Low life
That strain again
Jeffrey Bernard
So much music evokes so many places, times and people for me. It can be all sorts of music. My last wife was the Sibelius Symphony No 1, and an awful bit of pop called 'How Much Is That Doggie In The Window' was at the top of the charts when Stanley Matthews was playing for Stoke City and I was working there in the mines. That was in 1952. The Bach Brandenburg Concerto No 3 always takes me back to prep school and the first woman I ever fancied, who was a young schoolmistress who played a piano arrangement of it. I can still see her legs and heaven knows I spent enough time trying to look up them. That boring man Cesar Franck was with me for weeks when I first left home and got an awful bedsitter in South Ken. And so on.
The other night I played a compact disc of Haydn's Quartet No 1 Op. 20 and it took me right back to Chelsworth and I was awake all night remembering that. What an odd village it was. It was divided into two parts, not physically or geographi- cally, but by class. I called my end the broad bean end and the other the roses end. It was reputedly one of the prettiest villages in England and there were times when I thought it was a little too pretty. We had a thatched cottage with no ameni- ties — no bathroom, that is — and a small garden with an outside lavatory at the end of it. The rent was 3/6d a week but we still struggled a little on my £15 a week from Town Magazine. At first we were on the Sunday morning cocktail party list but we gradually got struck off. First by the vicar because I pissed in his garden and then, far worse, by the local bigwig for asking for a refill of Tio Pepe instead of waiting to be offered one.
What I did enjoy was being captain of the village cricket team, drinking all day in Sudbury with Maurice Richardson on mar- ket days and sipping whisky in the winter evenings by the fireside in the Peacock and listening to two farm labourer friends talking absolute rubbish. You know the sort of thing: if a thrush shits on you before midday then it will rain for a year. Our next-door neighbour was a nasty old bird who looked like the witch in Snow White and I took secret revenge on her by creeping into her garden in the middle of the night, digging a hole in it and then emptying our Elsan bucket into it. And she thought she was a good gardener.
But the thing I thought mostly about during this sleepless night of remembrance was walking my dog Smedley at dusk on autumn and winter evenings. She was a very pale Labrador bitch — the pallor native to East Anglia — and she was one of the kindest souls ever. I had a very good gun, a Cogswell & Harrison, and when the sun began to dip below the trees of the wood we would walk along through the mist that gathered above and beside the river. She would go along ahead of me, stopping from time to time to look back and see if I was still following, and I would be looking out and listening for pheasants, wood pigeons and rabbits. I was poaching 'Incredible.., conga eels.' but I couldn't feel too bad about it for the farmer didn't spend money on breeding game. It was just there, like the trees that had been there for hundreds of years. An all too rare treat we had was to see the barn owl gliding down along the river. He was so powerful that one languid flap of his great wings would carry him about a hundred yards. Freewheeling majesty. Then, when the sun had really sunk, we walked home through the wet grass, the smell of gunpowder lingering, cold and hungry towards the log fire.
I remember my wife cooking great fish pies with cheese sauce topping and we ate them by the fire while Smedley stared into the flames. I used to wonder what a dog could be thinking about so hard. How odd that Haydn should remind me of all that. I think Haydn would be a good name for a dog. Anyway, it may have been the broad bean end of the village but we had hon- eysuckle around the door. I also had a garden shed in which I was going to write the novel of the century. What came between us? The bees don't buzz quite like they used to. And now there is a giant pneumatic drill in the street outside and they are making a lot of noise behind me repairing the walls of the genito-urinary hospital. It is too much. I shall put on the Haydn again and go back to Chelsworth and raise a glass to Smedley.
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