Village Affairs Page 3

  Their house had been built in the reign of Queen Anne, and the octagonal summer house, according to Mr Willet, who considered it unsafe and unnecessarily ornate, was erected not long afterwards, although it was, more likely, the conceit of some Victorian architect. It was hidden from the house by a shrubbery, and nothing could have been easier for thieves than to slip through the hedge from the fields adjoining the garden and to do their work in privacy.

  The lead was not missed until a thundery shower sent cascades of water through the now unprotected roof into the little room below. A wicker chair and its cushion were drenched, a water colour scene, executed by Mrs Mawne in her youth, became more water than colour overnight, and a rug, which Mr Mawne had brought back from Egypt on one of his bird-watching trips, and which he much prized, was quite ruined. Added to all this was the truly dreadful smell composed of wet timber and the decaying bodies of innumerable insects, mice, shrews and so on, washed from their resting places by the onrush of rain.

  Fairacre was shocked at the news. It was one thing to read about lead being stolen from villages a comfortable distance from their own, in the pages of the respected Caxley Chronicle. It was quite another to find that someone had actually been at work in Fairacre itself. What would happen next?

  Mr Willet voiced the fears of his neighbours as he returned from choir practice one Friday night.

  'What's to stop them blighters pinching the new lead off of the church roof? Cost a mint of money to put on. It'd make a fine haul for some of these robbers.'

  A violent storm, some years earlier, had damaged St Patrick's sorely. Only by dint of outstanding efforts on the part of the villagers, and never-to-be-forgotten generosity from American friends of Fairacre, had the necessary repairs been made possible. The sheets of lead, then fixed upon much of the roof had formed one of the costliest items in the bill. No wonder Fairacre folk feared for its safety, now that marauders had visited their village.

  'They wouldn't dare to take the Lord's property,' announced Mrs Pringle.

  'I don't think they care much whose property it is,' observed Mr Lamb from the Post Office. 'It's just how easy they can turn it into hard cash,'

  'My sister in Caxley' replied Mrs Pringle, still seeking the lime-light, 'told me the most shocking thing happened all up the road next to hers.'

  'What?' asked Mr Willet. The party had reached the Post Office by now, and stopped to continue the conversation before Mr Lamb left them.

  Twilight was beginning to fall. The air was still and scented with the flowers in cottage gardens.

  Mrs Pringle looked up and down the road before replying. Her voice was low and conspiratorial. Mr Willet and Mr Lamb bent their heads to hear the disclosure.

  'Well, these lead thieves came one night and went along all the outside lavatories, and cut out every bit of piping from the cistern to the pan.'

  'No!'

  'They did. As true as I'm standing here!'

  'What! Every house?'

  Mrs Pringle shifted her chins uncomfortably upon the neck of her cardigan.

  'Not quite all. Mr Jarvis, him what was once usher at the Court, happened to be in his when they reached it, so they cleared off pretty smartly.'

  'Did they catch 'em?'

  'Not one of 'em!' pronounced Mrs Pringle. 'Still at large, they are. Quite likely the very same as took Mr Mawne's lead off the summer house.'

  'Could be,' agreed Mr Lamb, making towards his house now that the story was done. 'Though I heard as Arthur Coggs might be mixed up with this little lot.'

  'Now, now!' said Mr Willet, holding up a hand in a magisterial gesture. 'No hearsay! It's not right to go accusing people. Us doesn't know nothing about Arthur being connected with lead stealing.'

  'He's connected with plenty that's downright dishonest,' rejoined Mr Lamb, with spirit. 'Dam'it all, man, he's done time, he's a poacher, he's been had up, time and time again, for stealing. And he ought to be had up for a lot of other things, to my mind. Wife-beating for one. And dodging the column for another. Why, that chap hasn't done a day's work for weeks, and all us old fools keeps him by giving him the dole and the family allowances. Makes my blood boil!'

  'We knows all that' agreed Mr Willet, taking a swipe at a passing bat with a rolled-up copy of Handel's Messiah. 'But you just can't pin everything that's crooked on Arthur Coggs.'

