The Happy-go-lucky Morgans

by Edward Thomas

“Mrs Partridge was a labourer’s wife who came in two or three days a week to do the rough work. I did not like her because she was always bustling about with a great noise and stir, and she did not like me because I was a spoilt, quiet child. She was deferential to all of us, and called me ‘Sir’; but if I dared to touch the peel when she was baking, or the bees-wax that she rubbed her irons on when she was ironing, she talked as if she were queen or I were naught. While she worked she sang in a coarse, high-pitched voice or tried to carry on a conversation with my mother, though she might be up in the orchard. She was a little woman with a brown face and alarming glittering eyes. She was thickly covered with clothes, and when her skirts were hoisted up to her knees, as they usually were, she resembled a partridge. She was as quick and plump as a partridge. She ran instead of walking, her head forward, her hands full of clothes and clothes-pegs, and her voice resounding. No boy scrambled over gates or fences more nimbly. She feared nothing and nobody. She was harsh to her children, but when her one-eyed cat ate the Sunday dinner she could not bear to strike it, telling my mother, ‘I’ve had the poor creature more than seven years.’ She was full of idioms and proverbs, and talked better than any man has written since Cobbett. One of her proverbs has stayed fantastically in my mind, though I have forgotten the connection—‘As one door shuts another opens.’ It impressed me with great mystery, and as she said it the house seemed very dark, and, though it was broad daylight and summer, I heard the wind howling in the roof just as it often did at night and on winter afternoons.

“Mrs Partridge had a husband of her own size, but with hollowed cheeks the colour of leather. Though a slight man he had broad shoulders and arms that hung down well away from his body, and this, with his bowed stiff legs, gave him a look of immense strength and stability: to this day it is hard to imagine that such a man could die. When I heard his horses going by on a summer morning I knew that it was six o’clock; when I saw them returning I knew that it was four. He was the carter, and he did nothing but work, except that once a week he went into the town with his wife, drank a pint of ale with her, and helped her to carry back the week’s provisions. He needed nothing but work, out of doors, and in the stables, and physical rest indoors; and he was equally happy in both. He never said anything to disturb his clay pipe, though that was usually out. What he thought about I do not know, and I doubt if he did; but he could always break off to address his horses by name, every minute or two, in mild rebuke or cheerful congratulation, as much for his own benefit as for theirs, to remind himself that he had their company. He had full responsibility for four cart-horses, a plough, a waggon, and a dung-cart. He cared for the animals as if they had been his own: if they were restless at night he also lost his sleep. Although so busy he was never in haste, and he had time for everything save discontent. His wife did all the talking, and he had his way without taking the pipe out of his mouth. She also had her own way, in all matters but one. She was fond of dancing; he was not, and did not like to see her dance. When she did so on one tempting occasion, and confessed it, he slept the night in the barn and she did not dance again. There was a wonderful sympathy between them, and I remember hearing that when she knew that she was going to have a baby, it was he and not she that was indisposed.

“Our house was a square one of stone and tiles, having a porch and a room over it, and all covered up in ivy, convolvulus, honeysuckle, and roses, that mounted in a cloud far over the roof and projected in masses, threatening some day to pull down all with their weight, but never trimmed. The cherry-tree stretched out a long horizontal branch to the eaves at one side. In front stood two pear-trees, on a piece of lawn which was as neat as the porch was wild, and around their roots clustered a thicket of lilac and syringa, hiding the vegetable-garden beyond. These trees darkened and cooled the house, but that did not matter. In no other house did winter fires ever burn so brightly or voices sound so sweet; and outside, the sun was more brilliant than anywhere else, and the vegetable-garden was always bordered by crimson or yellow flowers. The road went close by, but it was a hollow lane, and the heads of the passers-by did not reach up to the bottom of our hedge, whose roots hung down before caves that were continually being deepened by frost. This hedge, thickened by traveller’s joy, bramble, and ivy, entirely surrounded us; and as it was high as well as thick you could not look out of it except at the sky and the hills—the road, the neighbouring fields, and all houses being invisible. The gate, which was reached by a flight of steps up from the road, was half-barricaded and all but hidden by brambles and traveller’s joy, and the unkempt yew-tree saluted and drenched the stranger—in one branch a golden-crested wren had a nest year after year.

