COLESHANGER
Norman E. Williams
“If it can be said that a village has a life, then this is a biography.”
—Norman Ellis Williams, (1906-1969).
Panda Books Australia
Sydney — New York — Tokyo — Berlin
LICENCE
This publication is a literal transcription of the 1952 manuscript “Coleshanger” by Norman E. Williams, OBE, MA (1908-1969).
This edition copyright 2016 Thomas Corfield.
Published by Panda Books Australia.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Neither Thomas Corfield or Panda Book Australia are responsible or liable for information pertaining to names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents recounted in this publication. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is wholly without prejudice. This transcription is presented “as is”, without any guarantee, in any form whatsoever, explicitly or implicitly, including but not limited to guarantees concerning merchantability, uses, non-infringement, and accuracy.
THOMASCORFIELD.COM
CONTENTS
Title
Licence
Editor’s Note
Biography
Foreword
1. The Scene
2. Williams And Others
3. Catastrophe
4. Mrs. Lynch
5. Sex And Other Pleasures
6. Gradua Ad Parnassum
7. Back For A Breather
8. Noiseless Tenors
9. Mainly Mordred
10. Ichabod
The Original Manuscript
EDITOR’S NOTE
I cannot know my grandfather’s reaction to having his manuscript published. He was a sensitive, humorous and awkward man, apparently, who might be more touched than impressed that it finally has been. The manuscript has been around, unread, longer than he was alive. And seventy years after his death, and a century after the book’s setting, there is a strange irrelevance in even pondering such matters. Nevertheless, I’m pleased to have revived its faded and brittle pages, and brought his story into the immortal realm of infinitely spinning electrons.
Norman’s recount of English village life is charming, light-hearted and self-deprecating, and because it was written in 1952, has a poignancy that’s impossible to conjure were it written today. It has an authenticity that I hope goes beyond any ancestral intrigue it holds for me, and gives readers a taste of village life in the English midlands during the early twentieth century.
Coleshanger tells of a village and the people within it, villagers who lived far simpler lives than ours: either we have too much distraction in this day and age, or perhaps Coleshanger hadn’t enough. Regardless, Norman Williams’ Coleshanger suggests one thing clearly: that despite all that humanity has endured over the last century, people have changed very little. And although this could infer that we’ve learnt nothing from such tribulations, it might equally suggest we have a resilience and spirit unwavering.
—Thomas Norman Corfield,
17th August, 2016.
BIOGRAPHY
Norman Ellis Williams was born in the small village of Greens Norton, Northamptonshire, England, in 1906. He was the youngest of five children. His brother, William Washington Williams, who became Bursar of Fitzwilliam College Cambridge, was ten years older. His three sisters died in their twenties from tuberculosis. After a childhood and adolescence in Greens Norton and Towcester, Norman was accepted at Cambridge University, where he studied Literature and Classics, culminating in First Class Honours.
In 1939 he married Margery Bosworth, whose family were from Northampton. They had one daughter, Alison, mother of Thomas Corfield. Shortly after his marriage, Norman signed up as a gunner at the outbreak of war. He served mainly in North Africa and rose to the rank of Captain in Intelligence. After the war he joined the British Council, with postings to Egypt, Holland, Czechoslovakia and India.
His final posting, in 1958 was to Australia as British Council Representative and Cultural Advisor to the High Commissioner, during which he was awarded an O.B.E. He and Margery lived in Sydney, until in 1968, he was diagnosed with acute leukaemia. He died within three months at the age of 60. When Margery returned to England a few months later, it was arranged that his ashes should be interred with the rest of his family at Greens Norton church. In 1988, Margery’s ashes were also buried there.
FOREWORD
Coleshanger is the village of Greens Norton in the county of Northampton, three miles from the small Watling Street of Towcester (the Polcaster of the book) and about eleven miles from Northampton. It sits on the Banbury lanes—a series of by-ways and still deliciously rural—taking in their embrace the small town of Banbury and a number of tiny villages. Amongst these is Sulgrave with its Manor House, purchased in 1539 by Lawrence Washington, a shrine of pilgrimage for Americans ever since Washington Irving introduced it to his compatriots. I understand that Norman’s mother (although not herself a native of Greens Norton) was connected with the Washington family, which accounts for the naming of her first-born, William Washington Williams. And certainly, on visiting Sulgrave Manor (where the Washington arms appear on the porch) certain resemblances can be seen between some of the old portraits and my late mother-in-law.
