Villager, page 26
A phrase I learned about the moor from my father was ‘If thee scratch my back thee shall pay for it.’ In his mind, if you attempted to tame the moor, to force your industry into its acid soil, to harness the great power of its rivers and trees for profit, it would eventually exact its revenge. To him, that great domed expanse rising above the surrounding countryside was always ‘She’, never ‘He’. ‘Old Her be angry today,’ he would sometimes say, and I would be uncertain as to whether he meant the great wild space above us or my mother. But then I would see the fearsome skies over the tor, and the even more fearsome ones over Trembling Hill beyond that, and he would add, ‘I wonder who’s angering Her today,’ and I would know what he was talking about. For me, those sombre slopes were where the world ended, and I never felt the need for more world beyond that. I have never been to London, never wanted to, and now I never will. But, seeing the row of houses that has just been built over towards Summersbridge – ugly dark red boxy things, without individuality or charm – I fear the city will soon come to us, and it is one of old age’s small mercies that I will not be here to witness it.
There is the high moor, with its tough wire grass, ice winds, vast treeless slopes and wind-blasted sheep, and there are its footslopes, with their soft river valleys and speckled woodland, and I do not rightly believe you can ask for one without the other. People told me Hell was a place down below and Heaven was above but in Underhill I know the positions to be the reverse of that, and down here in our Heaven Sarah and I continued to play under the plumed chorus in the faery light that can only be created when strong upland sun shines down on thick tiers of burgeoning leaves. Winter surely happened too but I scarce remember it, whereas now it happens at least once a year. The river gets rude and high and the stepping stones Sarah and I placed at even intervals across it close to Summersbridge can no longer be reasoned with. I have seen the river landed only twice in my life for, even when it is full, it moves too fast for that. Half a mile further up the valley is Megan’s House, empty now for many a year. My father said an old crone, not Megan but Lydia, lived there until not long before my birth, and used to walk over twenty miles a day on the moor, getting up not long after midnight in midsummer in order to make the most progress possible. He studied lines in the landscape: he noted that a straight line went from the Trembling Hill kistvaen, where they would later excavate the body of that young woman, through the stone circle and the centre of the tor and the churchyard, and the line brushed the edge of the house where Lydia lived too. Now I see there is this man Watkins, who has lately received much attention for his books on prehistoric lines, but my father was making note of the very same some fifty years earlier. History is full of quiet men who do not get the credit they deserve and would never ask for it, even if their life depended on it.
But then there are men like Cranford Frogmore, who will let the world know who they are, and what they have done, at any possibility.
Frogmore arrived down from Bath one spring with his fawning band of archaeologists, strutting about in his clean white frock shirt, speaking to other men he met as if they were so many woodlice in his path. It was in the orchard that I first spotted him, his train of similarly attired cohorts in his wake, as Sarah and I were lazing beside some new lambs and their protective mothers. ‘Who is this prize spoon on a stick?’ I remarked, but as Sarah’s eyes followed his thin prancing legs through the grass, she remained silent.
By this point, I had finished my schooling and had been given work by Mr Cosdon the thatcher, not because of any great talent I had for handling a blade or laying a water reed top lane or wheat reed ridge, but because I was known as a good little climber who could squeeze into a spot smaller than himself. The business was to an extent in the family, since my mother had once worked as a comber of reeds for another old thatcher, Toddler Crockford, who lived up in Wychcombe in a very horrible house. There only being a limited amount of thatch to renew in Underhill, my work also afforded me the opportunity to travel, once even almost as far as Sidmouth. Not being a person who got the chance to look down on much when walking at ground level, I loved my new life in the sky, even though I felt all of the weather there more keenly than ever as it came down off the tor. One night I dreamt I was a church bell, with the face of a very beautiful lady. In this dream it was my job to stand high above the town and ring myself whenever bad weather or danger was approaching. Everyone looked up at me and smiled and appreciated my work but nobody ever got close to me, and I felt lonely in the dream and would have liked to have had another bell beside me. Not long prior to this, my father, who did some ringing himself, had told me that the first bells in the church had been sounded as an answer to coming thunder and lightning, to frighten it away. He loved to hear the bell tapping on the stay, the tick-tock it made, and often remarked that it was pleasantly like being inside a giant clock.
