Knapworth Fights On

Timothy Finn

Description

In his sequel to Knapworth At War Timothy Finn presents a further galaxy of eccentric village characters caught up in the toils of a distant war - or rather in the toils of local life where the war itself is just one more distraction. These gentle memoirs evoke a timeless world seen through the eyes of a small boy.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: eBookPartnership.com
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908886132
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

KNAPWORTH FIGHTS ON
TIMOTHY FINN
With drawings by Shoo Rayner

Duckworth
Table of Contents
Preface
Map
1: The Railings
2: The Escape
3: The Pies
4: The Visitor
5: The Bell
6: The Drag
7: The Bed
8: The Match
9: The Load
10: The Celebration
By the Same Author
About The Author
Copyright
For my god-daughter Katrina
Preface
As the crow flies northwards across the first brooks of the Welland the houses suddenly change from Northamptonshire stone to a mellow brick. A well-behaved crow which keeps going in a straight line will soon come to the long crest of Knapworth Hills, and on the flat land beyond there lies Knapworth itself, staring out over its broad fields.
Knapworth numbers sixty-three souls and is shaped like a minim on a page of music. A tight circle of road - The Loop - rings half the houses in the village. Then there is the straight tail of a street leading off The Loop which ends in a paddock full of nettles. This street has no proper name at all. The council once put a sign up which read Meadow Lane, but it fell off.
Four groups of people make up the population of Knapworth. These are the Farmers, the Smallholders, the Labourers, and the Outsiders. To outward appearance, because they occupy the grandest houses in the village - the Finns at Knapworth House, and Robbie and Bessie Duncan at the Old Rectory - the Outsiders look like a very important group indeed. They may look like that, but Knapworth has got them well in hand.
Knapworth has got the war pretty much in hand too. All that mood of vigilant defiance which the rest of the country is just beginning to get used to is something which Knapworth has had in its locker for years. If it can’t practice its skills on the distant figure of Hitler it will find busybodies and upstarts nearer to hand who will soon learn that Knapworth is not to be taken by surprise.
On the spiritual front the Reverend Cedric Plewman,
Rector of Knapworth-with-Mostley-cum-Tuddenham, continues his tireless war for souls. It is a conflict which promises little in the way of a decisive outcome.
1
The Railings
Mother kept the gin in the grandfather clock. She fed the chickens on hard-boiled eggs.
I mention these facts for two reasons. In the first place they are true. In the second place they were the sorts of doings which won her the respect of the village from very soon after her arrival. I don’t mean by this that it was necessary to be some sort of an exhibitionist to gain approval in Knapworth. Precisely the reverse was the case. Had she been a sculptress, for example, or had she hurled herself into macrame, these unusual goings-on would have doomed her from the outset. But what Mother’s gin-keeping and chicken-feeding did show was that she was a woman of independent mind, different in type from anything which would pass for the norm of gentility within the bounds of the Woodland Pytchley. This was much to her credit.
Between House and Village in South Leicestershire there lies in general a gulf of mutual hostility. Far back in the eighteenth century the county had forsaken the good old farming mixture of cows and corn and cabbages, and had thrown in its lot with grazing. From that moment on, investment rather than involvement had become the bond between the landowner and his estate. Wealth accumulated. With the nineteenth century foxhunting, the sport of the very rich, dug a further land-drain beneath society. House-parties of forty or fifty guests would last all season long. Through thicket and copse, across hedge and pasture, man would pursue woman with an almost mediaeval voracity.
The new lady of Knapworth House was not in this mould at all. She was, for a start, a worker. With a gaze which was less and less inclined to be disapproving as the months passed, Knapworth could see her at her chores. From the windows of the attic bedrooms blankets were flung out and beaten. Two jackdaws which had claimed squatter’s rights in the chimney of our big end drawing-room were evicted by spade from the top of a ladder. Most triumphant of all was her handling of Riddle.
Riddle was a disgusting figure who passed himself off as a gardener. He went with the house, but, like the dry rot and the crumbling masonry which also lurked in the corners of the property, the estate agent had thought it best not to mention him in his original advertisement.
The morning after our arrival in 1938 Fred Quoyles paid Mother a social call. In a bag he carried a small pot of clear honey by way of offering.
‘Our Auntie Enid keeps bees, you know - poor, dear soul,’ he said. Riddle sniffed the honey on the breeze and came out from the loft.
‘Who are you ? ’ said Mother in surprise.
‘Arrumm Riddle, mum.’