I feel more than ever, after reading the manuscript, that it was right, following the big, official funeral in Sydney, to fly Norman’s ashes to Greens Norton. I contacted the Rector (whom I did not know but who has since, with his sister, become a friend of mine) asking if he could arrange to intern the urn in the family grave in the churchyard. This he did, preceding it with a simple service in the church. Although a private matter and no invitations or notices were sent out—I myself was still in Australia—hundreds of people turned up for the occasion: they came from Greens Norton and the villages around, and from Towcester and Northampton. I think Norman would have been happy to find that his world was not entirely lost2 and that many of the old loyalties still lingered on. And at a magnificent tea-party Canon Worthington-Hardy and his sister threw for me on my return to the UK, I met again around a festive board many of those who shared Norman’s reminiscences and his sense of values, if not his pointed humour.
—Mrs. Margery Williams (1908-1988).
From a letter regarding the book, 10th March,1980.
In 1980.
2 The manuscript was originally titled “My Lost World”.
THE SCENE
“The people lived in darkness and vassalage.
They were lost in the grossness of beef and ale.”
—T. L. Peacock.
VISITORS TO COLESHANGER received an impression, not so much that they had gone backwards in time, as that they had gone sideways. Some of them, in spite of their struggles, never managed to return but stayed in the village, wandering around with a lost look on their faces and despair and dejection in their hearts until they died. But even the contemplation of death brought them no consolation. They seemed to feel that when their souls were freed and shot upwards at the resurrection they would be incorrectly aimed, and would go whistling past the gates of heaven into a cold and featureless infinity. My aunt Margaret married one of these unhappy creatures. He used at first to speak regretfully of the town he left, and was soon known in the village as Johnny Come-from, for it seemed to us incredible that anyone admitted to our society should have regrets for the outer world. Johnny Come-from and Aunt Margaret had a son named Mordred who was a warning to us all in the matter of mixed marriages and of whom I shall have much to say in the less pleasant passages of this book. One day a man came out of the county town in the course of a lecture and in the schoolroom explained that educated men now agreed that they were descended from apes. In concluding, he said that he hoped we should not take offence at anything he said which was, after all, scientific and not personal. Pious Dackers, speaking for the village, said,
“No, it wasn’t our place to be upset.”
“Would he please explain?” the visitor asked.
“No marriage outside the village for as long as we could tell,” Pious said, “at least, not with educated peoples, so we was let off.”
“What then,” demanded the lecturer, “did we think we were descended from?”
“Coleshanger men,” said Pious.
And I sometimes think there was a deep and alarming truth in his contention.
To the visitor, Coleshanger, during opening time, must have seemed very much like any other Midland village: empty and ugly, with a church, a chapel, three pubs and a school. There was a third place of worship known as the temple of the Eighth Day Creationists, a sect which never gained much ground outside Coleshanger and which in my day had only eight, or nine adherents. It was started by a blind and deaf lady who had left London to live with us in the country and who had a strong feeling one morning that she was, as it were, in the Garden of Eden on the first day of its full activities. She went into an ecstasy over the peace and tranquillity around her, and dictated to a friend the principles on which these could be perpetuated. It was unfortunate that amanuensis missed a great deal of what she said owing to a fight between the Withams and the Hotchpennys which was going on outside the window at the time, but enough was taken down to encourage a small secession from the Wesleyans and to set up a persistent, though not dangerous, spiritual opposition. There was already a bitter rivalry between the chapel and the church. The former attracting, in general, the middle sections of village society, and the latter retaining both ends. Real theological differences we only imperfectly understood, but our general impression was that the church looked to the First, the chapel to the Second, and the temple to the Third Person of the Trinity. It seemed, therefore, that the village was reasonably well looked offer, and most of us felt we could occasionally take time off for other interests.
