‘Best see ’bout ut then,’ he said.
‘Well, he was to the point.’ Cullurne nodded and walked off, touching his brow. I watched him for a moment, then turned and left that spot myself; left the foolish nuzzling of the sheep in their feed, the finches scrabbling about the hedgerow, the gold disc of the sun filtering through a thousand leaves as it sank — left that particular place enjoined on that particular evening, in which two forces came together for a moment, bristled, and departed; as if all that is irreconcilable lay not in the far-off thump and whistle and wet of the Aisne, but there, in that golden, English dusk, that glimpse of Attica!
It was, I think, at the beginning of the following week, when I had shoved a ladder into the branches of my apple-tree and was twirling the russets easily off their stems of an evening, that Lock, assigned to a corner of the (by now) vast digging area, clambered up the stepped side of the site and thrust something at Ernest, who almost fell off his canvas stool in fright, for the object in question was a dagger. The Squire, relieving himself against a nearby elm, had scarcely buttoned himself back into decency when Ernest’s excited shriek brought him hurtling back. Lock’s eyes were wide in his small face as he pointed out the exact spot in which the dagger had lain. It was, Ernest stated, of bronze or copper, with a simple triangular blade and a pointed tang to which a wooden hilt would have been tied by twine.
We were each assigned a tiny area and given a brush, of the sort used in watercolour painting — except for Dart, who was told to wield his trowel as far as possible from the rest of us. It was a tedious business, especially as it had rained unexpectedly (though Cullurne’s prediction was to come true) and the soil was wet, gathering into small clods with each stroke. Ernest joined us and it was he, fortunately, who first revealed the hump which stroke by stroke, hour by hour, turned inexorably into the cranium of a buried ancient. I fancied we were painting it into life, and had difficulty in grasping the extraordinary truth of that long sleep — though but a moment in comparison with the aeons of buried Time those rolling chalk hills were witness to, the millions and millions of submerged years my feet compressed each time I walked that turf, the unimaginably lengthy accumulations of centuries that saw the slow sinking of microscopic sea-creatures and the slow rising of their bodily memoriaclass="underline" the same that marked my knees bone-white as I kneeled to my task within the opened barrow. The ancient White Horse, which lay then shrouded in a tangle of bramble on the scarp below us, was but a second old in comparison with the flesh it had once been cut from. The tesserae of the past — Bronze-Age, Roman, mediaeval — thrown up by the coulter are as infant toys to the booming venerableness of the chalk that cradles them. And we — who are we to flail and clamour, to batter and slay, when all that surrounds us tells us of our insignificance, of our infinitesimal capacities, of our inevitable anonymity in the eternal reaches of Time?
But there in our barrow the present peeled back into sufficient ancientness to make every man around me thrill to the sight. The Squire bent down with his mouth open, his pince-nez crooked, his hair stuck upright — the almost comic embodiment of boyish excitement — as the brushes unveiled the eye-sockets, then the nose cavity, and finally the grin of those broken teeth and their slung jaw: as if the face of some horror had broken a calm sea’s surface and rested there. Within a week the outline of the complete skeleton had been sketched, as it were, into view — my own contribution being the right hand and the knees upon which the scattered knuckles rested. From the rim of the barrow, a man’s height above it, the body resembled that of a foetus, legs tucked up towards the chin — except that the head was curiously swivelled round, staring up at the indifferent passage of the clouds.
Walking home one evening that same week, I saw a group of children running excitedly to the low wall that fronted one part of the square, and which penned in a few pigs belonging to several of the villagers — one of whom was Percy Cullurne. I heard the children’s chant before I saw the object of their mockery, and with a shock unravelled the uneven chorus into its component parts:
‘Bid-at-ome, bid-at-ome, bid-at-ome Yeller!
His body en’t o’ steel
But o’ pigeon’s muck an’ feather!’
I was already aware that ‘Yeller’ referred to Percy Cullurne, but the appended verse, repeated vociferously, was new to me. A study should be made of the genesis of these types of incidental or topical verses, as indicating a remarkable degree of creative unanimity, since the progenitor is never to be tracked down, for he almost certainly doesn’t exist. Scraps of popular local rhymes, deeply sunk into every village child’s otherwise unbookish mind, are often found in these new-fashioned and temporary verses, suggesting that the core is adapted and re-used again and again — raided virtually spontaneously. In the above example, the imagery has strong echoes of our Christmas-Tide ‘Mummers’ play about it — ‘muck’ having been substituted for ‘milk’ — although if they had been familiar with their Shakespeare they might have kept with the latter! Recently, with the increased use of our great poets in even the village schools, fragments of Kipling and Walter de la Mare have been spotted, though in a context our educators would no doubt look upon in an unfavourable light.
Here, however, in the still-remote country, these town-bred educators might see, all about them, old things put to new and unlikely uses: each summer I have seen the children make their camps beside the river out of old iron bedsteads threaded with reeds, and sods piled on the top and sides, and an old iron pot glowing through the night, so that sometimes I have felt back in the days when our ancient warrior was flesh and blood, polishing his sword before a smoking hut. I have seen a waggon wheel become a merry-go-round (of sorts) twirled on its hub, while a rusty plough-wheel has served as a champion hoop, kicking up the dust down the Fogbourne Road for a good half-mile before burying itself in the hedgerow not three feet from me, shedding clouds of Old Man’s Beard upon my own. I have stood upon many a peg-rug woven from a lifetime’s worn-out garments, warming my hands in as pleasant a fug of reminiscence and tobacco as any London drawing-room might provide. And as for the bits and pieces to be found reincarnated in the humble cottage garden! — digression’s confined space dictates I must mention only the most memorable (and perhaps tragic) instance, in which I discovered over fifty irreplaceable glass-plate negatives nestling amongst the weeds of a neighbour’s ragged patch. Apparently the previous occupant, an old labourer named Jo Perry (a rather tiresome, rambling fellow according to Mrs Holland, who employed him in his latter years as a handyman and gardener, and who was left the sum of his worldly goods) had used them as cloches for his cabbages. Sadly, most of them were ruined, scoured clean by unnumbered seasons. The few that survived include a fine study of our former blacksmith’s shop (now a garage for motor-car repairs); a remarkable portrait of an old peasant woman of the last century; and a candid study of the village schoolmaster of some seventy years ago, which sparked memories and thereby spawned a book [No Dead Men, No Tales, 1919] for which I was accused of libel by our local doctor — but that little episode must await its proper turn. Suffice to say that each negative, once developed, showed the degree of loss occasioned by this otherwise resourceful adaptation — though none could say with certainty who the masterly progenitor was (see also Chapter VII).
To return to the scene, on that mild October day of 1914: there in the pig-pen, as I had surmised, stood Percy Cullurne, indifferent to the metrical taunt of the village urchins. He was scattering straw across the churned, stinking mud, and when I shouted at the children and made for them with my doughty Indian walking cane, he looked up only for a moment, returning to his sows as the chanters scattered in squeals and giggles. One of them threw a pebble vaguely in my direction, but the force of gravity sufficiently enfeebled it to close its parabola with a ‘ping’ on the handle of the village pump. I felt a sudden darkness of mood close over me, and felt quite incapable of conversation. Or perhaps I was embarrassed, somehow, by the humiliation of the man. I walked away without a word or a glance. Hardly had I returned to my cottage and slumped into my chair when a feeling of shame rose within me: Cullurne had felt neither humiliation nor oppression, I was sure. That is the true power: to recognise that it is one’s beholders that impose these things upon one, and that the soul remains uncorrupted, untouched.