The Cuckoos of Batch Magna

Humph, erstwhile short-order cook from the Bronx, arrives in Batch Magna as Sir Humphrey, the 9TH baronet and squire of this March, with a wad of eviction notices in his briefcase.

Chapter Ten

 

On his first visit to Batch Magna, the newly entitled Sir Humphrey Franklin T Strange, the 9th baronet of his line and squire of this March, had been driven there from Kingham by the land agent, in company with his mom and the man he called Uncle Frank.

On this occasion he was on his own, and apart from having to remind himself to look right, stay left, stay on the goddam left, was doing just fine.

His large frame never having quite enough room in the driving seat of the hired Ford, he had driven from Birmingham airport to Church Myddle, arriving just as it started raining again, another of the heavy showers he’d been driving through for the past hour.

In the town square, where he’d found a parking space, surrounded by overhanging Tudor gables and Elizabethan half-timbers, a huge copper kettle, polished by the rain, sat fatly above one of the shop doorways.

Sheltering under a plastic raincoat he’d remembered to bring after his last visit, and hoping it wasn’t just a shop which sold huge fat copper kettles, Humphrey made a dash for it.

It was a tea shop, or shoppe, as the sign had it. A busy place of tweed and gossip, smelling of damp mackintoshes and coffee, and with a bell on the door which tinkled when he entered, and waitresses in black and frilly white.

Humphrey ordered a pot of tea and sat listening to the accents around him, the Welsh lilt among them breathy with scandal. On one of the walls was scrolled something about Pailin, the Prince of Cake Compounders, and how, The mouth liquefies at the very sound of thy name.

And boy! He didn’t know who Pailin was, but they weren’t kidding. There were thick pastries with rum syrups, and cream topped with chunks of icing, mounds of sweet chestnut puree, whipped cream and grated chocolate, and gateaux stuffed with jam and cherries, and more cream.

And no Sylvia here, adding up the calories and ready with the latest on blood sugar. Or Doctor Frieberg pointing out what he was really putting into his mouth. According to Doctor Frieberg, the Park Avenue analyst Sylvia had recommended he see, what he was really eating was failure �" or was it success? Was he eating because he wanted success but feared failure? Or wanted failure and feared success? He’d never been sure about that, and he was frowning over it again now, in a vague, inattentive sort of way, while keeping an eye on the cake trolley.

He was served by a young Welsh girl, as plump as a cake herself, with creamy skin and cheeks buttoned with dimples.

Humphrey said he’d have that and that, please, a slice of this, some of that, and one �" no, better make it two, of them. Oh, and one of those, as well, if she didn’t mind. And sitting back, tucked his napkin into the collar of a shirt with palm trees and a sunset on it.

Back at the hire car, parked in front of a red sandstone building called the Council House, he noticed the town’s arms and motto above the door in dark blue and gold. Fidelitas Salus Regis. In the town’s loyalty lies the King’s safety.

He’d seen the translation on the tea shop menu. This area had stayed loyal to the crown during the Civil War, he had the ruins of Batch Castle to show for that. And he remembered the family story, from a time when he considered the whole thing, Hall and all, just that, a story, that after the Restoration the English King, Charles II, had once stayed at Batch Hall, the ancient seat over there in England and the bit that was in Wales, of the Strange family.

Humphrey sat in the car for a few moments, chewing on a cigar and thinking about it.

Yeah, he might do that. Have a Charles II Room or something, when the Hall was turned into an hotel or country club, or whatever it was decided was most likely to show the biggest returns. He left stuff like that to his Uncle Frank, who was back home now, busy putting an investment package together.

The same Uncle Frank, he liked to remind himself gleefully, who had once hired, then fired him, and who now worked for him. It couldn’t be neater if he had arranged it himself.

Uncle Frank, who was not Humphrey’s uncle, but a cousin of Humphrey’s late father, had been a last resort for Humphrey’s mother, in despair at her son coming home with yet another career in bits. Frank was the boss of a small Wall Street brokerage, and reluctantly, under pressure from Humphrey’s mom, had found her son a place in it. And Humphrey had bounded into the job as he usually bounded into things, like a large, wet puppy, showering people with yet another new enthusiasm, and how this time this was it, this is what he’d been looking for all along. The world of daring young men flying by the seat of their pants, the world of wheeling and dealing, of money markets and fortunes made on the turn of a financial index. This, Humphrey had decided, was where he lived. This was coming home.

