Night of the Animals(30)
“God gave ’em souls, and what did the English give ’em?” she’d once asked. “A slaughterhouse in every town—a bunch of clarty land, dorty seas, rivers turned into gubbon holes,* and thousands of book-learnt clish-clashers who say the bastes* are nothing but bondservants or jumbles of chemicals or whatnot. No wonder they went quate!”
As Winefride remembered it, the Wyre Forest before the Second World War seemed like the last verdant haven against all this, a place of glory and grief somewhere between Eden and Gethsemane.
“It always ’ad a rainbow above it—the ‘bow in the cloud.’ A special green and gold one, like the one God had shown Noah after floodwaters. When I was a much younger lass, ’twas paradise to me, and to the animals,” she had said that morning, in the car. Drystan had been plucking habitually at the end of a dark green thread in the Hillman’s springy plaid upholstery. As he began to pull it, his gran gently took his hand in hers to stop him. “The beasts loved the forest. But they knew its end was coming, and it broke their wild hearts.”
“Mother,” her daughter suddenly said from the front. “These boys are gullible. You’re going to worry them.”
His gran had whispered into Cuthbert’s ear, leaning hard against him, “I wouldn’t ever lie to thee or to Drystan. Ever.” He’d felt safe and happy smooshed into her warm, damp muscles; she felt like some enormous dolphin, carrying him out to sea.
the death of the wheat farmer
BEFORE THEY ARRIVED AT THE OLD HANDLEY relatives’ house, his gran managed to tell Cuthbert the whole history of the region, even how she’d met his long-dead grandfather.
“Tell us, Gran.”
“Ha! You’re really going to suffer now,” she said. “It was this one lovely day, in 1919. I had my long black hair unpinned and hovering in the wind—the villagers sometimes used to call me ‘the Basque Beauty’—and I walked two pretty miles into the town of Bewdley, from the country, just beyond the Wyre, to buy a few stalks of this new fruit being sold called ‘banans,’ as I called them.”
These “banans” had stopped appearing at the grocer during the war, their gran explained, but they were finally back, she’d heard, and she couldn’t wait. They were beautiful things, soft and aromatic, “loik a kind of custard you can hold.” The fish and fruit grocer, Mr. William Wood, swore they were good for heart problems and “general nutrition” (though any girl from the Clees knew you used foxglove for whatever ailed the heart).
“Eat as thee please,” Mr. Wood had said. He was staring at Winefride with something just short of awe. She had long, deft fingers and that hair of hers was as shiny-black as Scottish obsidian—and blown over her one ear just so.
“I was a tall girl, and healthy, and Mr. Wood knew my family was poor, too. Back in the owd times, most of the country people had little meat to eat, but I gave it up on my own as a young lass.”
Being a vegetarian at the time, Winefride said, attracted incredulity in the town, and “a kind of pity” in the country.
But that day in 1919, she stood there near a table piled with bananas, oranges, and plums, pulling the bruised skin off three bananas in a row. She dropped a skin into her purse, almost reluctantly, and plucked another small, squat cylinder off the fruit.
“I’ll be making myself sick,” she said. “You shanna be canting about this to everyone, oo’ll be, Mr. Wood?”
Mr. Wood, a hardy man with a large belly, was amazed she could devour so much.
“Thee ’oodn’t be the first,” he said. “The children are mad for them. They can’t get enough.”
“Dack, dack, dack,” she had said, using the common pig-call from her neighborhood in the hills. “Dack, dack, dack,” filling her maw. “I’m a gilt-swine when it comes to banans.” And just then, as she stood with her mouth stuffed with this tropical food, a young farmer, Alfred Wistan Wenlock, not long back from the Great War, walked into the shop.
“’E wasn’t much of a sight—just a thin wimbling, I thought,” she recalled. “Loik summat grown in a soil of sadness. And I could see he drank too much.”
A sickly veteran with roots in Northumbria and a defining talent for impracticality, Alfred came from a long line of undistinguished clerks. He’d never quite fit in at Bewdley, but having survived the war, he felt resented and guilty; so many of the town’s own sons, and many of his friends, lay buried in Flanders and France among the ten thousand dead from Worcestershire. Anguish never was far from his heart, and homemade brandy never far from his lips. Occasionally, to ease his sadness, he painted harmless watercolors of town fountains and churchyards. The war depressed land prices, too, and Alfred took his paltry veteran’s pay from the war and managed to buy a small cottage and plot in the hamlet of Far Forest on the western edge of Wyre.
He was going to grow wheat—an ambitious if not foolhardy crop for the district.
“Miss,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “Those bananas,” he said. “I had one in London. They are as lovely as anything I’ve ever seen.” He added, peering at her carefully, “Almost.”
They started talking. Alfred told her about the little plot, his plans for a farm, and Winefride, despite knowing better, found herself smitten. She lifted her hand to her mouth, trying to cover a fleck of the fruit that had emerged.