Adam Thorpe - Ulverton

‘The initial justification for such a sizeable mound,’ he replied, in a triumphant tone befitting the Assistant Secretary of our county’s Archaeological Society. His moustache quivered at my quizzical look. ‘Our finds up to now, um, these recent finds — they were simply additions. And cremation is, I believe, associated with later centuries. If we continue, I confidently predict that, um, we will uncover a rich burial, uncremated, with grave-goods to match. It might take many weeks, but I am sure it will be, um, worth it.’

I sat back and pondered his assertions while he lapped his tea. In actual fact, I was hardly bothered one way or another. With such recent memories of my wife’s last illness, I was growing averse to finding anything at all, if it meant uncovering something so manifestly morbid. To reveal the dead is not to release them.

‘I see. But with whom? Dart? He’s more a liability than a help. He still believes the trowel is his hammer and the chalk the anvil, if I’m not mistaken. He would smash the skull before we saw it. I say we should enlist some female support, but the Chief is dead agin it, needless to say.’

Ernest laughed — giggled would be a better description. The Chief’s misogyny was the best known fact about him — the oft-given explanation of his bachelor state, accompanied with an apparent unconcern at the inevitable withering of the Norcoat-Wells tree.

‘Yes, there’s the problem. Um, I’ve often wondered why the under-gardener hasn’t joined us. He’s, um, very strong.’

‘Percy Cullurne?’

‘Yes.’

I sighed. ‘That man has strong opinions of his own. As you saw — or rather, would have seen, at the meeting.’

‘I heard, yes,’ he said, flushing a little at this somewhat oblique reproval. ‘But what are these opinions? Concerning the excavation, I mean.’ He coughed and blew his nose, in case I had forgotten about his weakly constitution. ‘He never,’ he added, ‘says very much.’

‘That’s partly because the Squire has forbidden him to do so. Button your lip, he was told, apparently. Too much talk of treasure. So that is what Cullurne has done, in toto . I have had several most fruitful discussions with him on ornithological and botanical matters, as well as other more general concerns, such as the survival of the soul after death. Now it is exceedingly difficult to extract the shortest of sentences from him, unless you are talking of the weather, or the crops, or such like. And that in an almost impenetrable dialect, which was not the case before.’

‘Ah,’ Ernest nodded, and wiped his moustache with the corner of his handkerchief. ‘Then we will have to work slowly. Or recruit others. Older men. A pity, a pity. Um, yourself excused, of course. The new chauffeur looks very, um, frail. And the harvest is at its height. Pray for a fine autumn.’

After the Battle of the Marne, which raged through the first and second week of September, and in which our county regiment was not involved, the Germans dug in at the Aisne and trench warfare began. It was around then that my depressions returned. That week of enforced inaction though a spell of unusually hot weather, joined with a certain emptiness about the village heart, and the sight of a small girl outside the village shop weeping for her father ‘as goed off to fight on my birthday, an’ med never come back!’ — these played on my nerves, already as much frayed as my skin was by the many years of tropical sun. A colonial servant is instantly recognisable by his bleached and desiccated hair, his prematurely lined face, the hand-shake from repeated bouts of fever, and frequently (not, I am happy to add, in my case) the redolence of alcoholic addiction. His wife will be a mirror image, if wispier throughout, and with eyes dazed by monsoon-boredom and the company of dolts. Dark moods are an occupational hazard, even more so when these husks return to their mother-country, and find her erring on the side of dampness rather than coolness, as well as changed for the worse — always changed for the worse. The great wheels of the Empire, though in my opinion faltering now, grind her servants as effectively as they do her coffee-beans, but with far less substance to the end product. They are somehow emptied of anything but a kind of bitter regret, as if true happiness had only just eluded them in the middle of blinding squares or on the netted verandahs. How much happier that man who remains in his birthplace, and does not take the horizon as his gate to contentment!

My dreams around this time were all of skeletons, turning their heads in the chalk and grinning at me with my wife’s face; not the face I married and loved but the late phantasmagoric countenance of advanced dysentery. When the excavations resumed in the middle of the month with Dart, Ernest, the Squire, the new chauffeur Dick Lock, a white-stubbled handyman named Davey Purdue who was almost my age, and Robert Rose — an unpleasantly supercilious young northerner, who had been a footman up at Ulverton House until the loss of the last Chalmers-Lavery in the Titanic disaster — I had half a mind to give the whole thing up. But I persisted, partly for the sake of the exercise and the fresh air, and partly, curious as it may sound, for the sake of our Chief, whose pale complexion now bore small vein-marks of anxiety across the cheeks, but whom Ernest had persuaded nevertheless to continue with the enterprise. My weakness and my strength had always been an abiding sense of loyalty — even to those whom I could otherwise condemn. And as each scrape of the trowel rang off the flints and was taken by the breeze, a new sense of excitement hovered, despite my nostalgia for Marlers’s quiet quips, and Tom’s wheeze, and Terence Brinn’s silly laugh, and Allun’s nonchalant handling of the Squire’s moods. Stumpy Dick Lock was amiable enough, but Rose’s affected superiority and coarse humour cast a blight on those days, so that the golden presence of the Ineffable rarely stirred and rustled.

About a week after harvest I was walking that same back-path that comes out behind the brick wall of the Manor estate and its effulgent dog-rose, when I glimpsed Cullurne pouring feed into a tin trough. The sheep — an unusual spiral-horned breed the Squire was keen on promulgating — were running towards him and pressed quite happily about his knees as he shook the sack out. The dust hazed him in a copper-coloured aureole as the autumn sun levelled itself through the leaves of the small wood behind. He saw me, and raised his hand in greeting. I thought how clear and simple that life was, how like the ancient shepherds on the slopes of Attica he must look! I walked to the gate, and he came over and leaned on the iron. Flecks of bran nestled in his hair and in his stubble; his jacket was buttonless. He rested a boot on the lower cross-piece. His repose was one of energy held in check, his big arms the calmer for the exertion they were used to.

‘Middlin’ weather,’ he said. He sucked on a tooth with a most impressive squeal.

‘Very decent weather, I thought,’ said I, putting his caution down to the usual tendency of rural folk to underplay good fortune.

‘Drought,’ he replied, without a hint of superciliousness. ‘Ben’t be goin’ to rain agin till November, by my finger.’

‘Ah, drought,’ said I, feeling once more the unbridgeable gulf between myself and my surroundings on anything other than aesthetic terms. ‘Of course. Drought.’

‘Put the harvest in your pipe an’ smoke her. Malt-rashed. Atermath ben’t hardly wuth gallin the herse-collar vor. Put her in your pipe too. Cheaper nor twist.’

This being a particularly opaque piece of information, I merely nodded my head, and vowed to join the English Dialect Society forthwith — as I usually vowed when talking to the recently uncompromising Percy Cullurne, or any other provincially-immured inhabitant. Then I remembered a local saying taught me by Marlers, and tried it out, feeling the proverbial coals-to-Newcastle effect, but not willing to let such an extraordinarily suitable slot go unfilled — even though the phrase had struck me as odd, having all the riddling quality of so many rural saws.