The Voice That Thunders, page 17
“One night who should come into the hall but Ma and I never seen her before there of course I had a dance or two with her but with her being a few years older you have not got the cheek to ask questions.
“Anyway, Thursday night comes again and Ma was there again anyway I said if you were going home and you have not got a partner I will walk up with you as we both had to go the same way home a few times I just left her on the road and just said goodnight and asked her if she would be there next Thursday all being well I shall come and it was the best day’s work I had ever done because I was just beginning to be a wild card, going out every night nearly dancing and coming in at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning.
“Now then me and Ma seem to understand I had got to going across the field to their house I had never given her a kiss not even tried till this night but it came off now we are courting proper now we keep on courting till the spring of 1904 and we got engaged. It was on the peesteps up Findlow lane then we got married on Boxing Day 1904 at Birtles Church. I walk to the church and I send a cab for Sarah from Len Smith’s and Charlie Eveson drove them there anyway we went to the copper mines for our honeymoon.”
[From the wedding, Fred Wright moves swiftly, by anecdotes, through the fifty-five years of marriage, as though he is being driven to record the death before he can go back and record the life. His description of Sarah’s last illness, and of her death, is harrowing; and it is literature.]
“Hilda said she was a Martyr how she stuck. Then of course she comes home and is in bed, then in a few days Dr Edwards come in and reads the report from the Specialist now that knocked the stuffing out of me now she is a good patient she wont give you anymore trouble than she could help, anyway we bring her downstairs into the New Room. Dr Edwards said I must stop climbing the 12 stairs. Now she is lying in the new room and listening to the hundreds of people that have come into the yard, now she is very poorly for about one month only taking drops of water and Brandy and often unconscious. Then the last two weeks were the worst on the Monday she said am I getting better or worse now these were you could not help her any and she always had to Kleenex tissue always in her hand Now Hilda as been stopping with her and then Ann came also but the final day Sept 5 I was sat holding her hand about ½ past four in the afternoon and she looked at me and said it will not be long now and she rallied till ½ past six and she whispered ‘come with me’ twice and I and Ann thought she had passed out so I went out of the room while Ann was going to straighten her up and she began breathing again and she rallied till ½ past ten but those last 4 hours did me more harm than all the time she had been bad, I don’t really know why she had to suffer like this she was a very good living woman. I never knew her tell a lie or sware and she always said a little prayer at night.
“I think we were made for each other as we seem to be identical in everything what I was thinking I am sure she was but we have had a very happy life all through the fifty-five years and the three courting years, I wish we could live it all over again, one thing I wish she could have kept up this summer and seen the sun and the gardens but no it must not be but one thing I am sure I know she is gone to heaven and I am hoping to meet her there, God bless her.
“Now I am writing tonight December 28 1959 as we went to Edith’s party we had only been courting a few weeks that would be in 1903. I was driving the quarry horses I had to give them the supper before we could go we started about ½ past 4 and got there about 6 for tea of course we had to go on our bicycles and I know we started back about 2 o’clock on Sunday morning, of course there were no motors or Busses on the road then now let me tell you after we got married of course we were at Adder’s Moss so one day she said to me I don’t think it is right for you to have to get all the money to live she said I am going to let the two front rooms which will bring in a little more money and she did and she did very well out of it then in 1911 we left Adder’s Moss and went to Bradford House and she did the same there letting the rooms in those days every shilling counted then came a time when the ladies of Alderley Edge started to fetch the poor children out of Manchester and of course Ma said she would have some they paid 6s each with them that was 36 shillings per week of course that helped us along.”
[The novelist in me would be thankful to be able to handle pace, mood and time as deftly as that. But a novelist is making a knowing artefact: Fred Wright is reporting his life.]
“Now I will tell you about the Boer War. It started in 1899 but there was no conscription like this has been like the World War One and this second war. Now of course we had fires while this war was going on. We had a carnival every time we killed two Boers.
“I shall never forget one in Particular we were in the Trafford, and 6 of us said we would have a cavalry parade in front of the carnival and we borrowed horses and rode them in front of the band. Now I will give you the names of the riders Aaron Shuttleworth, Walter Read, Charlie Eveson, Charlie Ford, Bill Gray, and myself now there is only Charlie Eveson and me living out of them.
