Bell The Cherry Tree

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-25295-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 160 Seiten

Reihe: A rural trilogy

The Cherry Tree was first published in 1932 and is the final volume in Adrian Bell's classic rural trilogy. The first two volumes are Corduroy and Silver Ley. In The Cherry Tree the author describes further farming experiences, his marriage, and becoming habituated to country life. Taken together these three volumes have been described 'as the classic account of a twentieth-century Englishman's conversion to rural life'.

Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire, grew up in London, and was educated at Uppingham School which he hated. His father, news editor of the Observer, was a republican and a socialist and had no truck with university education. His son was to do something useful; in 1920 he went to East Anglia to work as a farm apprentice. He subsequently became a farmer himself. These experiences provide the material for his famous rural trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. In total he wrote over twenty-five books, he also set the first Times in 1930 and continued to devise crosswords for the paper for the next thirty years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bell, Adrian

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

IT is good to be a bachelor while freedom has still the bloom on it and is prized for itself alone. I used to pity those who were married, like men caught in a trap by one leg; for they never seemed whole-heartedly in one place, but while with one foot were among a merry gathering,’ with the other seemed always stuck fast at home. They would be ever fingering for their watches, with mumblings about “the wife expecting me back.” But, after all, the brightest occasion had to finish some time, even for the freest of us, and I’ll admit that the smile died away as one blundered up the dark garden path and flashed one’s torch on to a mound of white ash in the living-room grate and the remains of breakfast on the table. Silence seemed more than silence after late laughter; and one had no heart to cook a meal, but had some bread and cheese by an oil stove and went to bed. At such times I had inklings that perhaps the boot was on the other leg, and those fellows who always left early pitied me! However that may be, in time mere freedom became empty of possibility. I wearied of solitude and married a wife.

(As I am writing a book about a farm I suppose this last fact should be thus baldly stated and left at that. But I cannot forbear re-living those disconnected moments that stand forth in mind as the code by which memory interprets the past. If anyone is impatient with me, and would be on the farm, let him go on to page 15 where I will be with him shortly.)

Now one evening, after I had had my tea, I was rummaging in my cupboard and shuffling my bills when I came upon my first farm account-book, and read again the entries of my early days as a farmer here. That set me musing on the past, and on the year I had spent with Mr. Colville at Farley Hall as a pupil on his farm, then a feckless cockney youth full of baseless fancies. I was very glad the experience had been mine; and, as my evenings were long, lonely, and unoccupied, I began to write of it, the more clearly to summon it up. Yes, after completely renouncing the pen at twenty, at the end of ten years I found myself taking it up again to write, not the mysterious poems of my youth, but a bull-headed account of my year at Farley Hall. It even achieved publication, and that really surprised me, for, though the subject was of interest to me, I didn’t think it would be to a world busy for the most part on more novel problems. I enjoyed writing it; it was merely putting on paper the mental diary I had kept of those days, and it somehow made my present life more emphatically worth while. Not that the book, when I received my six gratis copies, seemed to have anything to do with me. I turned the printed pages curiously; and seemed to come face to face with my reflection unexpectedly in a mirror.

One morning I received a letter from one who said she had enjoyed reading of the days at Farley Hall, and the reason for her enjoyment had been, she said, that the life seemed “like clean linen, shining forks and spoons, the beauty of everything you use every day.” It was continually with me, as I went about that morning, that such beauty, the bright-worn, manual workaday beauty of what one used, was the light of life for me, though it had not occurred to me in those words. For labour, I feel, is the key to satisfying life, the soother of worry, preparing one also for the appreciation of food and rest. If you consider bodily toil primitive and blunting (as you may be justified in doing), then this beauty is a very pedestrian affair, but I confess I am touched always with a sense of mystery at sight of things that flash and shine with use among the mire they move in; it is always a little miracle of transfiguration—ploughshares, iron toe-pieces of men’s boots, fork-prongs, and chains.

There was no address to the letter I received, or I should have written thanking my friend for her words.

Now coincidence, I know, has no story value whatever; yet every person in actual life experiences one or two startling coincidences, and one of mine was that later I met by chance the person who had written to me.

