The Voice That Thunders, page 16
That period of time, found so often, of twenty years or so, of the novitiate interests me personally. I write novels, but each novel has at its heart a myth, which should not be recognised by the reader, but provides the aetiology for the book. Yet I had been writing for twenty years before I felt confident enough to risk tackling the raw material openly. I am not the one to judge success or failure here, but it is significant that from infancy I absorbed, as if by osmosis, the precepts and music of the voices of masters.
Let me try to give you some of the flavour of the experience. If you know my books, you may hear the tonality of the voices of my masters speaking through me, but that will be a bonus, not a sine qua non of understanding.
I am a writer, and my duty is to the telling of tales through the medium of the written book, which will be read, either aloud to a group or silently by an individual. Although I must be able to hear and use the spoken word that I am interpreting, it is the printed text that is the vehicle. It may itself become again a spoken text, but I cannot, beyond a point, control or predict the voice that will speak it. That voice will most likely belong to a parent, a teacher, or an actor, all of whom usurp the position of storyteller without any questioning of their being qualified to do so.
The printed word, to be true to the primary voice, the voice in the shadow, must be proof against such performers. It must also communicate directly with the eye, and not obscure the story, so that it can speak to its other audience, the solitary reader.
An oral tale, merely transcribed, however accurately, will not fulfil these requirements. Some accommodation has to be made to phonetics in the transcript, and the result alienates both eye and ear; the words look, at best, amusing; at worst, baroque; grammar and syntax that represent plain speech become, in a mouth modulated to the dialect of white man’s business English, an embarrassment, a condescension, an affront. Scholarship may be served, but the tale is not. The claim of the voice in the shadow is not sung, nor is there chanted the rhyme of the fish in the well.
In the written traditional story, it is not enough to repeat the words as they were said; the skill is not to record the moment of the telling, to act as a machine, but to re-create the effect of that moment for the reader.
The achievement of such a balance between the natural voice and the formal page is not easy; and it is made harder by the differing worlds that the two elements often represent; for, whereas the audience of the traditional tale is naturally in the community of a rural society, the audience of the book is to be found more among the sophisticated and the urban.
How to serve both tradition and audience in a book? Each writer has to answer the questions with whatever skills are at his or her disposal, and with whatever insight experience may bring.
My way is simply my way; another writer will have another; but one element comes close to being essential, if the stories are to be handed on as living entities. The storyteller should, as all apprentices are, be guided by a personal master. It is a craft to which a proper time has to be served.
My good fortune has been to have had four such masters who have thought it a matter of importance that I hear what they have to say; and now I want to let them speak, to give you an example of how the voice in the shadow may be heard. I shall draw on three of these masters only, because with them I share a commonality of place and of culture that I do not with the fourth. That fourth is Welsh, and the bond between us, though adamantine, is not so clearly visible as it is with the other three, and would, I feel, be a distraction here.
The place that is shared in common is East Cheshire: a country of lowland hills on the flanks of the bleaker Pennines; the land, and the language, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the location of the Green Chapel. The culture is that of its rural working class.
The first master is Joshua Birtles. He was a pig-sticker and small farmer on Alderley Edge, where both our families have been long settled, though his must have come originally from Birtles itself, which is the next township to Alderley, while my family probably came down from the hills above Macclesfield, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, to cut stone in the quarries on the Edge. I abused Joshua as the character of Gowther Mossock in my first two novels, as a result of which I became aware of the questions his and my consanguinity posed.
Every Friday, Joshua used to deliver eggs and vegetables in his cart, pulled by his horse, Prince. Some of my earliest memories are of Joshua’s britches, stockings and boots looming over me as I sat on the kitchen floor, and of hearing his voice, pitched to carry against gale and hill, jarring the windows. His hands were gigantic, spilling cauliflowers, cabbages and potatoes over the table, and themselves seemed to be producing the great bounty, without the need for soil.
He was huge in frame and spirit; he was almost not credible, so completely was he the image of a pre-industrial, bucolic ideal that never was or could be, except in the sentimental minds of the urban middle classes. And he knew how he looked. “You see,” he said to me once, “I’m just at the end, like, of one period, some way.”
It is an aspect common to all the masters I have known. They seem, but only seem, to be out of step with time. Yet it would be a mistake to think that, because a man is content to keep to the old ways, his mind is not up to date. It is not that such individuals are living in the past, but that their intensity of life includes both past and present; and from that security they grasp the future.
It was exemplified for me when Jos said, “You know how some people carry on if an old windmill has to come down: ‘Oh! They’re taking away a landmark!’ Then, when these pylons go up, they create the dickens about that. Well, there’s not a lot of difference between a pylon, in the distance, and a windmill. And, I mean, you can’t hinder progress.”
When I learned to walk, Friday became a high point of the week; for Joshua would let me ride next to him on the seat and to hold Prince’s reins. And all this time, he was talking to me, and telling me things: the reason why a particular stone in a hedge bank was called the Bull Stang; that a hummock in a field above his farm was called Finlow because a king was buried there. When formally educated, I recognised that the hummock was a Bronze Age tumulus, four thousand years old. So, in every way, I came to know my place, and to see that myth was also memory.