“Now we had all sorts of gun warfare 6 inch waterpipes fixed to Handcarts. Of course a lot of fools were pulling these. Now I will tell you about Krudger now he was the big mouth, like Hitler was in the last war anyhow Burgess’s lads, Tom, Ernest and Jack they brought their old horse rake and had a man sitting on acting as Krudger with a placard on his back called himself Kruger King of South Africa now they used to march through the village and go down Chorley Hall lane to the recreation ground now Ted Lewis lived with Sarah Henshaw who kept 2 cows and poultrey and old Ted had found a nest of rotten eggs, and he told two girls about them and they got them and as Kruger went past riding on this rake didn’t they pelt him with these rotten eggs oh I forgot I must tell you the names of these two girls one was Alice Russell and the other was Aggie Aston; Aggie is dead but I don’t know about Alice and I think the war finished at the end of 1900 and that was when they would not have old Joe in the Trafford as he stunk the place out and he had to drink his beer in the yard and the Alderley Edge Temperance band2 were all very fresh and they were playing in the road at the front of the Trafford some were leaned against the High School wall for to play and G. Cragg was sat on the floor he played the big drum they say he was the only one to keep time sitting down.
“Now then. Let me tell you about George Birtles who was a comical man now Over Alderley Chapel had just bought one acre of land from Lord Stanley as a burial ground so when the day of consecration were of course old George must have gone anyway he went home and said he should be buried there he said it was a grand place and you could see White Nancy from there and Ma Birtles said thee get on with dieing and we will show thee where thou will be buried and I think he is in Birtles churchyard.
“Now I seem to have forgotten about Ma talking about everybody else that is one thing I never shall forget she is in my mind night and day and I don’t want to forget it is just twelve months she was just taken ill it was on the 19th. of February twelve months ago and she will have been dead 6 months on 3 March. What a pal I have lost which I am sure never can be replaced.”
The life of Fred Wright and his dear wife. He wrote as he spoke. Yet I would ask you to notice that, even here, it is not enough for the written word to copy the spoken. No one wanting simply a story would read it, even punctuated to the received norm. The text is strong, all seventeen thousand words of it, because it is stark anthropology. It is not, in itself, the natural medium for telling a tale. But, for me, a writer from that culture, the language, rhythm, grammar, syntax and content are one and the same gold.
The greatest of the masters was Wilfred Lancaster. He was the miller of Swettenham, six miles from Alderley. The mill is a water mill, and the water is used to generate the electricity for the mill house as well as to grind corn and to run a saw bench. Wilfred’s grandson is an engineer at the nearby Jodrell Bank radio telescope and built himself his own computer. It is the only water-driven database that I know of.
Wilfred Lancaster was always able to deflate me instantly. He cut across my intellectualisations with concrete logic. “Can you tell, Alan,” he said once, after I had been plying him with questions about traditional beliefs, “which side of the church yew trees grown on?” I ransacked my brain for all that I had read about tree cults, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death, and the merging with later tradition, but had to admit that I could see no significant pattern of ritual deployment about the churchyards in the cases I knew personally. “Why,” said Wilfred, “they grow on the outside, dunner they?”
From such chastening experiences I learnt the lesson of the mythopoeic mind: use metaphor, never the abstraction.
The information I gained from Wilfred had to be got cannily: by waiting; by indirect reference; by elliptical conversation. I had to earn my right to move from the secular knowledge to the esoteric, and that would happen only when Wilfred judged that I was fit to hear him. So it was a surprise when he sent word that he wanted to see me. All my life, before, the only way to visit him was to drop by, as if through happenchance; and sometimes he would talk, and at others, not, allowing me to be present, but to watch, not speak. This time it was a summoning. I went.
Without preamble, Wilfred said, “I want to tell you everything I know. I’ve still got my wits, and I’m in good health, but it wunner always be so, and then it’s too late, inner it? You see, there’s things I can tell you that aren’t in books and are on no maps, and it inner right as we should die and keep it all from other folks. It’s nowt only right as we should let somebody else know, shouldner we? And it’s nowt only right as we should let the young uns know, and then let it be carried on.”