He had christened Frank ‘uncle’ then, when he was offered the job, slapping his back and telling him to leave it to him.

Frank had no intention of doing anything of the sort. He kept Humphrey firmly where he could see him. And that, as far as Humphrey soon came to realise, was just what was wrong with the old firm. That same stick-in­-the-mud, wishy-washy sort of attitude that had kept it sitting on the runway while others took off all around it.

And then Uncle Frank went to Europe on a business trip. And Humphrey got the company airborne.

Sitting at Frank’s desk in his Atlantic Sports Club tie and Wall Street suspenders, one of Frank’s reserve Havanas in one hand and the phone in the other, and using a complicated combination of the Super Bowl, World Series, and New York Yankees stock market theories, based on game wins and losses over the past five years, and sold to him for a snip by a guy in a Wall Street bar, Humphrey blazed briefly but spectacularly across the financial skies before falling, equally spectacularly, to earth again, taking Frank’s reputation for cautious dealing, and a large chunk of investors’ money, with him.

That had even quietened Humphrey down for a while. He got a job in a diner after that, reaping what he’d sowed, as Shelly, his mom, told him when he complained, glumly learning his lesson working as a short-order cook.

And then came the letter from the lawyers, and his life turned into a movie.

He even got the girl. Sylvia, a Wall Street super highflier, a woman Humphrey, as an underling in Frank’s office, had regarded with an equal measure of lust and awe. Won from the top floors of Snell and Bloomfield, carried away from under the noses of hotshots and Upper East Side Ivy Leaguers, and soon to be his. Sir Humphrey and Lady Sylvia Strange.

He laughed suddenly and loudly at it all. And clamping the cigar between his teeth, gave a couple of blasts at absolutely nothing on the road ahead of him.

 

 

 

Chapter Eleven

 

Six or so miles out of Church Myddle, Humphrey picked up a signpost for Batch Magna, just as, on cue, the sun came out and the rain stopped, the last of it turning to brittle silver in its light.

He sailed off, whistling cheerfully, and starting vigorously on songs he then almost immediately forgot the words to, with the windows down, and the sun shining, and the birds singing.

He felt he was on vacation, and at the same time truanting, taking time out from Frank and the serious business of making money, and even from Sylvia.

He might, he decided, do a bit of the tourist thing this time, see a bit of the old country before saying goodbye to it. It needn’t get in the way of business. He could still keep his eye on the ball and the bottom line, Frank’s parting shot of advice to him. And when he got to the Hall the first thing he’d do would be to ring Sylvia.

The road twisted and turned its way down into Batch Valley under high-banked hedges, the Ford bouncing like a New York taxi cab over ruts and potholes, and Humphrey hoping nothing was coming the other way on the bends of the narrow lanes.

He scattered a few pheasants wandering about on the road, flustering them like elderly maiden aunts, as he hugged it round the edge of a wood. And up and over a hill, a small, perfectly shaped hill, like a hill in a storybook, down to a crooked junction of three lanes.

And not a signpost between them. And he couldn’t remember which direction the land agent had taken last time.

He moved the cigar about in his mouth, and then guessed the middle lane, which at least seemed, more or less, to go in the sort of direction he thought he ought to be going in.

The road dipped suddenly, jolting the car’s suspension and lifting his stomach, and then swept in a wide confident arc to the right.

He followed it, straight into a farmyard, scattering geese and chickens, and collecting half a dozen sheep dogs, barking and leaping up at the car. A cab-less tractor with a smoke stack, its seat padded with sacking, sat in front of the farmhouse as if waiting for someone. But the house, its half-timbers of English oak blacked with pitch under a roof of Welsh slate, stayed silent.

He reversed out, followed by the dogs, and back at the junction tried the lane that went more or less left.

And some time later, after travelling along lanes that kept dividing up into more lanes, and then dividing up again, found he’d guessed himself back to another part of the Church Myddle road.