She lived in London. She worked in an office, in a great block of buildings near the Abbey and facing the hospital at Westminster, whose architecture, supposedly ecclesiastical, actually looked mediæval and prison-like. It looked to me, at all events, like Doubting Castle, in which lived Giant Despair, for how should one single-handed storm that citadel against all the forces and inducements of civilisation, and carry off a woman from its warm imprisonment to the cold freedom of my Anglia? For that was what I intended, having fallen in love.

As I stood at the corner, breasting the storm of traffic, I noticed that a newsvendor had left his pitch temporarily; his pile of papers lay on the wall there, held down by a stone: beside it lay a small pile of coppers. As I waited by that building for its prisoner to be let out on parole, I noticed that every so often a passer-by would lift the stone and take a paper, adding also a copper to the pile. Yet, strange to say, no one in this great cyclone of mercenary endeavour thought fit to take those pennies for his own use. This stood as a sign to me that the bark of the city might be worse than its bite. In fact, this place put into my hand the key which would unlock the door if the prisoner would then walk out into the fields. For quite a number of its citizens had bought my book, and the otherwise impassable gulf of penury was temporarily bridged.

But the future, viewed however optimistically, was a question mark upon a faintly roseate background, which was the Micawber-like hope of something turning up. We—that is, Nora particularly—did not press the matter to the extent of whisking away the pleasant sentiment and exposing the complete blank of ineligibility. And in that, and in a certain weariness of the shoulders after the day’s work which it took a glass of sherry under the cosy lamp of the Soho dinner-table to dispel, I first tasted the intoxicating possibility of success. For if I were ineligible with my fifty-odd acres, I should have been no less so with five hundred, as any farmer who experienced those times will admit. And those were such times that he who was eligible yesterday might not be so to-morrow; so that mothers knew not what to do for the best.

At least I had little to explain; it was all down in black and white, and she was as familiar with it, she said, as I was.

But sometimes Nora would take a different tone altogether. My courtship (is there a more modern word?) took place over a long series of week-ends. It would be when we had dressed to make an evening of it, Nora in a long daffodil-coloured frock, beringed and coiffured close into the neck—as we dined, with all the evening and its theatre before us, she would suddenly discover some insuperable obstacle which increased my own momentary misgivings that such a vision should ever tread the red-brick floors of Silver Ley.

She had heard, she said, from a friend, that Suffolk possessed the bleakest climate in all England, against which I hastily sought authoritative witness, and memory served up Mr. Prioleau’s recommendation of “frozen sunlight.”

“Frozen!” Nora shuddered in the warm restaurant.

“But sunlight,” I insisted, and pointed out its healthiness compared with the moist and muggy murk of the West Country winter—for my proposal may seem a little less mad if I mention that Nora was really a West Country girl, and only a Londoner of late years through the need of earning a living.

Then she asked, did the bedroom fireplace draw well? As though that might make the climate just possible.

I had to admit there were no fireplaces upstairs—“But a thatched roof,” I said hurriedly (it was my only asset), “keeps the cottage very warm in winter and cool in summer.”

“Have you a special heater for the water, or is it just the old-fashioned kitchen range affair?”

“Well, in a sense there is a special heater.”

“What about the bathroom?”

Again I shook my head.

“What—no bathroom?”

“None,” I admitted.

“Then what do you mean about a special heater?”

“I meant the kitchen copper,” I said, defensive but defiant, and went on to paint a picture of the drowsy pleasures of sitting in a hip-bath before the glowing kitchen fire—(“Like an opened oyster,” Nora put in)—with the cat and loudly ticking clock for company. What a delicious resolving of all the ardours of the day that was, as one dabbed oneself nervously with soap and water.

But my epicurean flight availed nothing against the sudden crop of doubts which sprang up and seeded themselves a hundredfold in the otherwise barren silence.

Now, indeed, I saw the folly into which love had surprised me. I saw my hopes puffed out with their own breath and tottering on their meagre base. I had written a book which Nora had enjoyed—no more. I had confused life with literature. The person before me was born to be served by magic powers—the flashing leap of electricity, the powerful motions, controlled by a finger pressure, of modern civilisation. Her attitude said so—the poise, the nonchalance. And this is what strikes me about the city-dweller as against the countryman—he may be the slave of his system, in bodily comfort he is a king, and his attitude is always implicit with the knowledge that he has but to lift his finger for any of his reasonable needs to be instantaneously satisfied. He never need exert himself—and therefore, being human, has to “take exercise.” But the countryman goes about as though always expecting to have to stoop and grapple with something; he...