The amount of original sin in Coleshanger was probably no greater than in any other village of the same size; but it was different, and on the whole, more original. Sins venial and moral had an honoured and accepted place in our daily routine, and a catholic missionary who visited the village for a week’s assault is said to have left in despair on the second morning, having encountered several kinds of vice not accounted for in the very comprehensive catalogue issued by his superiors.
We had, however, other qualities, equally rare and surprising. Generosity, kindness and loyalty, for example; and in the summing up of spiritual accounts the balance was probably in credit. Certainly we all loved the village, and there was an old saying current among us that everyone who left Coleshanger came halfway back, which alluded to the lunatic asylum which lay midway between us and the county town, the greatest distance that anyone might expect us to travel.
We hated change, and were as much annoyed with a reformed drunkard as with a man who substituted slats for thatch on the roof of his cottage: our society was framed with room for drunkards if they developed—as long as they got drunk in the village. Any man who changed his character, even for the better, was liable to forfeit our confidence.
The one exception to this was Dan Patchworthy (or Padgery). Pious Dackers described him as a “Jack-of-all-faiths and master of none.” It was not quite accurate, but as a short description we could not improve on it. Up to the age of twenty-two, Dan had not been particularly interested in religion, but in 1864, and for some reason I never understood, he suddenly became a regular attendant at divine worship. This lasted only six months, however, after which he became lost again in the ways of sin and general village activities. But the next year, a home missioner came to the chapel, and Dan was converted again. His previous election had been to the Eighth Day Creationists, and his change of front was not all jam for the chapel, which we Williams supported. Dan’s approaches to the Almighty at the weekly prayer meeting seemed to us to have something of the manner and delicacy of the bum-bailiff, and one of the older members once said to me, “Mr. Williams, Dan Padgery goes on so in them prayer meetings. If your grandad ’adn’t built the chapel, I’d expect the Lord to cause the roof to collapse and crush us all.” On the other side, the Creationists felt he was conveying information to the enemy, and ultimately the situation became a little strained. The village feast, however, which fell in September, seduced Dan from this new righteousness, and it was not until the next spring, following an unfortunate experience with a barrel of ale which he breached and had to spend an entire night with his mouth to the bunghole, that he turned over another leaf and joined the church. It reminded some people of the dove and the ark, and it gave Dan quite a lot of pleasure for a time. He had a healthy voice which he used at first with a rather endearing timidity, and they put him in the choir, which was a mistake, for it went to his head. Many of the hymns he did not know at all, but he felt he must earn his promotion and succeeded in drowning everyone but the Squire, and could only come level with the loudest parts with a vigorous “tally-ho”, which was not always in sympathy with the hymn’s sentiments. It was the Squire who got rid of Dan in the end by asking him in to the hall and requesting his opinion on such a variety of liquors as laid Dan up for three days and kept him for some months afterwards searching and experimenting to discover what the mixture was. The next year he joined the Creationists again, but he fell out with his brother, and showing too much sympathy with Cain, was ejected. A spring conversion was now, however, a habit with him, and for the rest of his life he went on doing the rounds, finding salvation in March or April, and losing it in the early autumn, and always sticking to his strict rotation of faiths like a contentious theological husbandman. When he was about to die, his family wanted to call the parson, but Dan insisted on a chartered accountant instead.
When the accountant arrived, Dan told him to get out his pencil and paper and take down figures, and for half an hour there was writing down and adding up until Dan began to grow impatient.
Looking whitely at the ceiling he demanded, “Come on, Mr. ’udson, what is it then?”
Mr. Hudson sucked his pencil and fiddled for a moment longer. “A debit balance of three years four months and nine days,” he said at last.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Dan, and it was a statement, not and oath.
The accountant chewed his moustache. “How do you sleep, Mr. Patchworthy?” he asked.
“Sleep? Why, allus sleep like a log.”
“And do you dream, sir?”
“Aye,” said Dan, fretting to get back to the figures.
“And what sort of things do you dream?”
“Most ’an general about the devil.”
“What kind of things about the devil?”
“Well, us be allus a-chasin’ between the pubs, the church an’ the chapel,” Dan said. “Sometimes ’e be chasin’ I, and sometimes I be chasin’ ’e.”
“Do either of you catch the other?” asked Mr. Hudson, leaning forward eagerly.
“No,” said Dan, regretfully. “Never.”
