The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Read Free Book Online

village children would shout at some egregious victim: to which there was, really, no effective retort. Best ignored.
    There were also, of course, sweets on sale at Nutworth’s, but my brother had somehow put it into my head that they were not nice, and I generally went elsewhere. There was no ice-cream - not yet by eight or nine years, which were to see refrigeration introduced. (My mother never possessed a ‘fridge in her life, which ended in 1957.) Ginger beer and fizzy ‘lemonade’ in bottles, un-iced, were the best to be had in hot weather.
    The real reason, as I now understand, for people feeling that there was something wrong with Nutworth’s was the Nutworths. They were unsmiling, disobliging and down on life: with good reason; they had an only son who was hideously deformed. Mrs Nutworth was a little, sharp, black-eyed woman whom you always felt was waiting for a pretext to snap at you. Mr N. was a quiet, rather surly man who never bantered, or called you ‘young doctor’, like the other grown-up villagers.
    But Cecil, the son, was the frightening one. Poor Cecil! He was a hunchback - a really bad one, with a great hump, a pigeon chest and his head, with no perceptible neck, sunk between them. He had a good enough face, but he wore his straight, black hair long, which made him appear even more sinister. Small children, of course, feel no pity for deformity - only curiosity if it’s slight and fear if it’s severe. The very possibility that Cecil might be going to serve you was enough to make you think twice before going into Nutworth’s - certainly if you were alone.
    However, you couldn’t entirely avoid Cecil, because of Mavis. Mavis was a private ’bus - very rattly, and bottom gear up Wash Hill. (I suppose Mavis may have been Mrs Nutworth’s name.) It was painted in yellow, in a flowing script, down each side of the ‘bus, which was brown and held perhaps twenty-five people when (and if) full. It went down into Newbury and back twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon - 2d. for an adult and 1d. for a child. (Rather less than 1p and rather less than ½p
.)
Mr N. drove and Cecil was the conductor, with a ping-ping ticket-punch at his belt. There were no official stops. You just held up your hand anywhere along the road and Mavis would stop. Once aboard, it was tensile to be aware, not daring to look behind, of Cecil ping-pinging his way up the ’bus until he was standing over you. He never spoke. Later on, as I grew up, Boris Karloff got few shivers out of me: I’d been inoculated by Cecil.
    I feel so sorry for them, now. I never used to see Mrs Nutworth at the Women’s Institute gatherings, where I sometimes went with my mother {competitions, amateur dramatics, concerts, whist drives - not half bad fun, actually), and I never saw Mr N. in The Bell either. (Perhaps he went to The Gun, though.) They were not liked. A damned shame, I reckon.
    The other shop was Leader’s. This was nearer home - only about half the distance to Nutworth’s. Leader’s really
was
Ginger and Pickles - or Sally Henny Penny’s, perhaps. Mrs Leader, a warm, genial woman with a beautiful voice, certainly sold bootlaces and hairpins, if not mutton chops. Again, sweets and ginger beer were about my range. Mr Leader was moustached and loquacious - sententious, even. Later on, however, as a young adult in The Bell, I came to enjoy his company. They were childless, I rather think. Mrs Leader played golf, which was unusual for a village woman in those days. It rather raised her standing.
    Another early memory, going back to when I was perhaps four or five, is of the tarmac being laid in the Andover Road and in Essex Street. Essex Street was the principal street in Wash Common, leading from the pond and the Falkland Memorial about half a mile west, past Nutworth’s and the upper pond to Wash Common Farm. (Cotterell’s, it was called then, and a