He sat for some moments, looking at it. The world was still going on out there, a truck and a couple of cars passing. Here, he hadn’t seen another soul since turning off.

He went back down the hill he’d just come up, and tried the lane he’d noticed on the right, on the other side of a dog-leg half way up it.

It was little more than a track, overhung with dripping trees and patched here and there with hardcore and tarmac, and puddled with rainwater. It cut through more woodland running along the side of the hill, and was forded in places where streams ran across it, the dense woods either side when he slowed ringing with birdsong. Before the road dropped down to the fields again, and left him there.

He stopped at the first field gate facing down the valley, in the direction he was sure he wanted to go, and got out. He had an idea.

A herd of sooty brown-black sheep had their heads down to the rain-freshened grass, and a feeding crow rose when he appeared, and flapped lazily above them.

He balanced his weight shakily on the middle cross-pieces of the gate, and found the landmark he was looking for piercing the summer green, the tower of St Swithin’s parish church, the highest point in Batch Magna.

Gotcha! he said, clambering down, and determinedly heeling the butt of his cigar out, set off for it.

He would have been happier finding a right turn a little way along, going down into the valley, but the road went straight on. Until it went left. In the direction again of the Church Myddle road.

Humphrey came slowly to a halt and sat, fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

He leaned suddenly forward then, and peered through the windscreen. Fifty or so yards up from him there appeared to be a turn-off, going right.

Keeping an eye on it, he pushed the gear home.

It was another overhung potholed track, and it took him through another stretch of woodland, and then down again under the sheltering hedges of more fields.

And along more lanes, hillocky with sudden dips and rises, the road constantly seeming to be turning back on itself, before shooting off in another direction, twisting and turning as if the very lanes themselves were lost.

He knew by now that either he had long overshot the village or he’d been going round in circles.

He was looking for another gate to peer over, coming round yet another bend in yet another lane, when he saw ahead of him what he at first took to be a farmworker, doing whatever it was farmworkers did on their knees on verges.

Drawing nearer he saw that it was a woman.

Miss Wyndham, a keen amateur botanist, was kneeling among the summer grasses, with a magnifying glass and a handbook of wild flowers, examining a patch of dry-stone walling.

When the Ford pulled up and Humphrey got out, she glanced round vaguely, and as if resuming a conversation, said decisively: “Moss campion. Silene acaulis. Unmistakably so.” She rapped the open pages of her field book with the glass. “No doubt on it.”

Miss Wyndham gave a short laugh and shook her head. “I know it’s not supposed to be there. North Wales is the nearest it’s supposed to be. Rather like, one has to say, Colonel Ash, who’s supposed to be an expert on local flora. But it’s not up a mountain, is it. Where, as a species of alpine plant, we all know it should be. So of course it couldn’t be moss campion, could it.”

She gave another little laugh. “Well, it is!” she declared, snapping the book shut, and in a sudden flurry of activity struggled untidily to her feet, her reading glasses dropping to the end of a length of black cord worn round her neck.

“Moss campion,” she added faintly, and swayed alarmingly.

“Are you all right, ma’am!” Humphrey said, starting towards her.

“Emm? Oh, perfectly, thank you. Perfectly. It’s age, you know. Everything takes that much longer to catch up.”

Humphrey nodded at her bicycle lying nearby on the verge. “Tough going, too, I should think, ma’am, on these hills with that.”

“What? Oh, I push it up. Always do. Then free-wheel down.” Sometimes Miss Wyndham pushed it up only to free-wheel down. “Although I really must remember to get the brake-blocks fixed one of these days,” she muttered to herself, before remembering her manners.

“Well, at least it’s stopped raining. Although, there’s more to come, apparently. Heavy intermittent showers into the evening, according to the weather forecast on the wireless this morning. Although I have to say that that isn’t what my barometer indicated. Set fair for the day, it said. But then it always says that.”

Miss Wyndham’s mackintosh was stuffed into the wicker basket of her bicycle but she still had her black sou-wester on, or had forgotten to take it off. Her blouse was buttoned up to its pie-crust collar, and the front of her green twill skirt patched with damp. She tucked an escaped hank of hair behind one ear and took an abrupt deep breath.

“Oh, how good it all smells. And how glorious everything looks now.”

