MARGARET AND KENNETH
The village looks different now. It has become an urban overspill area. Factories have grown up, a motorway runs nearby and what used to be open country, including Lye Hill and the vast common we called The Marsh, has been given over to council houses and tall blocks of flats. Even my grandfather's four or five arable acres have gone and in their place there is a housing estate of small, neat bungalows, each with its patch of front lawn and small back garden.
In my early childhood the village occupied only two streets and these were at right-angles to one another. On the road which ran steeply uphill to the manor house my grandfather had built two imposing semi-detached villas. They had flights of broad stone steps up to the front door, basement kitchens which opened into very large, non-basement sculleries at the back and they were furnished with back and front staircases. Grandfather and his widowed daughter, our Aunt Lally, occupied the villa with the passion-flower plant at the side of the front door and the other house, which had trails of periwinkles down the side entrance, belonged to Uncle Arthur and Aunt Kirstie. Both houses had long back gardens with end-gates which opened on to grandfather's small-holding.
My mother and father, who had shared grandfather's house when they were first married, moved to a London suburb after Kenneth was born, so neither he nor I regarded ourselves as natives of the village, although we spent our summers there. When it was term-time we attended the village school. I remember very little about it except that children of all ages were taught in a large room which had been built as a chapel and that (I suppose because of the age-range of the twenty or so pupils) we older ones spent a great deal of our time in an exercise called Transcription. This meant that, in our best handwriting, we copied chunks of history, geography and poetry out of dog-eared, grimy, tattered text-books. I cannot remember that our work was ever tested or corrected, but at any rate it put no strain on the intellect.
When Saturday came there was our pocket-money to spend. Where the bingo hall now stands there used to be old Mother Honour's little post-office and general store and where Miss Summers had her shop, that and a few cottages have been pulled down and a supermarket built.
In our day we usually patronised Mother Honour. She was a shrewish old lady who detested children, but if the brass bowl on her pair of scales hovered uncertainly, she would (grudgingly) drop in another sweet, whereas Miss Summers, who sold bread and buns as well as confectionery, faced with the same problem, would be content to leave the scales wavering always slightly to her advantage, never to ours. She was gushing, blonde and plump, and was said to have designs on the baker who came from the town to deliver the loaves which she sold to the villagers.
The only reason we ever gave her our custom was that she sold so-called brandy balls, hard, dark-brown, glistening, strongly-flavoured sweets which Mother Honour did not stock. They could be pouched in the cheek and made to last a good long time. I think the two shopkeepers must have had some kind of gentleman's agreement not to duplicate their stock, so that there should be no poaching on one another's preserves. 'Live and let live' seemed to be their motto, and although neither woman was conspicuously prosperous, nor did either of them fail to make ends meet.
We had several sets of relations in and around the village, but when we played with other children it was not with our cousins, who were mostly older than we were, but under the leadership and guidance, not to say protection and patronage, of a biggish girl known as Our Sarah. We were pleased to belong to her band, although she bossed us about, as she did all the other children. I always felt, though, that Kenneth and I were mere hangers-on, for she never addressed us by our names. It was always: 'Hoy, you young Oi say! Come on out o' that brook. Your auntie's 'olleren for you,' or, 'Hoy you young Oi say! Tuck them trousis up 'oigher, else you be goen to get 'em wet, and then you won't arf get an 'oiden.'
The brook was our chief plaything. It conveniently ran alongside The Marsh at the bottom of our grandfather's acres, so that Kenneth and I could cross on to The Marsh by way of an iron gate and a broad plank bridge, both of them grandfather's property, whereas all the other children had to walk to the end of the village and cross by a bridge which spanned a culvert. It never occurred either to us or to them that they should take the short cut across grandfather's land. Perhaps they, like ourselves, went in awe of him, for he was in all respects the village patriarch and owned more than half its cottages.
Apart from giving easy access to the brook, his grounds were a paradise for young children. There were raspberry canes and currant bushes which we were allowed to plunder as we pleased. There were pigs, ducks, chickens, sometimes a calf and there was also a stable containing a vicious mare named Polly whom we were forbidden to approach.
Best of all there were Uncle Arthur's whippets, Floss and Vicky. Floss was a graceful fawn-coloured animal, a bitch in every sense, for she had a most unpredictable temper, loving you one minute and, for no apparent reason, viciously snapping at you the next.
Vicky, on the other hand, was a liver-coloured little love, the sweetest-natured creature that ever allowed young children to dress her up in their sweaters, almost smother her with clumsy caresses and take her for walks with an undignified piece of string tied to her collar. Her affection for us was boundless and was as sincere as it was touching.
We had little in common with the ducks or chickens. The latter pecked us when we turned them off their roosting boxes to collect the eggs, and we were nauseated by the former when we saw two of them disputing possession of a frog. We rescued the frog and Kenneth took it over to the well, but in dropping it in he slipped and went in, too-luckily feet first. He managed to clutch the edge of the brickwork and I held on to him and bellowed for help. Fortunately this happened to be at hand in the person of Uncle Arthur, who was boiling tiny jacket potatoes in an outside copper for the pigs. As a reward for saving Kenneth's life I claimed and was given as many of the pigs' delicious potatoes as I could eat.
We took all our meals at Aunt Kirstie's. She was a better cook than Aunt Lally and a much more indulgent person than grandfather, who found children a nuisance at the table because he said we chattered. We would have liked to stay altogether with Aunt Kirstie and Uncle Arthur, but two of their upstairs rooms were given over permanently to a lodger, a snuff-taking, silent old gentleman named Mr Ward, who (so we heard) was some connexion of the Kempsons up at the manor house. So far as I remember, he never addressed a word to us, but sometimes we would come upon him out on The Marsh or at the foot of Lye Hill near the sheepwash. He would be digging, but for what purpose we had no idea.
He was not the only person in the village about whom we speculated. Another was Mrs Grant. She was always to be found seated on the doorstep of her respectable little cottage and she never seemed to cease rocking herself to and fro and declaiming to anybody who was passing, 'I hab de ague, bery bad, bery bad.' She claimed to be Maltese and the widow of an English sailor. The village children used to mock her. We were neither old enough, nor courageous enough, to take her side against their tauntings, but at least we never joined in the teasing. I think now that she was not a Maltese, but an African. She was certainly darker-skinned than the Maltese I have seen since, and her lamentations had an air of African fatality about them. The village children would shout,
'Black-pudden! Black-pudden!' as they passed her; but, as Kenneth said to me:
'Black-puddings are very nice, and I expect she'd be nice, too, if we ever got to know her.' (We did, in a