It was as simple as that. I would go to the mill, and Wilfred Lancaster talked, insisting on using my tape recorder, fluently, almost oracularly, without prompting or questioning, unselfconsciously and with force. History, legend, folktale, anecdote, gossip, ribald humour, tragedy, opinion and superstition: he never repeated himself. Here, the voice in the shadow speaks most clearly to me. You may find amusing some of the exoteric parts of the Divine Comedy through which I was led by my particular Vergil.
“It was easy enough when you got in the rhythm of it, Alan. You know, same as I say: you can be cross-cutting a piece of timber, two on you as know what cross-cutting is, and it isn’t hard work; but get another beggar as dunner know what it is, and, same as I say, he’ll maul your blooming belly out. And yet he thinks he’s working! He is, by gum! And hard work for you, and all! ‘I dunner mind you having a ride, but pick your feet up!’, that’s what I tell ’em. And they look at me like a cow at a cabbage. You know, when you tell them that, they wonder what the heck’s up. But, oh, they’ll blooming murder you, some on them will, for cross-cutting. Oh, no, bigod, they’re murderous. But they dunner know they’re doing it, you know; they’re laying on, and they think it’s cutting, but it inner cutting it at all. You know, your saw should cut itsel’, if it’s anything like. Oh, be beggared, ah!”
[Undertakers were frequent visitors to the mill, on the lookout for suitable timber. One of them gave Wilfred this story.]
“‘So, anyroad,’ he said. ‘Did you hear of that job as we had,’ he said, ‘the other week?’ He did say such-and-such a place. ‘We were doing the job. They’d been in church; taken the corpse into church; come out again; put it at grave side; lowering it down; pulls planks from under; lowering it down by its handles; and the bottom dropped out! Man dropped out! Clatter! Straight in the bottom!’ I said to him, I said, ‘By the God,’ I said, ‘you dunner go to much trouble at screwing bottoms in!’ ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘They get these here staples and staple them in now.’ Well, of course there was pandemonium. Folks was fainting, and all beggaring roads. They had to cover it up. This undertaker had to fetch another beggaring box and put him in. They had to take the beggar in church again and have another beggaring service. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I got to know him particularly well.’ Ah. The feller clattered out o’ th’ bottom. Ah! Oh ah! He fell out, right enough. He fell out!”
“Did you hear of Dr Jack as lived in Macclesfield? Well. Now then. He’d been to a Christmas party; and old Jack goes for bed; about two o’clock in the morning, a rattle on the blooming door. And anyroad, he gets up to the window. A fellow there. He says, ‘Come on, doctor!’ he says. ‘I want you to go with me!’ ‘What’s your trouble?’ He says, ‘I don’t know’. ‘Be down in a few minutes,’ he said. Anyroad, he said, ‘I want you to go up to Macclesfield Forest.’ His wife, like, up at Macclesfield Forest. This and t’other.” [Macclesfield Forest is a wild area of the Pennines, some five miles from Macclesfield, and fifteen hundred feet higher, up vicious gradients and over bad surfaces.] “He said, ‘How much will it be?’ ‘Oh, at this time of night,’ he said, ‘ten shilling.’ Anyroad, he gathered his traps up, the old Dr Jack did, and chap sits by him, like, in the motor, and away they goes.
“Got to the bottom somewhere, this Macclesfield Forest. About six or eight gates they opened, like. They sees farm, up at top; and he stopped at the last gate. He says, ‘You’ll do at that, doctor.’ Doctor was out with his bag and for up. He says, ‘How much did you say it was?’ ‘Oh,’ says doctor, ‘ten shilling,’ he says, ‘but,’ he says, ‘I haven’t done the job yet.’ ‘No, but,’ he says, t’other chap, ‘you were half-a-crown cheaper than taxi man.’”
Sometimes the directness, the assumption of a shared background of understanding, can result in an allusive language that needs a commentary if it is to communicate. Here, Wilfred is telling a story to illustrate the truth of the belief that to order more wood for coffins than is needed for the number of corpses in hand, leads to the death of the undertaker, in this case within the week.
