4. To Little Barley and Beyond

The country buses started from a special place in Castleford, a place not frequented by town buses; and, on market-day, the passengers were nearly all people like Grandpa Fitch, doing their weekly shopping. A bus crew usually knew its whole load of passengers by sight, even by name.

‘Fine day, Grandpa,’ said the driver of the Yellow Salden bus, who was leaning against his vehicle, smoking. He knew that old Mr Fitch lived halfway to Salden, by the driftway beyond Little Barley.

‘It is, Bob,’ said Grandpa. ‘Got my grandson with me.’

‘Wouldn’t know you apart,’ said the driver, and winked at Ben.

They got on to the bus. It was a single-decker, so there was no bother about taking Tilly upstairs. She crouched under Grandpa’s knees, and on top of them he carried all his shopping and Ben’s suitcase, upended. Ben himself had given his seat up almost at once to a woman with shopping and a baby.

When the bus was quite full and the driver had swung up into his seat, the conductress called down the crowded gangway: ‘Anyone not going beyond the Barleys?’ There was a hush among the passengers, for this was rather like asking whether anyone in a party had not been invited. ‘I –’ said a hesitant voice, and everyone turned round or craned forward to see who. A lady with a suitcase and no shopping said, ‘I – well, I was going just to Great Barley. The timetable said this bus went to Great Barley.’

‘Through Great Barley, without stopping,’ said the conductress. ‘Full and five standing, on a market-day, we don’t reckon to set down or pick up until after the Barleys. There’s other buses to do that.’

The lady was civilly helped off the Salden bus and directed to a Great Barley one. Then the Salden conductress asked her question again, and a third time just to be certain. Each time there was an unbroken hush. Then she rapped on the driver’s window and they set off – the five miles from Castleford to Great Barley, and straight through Great Barley, and bouncing over the two bridges into Little Barley, and through that, and well ahead of time, and everyone looking forward to early teas.

Beyond Little Barley the bus entered real countryside, with shaggy elms at the far limits of fields and meadows on either side of the bus route. A house stood quite by itself at the side of a field-track.

‘The driftway!’ cried the conductress, in case Grandpa, from behind his luggage, had not seen where they were. But he was already struggling out of his seat, with Tilly and Ben pressing close behind him.

The bus stopped for the first time since Castleford traffic lights. There was someone waiting to get on, anyway: young Mrs Perkins, who was the Fitches’ next-door neighbour.

‘I popped in twice to see her,’ said Mrs Perkins to Grandpa, as he came down the bus steps. ‘She wouldn’t let me lay your tea, though. Said she could manage. Last I saw of her was going upstairs to watch for the bus from the bedroom window.’

‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Grandpa. He and Ben and Tilly and the baggage had got off; Mrs Perkins got on. The driver leaned from his window and said something he had been thinking out ever since his remark to Grandpa Fitch in Castleford: ‘All three so alike that I can’t tell which of you is the dog!’

‘That’s Bob Moss!’ said Grandpa, as the bus drove off. The driver was laughing so much that you could see the spasms of it in the wobbling of the bus along the road. Then Mr Moss remembered his responsibilities: the bus straightened its course, and dwindled into the distance.

Mr Fitch let Tilly off her lead, and she went ahead of them up the driftway. A little way along it there stood what looked like one house – really, two semi-detached, brick-built cottages that some farmer had put there for his labourers, long before people had thought of building houses where they might easily be connected with sewers and water pipes, electricity and gas. In one half of this double house lived young Mrs Perkins and her husband; in the other half, the Fitches. The front of the house looked over the road and its infrequent traffic. The back looked up the driftway – a rutted track that ambled between fields and meadows, skirted a wood, crossed the river by a special bridge of its own, and came out again at last – with an air of having achieved nothing and not caring, anyway – into another country road just like the one it had started from.

Evidently Mrs Fitch had seen the bus, for she was coming down the stairs as Grandpa and Ben came through the front door. The front door opened straight into the living room, into which the stairway also descended. Ben had a rear view of his grandmother in a black dress with little purple flower-sprigs on it. She was climbing down the stairs backwards and very slowly, because of stiffness in the knees. As soon as she heard the front door open, she called, ‘Don’t let that dog bring all the driftway in on its paws!’ Tilly stopped on the threshold, sighed, and sat down. Mrs Fitch reached the last stair-tread: ‘I’ve laid the tea, as you see, in spite of what’s-her-name Perkins thinking I’m not up to it any more.’ She reached floor level and turned to face them: she was a little old woman, thin, and yet knobbly with her affliction; but like some tool of iron, much used and worn and even twisted, but still undestroyed and still knowing its use.

