The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

Cotterell farms it now.)
    The men on the laying - and all workmen in general - my mother used to call ‘Jims’. (‘There’ll be some Jims coming tomorrow, Dicky, to do the front gate. You can help them if you like.’ The ‘helping’, of course, consisted of standing about and chatting - picking their brains, really, for like all children I wanted to learn what it was like to be grown-up. You acquired ideas from things let fall rather than from direct instruction. E.g., ‘You wants t’ang on to that there box, ‘Arry. See ’im Friday, old Jack’ll give you threepence for ‘e.’) A whole army of Jims, of course, turned up to tarmacadam the Andover Road, equipped with wonderful things - tar-boilers, tar-spreaders, broad rakes and a real steam-roller. Nearer and nearer to the house they came, day by day, up Wash Hill, until they were actually outside, great men with walrus moustaches, thick braces and string round the knees of their trousers, calling out things like ‘Couple o’ foot, then, Fred’ and ‘Take ’er steady, Joe.’
    One of these Jims I remember clearly. He had come into our garage yard for some reason or other, and had been talking to Thorn, our gardener, about a screwdriver or some such. I was around and he began talking to me. He told me, seriously and earnestly, about soldiering on the western front during the Great War, addressing me as ‘Boy’. I liked this. It seemed more grownup than ‘Master Richard’ or ‘Young doctor’. Jim Hawkins to the life! ‘And when we come out o’ them there trenches, boy,’ he said, ‘we was proper
lousy.
Yer, proper lousy we was!’ I could sense all right how nasty this must have been.
    Then he began explaining to me how a pistol worked. ‘That’s what they calls the mechanicism, see, boy,’ he said, demonstrating with his left fore-finger crooked in the palm of his right hand. ‘The mechanicism of the trigger.’ I was impressed. No stranger grownup had ever talked to me like this before - seriously setting out to communicate grown-up matters, without banter. Tobacco, sweat, an old waistcoat all ragged, rough hands ingrained with tar. He was majestic: I’d have done anything for him.
    But as a matter of fact it was he who did anything for me. A few days later Constance and I were going up the village to Leader’s, when by the pond we came upon a whole squad of Jims gathered round the steam-roller. They had laid the tar and raked it and now it was to be rolled. My friend was among them, and he began chatting up Constance. After a bit he said ‘You wants get up in there, boy, ’ave a look. That’s steam-powered, that is.’ He lifted me up bodily and the man who was driving the roller took me from him. Inside the roller the fire was flaming before my very face, roaring in its iron boiler. The steam blew back at us out of the funnel in front. Then the driver, leaving me to myself, set to and spun the control-wheel by its projecting handle. There was a tremendous, accelerating crescendo of puffs and heavy rumblings as with a crunching and a shaking, we began to go
backwards
! Forward and back we went, forward and back, Constance watching half-afraid. (‘Whatever’ll the mistress -’) I held on tight. When at last they lifted me down I was far too much over-awed to say Thank you. This was something like an experience! I suppose my feelings were more or less equivalent to those of an adult witnessing a volcanic eruption.
    The Jims, day by day, moved on until they were far off. No more summer dust on the hawthorn - for ever. But at least they’d compensated me as handsomely as they could.
    They built a bridge, too, did those Jims — or some Jims did. The nearest water to our home which you could call a river was the little Enborne brook — still, as then, the county boundary between Berkshire and