The trees dipped light, the sun striking more liquid sparks from fields and verges, and the tops of hedgerows. From up in a field maple a mistle thrush broke into song, and Miss Wyndham lifted her face to the sudden shower of notes as if to the sun.

And then she looked abruptly at Humphrey. “I sheltered from the worst of it,” she added gravely.

“It stopped just as I got here. Then I got lost.” He shook his head. “The lanes around here …”

“Yes, they can be quite confusing. People have been known to get lost. I have been known to get lost. And I’ve lived here all my life. It’s all to do with what Mr Rhys-Thomas calls original purpose. Many of them were green lanes, you see �" old track or cart ways, prehistoric, some of them. And drovers’ roads, of course, and bits of Roman road, and coffin routes. All adopted into the local road system. And you should bear in mind,” Miss Wyndham advised him, “that the standard width of a cart in those days was only four feet. That should explain a few things. But I really can’t help you further there, I’m afraid. As I say, you need Mr Rhys-Thomas, our local historian, for that. He’ll tell you all about it. Now he really is an expert.”

Humphrey smiled at her. “It sounds fascinating, ma’am, but right now I’d settle for finding the way to Batch Magna.”

Miss Wyndham looked startled. “Batch Magna?” she said with surprise, and Humphrey wondered just how far he’d strayed.

“It’s over there,” she said, pointing, and as if now there might be some doubt about it. “Down there. On the right.”

“Well, I guessed it might be in that sort of direction,” Humphrey said. “But it’s getting to it.”

“Oh, that’s quite simple,” she said, sounding relieved. “Just continue on along here. Turn right, first right. Then first left. First right �" No. No, wait a moment. Second right. I do beg your pardon. First left, then second right. That’s it. Then a few yards on you take another right, and then a sharp left. Then simply follow the road all the way round, all the way round.” Miss Wyndham’s hands were on the handlebars of an imaginary bicycle, steering her way home. “Ignore the turning on the left, it’s a farm track. You’ll then come to a fork in the road. Take the right hand lane, and then a left, and then right again. Follow that down, and then …” She thought again. “No, no, my mistake. Forgive me. No, right again first, after the folk, and then left. That’s it. And then another left, followed by a right, and then left again. That will take you down Hollow Oak Hill. Follow the hill down” �" Miss Wyndham’s hands twisted and turned down Hollow Oak Hill �" “all the way down, all the way down, to Monk’s Bridge, the humpbacked bridge. You turn left then, on the other side of it, and follow the road round, all the way round, and into the village.”

She stopped, as if catching her breath, and blew a strand of hair from her face.

“You can’t miss it,” she added with mild reproof.

  Humphrey got paper and pen from the car, and asked Miss Wyndham would she mind saying all that again. Miss Wyndham did so, while Humphrey, repeating it carefully after her, wrote it all down, and then drew a map for good measure.

   “You’re an American, aren’t you?” she asked then, shyly. America to Miss Wyndham was still Liverpool during the war, when she did her bit there in a factory after the death of her fiancé. It was the place still where dreams came from, on Saturday nights in the local Regal, when the smell of machine oil and the banging of the presses could be forgotten. And the tears she sniffed back in the darkness were not for her own loss, but for other people’s happy endings.

“Yes, ma’am.” Humphrey saw her glance again at his shirt, and smiled. “It’s Hawaiian.”

“Hawaii!” Miss Wyndham closed her eyes and swayed to the word as if to music.

After she’d declined his offer to put her bicycle in the back of the car and give her lift down, he thanked her again and they said goodbye. 

“Do have a good holiday!” she cried on a note of sudden gaiety. “Or vacation. I’m sorry, I should have said vacation.”

Humphrey regarded her over the roof of the car. “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m not on holiday, or vacation. Well, not really. Not officially, anyway. I’m on my way to Batch Hall there. On business.”

Miss Wyndham opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it.

“You are not,” she said then, slowly, regarding him with her bloodhound gaze, “you are not by any chance Humphrey Strange? Sir Humphrey Strange?”

Humphrey admitted that he was, his small self-deprecating laugh at least partly meant. Even he was given at times to consider it lousy casting.