“Then I reckon you’re alright,” said the accountant, looking at the figures. “You’re seventy-two years old, you’ve slept a third of the time—that’s twenty-four years. Half of that we’ve taken in already. That leaves twelve. You were first converted at twenty-four, so even counting you being a limb of Satan until then, which by all accounts seems pretty certain, we’ve got four years left over. Take away the debit and seven months and twenty days in hand.”
But Dan could not see it at first.
“Look here,” the accountant explained, “if you were chasing the devil, then you were on the right side, and so you were if you were running from him. You must have been saved in your sleep.”
Dan thought for a minute and then sent for the doctor.
“Doctor,” he said, “how long have I got?”
“Well now,” said the doctor, and began hum-ing and ha-ing.
“Come on! Out with it. It’s for a bet.”
The doctor’s eyes lit up: he was a sporting man. “A week at most,” he replied. “It’s even you don’t last six days, ten to one against seven, and a hundred to one against eight. You couldn’t bet on nine, but I’ll take any money on my terms up to eight.”
Several of Dan’s friends put small sums on then and there, but Dan called his daughter-in-law to him.
“Lize,” he said, “bring me a pint o’ bitter with a noggin o’ brandy in it. I’m about six months to the good.”
At his funeral, eight days later, burial services were read by the church, the chapel and the Eighth Day Creationists. Not because they all wanted to claim Dan, but rather to be quite certain that his spirit would not, from force of habit, came forward as an unwelcome fruit of evangelisation next spring.
As I said, however, we were, on the whole, opposed to any kind of change: we regarded it as inimical to the spirit of Coleshanger. We even resented marriage outside the village, but there were just enough adventurers among us, bringing their brides from four, five or even six mile distance, to prevent the stock from deteriorating: and at the same time, the dilution was small, and never amounted to a dangerous adulteration. The life of the newcomers was a little difficult for the first thirty years or so, after which pity and charity began to assert themselves. But their children were always half foreigners, and regarded with something like awe by the rest of us. We used to wonder what they looked like with their clothes off.
Our attitude to time, or our disregard for it, was perhaps exemplified by the incident of the schoolmaster’s father. When the old man retired so that he might have more time for serious drinking, his son was appointed in his place, since the managers did not want a complete stranger about the place. This arrangement was quite ideal as the son had been a poacher with our fathers and they could rely on him not putting any nonsensical ideas into our heads, if for no other reasons than that he had none of his own. It is, I think, well known, or I should not have heard of it, that school teachers come in time to look upon the whole world as one puling riot of irritating infantilism. The schoolmaster’s father had this at least in common with his profession, and one morning, having quarrelled rather violently with his son, he came down to school, ordered him to bend over the desk, and gave him six with a rough stick he had cut from the hedge outside. The schoolmaster was then made to sit with us, and his father took charge. The lesson then went on something like this:
The schoolmaster’s father, looking down at his son, “Twice seven.”
Schoolmaster, “Fourteen.”
Father, with infinite scorn, “Fourteen, indeed! What a brain! Exactly what I would have expected from a child of seven! And I expect you learned it from someone else. Fourteen, indeed!”
Schoolmaster, trucently, “Very well then, what is it?”
Father, beginning to lose interest: “What’s what?”
Schoolmaster, “Twice seven.”
Father, in despair to the rest of us, “Do you hear this, children? Your schoolmaster has to go round asking what twice seven is!”
And so we bickered our way through mathematics, history and geography, and it was not until the end of the morning, when the schoolmaster’s father suddenly leaned towards us and whispered, “And now children, some music!” that we reached accord. The song he chose was not in our books, and had never been sung in school before, and drunk though he was, he had the decency to send the girls home before teaching us. At first we were a little nervous, for every verse was more coarse than the last, and we didn’t really understand them. The adventures of Sally and the Red Major seemed at times a bit obscure. But gradually we rose above what are now, I believe, called our inhibitions, and then let them go altogether in the end, the schoolmaster, encouraged by flourishes of his father’s ash plant, singing as loudly as anyone.
Strangers sometimes caused a little trouble, but if they were men they were thrown into the river. The women were more difficult to handle, as in the case of Miss Porritt and the order of precedence, which caused fights all over the village for some months, and of missus Souster, who used to suffer from diseases we refused to accept so that when she died she had to be buried in the next village as we declined to recognise her death.