  'Why not?' asked Mrs Pringle belligerently. 'More times than not you'd be right!'

  And on this note the friends parted.

  Human nature being what it is, there were far more people in Fairacre who shared Mrs Pringle's view than Mr Willet's.

  Arthur Coggs was the black sheep of the village, and his wife greatly pitied. He was supposed to be a labourer, although his neighbours stated roundly that labour was the last thing Arthur looked for.

  He occasionally found a job on a building site, carrying a hod, or wheeling a barrow slowly from one place to the next. But he rarely stayed long. Either he became tired of the work, or more often, his employer grew tired of paying him to do nothing.

  The greater part of his money went on beer, and he was a regular customer at the Beetle and Wedge in Fairacre. He and his family had once occupied a tumbledown cottage, one of four in Tyler's Row, now made into one long attractive house occupied by a retired schoolmaster from Caxley and his wife.

  The Coggs' family had been rehoused in a council house which was fast becoming as dilapidated as their last abode. Mrs Coggs, with a large family to cope with, and very little money with which to do it, struggled to tidy the house and garden, but never succeeded. Over the years she had grown thinner and greyer. Her highest hopes were that Arthur would stay sober, and that he would provide more housekeeping money. So far, her hopes had not been realised.

  Now and again, Arthur would appear to have money in his pocket and this she felt certain was the result of some dishonest dealings. Arthur had appeared in the Court at Caxley on many occasions, and his list of previous convictions, handed up for the Bench to study, included such offences as theft, receiving goods knowing them to have been stolen, shop-lifting, burglary and house-breaking.

  Mrs Coggs knew better than to question Arthur about any unusual affluence. A black eye, or painful bruises elsewhere would have been the outcome. But experience had given her some cunning and she had sometimes been able to abstract a pound note or some change from his pocket, when he was fuddled with drink.

  Pity for Arthur's wife had prompted several people in Fairacre to employ her dissolute husband over the years. Mr Roberts, the local farmer, had taken him on as a farm hand, only to find that eggs vanished, one or two hens disappeared, as well as sacks of potatoes and corn. The other men complained that they were doing Arthur's work as well as their own and they were right. Mr Roberts dispensed with Arthur's services.

  Mr Lamb had tried to employ him as a jobbing gardener, but again found that vegetables were being taken and the jobs set him were sketchily done, and the local builder's patience snapped when he caught Arthur red-handed, walking home with a pocketful of his tools.

  The plumber at Springbourne, whose soft heart had been touched by the sight of Mrs Coggs and her four children all in tears one morning as he passed through Fairacre, was moved to take on Arthur for a week's trial. By Wednesday he discovered that a considerable amount of copper piping had vanished, and Arthur was sacked once again.

  Virtually, he was unemployable, and soon realised that he was far better off collecting his social security allowance and other moneys disbursed by a benevolent government, and indulging his chronic laziness at the same time.

  He was known to be in tow with some equally feckless and dishonest men in Caxley, and, in fact, Arthur frequently acted as look-out man when the more daring of the gang were breaking-in. His wages for this kind of work were in proportion to the loot obtained, but always far less than the share each burglar received.

  'You didn't take much risk, chum,' they told him. 'Piece of cake being look-out. You can reckon yourself lucky to
get this bit.'

  And Arthur agreed. As long as it helped to keep him in beer, there was no point in arguing.

  For a while, immediately after the discovery of the loss of Mr Mawne's roofing lead, Fairacre folk were extra careful about making their homes secure. People actually shut their front doors on sunny days, instead of leaving them hospitably open for neighbours to enter. They began to hunt for door keys, long dis-used, and some very funny places they were found in after the passage of time. Mr Willet, after exhaustive searching, admitted that he found his front door key at the bottom of a biscuit tin full of nuts, bolts, screws, hinges, padlocks, latches, tacks, brass rings, and other useful impedimenta vital to a handyman.