‘ Riddle ? ’
‘Yurrum. Arrrumm garrrum, mum.’
‘You’re what ? ’
‘Garrdurrumm, mum.’
‘I think that Mr Riddle means that he’s a gardener , Mrs Finn,’ Fred translated brightly.
‘Oh, is he?’ In her right hand there was the jackdaws’ spade. ‘Here you are, then. GARDEN.’
It was all so simple there was no way out. Clutching the unfamiliar implement Riddle muttered his way around the side of the house. From now on he was going to have to live in a style which he had always feared possible.
News of this feat spread rapidly around the village.
But it was in the matter of the railings that Mother scored her earliest enduring success. Both gin and eggs flavoured the ingredients from the very outset.
Major Edward Tizzard, Gurkha Rifles (Retd.) was not a native of our neighbourhood. In length of residence he had scarcely twelve months seniority over ourselves. It was in knowing the points which distinguished the hunting gentleman from the common stock of mankind that his true advantage lay. These he had been studying for years.
Major Tizzard rented a house at Clopton. It was large and dank and imposing, and the stable block was quite as big as the mansion itself. It had about it that air of sallow neglect which proclaimed that the householder was a hunting man. It also had the advantage of being owned by the Lord Lieutenant, so that by the very fact of taking it Major Tizzard was able to establish a relationship with the great Baronet himself.
Given that his house had so many things in its favour Major Tizzard was prepared to tolerate one minor drawback. There already existed at Clopton a family, the Glazebrooks, whose long standing and sporting instincts entitled them to the social presidency of the village. If Major Tizzard was going to play the squire, therefore - and he had every intention of doing just that - he would have to take some other village under his wing, somewhere nearby where there was no family of breeding. Knapworth seemed to be a case in point.
Needless to say Knapworth was never consulted about Major Tizzard’s scheme of things. Nor, if it had been, would it have paid the least attention. Humphrey de Knapworth, the last native leader that could be identified in the church records, had been waved off to the wars sometimes far back in the fourteenth century. Ten years later news of a ransom demand had come back to the village from the French king, and within a further short decade, while the villagers were still trying to talk the price down, the French king had suddenly lost patience and pressed him to death with slabs of masonry.
From that moment on Knapworth had vowed that it would manage without a squire - and manage it did. The building of Knapworth House in the early years of the nineteenth century did little to change the situation. Grand though it was, Knapworth House was nothing more than a roosting place for a succession of hunting gentlefolk. In the winter they would ride forth. In the summer they would fling themselves into the London season. Then they would bankrupt themselves in the effort to keep up appearances and a new family of hopefuls would replace them.
It was just this sort of homespun self-rule in Knapworth that Major Tizzard planned to change. He had met Finn - that is, Father - briefly, on Home Guard business. The man seemed to be some sort of lawyer or accountant, a gentleman of the robe. All very clever no doubt in his way, but not the sort of material from which the landed classes are made. The wife he had not met, but he could imagine the type. What they needed was somebody they could look up to. So, for that matter did the rest of the village.
‘Mornin’, Heasant,’ Major Tizzard would call out through the mists of an October dawn as Cally set out with billhook and carborundum to do the hedging for the hunt. The Major’s horse clattered to a chiding standstill at the roadside. ‘I want you to trim back those jumps over towards Mostley.’
‘Why’s that, then? Can’t you get over ‘em?’
Or, ‘Mornin’ Palmiser,’ - he was riding Knapworth way again. ‘Extraordinary fine mornin’.’
‘Yes, Tizzard.’
And just as he spoke the horse would shy at Ted Palmiser’s sheep-dog, so that the infuriated ‘Confound you. Dammit. Look here,’ as the Major bolted away pumping at the reins, might have been addressed to man, mount, or collie.
In general Knapworth took the Major’s impertinences with equanimity. The man was an upstart, commanding here, braying there, all without the smallest stick of tinderwood with which to fuel his claims. They even mocked him into thinking he was making progress by chorusing a solemn ‘Good morning, Major,’ as he cantered past the assembled farmers on sheep-shearing day. ‘Mornin’,’ he returned vibrantly, and the dew on his moustache glistened with a new light. Knapworth, he was glad to see, was beginning to understand who was who.
Perhaps it was this last exchange which encouraged Major Tizzard to make his weight felt with Mother. If so, he hadn’t reckoned that there would be an exception to the rule. No one was ever less inclined to treat impertinencies with equanimity.
‘Mummy, Mummy,’ we boys came skeltering into the house. ‘There’s a man outside the front garden.’
‘A man on a horse, Mummy.’
It was a chilly