But on the whole, all these disturbances which are so necessary to a healthy community we were able to raise by ourselves. And if internal affairs did get dull, we could always have a cricket or football match with a neighbouring team which would start up any number of fights and keep us occupied until our own affairs demanded attention again.
Our public houses were the Greyhound, the Gordon Arms and the Duchess and Trumpet. The latter, as I first knew it, was a very old inn with a sign representing an hermaphroditic figure blowing a kind of cornet, with dozens of small, white figures all around standing sharply to attention. Some said it had originally been called “The Angel” or “The Reckoning”, but others maintained that the sign was a portrait of Her Grace the last Duchess of Gordon, who had lived in the village many years before and who used to waken her household at any hour of the day or night with a blast of hunting horn. She always kept all the shutters closed as she could not be persuaded that the Gordon riots, which on hearing mentioned she had taken personally, were over. Day began when she felt like it, and ended when she had lost all interest. Some days she did not keep at all, and when she died she was found to be eighteen months behind the times and the servants’ wages had to be made up by the executers.
The Gordon Arms lay on the way to the allotments and there was a convenient back door and a gap in the hedge at the end of the garden giving easy access to the fields. More gardening was done in the taproom of the Gordon Arms than all the land of the village put together.
The Greyhound was kept by a woman who, in consequence of her mother having had a chair pulled from under her while in an interesting condition, lived in constant dread of an earthquake. The snug looked like the saloon of an ocean going steamer, and under the bar she had a little iron shelter into which she would plunge if a door was slammed or a heavy cart went by. She also had, hanging above her, a curious contraption she had made out of bells and bits of tin, which she said would ring if the earth began to tremble. Once, the string broke and it fell on her head: it was then we learned that she wore a toupee with a metal lining. I shall have more to say of our amusements in later chapters. On the surface they looked innocent enough, but they had deeper significance which a mere outsider could not guess at.
There were several clubs, or “lodges” and a Band of Hope to set against them. Grandfather was a notorious if dignified drinker, so that Father, preserving the family’s reputation for living at one extreme or the other, went in enthusiastically for temperance, and the success of the Band of Hope was wholly a result of his efforts. Its members were, in the main, preadolescents who liked to come out of the cold to which they were otherwise condemned by a callous law prohibiting the sale of alcoholic liquor to young persons under eighteen years of age. They used frequently to recite, when Father would creep behind the tortoise stove in the schoolroom and hide his head in his hands. Once a year they went on an outing, and once a year they had a party. It was at the latter that my cousin, Edmund, got the lantern slides mixed up, including a few he should not have bought in Paris, and my cousin Mordred, who wanted the French slides himself, gave Edmund away. Fortunately, Father was so angry that he got the affair all muddled, thought Mordred was confessing to the outrage and gave him a beating in public. This, of course, delighted everyone but Mordred: all the same, Edmund, who almost worshipped Father, was terribly upset by the whole business and shortly afterwards emigrated. He ultimately distinguished himself by being twice elected president of a small American republic. The first occasion was a genuine mistake, since he was down there on business and was having his cards reprinted in the same office that was printing the ballot papers. The typesetter was drunk, and not being used to having two jobs in the works at the same time, printed two unknown foreign names on Edmund’s card, and put Edmund’s name alone on the ballot sheet, so that he got the only four votes recorded. He argued a little, but they did not understand him and he took office. Two day’s later, however, there was a revolution, and he just escaped with his life. He wandered in the forest for a week and then suddenly, to his horror, emerged in the town where he had achieved such unwilling eminence. His arrival coincided with a counter-revolution, and most reluctantly, he found himself back in office. Later in the week, however, there was another revolution, and we never heard of him again.
Looking back, it seems to me that the village had a coherence which contemporary planned communities seem to lack, or shyly conceal under a show of cold indifference or dull, ingrowing individualism. We spent all our time together, buried each other and fought amongst ourselves. The relative prosperity of every person was essential to the well-being of the whole, but we not only felt that we had a responsibility towards our neighbours, but that they had one to us. This bred a sort of genial anarchy amongst us which seems now almost entirely to have disappeared, giving place to an ill-tempered self-assertion.