  His neighbour found his on top of the cistern in the outside lavatory. The two Misses Waters, Margaret and Mary, who had a horror of burglars but so far relied on a stout bolt on both back and front doors, now scoured their small cottage in vain for the keys they had once owned. It was Margaret who remembered eventually, at three o'clock one morning, that they had hidden them under the fourth stone which bordered their brick path, when they were going away for a brief holiday some years earlier. At first light, she crept out, and unearthed them, red with rust. She remained in a heady state of triumph all day.

  Mr Lamb, it seemed, was the only householder in Fairacre who locked up and bolted and barred his premises methodically every night. But then, as people pointed out, as custodian of the Queen's mail he'd have to see things were done properly or he'd soon get the boot. No one gave him credit for his pains, and to be honest, Mr Lamb was sensible enough not to expect any. But at least he was spared the searching for keys, for his own hung, each on its hook and carefully labelled, ready for its nightly work.

  For a time, even the children caught the fever and became aware that it was necessary to be alert to dishonesty.

  One Caxley market day, Linda Moffat and Eileen Burton arrived each with a door key on a string round their necks.

  'My mum's gone on the bus to buy some material for summer frocks,' said Linda 'and she may not be back when I get home.'

  'And mine's gone to buy some plants,' announced Eileen. 'Ours never come to nothing.'

  'If they never came to nothing,' I said severely, 'then they must have come to something. Say what you mean.'

  The child looked bewildered.

  'I did, miss. Our seeds never come—'

  'Your seeds did not come up,' I said, with emphasis.

  'That's what I said.'

  'You did not say that,' I began, and was about to embark, for the thousandth time, on an elementary grammar lesson, when Mr Willet intervened. He had been listening to the exchange.

  'Your mum's seeds never come up,' he said forcefully, 'because she used that plaguey compost muck out of a bag. She wants to mix her own, tell her, with a nice bit of soft earth and dung and a sprinkle of sharp sand. Tell her they'll never come to nothing in that boughten stuff.'

  I gave up, and turned to the marking of the register.

  It came as no surprise to the good people of Fairacre when they heard that a week or two after the visit of the police to the Coggs' house Arthur Coggs was to appear in Court charged, together with others, with stealing a quantity of lead roofing, the property of H. A. Mawne Esq.

  At the time of the theft, The Caxley Chronicle had given some prominence to the affair, enlarging upon Mr Mawne's distinction as an ornithologist, and reminding its readers that the gentleman had frequently contributed nature notes to the paper's columns. News must have been thin that week for not only was Mr Mawne given an excessive amount of type, but a photograph was also included, taken by one of the younger staff against the background of the depleted summer house.

  Even the kindest readers were at a loss to find something nice to say about the likeness, and the subject himself said it looked to him like an explosion in a pickle factory, adding tolerantly that maybe he really looked like that and had never realised.

  'There's three other chaps,' Mr Willet told me. 'Two of 'em is Bryants—that gipsy lot—and the third's a real bad 'un from Bent. I bet he was the ringleader, and that poor fool of an Arthur Coggs told him about the roof here. I still reckons we ought to keep watch on the church, but the Vicar says we must trust our brothers.'

  'He's a good man,' I commented.

  'A sight too good, if you ask me.' 'There's brothers and brothers,' I told him. 'I wouldn't want any of them four for brothers, and I wouldn't trust them no further than that coke-pile, idle thieving lot.'

  'We don't know that they're guilty yet,' I pointed out.

  'I do,' said Mr Willet, picking up his screwdriver.

  I overheard a conversation in the playground as I strolled round holding my mug of tea. It was a glorious May morning. The rooks cawed from the elm trees as they went back and forth feeding their hungry nestlings, and the children were sitting on the playground bench, or had propped themselves against the school wall, legs outstretched, as they enjoyed the sunshine.

  Joseph Coggs sat between Ernest and Patrick all three oblivious of the condition of their trouser seats in the dust.

  'Saw your dad in the paper,' said Ernest.

  'Ah' grunted Joseph.

  'Bin pinchin', ain't he?' said Patrick.

  'Dunno.'

  'That's what the paper said.'

  Joseph scratched a bite on his leg and said nothing.