Sometimes, now, I think of my life as having been lived in two distinct parts: the one where I was climbing higher and higher, and the one since then where I have made it my business to tunnel down, into the essence of things. This perhaps begs the question: when have I lived on the level that most people do? Perhaps very rarely. And perhaps that has suited me just fine. Here on the moor, the air is known for its buoyancy, and you don’t have to be perched on a roof to feel that, but up so many feet above everything, I often felt like I could just ascend to the clouds, especially not being a person of any great heft. I liked the view my work gave me of the trains coming into the new Wychcombe Junction station. In those days the brakes were not the most reliable and many times the carriages overshot their mark, meaning passengers would have to walk very many dozen yards back down the track. Not all trains did stop and once I watched the carriages creak to a halt, only for nothing but several thousand bees to disembark, in the form of six hives that were then transported to Riddlefoot Meadow. Our parish has also not been without eminent human visitors. Prime Minister Gladstone passed through Underhill on his tour of Devon in 1872, and although I have no memory of this, my father said he had the opportunity to shake his hand and felt that he was ‘not a proper person’. Sir Walter Raleigh, it is said, was at large in the alehouses of the moor not long before his arrest in 1603. Edward claimed that, as a young soldier, he met Napoleon when he was moored in Torquay harbour, but Dorothy dismissed this as ‘whiskey talk’. Edward also assured me that as a child he’d met a man whose grandfather had been one of the royalists who had been infamously ambushed by parliamentarians while playing cards in the old Wickcoomb Inn, but by this point Edward was well into his eighth decade and often known to go amiss for several days, taking his night’s rest in fields and hedge bottoms.
Living with three men who were constantly bringing pieces of the outdoors back into the house with them – me with my dry reeds, my father with his soil and Edward with the burrs and leaves and buds that had attached themselves to him during his wilderness naps – was the bane of my mother’s existence. She reminded us with little respite about the relationship between soap and the almighty and it was as if, in her eyes, none of life could quite happen right unless every surface of the cottage was spotless. But of course as soon as it was spotless and life did start happening, the happening of it would make the surfaces dirty again, so in a way the life she hoped would happen was destined to always be but an unreachable dream. She worried terribly what her peers in the village thought of her and was forever haunted by the day in 1868 when she had visited Sidmouth without a bonnet: an incident she had later overheard two of the sisters from Pixies Cottages gossiping about. She was vehemently against the drinking of tea, maintaining that it was the Devil’s own drink, destructive to the senses, and did not allow it in the house. I never felt more taboo or lawless than when drinking a strong brew in Sarah’s kitchen – an exception mayhap being the time that Fernie Saville and I went out in the snow and, with one of my father’s shovels, dug up the sign to Upper Wadstray and Wychcombe and turned it in the opposite direction.
It was Cranford Frogmore who took Sarah away, as I suspected he would, from the moment I saw her eye roving towards him in the orchard. The day that I did not find Sarah at home when I called for her and saw his white frock shirt discarded on the ground near our old stepping stones, then heard giggles from in the copse behind, confirmed my worst fears. From the moment Sarah’s body began to mature, a wall that could not be perceived by the eye had gone up between us, and that feeling of syrup pulsing through me as she pressed up to me in the long grass was now just a memory. I had accepted this and that she was deserving of more of a man than me, but Frogmore was not a fraction of what I had hoped for her. I saw that he viewed everything in his immediate environment at best as part of a supporting cast in the play of his life, and any lover he chose would eventually have to be a victim of the same fate, and worse. If he had been less interested in the upkeep of his own moustache and the suppression of those in his stead, maybe it would have been him who found the prehistoric nuggets right under his nose in the kistvaen on Trembling Hill, rather than his more pleasant successors, some three decades later. He and his supercilious gang of trousers had only been in Underhill two days before they had commandeered a table in the corner of the Stonemason’s Arms, which they looked upon with as much ownership as if they had been responsible for the carving of its own sturdy legs from oak. ‘Do as my shirt does!’ he had commanded me, when I had the temerity to take a seat at it, and it was only later I had realised that what he was telling me to do was kiss his self-adoring arse. I walked silently away from that, just as I walked silently away from Sarah’s involvement with him. I have always shied from conflict. It is my way. Yet it is in my memory of these days that can be found my life’s great regret.