“Two trees reigned at the bottom of the garden—at one side an apple; at the other, just above the road, a cypress twice as high as the house, ending in a loose plume like a black cock’s tail. The apple-tree was old, and wore as much green in winter as in summer, because it was wrapped in ivy, every branch was furry with lichen and moss, and the main boughs bushy with mistletoe. Each autumn a dozen little red apples hung on one of its branches like a line of poetry in a foreign language, quoted in a book. The thrush used to sing there first in winter, and usually sang his last evening song there, if it was a fine evening. Yet the cypress was my favourite. I thought there was something about it sinister to all but myself. I liked the smell of it, and when at last I went to the sea its bitterness reminded me of the cypress. Birds were continually going in and out of it, but never built in it. Only one bird sang in it, and that was a small, sad bird which I do not know the name of. It sang there every month of the year, it might be early or it might be late, on the topmost point of the plume. It never sang for long, but frequently, and always suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere else. The song was monotonous and dispirited, so that I fancied it wanted us to go, because it did not like the cheerful garden, and my father’s loud laugh, and my mother’s tripping step: I fancied it was up there watching the clouds and very distant things in hope of a change; but nothing came, and it sang again, and waited, ever in vain. I laughed at it, and was not at all sorry to see it there, for it had stood on that perch in all the happy days before, and so long as it remained the days would be happy. My father did not like the bird, but he was often looking at it, and noted its absence as I did. The day after my sister died he threw a stone at it—the one time I saw him angry—and killed it. But a week later came another, and when he heard it he burst into tears, and after that he never spoke of it but just looked up to see if it was there when he went in or out of the porch. We had taller trees in the neighbourhood, such as the wych-elms and the poplars by the brook, but this was a solitary stranger and could be seen several miles away like a black pillar, as the old cherry could in blossom-time, like a white dome. You were seldom out of sight of it. It was a station for any bird flying to or from the hills. A starling stopped a minute, piped and flew off. The kestrel was not afraid to alight and look around. The nightjar used it. At twilight it was encircled by midges, and the bats attended them for half an hour. Even by day it had the sinister look which was not sinister to me: some of the night played truant and hid in it throughout the sunshine. Often I could see nothing, when I looked out of my window, but the tree and the stars that set round it, or the mist from the hills. What with this tree, and the fruit-trees, and the maples in the hedge, and the embowering of the house, I think the birds sometimes forgot the house. In the mornings, in bed, I saw every colour on the woodpigeon, and the ring on his neck, as he flew close by without swerving. At breakfast my father would say, ‘There’s a kestrel.’ We looked up and saw nothing, but on going to the window, there was the bird hovering almost above us. I suppose its shadow or its blackening of the sky made him aware of it before he actually saw it.

“Next to us—on still days we heard the soft bell rung in the yard there at noon—was the manor-house, large, but unnoticeable among its trees. I knew nothing about the inside of it, but I went all over the grounds, filled my pockets with chestnuts, got a peach now and then from the gardener, picked up a peacock’s feather. Wonderfully beautiful ladies went in and out of that old house with the squire. A century back he would have been a pillar of the commonwealth: he was pure rustic English, and his white hair and beard had an honourable look as if it had been granted to him for some rare service; no such beards are to be found now in country-houses. I do not know what he did: I doubt if there is anything for such a man to do to-day except sit for his portrait to an astonished modern painter. I think he knew men as well as horses; at least he knew everyone in that country, had known them all when he and they were boys. He was a man as English, as true to the soil, as a Ribston pippin.

“The woods on the hills were his, or at least such rights as anybody had in them were his. As for me, I got on very well in them with no right at all. Now, home and the garden were so well known, so safe, and so filled with us, that they seemed parts of us, and I only crept a little deeper into the core when I went to bed at night, like a worm in a big sweet apple. But the woods on the hills were utterly different, and within them you could forget that there was anything in the world but trees and yourself, an insignificant self, so wide and solitary were they. The trees were mostly beeches and yews, massed closely together. Nothing could grow under them. Except for certain natural sunny terraces not easily found, they covered the whole hills from top to bottom, even in the steepest parts where you could slide, run, and jump the whole distance down—about half a mile—in two minutes. The soil was dead branches and dead leaves of beech and yew. Many of the trees were dead: the stumps stood upright until they were so rotten that I could overturn them with a touch. Others hung slanting among the boughs of their companions, or were upheld by huge cables of honeysuckle or traveller’s joy which had once climbed up them and flowered over their crests. Many had mysterious caverns at their roots, and as it were attic windows high up where the owls nested. The earth was a honeycomb of rabbits’ burrows and foxes’ earths among the bony roots of the trees, some of them stuffed with a century of dead leaves.

“Where the slope was least precipitous or had a natural ledge, two or three tracks for timber-carriages had once been made. But these had not been kept up, and were not infallible even as footpaths. They were, however, most useful guides to the terraces, where the sun shone and I could see the cypress and my mother among the sunflowers, and the far-away hills.

“On my ninth birthday they gave me an old horn that had been a huntsman’s, and when I was bold and the sun was bright, I sometimes blew it in the woods, trembling while the echoes roamed among the gulfs which were hollowed in the hillsides, and my mother came out into the little garden far off. During the autumn and winter the huntsman blew his horn in the woods often for a whole day together. The root caves and old earths gave the fox more than a chance. The horses were useless. The hounds had to swim rather than run in perpetual dead leaves. If I saw the fox I tried hard not to shout and betray him, but the temptation was very strong to make the echo, for I was proud of my halloo, and I liked to see the scarlet coats, the lordly riders and the pretty ladies, and to hear the questing hound and horn, and the whips calling Ajax, Bravery, Bannister, Fury Nell, and the rest. Then at last I was glad to see the pack go by at the day’s end, with sleepy heads, taking no notice of me and waving tails that looked clever as if they had eyes and ears in them, and to hear the clatter of horses dying round the end of the crescent into the outer world.

“Nobody took heed of the woods except the hunters. The timber was felled if at all by the west wind. The last keeper had long ago left his thatched cottage under the hill, where the sun shone so hot at midday on the reed-thatched shed and the green mummy of a stoat hanging on the wall. So I met nobody in the woods. I took an axe there day after day for a week and chopped a tree half through, unmolested except by the silence, which, however, wore me out with its protest.