Here are some of Joshua’s words: the words he gave me as a child, and which I have kept safe.
“There’s an old thing he used to tell me. If I was a bit upset, my father would say: ‘Come here, lad, and I’ll tell thee a tale.
‘I’ll tell thee a tale
About a weasel and a snail,
A monkey and a merry abbot:
Seven good sons for winding.
They rambled and they romped,
And they come to a quickthorn hedge.
E’en the millstones we’re going to jump in!
What must I do to save my shins?
O’er Rinley-Minley common.
Up starts a red hare
With a good sort of a salmon feather in its tail.
Having a good broadsword by my side,
I shot at it.
No matter o’ that, but I missed it.
Up comes Peter Pilkison
Mowing oat cakes in the field of Robert Tellison.
Hearing this news, he come;
Tumbled o’er th’ turfcote,
O’er th’ backerlash,
O’er Winwick church steeple;
Drowned in a bag of moonshine
Behind Robert Chent’s door,
Chowbent.’
“Now what that means, I’ve no idea! He used to sing these little ditties to me. (He was no singer.) One was:
‘I’ll dye, I’ll dye my petticoat red;
For the lad I love I’ll bake my bread;
And then my daddy will wish that I were dead,
Sweet Willy in the morning among the rush!
Shurly, shurly, shoo-gang-rowl,
Shoo-gang-lollymog-shoo-ga-gang-a-lo!
Sweet Willy in the morning among the rush!’
“And what that means, I’ve no idea! Oh yes! Here’s another little song:
‘Oh, Taffy was born at Lincoln in Wales,
Sold him again to darling-a-Noddy.
He came over to England to tell his fine tales;
He sang: Tither-o, tether-o, kither-o, kell-o,
Kai nello!’
“Ay! And I think that’s about the lot of those little ditties he used to sing me!”
When Jos was a boy, he used to blow the bellows for the organ at Birtles church, as his father had done before him. The time came for a new organ, and Jos was allowed to keep the old bellows handle, which he split to make the runners for a sledge to ride on the Riddings, a field across the lane from the farm, and so steep that it could be sledged all the year round.
“When I was a youth, we had this big sledge I was telling you about. It held seven people. And one Sunday we were sledging there; and Sam Read, that lived down at the farm here, he was younger than me, a young lad, and he’d been to Sunday school; and, instead of going in, changing, he thought he’d just have a ride down first: just have one.
“Anyway, he was the back man, and when we got to this ridge where the sledge did a jump and left the ground for about five yards, his behind slipped over the end of the sledge.
“He couldn’t fall off, because someone had got hold of his legs (we held each other’s legs fast) and he was dragged down, and all the gorse that grew there, and his pants were just about worn out, to say nothing of the gorse thorns he had to contend with.
“His mother played the dickens with him! So that was that. He never had another ride in his best clothes. But, at different times, we sprained two young women’s ankles. Of course, it was such a big stop at the bottom, if you didn’t put the brake on: get your heels out; and even if you did, you ended up a bit rough. Ay. But it was a wild ride. It fair took your breath away. It was a good one.”
At the other side of the field called the Riddings, there was a brick cottage, divided into three dwellings. At one end there lived an old man; and, at the other end there was his barn; and in between lived Polly Norbury.
“Ay! Polly Norbury! She had the misfortune to lose a leg; and I think that embarrassed her a lot, because, after coming back from the First World War, although I went to school with her, I only saw her twice in all the time till she died, which was about four years ago. Only twice in forty years. No. She didn’t seem to go out. No. I suppose it was a big shock, you know, to have a leg off, for one thing. And then living by yourself is no use. You just get tied up in yourself, don’t you?
“I’ll tell you a little story about that barn. The barn is eighteen inches higher up than the cottage floor where this Miss Norbury lived. Anyway; Percy Grainger and me must go kill him a pig one day, the chap as lived in the end cottage, and hang it in this barn.
“And I noticed that the water and, you know, water that was mixed with blood, bloody water, was getting away somewhere; just when we were finishing, I noticed this. It was going into her house. So I said to Percy, I said to Percy, ‘I think we’d better, we’d better go now. We’ve finished.’
“This little fellow, he did get in a row, that owned the pig! It was going in there, because it was lower there, eighteen inches lower, her floor was; and, of course, the walls were old; and it had just had time to start getting through. I said to Percy, I said, ‘I think it’s time we went.’
“That’s not why I hadn’t seen Polly Norbury. No. I think it was having this leg off.
“Now, we noticed, both our children had slight accidents. One broke a collar bone; it was Ruth broke her collar bone: that was it. And she was only about two. Do you know, although she was a child that was full of vim and all that, it must have embarrassed her. It put a quietness on her. She hadn’t as much to say for quite, oh, a few weeks, until it was better again. It has some effect. I suppose it’s a bit of shock. Well, it’s a bigger shock still, to have a leg off, like that.”
Alderley had a mummers’ play, which was performed annually, and jealously, by the members of the one same family: the Barbers.