  'That's what the copper come about,' said Ernest to Patrick.

  'Is he in prison?' asked Patrick conversationally of Joseph.

  'No,' shouted Joseph, scrambling to his feet. His face was red, and he looked tearful. He rushed away towards the boys' lavatories, obviously craving privacy, and I approached his questioners.

  They gazed up at me innocently.

  'You should stand up when ladies speak to you,' I told them, not for the first time. They rose languidly.

  'And don't let me hear you upsetting Joseph with questions about his father. It's none of your business and it's unkind anyway.'

  'Yes, miss,' they replied, trying to look suitably chastened.

  One or two of the other children hovered nearby, listening to my brief homily, and I was conscious of meaning glances being exchanged. It was difficult to be critical. After all, the Arthur Coggs affair was the main subject of spicy conjecture in their homes at the moment, and it was hardly surprising that they shared their parents' interest.

  That afternoon when the sun was high in the heaven, and the downs were veiled in a blue haze of heat, I decided that a nature walk was far more beneficial to my pupils than a handwork lesson.

  As the sun was so hot, we kept to the lanes, in and around the village, which are shaded by fine old trees. The hawthorn hedges were sprouting young scarlet shoots, and in the cottage gardens the columbines were out. The children call them 'granny's bonnets', and they are exactly like the beautifully goffered and crimped sun bonnets that one sees in old photographs.

  Some of the lilac flowers were beginning to turn rusty, and the old-fashioned crimson peonies were beginning to droop their petals in the heat, but the scent was heavy, redolent of summer and a whiff of the long days ahead.

  The children straggled along in a happy and untidy crocodile, chattering like starlings and waving greetings to friends and relations as they passed.

  Fairacre, I told myself, was the perfect place to live and work, and early summer found it at its most beautiful. I stopped to smell a rose nodding over a cottage gate, and became conscious of voices in the garden. Two neighbours were chatting over their boundary hedge.

  'And if it isn't Arthur Coggs, then who is it?' asked one.

  I sighed, and let the rose free from my restraining hand.

  Every Eden seemed to have its serpent, Fairacre included.

  4 Mrs Pringle has Problems

  WITH the departure of the infants' teacher, Pat Smith, we were back in the familiar circumstances of looking for a second member of staff.

  As it happened, only two new children arrived for the summe
r term, both five-year-olds, making the infants' class seventeen in all. Altogether we had now thirty children on roll, and although this might sound a laughably small number to teach compared with some of the gigantic classes in overcrowded urban primary schools, yet there were considerable difficulties.

  I struggled alone for two weeks before a supply teacher could be found.

  It meant a proliferation of groups working in the one classroom, and an impossible situation when one tried to play games, or choose a story or a song, which could be enjoyed by five year olds and eleven year olds at the same time. I always feared that some accident might happen, when the sole responsibility rested on me to get help and to look after the rest of the school at the same time. It was a worrying time and I was mightily relieved when Mrs Ansell arrived to share the burden.

  She was a cheerful young woman in her thirties whom I had met once or twice at teachers' meetings in Caxley. She had a young son of two, and had not taught since his birth, but her mother lived nearby in Caxley, and was willing to mind the child if Mrs Ansell wanted to do occasional supply teaching.

  All went well for a fortnight, and the children were settling down nicely under their new regime, when the blow fell. She rang me one evening to say that her mother had fallen down in the garden and damaged her hip. She was in Caxley hospital, and of course quite unable to look after Richard.

  I expressed my sympathy, told her we could manage, and hung up.

  Now what, I wondered? Supply teachers are as rare and as precious as rubies. Most of those local few who were in existence lived in Caxley and preferred to attend the town schools. I had been lucky enough to get Mrs Ansell because she particularly wanted to teach infants, liked country schools, and had her own car.

  'I shall have to ring that office again in the morning,' I told Tibby gloomily. 'And what hope there?'

  Tibby mewed loudly, but not with sympathy. Plain hunger was the cause, and I obediently dug out some Pussi-luv and put it on the kitchen floor. I then supplied my own supper plate with bread and cheese.