She never returned to the village. The rest of the Slatterleys moved away, to Penzance I believe, not long after. I heard many years later that Frogmore ploughed his way through the whores of Hackney while she went mad, alone, in a big Regency house up in Bath, before being committed to the madhouse. But who is to say for certain? As I have mentioned, I am distrustful of rumour and tittle-tattle.
I recall Sarah’s and my small story here so it will be held in print, but it strikes me as futile, not just because I do not know who would ever be interested to read it but because I am sure the earth and the river hold it and tell it too, as they tell all our stories, and that when they tell it they do so with a far greater eloquence and recall than I ever could. My father, despite the nature of his work and his diligence in attending his employer’s sermons, possessed a quite pagan view of the afterlife. He believed that parts of us seep into the earth, to become parts of the landscape around us, and perhaps parts of other souls yet to be. He saw it as a sort of dispersion of narrative. The root ball of a tree planted in a churchyard, he said, would soon go to work in absorbing the dead. He told me about the highwaymen who had been caught and hung in chains up on Underhill Tor, starving, getting their nutrition only from shreds of candle wax fed to them by those passing by until they finally expired and rotted into the earth. I saw in my mind’s eye the thick broth rain up there washing their secrets down into the soil and the river, and the river telling those secrets, just as it told the secret of the lady in the carving in the church and the secret of my mother’s true father.
Because the rainfall is so great here, digging is usually not difficult, but during a rare dry spell it was not uncommon for my father to break a shovel. He always kept a spare in a small attic in the stone barn behind the cottage: a topsy-turvy space that my mother constantly reminded him to keep tidier than he did. Could my father’s life have been as quiet as he wished it to be, if he had actually taken on board some of the advice my mother barked at him, or would she just have found more shortcomings to chastise him about? It is hard to say. I try now, as an older man who spends time underneath matters, to see more of what made her what she was: the story under the story, what it took for her to hold everything together, in a house of cows, chickens and men that were invariably either uncommunicative, crapulous, clumsy and hungry, if not all four at the same time. Heavy responsibility and lightness of manner cannot easily go hand in hand. What I do know is that my father rarely remembered to do any of the tasks that she shouted at him to do and, because of that, I know that on the day that she dislodged the shovel from the attic space and it fell on his head, it would have been in a precarious position, and because of that, it is questionable whether she can be blamed directly for his death.
I can picture the scene now: my mother on the ladder, growling her dismay at the disorder of my father’s tools, her hands busy above her, rummaging. My father directly below, staring at his dusty boots, uttering not a word, waiting for the storm to pass. The shovel falls and the sharp metal blade hits the softest part of his temple. The end of his life was not slow, although part of me suspects that my mother’s verbal annihilation of his character continued for a minute or two, even after he passed from this world into the next. It is hard not to note the irony that so many heavy objects had been propelled towards him over the years – earthenware mugs, griddles, trays, china birds, plates – and he’d lived through it all, yet the one that finished him off was the one she accidentally sent in his direction.
