A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

me this afternoon, Mother.’
    â€˜The Superintendent shouldn’t have planned you then,’ his wife exclaimed indignantly. ‘He’s planned you for Malmerby for their six o’clock. Planning you for morning and evening in different chapels is bad enough, but afternoon and evening is over much. And Ferry!’
    â€˜Poor little Ferry!’ Mr Ellberbeck said, showing no inclination to hasten there. ‘Well, we have to keep those little spots going, and chapel is about all that ever happens there.’
    â€˜You’re tired out,’ Mrs Ellerbeck said fiercely. ‘At your age you should be having a lie-down, not pedalling down that long road.’
    â€˜And the wind always against you, whether you’re coming or going; you always say so,’ Kathy put in, rooting her dad more firmly in the armchair. Feeling something was expected of me, I made a mournful noise.
    â€˜Perhaps Tom here will go for you,’ Mrs Ellerbeck said resourcefully, turning on me and knowing that, after one of her splendid dinners, I was defenceless. ‘There’ll be only two or three there.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Kathy pitilessly. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, is there, Dad? You said yourself there was nobbut a great farm lad, two or three kiddies and Lucy Sykes on the organ. With all your education, Mr Birkin, you can deal with that poor little lot?’ She made me sound like a fair-to-average all-in wrestler.
    Mr Ellerbeck did not rush forward to succour me. Instead, he looked quizzically at me, only committing himself as far as ‘Well, there’s no denying that Tom’s legs are younger than mine.’
    â€˜You can have Dad’s bike,’ Kathy said, advancing rapidly into the breach. ‘It’s a three-speed and the chain has an oil bath.’
    The assault’s development had been far too rapid and my defences too over-run for me to mount more than a makeshift counter-attack. ‘I’ve never done anything in that line,’ I protested. ‘Preaching! Or praying! Praying aloud, that is.’ (Conscience compelled ‘aloud’ because I’d prayed eloquently enough in my signal-pit during big strafes. And had I felt disposed to reproduce one of those very particular prayers, it would have been the most remarkable utterance heard in
any
chapel, let alone Barton Ferry.)
    â€˜You can tell them what you’re occupied with,’ Kathy said. ‘They’ll be very interested because they’ve got nothing like it in Ferry.’
    â€˜But the praying …’ I mourned.
    â€˜The Lord will put words into your mouth,’ Mr Ellerbeck said, abandoning his neutral position to carry the day.
    Well the Lord vouchsafed me no answer to that, and, as token of my unconditional surrender, Edgar (who very decently had preserved impartiality) found me a pair of bicycle clips.
    Until then, I’d always been rather fond of Edgar.
    Barton Ferry lay four long miles distant along a featureless road. Farmhouses along the way stood a field’s length back, and a broad dyke carrying seepage from ditches and drains followed the dusty way to where it stopped at the river’s brink. There were a few cottages, a bell on a stout post which also restrained a rowing boat and, on a patch of grass sprinkled with ducks’ feathers, a brick chapel scarcely bigger than a large room.
    I’d arrived in good time but a brown-faced young woman, a fine healthy child-bearer, was waiting by the door. She was pretty but terribly shy, and gazed away over the river and the road beyond, as I explained lamely that Mr Ellerbeck was off-colour and that I was his inadequate reserve. She made no comment but neither did she seem overly cast down by this news as she let me in and asked for the hymn numbers. I said I’d leave them to her but would be obliged if she’d pick long ones and, preferably, with choruses between each verse.
    There were only