Shy by nature, and with an intense dislike of confrontation of any sort, and most particularly with a stranger, Miss Wyndham found it within herself to do her duty.

Her considerable bosom lifted in outrage, she told him just what she thought of the eviction notices and his plans for the river front. Of his despoiling of history, and of a way of life entrusted to him.

“You have sold, sir,” Miss Wyndham, a clergyman’s daughter, pronounced in a tremulous parting shot, “your birthright for a mess of pottage.”

She watched Humphrey’s car until it had turned off, following the directions she had so obligingly provided, a map handed to the enemy. And then made a dash for her bicycle.

She had no idea what she was going to do. No idea what she could do. But she did it anyway. Quivering with excitement, she hiked up her skirt, and peddled furiously after him.

 

 

Humphrey’s ears burned, as they always did when he was angry, all the way down to the narrow humpbacked bridge.

He couldn’t see much of the river, just the glint of sunlight on it as he started over. But he heard it, some bird on it, honking, he was in the mood to think, in a deliberately derisory sort of way.

Humphrey roared over the bridge, not caring if anything was coming the other way, crossing it like an invasion.

In the High Street, he pulled up with a squeal of brakes outside the shop and post office, his first visit to it. On the flag of Wales above the entrance the red dragon hung damply after the rain, as if doused.

Mrs Pugh had already cashed up and was upstairs, and her husband was about to lock up for the day, when the door opened and Humphrey’s bulky frame filled the doorway.

The shopkeeper blinked at his shirt.

“You still open?” Humphrey asked without preamble.

“Always time to serve a customer, sir. That is what we are here for,” Mr Pugh said with dignity.

He was right out of picture postcards, but he thought he still had a few of those tea towels left, with a map of the Marches on them, and Shrewsbury tea caddies, and a whole box somewhere in the storeroom of souvenirs from Wales. It wasn’t every day he was sent a tourist.

“We pride ourselves on that, sir. On our service to the community, and of course the wider world. Service before profit. That is our watchword and our motto,” Mr Pugh said sternly, making his way to the counter. “Service before profit. Now, sir, what can I do for you?”

Humphrey moved his head to avoid a rope of wellington boots, hanging with various other goods from the ceiling, the soles on them like tractor tyres. “Got any candy?”

“Candy?” Mr Pugh said blankly. He’d been wondering whether to push the tea caddies or the Welsh music boxes first. Although judging by the man’s shirt, he thought that perhaps the novelty leeks might be more up his street.

“Candy. candy,” Humphrey said, looking at the shelves behind the counter, and then pointing.

“Ah,” Mr Pugh said. “Chocolates. Yes, I see. Black Magic, is it?” Mr Pugh only sold Black Magic. He had three boxes on the shelf, left over from Christmas and Mothers’ Day. “Very popular, they are, sir. Very popular.”

Humphrey said he’d take two. Mr Pugh got them down and surreptitiously wiped the dust off on his khaki shop coat while fiddling with the white paper bags kept on a piece of string below the countertop. The shopkeeper had a few yellowing strands of hair plastered across his scalp like flattened winter grass, his cheek hollows and bony nose threaded with broken veins.

“Staying in the area long, are we, sir, may one ask? Or just passing through, is it?” he asked, and bared his teeth like a horse.

Humphrey said no, he was staying here �" for now. He’d decided that. As soon as he’d got the bottom line squared up he’d get back. Back to where people knew which side their goddam bread was buttered on.

“At the pub, is it, sir?” the shopkeeper wanted to know then. Under cover of a few adjustments to the bagged chocolates, Mr Pugh was busy putting two and two together.

“No,” Humphrey said baldly. “Batch Hall.”

He knew it! 

“Then does that mean, sir, does that mean, may one enquire, that one has the honour of addressing Sir Humphrey Strange, ninth baronet, master of Batch Hall, and squire of this March?” Mr Pugh smiled coyly at the American, and then sniffed, sharply, as if at his own hypocrisy.

Mr Pugh’s head was English but his heart was Welsh. And after a lifetime’s servitude a source of rebellion when alone in his storeroom, the fierce whispered words of revolt like an outbreak of mice then among the stacks of cornflakes and washing powder. And to Mr Pugh, whose heart lived still in the shadow of Batch Castle, the squire was always English, even when he was an American.