“It was this fellow, and he’d come for this; chap had died, like, and he’d nowt put him in, sort of thing, as fetched him and come for this here, a suit of coffin stuff, put him in, you see. And then he was wanting this coffin stuff, and it was that clean, you know, he’d stop a bit extra long and have another suit cut, you see. And then me uncle said, ‘Ay, it’d pay a chap die to have a suit of that sort!’ And that were it. Ah. But he had it in the week. Ah. Had it in the week, right enough. He picked his own out. He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll have that, and I’ll have that, and I’ll have that. And a bit of old shelving will do for the bottom.’”
Finally, Wilfred Lancaster on the problem of a man’s having to be away from home, when he can’t keep his eye on his wife’s activities.
“It’s a bugger of a job, then, inner it? When you come back, and they’re singing, ‘When you come back and there’s nothing left for me.’ It’s there, you know! Oh yes! A slice off a cut loaf isner missed – unless you cut too deep. Of course, you’ve getten bread ready sliced now, dunner you? It gets missed a bit sooner then, dunner it, when it’s ready sliced?”
It’s by honouring such men that I know the Voice in the Shadow; by listening to the music of their cadences that I hear the Rhyme of the Fish in the Well. I take it into myself, and, with as much skill as I can muster and as humbly as I may, I shape it into my song. For them.
You might well think that a writer who ploughs such a narrow furrow is asking for oblivion, since he risks incomprehension on the part of his readers. But my experience is not that.
Somehow, and I think that it is a combination of a proper craft and of the universal power of myth, I appear to communicate. In one instance, The Stone Book Quartet, I thought that, since I was using my own family history and idiolect over a century, I had gone too far: that it was too personal. Yet, of all my books, that is the one that has drawn the most animated response from readers, of all cultures and races. They want me to tell them how it is that I knew that that is how their history was for them. And the book has been singled out for the Phoenix Award by the Children’s Literature Association of America. Turning inwards, and going through the self, would seem to be the road to what, translated, the Australians call the “All-Self”. How else could one square mile of Cheshire hillside speak to the world?
I would answer that, by employing such intensity, I have allowed that hill to speak its myth.
Here, to end, and to thank my masters, is a brief story retold by me, but not from them. I hope that it shows how I have tried to serve the Cheshire voice in the shadow. The story is called: “Johnny Whopstraw”.
“I’ll see if I can tell it as it was told to me; but I’ve got a bone in my leg, remember.
“Johnny Whopstraw was out walking one fine day when he spied a hare sitting under a bush on a common. He thought: What luck! Here’s me; and I’ll catch this hare, and I’ll kill him with a whip, and then I’ll sell him for half-a-crown. With that money, I can get a young sow, I reckon; and I’ll feed her up on scraps, and she’ll bring me twelve piglets.
“The piglets, when they’re grown, they’ll have twelve piglets each. And when they’re grown, I’ll slaughter the lot of them; and that’ll bring me a barn-load of pork.
“I’ll sell the pork, and I’ll buy a little house for my mother to live in; and then I can get married myself.
“I’ll marry a farmer’s daughter; and she’ll fetch the farm with her. We’ll have two sons; and I’ll work them hard and pay them little. They’ll be that whacked, they’ll oversleep in the morning, and I’ll have to give them a shout to rouse them. ‘Get up, you lazy beggars!’ I’ll say. ‘The cows want milking!’ But Johnny Whopstraw had fallen so in love with his big ideas that he really did shout, ‘Get up, you lazy beggars! The cows want milking!’
“And that hare, it took fright at the row he was making, and it ran off across the common; and he never did catch it; and his money, pigs, house, farm, wife and children were lost, all because of that.
“And so the bridge bended. And so my tale’s ended.”
I first told that story at a conference of storytellers, and it was well received, especially when I revealed that I had collected it from Siberia. But my moment of smugness did not last. In the audience was Duncan of the Three Thousand Tales, on his first venture out of Scotland. He came up to me afterwards, his eyes twinkling, and said: “That’s one of my stories, too.”
