The Dun Cow Rib Page 17

  I longed to examine these treasures, but dared not. We had been given strict instructions never to enter the smoking room unless taken there with an adult, and never to touch anything. My curiosity grew tendrils like a beanstalk. I had to be dragged out, longingly staring back over my shoulder at some new enticement I had only just spotted. But above all, trumping all other items, were the two curved Arabian swords, crossed like an insignia, hanging high up on the wall.

  Always encouraging my reading, my mother had given me a children’s version of The Arabian Nights. I knew Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor intimately and had been utterly gripped by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Those two swords must surely have belonged to a Persian king and were probably the very ones used to execute the virgin brides in the story of Scheherazade, the Grand Vizier’s daughter. They had scuffed leather sheaths and silver hilts, woven handgrips with golden braid and fur tassels. ‘Do you think Grandpa would let me see the swords?’ I asked Nellie.

  ‘Ooh, I don’t know about things like that, you’d better ask your dad.’ But I didn’t. I knew he would say NO.

  I lay in bed and wondered. I dreamed of climbing up and lifting one down. I dreamed of drawing it slowly out of its sheath, clasping the braided grip and flashing the blade through the air in a great sweep like Bernie’s cane. Then I dreamed of slicing off his head like the Shah’s hapless brides . . .

  The sun awoke me, impaling my window with savage halberds of daffodil light. Motes of dust danced in its dazzling shafts. Rooks were cawing and racketing in a sky raked by the vast old beeches and oaks in the churchyard. The Bowler in the hall struck with its ponderous booming chime. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five o’clock. I blinked into not just awake but as wide awake and eager as the sun itself. Then I remembered the swords. Would I ever get to touch the swords? The church clock clanged five falsetto bells and the feral pigeons on the tower clattered away in alarm.

  No one gets up at five o’clock, I thought. Not even Nellie. I dressed quickly. Out into the corridor on tiptoe and silently on down into the hall. The Bowler ticked portentously. I heaved open the heavy swing door into the servants’ quarters, grimy green baize on both sides, and closed it quietly behind me. I ran down the corridor to the game larder, past the rows of black riding boots and jackets, and turned out into the stable yard through the back door.

  Outside I sauntered, adventure bubbling excitedly in my chest. Up through the tall, boarded gate into the gardens and past the smoking-room lawn. The French windows onto the verandah were never locked. I could just take a quick look at those swords. No one will know. The doors clicked open and the stern embrace of stale tobacco flooded over me.

  A bergère and a table piled with books and copies of Punch and Country Life stood immediately underneath the swords. Up onto the bergère and I could touch the tip of the sheaths. Up onto the table and I could reach the hilts. Carefully and slowly I lifted one off its hooks. Heavier than I expected, it took all my strength to draw the blade from the sheath – long, curved, with a vicious point and an edge like broken glass. It was magnificent. I wanted to swing it like the Persian executioner, but there wasn’t room. I moved out onto the verandah with its rows of terracotta pots of rambling geraniums and its wisteria twisting and winding vine-like up through the wrought iron work. Still no room to swing it properly.

  Down the steps onto the smoking-room lawn. I was in full view of the bedrooms high above, so I ran fast and silently out onto the Broadwalk. I ran and ran, determined not to stop until I was well away from the house. At last a good barrier of laurel shrubbery protected me. I relaxed and swung the sword. Wheesh! Wheesh! The blade sang and flashed through the bright morning air. Wheesh! and off came the tops of a dozen stinging nettles. Swish again and a whole throng of thistle heads leapt into the air, scattering dew like penny brilliants. This was fun.

  At the end of the Broadwalk, now well away from the house, I climbed the post and rail fence into the paddock adjoining the farm. Wheesh! A forest of tall cow parsley collapsed into the grass. Just then I heard the triumphant crowing of a cockerel pricking the dawn from the farmyard. I wandered over to see. There he stood, as proud as a weather vane, strutting and crowing his morning machismo. He was majestic. Bright scarlet crest wattles and glowing, golden mantle, resplendent green tail feathers curving out behind him in an extravagant arc. Ha! I thought. It’s a villain in disguise. I ran at the cockerel, flailing the blade in front of me like a Cossack with a sabre. The bird ran flapping and squawking in alarm. ‘Stop and fight!’ I yelled. It ran on. I gave chase, still flailing the sword wildly from side to side. Suddenly it changed direction, swerving hard to my right – too late to stop the swing of the heavy blade. Whump! and off came the cockerel’s head, clean at the neck.

  I stood and stared in disbelief. The bird’s body was flapping about on the ground, legs still running, pedalling air, blood gushing out of its neck and pooling thickly in the dust. The head lay three feet away, beak agape, astonished eye staring at me from the dirt. Oh cripes! I thought. What have I done?

  It has taken me sixty years to confess to this lurid, accidental crime. I never breathed a word to a soul, not even to Nellie. Howson, the intemperate Manor Farm tenant, the man who had shot his own dog, complained angrily that a fox had taken his prize bird. He accused my uncle Aubrey of harbouring the fox in the Manor grounds – a charge we all knew to be more than likely. I sat at the tea table and listened to the discussion between my grandfather, uncle and my father, longing to join in but gagged by guilt. What seemed so unfair, and still rankles today, is that I did not mean to harm the bird at all.