Humphrey said yeah, yeah, he was Sir Humphrey Strange, 9th baronet, and all that stuff. On his way to foreclose on a few more mortgages, to turf a few more pensioners and widows and orphans out onto the street. It was just a pity it wouldn’t be snowing while he was doing it.

Mr Pugh looked aghast. He assured Sir Humphrey that if he was referring to the eviction notices then he would have Sir Humphrey know that he was doing the community a service. Yes, sir, a service! The things that went on there. Gypsies, that’s what they were, water gypsies.

“And the drinking! I have seen the empties myself. Cirrhosis-on-Cluny, one of their number, a certain Commander Cunningham, has called it. In this very shop. And he should know. And sex!” the shopkeeper cried suddenly, and Humphrey blinked, and caught the smell of strong mints.

“Oh, yes, sir! Sex. You only have to take a walk along the Hams in clement weather to see what goes on in that department. Naked men and women I have seen, laughing and chasing each other round the deck like Sodom and Gomorra. Now you, Sir Humphrey, have come among them. Now they are to be confounded. Now they shall be oppressed and spoiled evermore!” Mr Pugh declaimed with the heat of familiarity, the torment to be found in Deuteronomy and the Curses for Disobedience.

The shopkeeper inclined his head. “Welcome, Sir Humphrey, to Batch Magna,” he ended solemnly, and sniffed

Humphrey wasn’t at all sure what the guy was on about, but he was quite taken by it. He said it was a pity other people round here didn’t think like that, and was moved to tell the shopkeeper that he hadn’t expected a band playing and the flags out when he arrived, but he had at least hoped for some understanding of what he was trying to do, some grasp of economic reality.

Mr Pugh was shaking his head slowly and implacably at it. “You will never get through to them, sir. Never. Living in the past, they are, some of them. Living in the past. And of course for some of them it doesn’t pay to do anything else, does it. Take, if you will, the late General’s housing scheme and the estate cottages. His kith, the old General used to call them. Which is all very well, sir �" in its time. In its proper squirarchical context,” Mr Pugh qualified, his ill-fitting teeth rearing at the words. “And I can tell you, sir,” he confided, “I can tell you that some people think scroungers would be the more appropriate appellation. Oh, yes!”

He held up a sudden hand, as if in protest. “And I yield to no man, mind, in my respect for the old squire. No man! My father, the late Mr Pugh, had the honour of serving Batch Hall for over forty years, and when I took over I made sure things were kept up �" and saw it as a privilege, sir. Oh, yes. A privilege,” Mr Pugh insisted, and sniffed again.

He asked Humphrey if he’d heard anything from the council yet, about the planning permission, like. Humphrey said he hadn’t, but the decision was due soon, and that’s what he was here for, to make sure it didn’t get stuck in some in-tray. He was used to that, getting things done, putting a bit of zip into things.

“Well, sir,” Mr Pugh was able to tell him, “you might like to know that I have personally written a letter to them, strongly recommending your proposal. Strongly recommending it. As I said to Missus Pugh, the future has arrived, carrying a banner. Progress, that is the word we must march behind now. In step with you, sir, and the rest of the world.” Mr Pugh’s finger pointed the way. “Progress and modernisation, they must be our watchwords now, sir, isn’t it. Progress and modernisation.”

And profit. And Mr Pugh was provoked again by thoughts that had provoked him even in chapel, perhaps particularly in chapel. The new shop extension, with queues of holidaymakers at the three tills. And the girls on them. Girls like those in the supermarket in Kingham, in their short tight nylon overalls. Wicked girls, he’d no doubt, painted like sin, and in their hands the lure of money.

When Humphrey had gone, Mr Pugh locked the shop door, and moving aside the cardboard display sheets behind the glazed top, turned the sign to Closed.

And then he pushed his nose up against the glass, his face framed with sheets of hairnets, balloons, plastic farm animals and soldiers, and throat drops for sailors. Watching with a small, hidden smile as old Batch Magna, in the shape of Miss Wyndham, at the end of her brave, pointless dash, wobbled exhaustedly up the High Street on her bicycle.

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Be glad of general feedback.