‘Well, Ben!’

Ben went forward and kissed her, a little timidly. All Granny Fitch’s grandchildren felt a particular respect for her; so did her sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, and even her own children; even Grandpa Fitch felt it. He and Granny had been married for nearly fifty years, and they had brought up eight children – not in this tiny house, of course, but in another not very much larger. Grandpa had always worked on the roads, for the County Council, which was a steady job, but not well-paid. On the birth of their first child, Mrs Fitch had discussed the future with Mr Fitch, and he had taken the Pledge – for economy, not for principle. So he gave up his beer, and he gave up his pipe at the same time, and he had always given all his weekly wages into his wife’s hands. Mrs Fitch had gone out to do morning cleaning in Little Barley as soon as the eldest Fitch child had been old enough to begin looking after the youngest; and she had managed. People in the Barleys remarked that the Fitch children were cheaply fed, but well-fed; cheaply dressed, but warmly in winter and decently in summer. They had all gone to the village school, where they worked hard – their mother had seen to that. One of them, by means of scholarships, had reached a university; two had gone to Castleford Technical School. One of these had taken a job in London, where she had met and married a young fellow with a good job, working on the Underground Railway. This was Lily Fitch, who became Mrs Bill Blewitt, and the mother of Ben.

In the struggle of bringing up the children, Granny Fitch – for she always took the family decisions – had never accepted charity. Not much was ever offered, anyway, in her experience. You could not call scholarships charity: they were worked for – earned. Now Granny and Grandpa were old, and Grandpa had retired from road-work. They lived on their pension, and that was just enough. They still took no charity, even from their children. They were independent, Granny said; they always would be, unless anyone wanted to make a silly splash with expensive brass-handled coffins, when the time came.

In spite of her arthritis, Granny got about wherever she wanted in the little garden or indoors. This afternoon she had laid the tea-table for Ben’s coming, so that Grandpa had only to brew the tea, while Ben made the toast.

Over the tea-table Granny questioned Grandpa – what he had bought in Castleford market, how much he had paid, whom he had met, what they had said. Then she questioned Ben. She wanted to know how he was getting on at school, and Paul, and Frankie. She wanted to know about Dilys’s deciding to change her job, and about May’s getting married – and, of course, all about May’s Charlie Forrester, whom Granny had met only once: was he really sober? was he steady? was he hardworking? was he helpful about the house? Grandpa, unobserved, took an extra spoonful of sugar in his tea, while Ben answered briefly, carefully, accurately, saying he didn’t know if he didn’t know, for all this was what Granny liked.

After tea old Mr Fitch usually read to his wife, whose eyesight had dimmed from much plain sewing when all the little Fitches had had to be so cheaply dressed. Granny had the choice of Grandpa’s reading from the Bible, the Chapel magazine, or any recent family letters. Grandpa read as haltingly as he wrote, so he gladly gave up his task to Ben this evening. There were two letters to be read: the first was from one of Ben’s aunts who had settled in Essex, and the other was from an uncle in Canada. As Ben read, Granny would occasionally stop him to call, ‘Do you hear, Joe?’ and Grandpa would come out of the scullery, where he was washing up the tea-things. Then his wife would repeat to him the news of the letter, in the very words of the letter, for Granny had a remarkable memory for things both near and long ago. Each time, Tilly – from her position just outside the open front door – would whine a little, hoping that this meant the end of the reading. Every time she did so, Ben whispered ‘Tilly …’ in a steadying voice that promised her his company later.

When he had finished reading the Canadian letter, Granny said, ‘Would you like the stamp?’

‘Well …’ said Ben, not liking to seem ungrateful. ‘I mean, thank you … But, as a matter of fact, I have – well, really, I have those Canadian stamps, so if you don’t mind –’

‘Answer what you mean, boy,’ said Granny, and the end of her knobbed forefinger came down like a poker-end on the table, so that Grandpa in the scullery jumped, and Tilly, who had been crawling forward until her nose rested on the threshold, winced back.

