PM
5 2 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N
bell clanged and Aaron Walker glanced out of his peephole window. “That’s the twelve-ten from Bristol, right on time and I have to meet it. There’ll be a gaggle of directors aboard, all come to see how I waste my time ‘downalong.’ I have some difficulty convincing them I am not addicted to playing bowls on the Hoe, Mr. Swann.”
They shook hands across the desk, and Adam followed him out into the arcade.
Nothing had changed out here. Sombre gentlemen in dark suits and tall hats, all the cares of commerce on their shoulders, dodged in and out of the platform barriers. Luggage trundled by on two- and four-wheel trolleys. Women in “travelling” crinolines swished past, shaking their flounces to rid them of drifting smuts. The rumble of trucks, the intermittent hiss of escaping steam, the squeals of excited children soared like a multi-tongued prayer to the echoing canopy of the depot. With a lift of his hand Aaron Walker was swallowed up in a swarm of customers and underlings.
Adam drifted back to the luggage cave to claim the stub that the long-nosed clerk had been too busy to bring, and recognising his man he looked worried.
“Not had a minute, sir,” he said, “but I got it right here tell the Gaffer,” and he produced a voucher from his waistcoat pocket. “You can get your ticket at the booking-hall under the clock,” he added, as though to ward off a possible reprimand, but Adam felt he could afford the luxury of a small joke. “The luggage is going ahead,” he said, “but I’m following. On horseback,” and he thought he had never seen a man look more out raged. He went out into the June sunshine and boarded the nearest cab for the cattle market.
3
It was the most leisurely journey of his life and certainly the most instructive.
As he moved north-east, sometimes taking as long as four days to cross from one county border to the next, a whole spread of England unfolded, so that he saw not merely their geographical features but the crafts and characters of the people rooted in successive hill-folds and river bottoms. His ear, always attuned to dialects, marked their speech idioms, vowel sounds, and habits, and sometimes even their professions were revealed to him in gait and gesture. As he watched them from an inn window over looking some village green, his sense of isolation fell away, leaving him tolerant, watchful and deeply at peace with himself, as though he had entered into a new and deeper kinship with all he remembered of childhood and boyhood, and all he had admired in Englishmen whose bones GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 52
3/27/09 5:13:17 PM
The Black Dwarfs 5 3
lay in shallow graves on the slopes of the Fedioukine Hills and the Causeway Heights, and in half-a-hundred squalid villages along the banks of the Ganges.
But this was by no means all he gained following Aaron Walker’s eccentric advice. On still, midsummer nights, and again in the first hour after sunrise, he would sit crosslegged before his bivouac tent pitched in some woodland clearing, or beside some tumbling stream, sniffing, watching, and listening to the life stirring about him, recalling the name of this bird or that, checking his memory against a flash of plumage among the June gorse, and slowly adjusting to the miracle of regeneration that the scenes and scents of the countryside presented.
And as this healing process advanced the stench of putrefaction that had lingered in his nostrils since Cawnpore was exorcised by the scent of honeysuckle, and of a hundred hedgerow flowers for which he had no names. Soon this sense of liberation enlarged itself into an almost physical experience, so that to some extent he could analyse it, relating it to memories of a pastoral England that must have been hiding in his saddlebags all these years. It had to do, he supposed, with the casually bestowed legacies of Smollett and Goldsmith, Constable, Cotman, and Crome, who gave a man a sense
5 2 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N
bell clanged and Aaron Walker glanced out of his peephole window. “That’s the twelve-ten from Bristol, right on time and I have to meet it. There’ll be a gaggle of directors aboard, all come to see how I waste my time ‘downalong.’ I have some difficulty convincing them I am not addicted to playing bowls on the Hoe, Mr. Swann.”
They shook hands across the desk, and Adam followed him out into the arcade.
Nothing had changed out here. Sombre gentlemen in dark suits and tall hats, all the cares of commerce on their shoulders, dodged in and out of the platform barriers. Luggage trundled by on two- and four-wheel trolleys. Women in “travelling” crinolines swished past, shaking their flounces to rid them of drifting smuts. The rumble of trucks, the intermittent hiss of escaping steam, the squeals of excited children soared like a multi-tongued prayer to the echoing canopy of the depot. With a lift of his hand Aaron Walker was swallowed up in a swarm of customers and underlings.
Adam drifted back to the luggage cave to claim the stub that the long-nosed clerk had been too busy to bring, and recognising his man he looked worried.
“Not had a minute, sir,” he said, “but I got it right here tell the Gaffer,” and he produced a voucher from his waistcoat pocket. “You can get your ticket at the booking-hall under the clock,” he added, as though to ward off a possible reprimand, but Adam felt he could afford the luxury of a small joke. “The luggage is going ahead,” he said, “but I’m following. On horseback,” and he thought he had never seen a man look more out raged. He went out into the June sunshine and boarded the nearest cab for the cattle market.
3
It was the most leisurely journey of his life and certainly the most instructive.
As he moved north-east, sometimes taking as long as four days to cross from one county border to the next, a whole spread of England unfolded, so that he saw not merely their geographical features but the crafts and characters of the people rooted in successive hill-folds and river bottoms. His ear, always attuned to dialects, marked their speech idioms, vowel sounds, and habits, and sometimes even their professions were revealed to him in gait and gesture. As he watched them from an inn window over looking some village green, his sense of isolation fell away, leaving him tolerant, watchful and deeply at peace with himself, as though he had entered into a new and deeper kinship with all he remembered of childhood and boyhood, and all he had admired in Englishmen whose bones GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 52
3/27/09 5:13:17 PM
The Black Dwarfs 5 3
lay in shallow graves on the slopes of the Fedioukine Hills and the Causeway Heights, and in half-a-hundred squalid villages along the banks of the Ganges.
But this was by no means all he gained following Aaron Walker’s eccentric advice. On still, midsummer nights, and again in the first hour after sunrise, he would sit crosslegged before his bivouac tent pitched in some woodland clearing, or beside some tumbling stream, sniffing, watching, and listening to the life stirring about him, recalling the name of this bird or that, checking his memory against a flash of plumage among the June gorse, and slowly adjusting to the miracle of regeneration that the scenes and scents of the countryside presented.
And as this healing process advanced the stench of putrefaction that had lingered in his nostrils since Cawnpore was exorcised by the scent of honeysuckle, and of a hundred hedgerow flowers for which he had no names. Soon this sense of liberation enlarged itself into an almost physical experience, so that to some extent he could analyse it, relating it to memories of a pastoral England that must have been hiding in his saddlebags all these years. It had to do, he supposed, with the casually bestowed legacies of Smollett and Goldsmith, Constable, Cotman, and Crome, who gave a man a sense
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