Out of India by Michael Foss Read Free Book Online

tapping a glass tumbler. The mid-morning mug of milk came warm from the day’s first milking. In the afternoons, wrapped to the nose against the wind from the east, we learnt from the village kids the timeless arts of childhood mischief, how to defeatboredom with mud-slides and squabbles and troublemaking in farmyards. In the evenings, changed into pyjamas, we crouched on the landing of the pub, peering through banisters into the bar below.
    The aroma that wafted up to us was peculiar. Damp coals, wet clothes, manure sticking to boots, a mustiness rubbed off from the coats of animals, the sourness of old farmhands who had long forgotten to bathe, all this mixed with the slop of the beer on the mahogany and the dry frowsty stink of the tobacco. But it was companionable in there, in the warm fug, with the light strained out and mellowed by the nicotine colour of walls and ceiling, with the rasp of hobnails on the scrubbed planks of the floor and the subdued, almost monosyllabic mumble of country talk, to outsiders hardly distinguishable from the soft grunts of their farm animals.
    My mother liked to sit on a high stool at the end of the bar closest to the fire. The grate was small and the ration of coal not generous. She crossed her legs with some elegance and sat quietly, though the farmhands knew that she was Fred’s wife and they could address her if they wished. They were in no hurry. She lit a cigarette and waited, expelling smoke quickly through her nose, taking a medium-dry sherry or a small whisky with a lot of soda.
    We grew drowsy with the soft sounds and the clink of the glasses and went to bed. But we tried to keep awake until the bell rang for ‘last orders’. Then we crept out again to the landing, getting ready to join our treble shouts to the landlord’s traditional bellow of ‘Time gentlemen, please’. This seemed worth all our efforts to keep awake. The adults, or so we thought, needed all the help they could get to steady them at the end of the day.
    Once or twice while we were there, our grandfather sidled shyly into the public bar, having slipped the leash at home. Once, grandmother came to fetch him back. Atthe door of the bar – my grandmother would not enter – there was a muttered altercation.
    ‘Tom,’ she said with icy contempt, ‘I can smell the drink on you.’
    ‘Yus, missus, you can smell it right enough,’ his battered old face beamed at her, ‘but you cain’t smell how many I’ve had!’
    When my mother heard this exchange, she later said, she turned her head aside and laughed for the first time in weeks.
    *
    The jolly interlude did not last. Soon we were out in the flatlands, looking for somewhere more settled than a couple of rooms in a public house. It was unpleasant to discover just how dark was the world outside, away from the rough comfort and fellowship of the pub. Why was it that our life in the byways could not go on, pushing alphabet bricks into country words, singing ‘Jack and Jill’ with tremulous notes under a spinster’s furrowed brow, sneaking tuppenny bars of bitter chocolate from the dusty counter of the village shop, lying down to sleep to the squeak of the beer-pulls and the soft thud of darts into the dart-board?
    A ramshackle car took us to a bleaker reality. Out in dreary landscape we were dumped onto the rutted yard of Copse Farm where Farmer Griffith and his wife were prepared to rent us rooms but drew the line at extending to us anything like a welcome. Only the compulsion of the war drove them to rent out lodgings, but that cataclysm was not large enough to force them into friendliness.
    I began to learn how much of farming was squalor. The long midden-heap behind the barn; the urine stench from the straw in the milking parlour; the thick coat of the farmyard dog matted with burrs and dried mud; rusted old machinery strangled by the weeds; green scum on the cattle-trough; fallen and split branches rotting in theorchard; broken gates stitched together