  A prankster, my father had called me. That had seemed almost complimentary at the time, far better than anything Bernie had said. Now it rang a little hollow. This escapade had not been intended as a prank, and chasing the wretched bird was certainly unpremeditated. No, as usual, I was behaving wildly, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time when the witless cockerel made its fatal sidestep – in that split second its error became my crime, guilt greatly magnified by the self-imposed silence of fear. The capricious law of unintended consequences had visited itself upon me once again.

  I hid the cockerel and its head in the thickest patch of stinging nettles I could find and I scrubbed the blood into the dirt with my feet. Then I ran back to the house, stopping only to wipe the blade clean on the dewy lawn. A few minutes later the sword was back in its sheath on the wall. I scuttled indoors and leapt up the stairs two at a time. As I climbed back into bed the Bowler struck six.

  A few days later I crept over the fence to see if the cockerel was still there – the criminal drawn back to the scene of the crime. Nothing. I searched and searched. No sign of the body or the head, not a feather. Only a smear of blood on the nettle stems and a few gobs of clotted blood on the bare ground at their roots. I laughed and laughed, skipping and dancing all the way back to the house. The fox had got it after all.

  14

  ‘All my holy mountain’

  ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ It couldn’t have been clearer. ‘All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.’ So that was that. No room for doubt and even less for argument in the two boarding schools that had so far been responsible for shaping my mind.

  I can’t remember at what age religion first appeared as a classroom subject. I’m sure it would have been at Hampton Down and it was probably called Scripture. From the very beginning it was made clear to us all that the whole educational ethos was founded upon and revolved around a GOD, usually, but confusingly by no means always, called Jesus Christ. Even more bewilderingly we were told that this God was plural, the ‘Godhead, three in one’, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the last of these a particularly appealing notion to a seven-year-old, and someone I longed to meet. I visualised the Ghost as an angelic-looking older boy, perhaps a teenager, with wings and a halo, whom, if I was very lucky, I might glimp
se flitting mysteriously in and out of churches and chapels with the unquestioned ability to be everywhere at once.

  Slowly and irrevocably, such imaginings led us dumb and blindfolded into the mystical, and at that point in our slug-like progress toward the unimagined sunlit heights of awareness, the mysteriously undefined concept of spirituality. We were simply required to believe what we were told, a part of the pattern of life. I don’t think any of us ever questioned it or, more significantly, understood it.

  At Hampton House we had been made to say our prayers at bedtime. When I wasn’t praying for the downfall of Twig, I prayed to go home. From a mishearing of ‘Hallowed be thy name’, Betty prayed fervently to Harold. Such were the religious boundaries of my known world. I don’t ever recall praying for my mother to get better because I had never fully accepted that she might not. And although on Sundays the whole family dutifully attended church across the lane from the Manor House, waiting for the saddling bell and entering last to take our places in the family pew we had occupied for centuries, I had never really associated this conformist ritual with either the God we had been taught about or religion in general. It was just something we did, one more unchallenged ingredient tipped into life’s preordained recipe. Nor was I in the slightest aware that any of my family might have adhered to a faith. It was simply never mentioned.

  At Hampton Down we attended chapel every morning and twice on Sundays. Bernie never missed a chance to bray about the school’s long-standing Christian foundation. Missionaries came from countries I’d never heard of and preached to us about the evils and the ignorance of the heathen and of savages apparently living their entire lives in the pitch darkness of unenlightened purdah. Moral rectitude was ladled out in bucketsful, pious, self-serving and imperious. The underlying message was always the same – our God was not just the good God, the great God and the right God, but he was also the only God, despite occasionally being plural. It was a given, brooking no dissent and stifling all debate. This rigid diktat was further endorsed by frequent sprinklings of the word ‘gospel’, which, it was militarily drilled into us, meant ‘the absolute truth of God’s word’. I would go on believing that for years. When much later I discovered that it meant nothing of the sort – that its proper translation was simply ‘good news’ – I felt duped.

  The inevitable consequence of this indoctrination from such an early age was that we didn’t just believe it, we never dreamed of either questioning it or exploring any alternative view – a point which now seems to me to deny the very basis of education and the development of critical faculty. The fact is that by the age of nine I not only believed that the Bible was God’s word, I liked it too.

  By some curious genetic alchemy I had inherited a precocious awareness of metre and cadence. Combinations of words fell naturally into rhythms – rhythms that either sounded right or they jarred. Wholly untaught and certainly not influenced by either of my parents, it was the first teetering step toward a lifelong love of poetry, which, I quickly discovered, I found easy to learn by heart. Sixty years later I can still reel off the long, rhythmic verses of Macaulay’s Horatius at the Bridge, of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, as well as yards of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, all downed at school like cod liver oil and sticky and delicious malt extract that we were given every day, taken and absorbed without question. It would be some time before anyone recognised this affinity for poetry and even longer before I realised that not everyone shared it, but one unsolicited event brought it sharply to my attention for the first time.