For the remaining twelve years of her life, my mother was a milder presence, particularly from the point two years after my father’s death when Edward’s liver finally became too pickled to keep him above the earth. I had never noticed at the time, but when she had talked to me or my father or Edward, her hands were constantly held together, her nails digging half-moons into her palms, and it was only now that she ceased to do it that I noticed she had ever done it. Cats, hens and dogs no longer fled into hedgerows at the sound of her voice. She ate more unselfconsciously, remarking on many an occasion with a satisfied chuckle that she was ‘full to pussy’s bow’. The stones in her tone became smaller, less sharp, and her mission to tame dirt for good abated. The cottage was at the lowest point in the valley, where all water seemed to come to gather, and that dampness was more noticeable as my mother’s obsessive cleanliness and tidiness fell off. The walls have always felt like crumbling cake here. I believe it is a building fit more for cows than humans. Yet it still stands, and I am still in it, also standing, just about.
My father is interred on the north side of the churchyard, near that Devil’s Door that I have still not located, and it was I who dug his grave, and who planted the ash sapling beside it, which I trust is now hard at work absorbing his essence. It was the driest spring in living memory and the bluebells leaned and withered as soon as they flowered. After Cedric Boyland saw that I could dig with an enthusiasm and strength that belied my size, he believed it only logical to offer me my father’s old position, and I accepted, and at that point the part of my adulthood I lived in the sky ended and the more sunken part began. Yet it is in this subterranean part of my life that my mind has floated higher, into unknown places that seem to be somewhere above the clouds. Sometimes, I think a more significant part of it than not has been spent inside dreams – extremely lucid, deeply textured dreams, sometimes more real than Underhill itself.
There is not a lot else to tell.
I am still here, still digging my holes and filling them in, and am still for the greater part the person I was when I first began doing it, although my bones ache a great deal more, and I fear I only have a year or so left at it. My reading and writing has improved, with the help of my father’s old books. Mumble the cow is no longer amongst the living. In the end, she outlasted my father, Edward and my mother, and very close to the end of her life, I decided she should not be so lonely, and got some companions for her, after purchasing some land off Benny Woodcock. The herd – or their successors – provide milk but I don’t push them hard or make a song and dance about its availability. If people come for it, they come. Nonetheless these cows are more than enough to occupy the time I do not spend deep in the earth or words. I am glad of them and glad to not be a man who depends on them for income, to be a man who owns a plot of land and the roof above his head. Some say the damp in here is not good for my lungs but I have outlived many a man who spent his life in more parched rooms. My mother, in her more sensitive, confessional final days, told me that when he had the place built, Edward inserted a shoe in the wall, and a doll which an old lady in the village had told him would give the place protection from misfortune. The doll, she said, had originally been part of a pair. But I do not know about the truth of this. There are a few things I know for sure. Children swimming in a river will never be quiet, that is one. You cannot count the tadpoles in your pond, that is another. But there is infinitely more I don’t know, just as ever it was.
In truth, it is Underhill that has changed far more than I ever could. More folk arrive on the train now and, thanks to its improved brakes, it stops at the station platform with fair precision. The advent of the motor car has brought more daytrippers to the moor and not all of them treat it with the respect it deserves. Just the other day, I had to apprehend a young gentleman with an accent I could not place who was pulling moss off the trees in Combe Woods. He seemed startled by my interference and, were I younger and larger and less reserved, we might have sparred. Instead, with the remark to his lady friend ‘It seems the piskies do live and speak after all, Jean!’, he departed, towards the road. I fear great change coming. Sometimes, I dream images I do not recognise, unfamiliar machines with too many wires, popping and crackling with electricity. In one dream I saw my own tombstone and the words inscribed on it: ‘William Millhouse: virgin, underestimated’ but it did not have a date. In another I was sitting in a meadow in May surrounded by all its floral glory but looked up at Underhill Tor and saw a face in the hillside and the face was screaming. I fear the advent of a vandalism coming far greater than the one that concerned my father. I suspect the moor is about to have its back scratched and there will be multiple payments due.