“There was a fellow they used to call ‘Serjeant’ Barber. (He was some relation of Herbert’s. He may have been one of the mummers; he was one of the Barbers, anyway.) Serjeant Barber. And he was courting a girl from Delamere; and it was in the days when they used to walk. And this Serjeant Barber lived up at Cuckoo’s Nest, up near the Wizard there.
“Anyway, one Sunday he was there, spending the day; and it must have been about November time; and his fiancée lived down the wood about half a mile at Delamere; so she said, when he was going to walk home, she’d come up with him to the road. Some wag had put a turnip lantern on a post there; and she was frightened; and he had to go back with her.
“Well, her mother played the dickens when she got back: ‘Come on!’ she says. ‘I’ll go with you!’ When she saw it, she was scared. He had to go back again that half mile, and then, eventually, walk home. And he just landed home next morning in time to change into his working togs and get off to work. But he said, on the way home, love left him.
“How far is it? Good Lord, I don’t know! Twenty mile? It’s from Delamere to the Wizard, anyhow! Ah! But love left him on the way home. And no wonder.”
Fred Wright lived a mile and a half away from Jos Birtles, at the Beacon Lodge. He was a farmer, eight years older than Jos; stocky, with a white walrus moustache, and an impassive, Slavonic face. He was a man who spoke little. He had a reputation for surliness, but he was more shy than ill-tempered. However it was, the result was the same for me. I knew him from my childhood, but, unlike Jos, he did not speak much to me. Not directly. But he taught me the importance, and the communication, of silence. He showed, and did not tell in words, but through his eyes. At the end, what he did do was astonishing.
When Fred was in his late seventies, his wife, Sarah, died. The aloof man became more withdrawn, and people were worried for his health. But no one could speak to him of this concern. He was the remote patriarch, the stone-faced horse dealer, the alleged skin-flint. He was Fred Wright, and Fred Wright you could not talk to. But Jos Birtles did.
Jos told him that he was doing himself no good by going inwards. He should turn outwards. Fred said that it was not his way, and he was too old to change. So Jos urged him to write his memoirs: to get down on paper what he knew, so that, even if he could not mix with others, he would be communicating; he would be turning outwards.
Fred acted on Jos’s urging. His writing, since he left school nearly seventy years earlier, had probably been limited to postcards from Blackpool and to what little was needed to keep his accounting straight. But, because he had no experience, no sense of literary style or structure, he did not know the enormity of what he was undertaking; and so he wrote seventeen thousand coherent words without a sign of hesitation or struggle. He simply wrote as he spoke, letting the free thought and its associations direct the story. The impact is enormous, and a valuable social document. He inscribed it “The Life of Fred Wright and his Dear Wife.”
“I was born in a house at Varden Town the rent was IS 6d per week. I lived with my Grandmother we were very poor when I was 4 years old my grandmother sent me to the pub The Black Greyhound for 6d penny of whisky. It was pulled down in 1885 and rebuilt the same year but not as a pub. I had used to go on Saturday morning to Butcher Hattons for I shilling worth of beef and Mr Hatton used to put a slice of liver on for my grandmother and we had used to have a lb of butter 18 oz to the lb from R. Worthingtons at the Acton Farm.
“And then came the time to leave Varden Town and we went living at Daniel Hill with my Uncle Jim and then I went to Mottram school near to The Bull’s Head. The teacher’s name was Wilson, and he took to me like a father he used to shout to Fred Wright and say I want you to run me a little errand he would follow me out into the porch and give me a shilling to fetch him ½ gallon of beer from Hooley, and put it in the summer house of course ½ gallon was only 10d and the 2d left was for me also I had used to go and help Mrs. Wilson, with the washing, dollying all the napkins and I had used to take children in a three-wheel perambulator and I used to fetch her 2 quarts of stout 6d and hide them in the bottom of the dolly tub.”
[At the end of childhood]: “Now I think that ends another year. Anyway, I go back to Clockhouse with Jim Wright, that was 1896, me and Jim started to take two girls out for walks at night Annie and Edith Dunkerley from Manchester but my aunt went mad about that so we had to stop it anyway Jim left us and I drove the horses.
“Now we are got into 1897 the Queen Vic Diamond Jubilee it was a hectic year we had the largest bonfire that ever was built on Alderley Edge on Stormy Point. Now I have got another girl Amilia Leech very dark but deceitful took her to Blackpool at Wilmslow wakes paid for everything then she gave me the poke about three weeks after anyway she lives Brook Lane and has never been married now she is very fat and ugly, thank goodness nothing never happened I am positive I could not live with her. Now it is 1900 and I go and work for Mrs. Needham again at 12s 6d per week. I had the Irishman’s rise, IS less.
“Now we are at the end of the Boer War and we had a carnival every time we killed two Boers, now there seems to be girls everywhere we are going to a dance at the Public Hall, dancing from 7 till 11 for 6d. This was every Thursday night and sometimes Saturdays, but we had a long night once every month for which we paid 2s 6d but we had all the refreshments free ham and pork pies cakes jellies trifles Blanchmange as much as you could eat.” [It is here, at the public hall, that Fred meets his future wife, Sarah, a farmer’s daughter, and therefore far above his status, whom he writes of as “Ma”.]