  We were versed in the King James Authorised Version of both the Holy Bible and the Book of Common Prayer – the seventeenth-century literary masterpieces that were still in universal use throughout the Church of England. Although the original muscular translation from Latin and Greek had been tweaked many times over the centuries, and canonical pedants had quibbled endlessly over tiny details, the overall literary brilliance of that translation was never challenged. It was what the portmanteau term ‘Scripture’ meant to us all – weighty, leather-bound family Bibles at the Manor House, even larger ones on school chapel and church lecterns, red prayer books, psalters and navy blue hymnals, ‘Ancient and Modern’. The whole religious experience seemed to me to resonate around the sonorous, immutable solidity of an unquestionable presence, the unfathomable truths of which lay hidden between the covers of those ancient and venerable tomes.

  Mr George Barron, the Martock village schoolmaster, had asked to interview me before I attended the school at the end of the summer holidays. Holding his huge hand, my father trailed me through the village, past the imposing and dignified thirteenth-century church, to meet Mr and Mrs Barron one August afternoon. They lived in a new house in the grounds of the large Georgian vicarage with their only daughter, Susan, who was almost exactly my age. Hair brushed and shoes polished, I wore my now redundant Hampton Down uniform. Smiling broadly, Mr Barron answered the door. ‘Hullo, John. You look very smart.’

  This new headmaster displayed none of the pomp and disciplinarian aura that had surrounded Bernie. It would be several weeks before I began properly to comprehend the oceanic difference between the grand, inflated authority of the British private school system and the practical, undistilled, rough-and-ready approach delivered by rural village primary schools of the day.

  Mr Barron had a round face and the dark hair and swarthy complexion of the Ordovician Celts. In his forties, he was quietly but clearly spoken, with carefully enunciated words charged with a gentle and friendly authority. Mrs Barron gave me a Wagon Wheel, a large chocolate biscuit with a squishy jam and marshmallow filling. The interview turned out to be little more than a friendly chat. Mr Barron asked me what subjects I enjoyed most. Without thinking, I said, ‘Shooting.’

  ‘Humph. I’m afraid you won’t be doing that at Martock,’ was his mildly amused response. Hampton Down had had its own indoor small-bore range where we lay in pairs on gym mats with an instructor between us and fired open-sighted .22 rifles at targets twenty-five yards away. I had emerged as a good shot and I was proud of it. ‘Mr Barron means classroom subjects’ – a reproving frown from my father.

  ‘Oh, English,’ I added quickly. ‘I like English best.’

  On the way out, I heard Mr Barron confide, ‘Better not to wear his old school uniform.’ When I turned to shake his hand, I noticed a movement on the stairs. Their dark-haired daughter Susan was eyeing me suspiciously through the banisters.

  Since we were near the vicarage my father took me to meet the Reverend Lionel Walsh, a tall, imposing man of natural dignity, balding with ruddy cheeks and a ringing laugh, who had been a loyal friend to my mother throughout her illness. The vicarage stood in grounds of fine mature trees and neatly mown lawns. Mr Walsh ushered us into a formal study, with a noted absence of chocolate biscuits.

  The introduction only lasted a few minutes, but the vicar instructed me to return a few nights later for some private religious tuition to prepare me for the new school. ‘Be sure to bring your Bible.’ Why do I need special religious instruction for this new school? I worried on the way home. It built on anxieties already implanted by my mother, who had proffered mysteriously, ‘You’ll find this little school very different.’

  ‘How will it be different?’ I had quizzed from the fog of innocence.

  She backed off, almost as though she didn’t want to pursue it. ‘You’ll see.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘It is very small.’

  Two evenings later I returned to the vicarage, clutching an old black leather Bible. Mr Walsh took me into a large, sparsely furnished dining room where we sat at the table. To my surprise he took the Bible from me and turned quickly to Isaiah, Chapter XI. ‘I’d like you to read this chapter down to verse nine, please. Nice and loud.’ I took a deep breath and pitched in. ‘There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots . . .’ – I don’t think I understood a word, but it w
asn’t difficult to read – ‘. . . for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.’

  ‘Well! Well!’ He was nodding and smiling expansively. ‘Have you read those verses before?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Have you ever read a lesson in church?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Would you care to? We have a harvest festival next month. I’m looking for someone young to read that passage.’

  I was surprised, but the compliment had scored. My cheeks glowed. This vicar seemed nice, not a bit like pompous Bernie or sour old Reverend Ferguson at the Manor House church, who always glowered and made me feel guilty for no reason at all. Besides, I loved the music of those words, and all the animals: ‘. . . and the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together . . . and the cow and the bear shall feed . . . and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’. But most of all I loved the sound of it: the rolling metre; the sonorous, tonal modulation of its phrases; its commanding cadences that drew me further and further into the swirling authority of its language from so long ago, carrying with it a certainty infused with a strange and beguiling awe. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, without another thought. ‘Yes, I would.’