orchards hereabouts of apple, pear, plum; but it was cherries that made the local reputation. Little black cherries sweet enough to make your cheeks ache, known as corones, pronounced croons. Black juice like ink that stained your clothes something rotten. Tall as any elm those cherry trees, inter-bred with wild varieties until they were colossal. In a mature orchard they blotted out the sky.
The orchards improved Sankey's health every summer during the picking season. Air, sunshine, fresh fruit and, moreover, close proximity to God. The ladders took you up and up. Longer than any ladder he'd seen before in his life, they appeared tall enough to reach inside the clouds, with rungs enough to take you all the way to Heaven. They flared out wide at the bottom, funnel-like, for stability, making them look peculiar but inviting. A feller by the name of Bill Newton made them locally in Primrose Hill (he was known as Isaac by the fruit pickers, as homage to the very gravity that brought the uninitiated down off a ladder quicker than a flash).
It was two cherry pickers per ladder usually, picking different parts of the tree, smart in their waistcoats and moustaches, chattering like women in spite of there being no ground under them for several seconds.
Sankey took to it straight away. The heights didn't bother him. After two seasons he was as good as any of them. At the top of a ladder on a clear day he felt a kind of elation at the thought that he was right under God's nose, so to speak. He sang hymns and sacred songs and the other pickers joined him for the popular ones, 'Praise my Soul, the King of Heaven' and 'All People that on Earth do Dwell', and he filled his bushel basket faster for the joy the singing made inside him.
Cherry orchards had enemies same as all crops and the weather mattered to fruit like it mattered to corn, barley, hay and wheat. Heavy rain would split the cherries and they would all go bad. Everyone had an eye to the sky and a proverb made from experience. In good weather, however, Charles Sankey was for two or three weeks in June the happiest fruit picker in the south of England. Life, however, as anyone knew, was not a bowl of cherries. The picking season would end quicker than it started. There was the cereal harvest then, but the money was better at the chair shop, so Sankey would return with his friends to the rooms that were only ever freezing or boiling, and to the invisible poison fumes.
It was said Sankey had a hymn or four for every occasion. It was said he sang in the womb and even during his own birth, whereupon his mother, terrified out of her wits, died. Indeed, she had died young and he had hardly known her, except for a small grey-brown photograph he kept in his pocket. He imagined her a kind woman, her face suggested as much in the picture. The light was all on one side of her, brightening her skin and eyes and hair so that they glowed with goodness and humility. The other side was cast in shadow. Only the small brooch on her collar had caught the camera's attention, though insufficiently to suggest what exactly it might be. Sankey had examined the photograph every day of his life. He had long ago decided the brooch was the Saviour on the Cross, and that every person had two distinct sides, light and dark.
Oh to be over yonder, In that bright land of wonder,
Where the angel voices mingle, and the angel-harps do ring!
To be free from care and sorrow, And the anxious, dread
to-morrow,
To rest in light and sunshine in the presence of the King!
Sankey reckoned he would have known straight off, if he'd been around then, that the Messiah was the Messiah. He found it shoddy when people argued about that. He knew what he knew. What did they know? He would have known it was the Messiah because he would have seen it in his eyes: the light. I am the Bright and Morning Star. He would have looked in his eyes and he would have known.
'Cobblers.' This was Perfect's comment. Sid Perfect was a
The orchards improved Sankey's health every summer during the picking season. Air, sunshine, fresh fruit and, moreover, close proximity to God. The ladders took you up and up. Longer than any ladder he'd seen before in his life, they appeared tall enough to reach inside the clouds, with rungs enough to take you all the way to Heaven. They flared out wide at the bottom, funnel-like, for stability, making them look peculiar but inviting. A feller by the name of Bill Newton made them locally in Primrose Hill (he was known as Isaac by the fruit pickers, as homage to the very gravity that brought the uninitiated down off a ladder quicker than a flash).
It was two cherry pickers per ladder usually, picking different parts of the tree, smart in their waistcoats and moustaches, chattering like women in spite of there being no ground under them for several seconds.
Sankey took to it straight away. The heights didn't bother him. After two seasons he was as good as any of them. At the top of a ladder on a clear day he felt a kind of elation at the thought that he was right under God's nose, so to speak. He sang hymns and sacred songs and the other pickers joined him for the popular ones, 'Praise my Soul, the King of Heaven' and 'All People that on Earth do Dwell', and he filled his bushel basket faster for the joy the singing made inside him.
Cherry orchards had enemies same as all crops and the weather mattered to fruit like it mattered to corn, barley, hay and wheat. Heavy rain would split the cherries and they would all go bad. Everyone had an eye to the sky and a proverb made from experience. In good weather, however, Charles Sankey was for two or three weeks in June the happiest fruit picker in the south of England. Life, however, as anyone knew, was not a bowl of cherries. The picking season would end quicker than it started. There was the cereal harvest then, but the money was better at the chair shop, so Sankey would return with his friends to the rooms that were only ever freezing or boiling, and to the invisible poison fumes.
It was said Sankey had a hymn or four for every occasion. It was said he sang in the womb and even during his own birth, whereupon his mother, terrified out of her wits, died. Indeed, she had died young and he had hardly known her, except for a small grey-brown photograph he kept in his pocket. He imagined her a kind woman, her face suggested as much in the picture. The light was all on one side of her, brightening her skin and eyes and hair so that they glowed with goodness and humility. The other side was cast in shadow. Only the small brooch on her collar had caught the camera's attention, though insufficiently to suggest what exactly it might be. Sankey had examined the photograph every day of his life. He had long ago decided the brooch was the Saviour on the Cross, and that every person had two distinct sides, light and dark.
Oh to be over yonder, In that bright land of wonder,
Where the angel voices mingle, and the angel-harps do ring!
To be free from care and sorrow, And the anxious, dread
to-morrow,
To rest in light and sunshine in the presence of the King!
Sankey reckoned he would have known straight off, if he'd been around then, that the Messiah was the Messiah. He found it shoddy when people argued about that. He knew what he knew. What did they know? He would have known it was the Messiah because he would have seen it in his eyes: the light. I am the Bright and Morning Star. He would have looked in his eyes and he would have known.
'Cobblers.' This was Perfect's comment. Sid Perfect was a
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