‘No, thank you, Granny,’ said Ben.

‘Not interested in stamps now?’

‘No.’

‘But in dogs?’

‘Yes,’ said Ben, quickly and truthfully because he had to, but unwillingly.

‘Disappointed you didn’t have a live dog on your birthday?’ The clash and splash of washing up stopped in the scullery. Ben was silent too. ‘Answer,’ said his grandmother.

‘Yes,’ said Ben.

Again, a silence. Then Granny: ‘What possessed Joe to promise such a thing … Do you know how many grandchildren we have?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Supposing your grandpa and I began giving them all a dog each – twenty-one dogs …’

Grandpa appeared in the doorway of the scullery. ‘Not one each. One to a family.’

‘Seven dogs, then,’ said Granny.

‘One’s in Canada.’

‘Six, then.’

Grandpa went back into the scullery, having reduced the number of dogs as much as was in his power. Ben could see that, even so, there were far too many dogs. He couldn’t have had one. He began to tell his grandmother that, anyway, you couldn’t really have a dog in London. But Mrs Fitch was continuing her own line of thought: ‘And I hope Lily’d have more sense too. A dog eats bones that would make good soup, leaves mud on the lino, and hairs on the carpet. Yet men and children – oh! they must have a dog! It beats me why. Look at that foolish Till!’ Young Tilly knew her name, but knew the tone in which it was spoken; she groaned hopelessly. ‘We have her,’ said Granny, ‘as we had her mother, because she’s said to keep down the rats and catch rabbits for the pot. But there never have been rats here, and there aren’t rabbits any more; and, anyway, she’s too old and fat to catch anything except a bit of bacon rind sneaked down on to the floor.’

Grandpa, with the tea-cloth in his hand, came right out of the scullery, and spoke with fire: ‘There aren’t any rats because she keeps them down all the time; and it’s not her fault if there aren’t rabbits any more. And stout, not fat.’ He went back into the scullery before Granny could reply.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Fitch, ‘that is something your grandpa and I shall not agree about. Ben, will you put the letters away for me, please? With the others, in the top drawer in the chest in my bedroom, on their right piles.’

Ben had done this before. He went upstairs to the deep drawer that held all the letters from Granny’s children. They were divided into eight piles, one for each son or daughter. He recognized his mother’s handwriting on one pile. One pile was much smaller than the others, because it had not been added to for many years; the postmarks were all foreign, as the stamps would have been, of course, except that they had been cut out long ago for grandchildren who were collectors. These were the letters written by Uncle Willy, who had been drowned before he had had time to marry and set up a family – Uncle Willy, who had brought the woolwork dog from the place with the unpronounceable name in Mexico.

Ben put the two latest letters into the drawer and shut it, with a sigh for the dog he had been cheated of. Somebody sighed in sympathy behind him. He turned. There was Tilly. She was never allowed upstairs, and one would have thought that she could never have conceived the bold possibility of a dog’s going up there. But, as she waited on the threshold downstairs for Ben’s coming, she had seen the hedge shadows lengthening along the driftway, and had smelt the end of the day coming. She could not bear that she and Ben should miss it altogether. Grandpa had come out of the scullery and Granny had then engaged herself in a one-sided conversation on the worthlessness of dogs. Taking advantage of this, Tilly had slid into the house and upstairs, to find Ben.

Ben took her great weight into his arms and staggered downstairs, to where a window opened on to the back garden. He dropped the dog through the window and went down to his grandparents.

‘I’ve put the letters away. Can I go out now?’

‘Yes, be back before dusk,’ said Granny. ‘I expect you’ll want to take that dog.’

‘She’s gone from the door,’ said Grandpa, looking. ‘But no doubt you’ll find her outside.’

‘I’ll find her,’ said Ben. He stepped outside, into the early evening sunshine and the smell and sight of flowers and grass and trees with clean country air above them up to a blue sky. He dropped his eyes from the blue and saw Tilly’s face round the corner of the house. She advanced no further, but jerked her head in the direction of the driftway. ‘Come on,’ her gesture said.

Ben picked a stem of grass growing beside the porch, set it between his teeth, and followed her.