the fresh dung. Cullurne shrugged at my raised eyebrows.