Father and Grandfather were builders and wheelwrights, doing a bit of framing on the side: they were quite considerable employers of labour, but their relations with their workmen were odd to the point of fantasy. Rueben the carter lived only for his horses and would stand no nonsense from Father: sometimes he refused to put them to work for days on end.
“How would you like it,” he once demanded, “if I was to put a bit in your mouth an’ make you pull a damn great cart up an’ down the street all day?” And he stamped into the stable, slammed the door and began to blow the horses’ noses on his handkerchief.
Jack Pavel, the blacksmith, turned up to work a few minutes late one morning and Grandfather met him at the entrance to the yard.
“Now jack,” he said, “this just will not do: it’s gone six already.”
“Ah, master,” said Jack, “an’ later it will ’ave gone five.”
To this, Grandfather knew there was no reply, so he did not try to make one. On another occasion when we were adding a new room to the chapel block, Grandfather went along to find Enoch Mayo coming out of the Greyhound, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Grandfather reprimanded him.
“Now, Nocher,” he said, “I can’t have that, you know.”
“Well, you’re right there,” Enoch replied, “As I’ve just ’ad it myself.”
It was the sort of friendly bickering which goes on in a large family and on the quiet, we all enjoyed it.
But we were not solely on the lookout for our own advantage. Jack Pavel, for example, worked for Father for ten years without taking a day’s holiday. Father frequently expostulated with him, but to no effect, and in the end it began to get on his nerves. In the tenth year, just before Stratford Mop, he called Jack into his office and pleaded with him.
“Listen, Jack,” he said, “I’ll give you your day’s wages, and I’ll give you a fare to Stratford and I’ll even give a pound to spend if only you’ll go there for the day and enjoy yourself.”
Jack’s first reaction was to give notice, but after much argument he relented, and with a bad grace agreed to go. The day after his visit he came to Father, thanked him somewhat sulkily, and gave him twelve and fourpence change.
Then he went to the shops. The rest of the men were very interested in his journey, and he told them of the things he’d seen.
“An’ what did you do for grub, Jack?” they asked him.
“They was a-roustin’ a bullock and selling plates o’ mate for a shillin’, so I ’ad some,” he told them. “Taters an’ gravy was another tuppence.”
“Didn’t you ’ave no puddin’?”
“Aye. I ’ad some cakes. An ’a’penny each, they was, two for thruppence, so I ’ad a couple.”
“You what?”
“I ’ad a couple.”
“But they done you down, butty,” they pointed out. “An ’a’penny each? They should ’ave bin two for a penny!”
Jack didn’t see this at once, but after they had worked it out several ways on the walls with bits of chalk, he became convinced that he had, in fact, been cheated. Normally anything but a profane man—swearing was rare in Coleshanger—he demonstrated without fear of contradiction that he had been practicing restraint and that the normal purity of his language was in no way due to ignorance. He dashed off to Father and demanded another day’s holiday so that he might go back and fight the swindler. Father dissuaded him in the end, but Jack insisted on giving him a halfpenny more, feeling that he should himself pay the price of his own stupidity. The next year, Jack led a party of all the men to Stratford, and for a long time the trip was an annual event. I do not think they ever found the pastry crook, which must have been their hope and intention, but they always came back looking smug and self-satisfied so that I imagine Stratford gained very little by their visits.
I suppose we were stupid on the whole, but it was, among ourselves a warm, friendly and general stupidity with a comfortable texture and pleasing pattern. It suited us and as I remember the village, no one ever seemed to advance into a crabbed cage, but to mellow with the mild and genial decline of a summer day’s sunset. It used to be said of us by the envious country around, that Coleshanger men died when they wished to, but until then they enjoyed themselves.
Ruskin remarked in his essay “Of Kings’ Treasuries” that “the greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, and its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.” He was probably right. But in Coleshanger we made no efforts to earn praise, nor any excursions after pleasure. We were not indifferent to them, by any means, but we had no fuss and trouble with them. If we wanted praise then we praised ourselves until our craving or our vanity was satisfied; and our days were passed in a glory of exciting inconsequence which brought with them a regular diet of pleasure. Excursions beyond our limited circle brought us excitement, but also the uneasiness of the uncontrolled and unassimilated, and we were not really happy again until they were over and we could relax with the circumscribed perils of our own illogical routine, and begin to digest our experiences in the safety of tranquil recollection.
