TO
STEPHEN TOMLIN
CONTENTS
| ONE: | BIRDS IN THE SNOW | [ 3] |
| TWO: | PLOUGH MONDAY | [ 16] |
| THREE: | SOTHEBY’S SHOP | [ 31] |
| FOUR: | THE TRAPEZE BOY | [ 45] |
| FIVE: | THE FROST HELD | [ 60] |
| SIX: | WINGED SEEDS | [ 77] |
| SEVEN: | THE BURNT FARM | [ 90] |
| EIGHT: | WILLOW-PATTERN PARIS | [ 105] |
| NINE: | BIRTHDAY TEA | [ 121] |
| TEN: | NO GOOD-BYES | [ 134] |
| ELEVEN: | BEFORE THE SWALLOW DARES | [ 150] |
| TWELVE: | RICHARD’S FRIENDS | [ 165] |
| THIRTEEN: | PARIS | [ 179] |
| FOURTEEN: | A REMOVAL | [ 192] |
| FIFTEEN: | HONEYMOONING | [ 213] |
| SIXTEEN: | ANGELS | [ 228] |
GO SHE MUST!
ONE: BIRDS IN THE SNOW
Snow lay thick over everything on the morning of the second Monday in the year, and the Reverend Charles Dunnock, drawing back the curtains of his bedroom window, said to himself that if the great sycamore full of rooks’ nests in the churchyard were to fall, or even if a steeple were to be built for the little church of Dry Coulter, such changes would not alter the landscape so much as this snowstorm had done. Buried under three inches of snow the country was recognizable, but wholly transformed, and he asked himself how it was that a uniform colouring should make a totally new world yet one which was composed of familiar objects in their accustomed places.
Indifferent to the cold, he gazed out of his bedroom window enchanted by the beauty of the scene, and then, as he caught a glimpse of the first horizontal beams of the sun falling on Nature’s wedding-cake, he told himself that even the dullest witted of his dissenting parishioners would feel compelled to cry out: “This is like Heaven! I could fancy myself dead, and this Eternity!”
“Yes”—he reflected—“all men must feel it, for that conceit is helped out by the extraordinary stillness, the footfalls of man and bird and beast are muffled, and the world seems empty. Nobody is stirring, for there is nothing like a heavy fall of snow to keep people by their firesides. Only the postman and the milkman go their rounds”; and while he was dressing he heard their sudden knocks at the back door, with no warning crunch of gravel, or sound of the gate slamming in the yard.
“Their fidelity,” he said to himself, “is like that of the clocks striking the hours when there is death in the house”—for Mrs. Dunnock had died exactly a year before, and her death was always in his mind. His bedroom had been her bedroom, though only for a few months, for she had died soon after her husband had been presented with a living, and since her death he slept alone in the great bed where she had waited so often for him to come up from his study, and where he had always found her with her soft hair spread like a bird’s wing over the pillow, and in which she had died.
“The clocks strike the hours in the moments of our greatest sorrow,” he said to himself. “Nothing will keep them from the punctual discharge of their duty, and listening to them we are recalled to this life, we shoulder our burdens once more, we begin ticking again ourselves, ticking away our ordinary lives.”