WILLIAMS AND OTHERS
FATHER, WHO WAS a shortish man with a grey moustache, as I remember him, wore a bowler hat in cool or wet weather and a boater on hot days in summer. He had a quiet serenity of manner which caused all manner of people to come to him in trouble and such a transparent honesty that most of his clients never asked him for more than a verbal estimate, however costly the work they wished him to undertake. But he was seldom cheated: he seemed to perceive the presence of a rogue and would suddenly alarm him by bursting into merry laughter at his plausible dishonesty. Oddly enough, they seldom took offence at him. On the other hand, though he spent little money on himself and we lived simply, he was always giving money away, or lending it to friends and relations and then destroying their notes of hand, When he was dying, he said to Mother, “Maud, there’s a little bundle of papers in the drawer of my safe. Be a dear and burn them, will you?” Mother burned them, but not before she had seen that they were bills from about two dozen people who father thought might be hurt by repayment.
There was something pleasantly Elizabethan about the university of his interests, and so much that was saintly in his character that I have never heard him spoken of with anything other than affection and respect. Thirty years after his death the old Coleshanger men shake their heads to me and say, “Ah, Mr. Williams, things would be different if your father were alive,” as if this Gadarene age, under his kindly restraint, would have paused on the edge, turned about and walked quietly back to its grazing.
He was the oldest of Grandfather’s many children, and when Grandfather began to lose interest in the business, Father, at the age of sixteen, left school and took control. He had been reasonably brilliant in his studies and his mind was not content with the dull and protracted labours of a builder’s office. He learned to play the flute, violin, ’cello and viola, and was a first-class performer. He took land and learned to farm it, and was not content until it was the cleanest and most productive in the district. By himself, he studied architecture, and designed and built many houses, including our own: he got a name as a careful restorer of old buildings. He designed and constructed carts which are still eagerly bought at sales. He could do anything with his hands—carpentry, ironwork, painting, plastering—every bit as well as his men. He was an enthusiastic engineer, and from the earliest days had always some sort of unsatisfactory motor vehicle with which he would tinker in his spare moments. He chose, cut, felled and seasoned his own timber, and made his own bricks, drainage pipes and tiles. He designed and built a mill which ground our own corn and we produced our own butter, eggs and cheese. He was very active in village affairs and a non-conformist local preacher. His principles—how they worked I could not understand—would not allow him to use motor transport on Sundays unless he was in bad health and he frequently cycled thirty miles a day to his “appointments”. He never used trains on Sundays, his principle there being simple—neither to work, nor cause anyone else to work on the Sabbath. And with all this he had an exquisite sense of humour which was quite impersonal and entirely without malice.
Father probably inherited some of his natural gifts from Grandfather, but their characters were their own and entirely different. In a curious way they respected each other, but I think that Grandfather, dynamic and overbearing as he was, was secretly afraid and not a little proud of his son.
Father had, of course, his eccentricities, relating chiefly to food. Stranger dishes were placed before him at his command than ever repelled explorers in impossible lands. He ate them and thought they did him good: certainly they could have given him no pleasure.
This maggot became worse towards the end of his life—when he was really ill. Though we did not guess it. But even in his youth the extravagance was apparent. He was the only person I have ever met who wished on principle to be seasick.
With a friend and my Uncle Rhys-Lewin he crossed one summer to Ireland. It was a filthy day, and the friend and Rhys-Lewin immediately capitulated and went below, praying for the end. Father spent the whole journey going from one to the other giving what help he could, but no commiserations. On the contrary. Apparently his too frequently repeated remark was, “You’re very lucky, you know. It does you a world of good being seasick. Clears out your system. I do wish we could change places.”
That night they landed at Belfast and went early to bed. In the morning, Rhys-Lewin found a note by his bed in father’s almost illegible handwriting.
“The seas look very rough today. If the boats sail I shall go back, as it looks as though I might be sick.”
Poor man! He wasted his money. He was never seasick in his life.