A Month in the Country by J L Carr

Author:J L Carr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Classics, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9780141905822
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘Very! You can’t beat tallow candles for laying down a nice grease base for other muck to stew in. You modern women don’t know you’re born.’

(The thing that keeps you from screaming … well, that’s extreme … let’s say, it helps if you can guess how things once were. What I’m really getting at is that it’s not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages. They weren’t us in fancy dress, mouths full of thees and thous, quoths, prithees and zounds. They had no more than a few entertaining distractions to take their minds off death and birth, sleep and work and their prayers to the almighty father and his stricken son when things got too awful. So, in my job, it helps if you can smell candles, guttering in draughts, petitioning release for souls in purgatory, if you can see their smoke trailing amongst images, threading nave arcades, settling on corbels and bosses, blackening stone too high for the cleaning women to get at.

I suppose it all sounds airy-fairy but I stick to my point. If you can see or guess at the comings and goings from first daylight to dusk, crouching, nodding, stubbing breasts and heads with fingers just out of the cooking pot, grubby faces staring up at the only picture they’ll see till next they see it – well, then you put that bit extra into the job, you go at it with emotion as well as diluted hydrochloric.)

‘Mr Birkin … Mr Birkin … is it an oil-painting or a watercolour or what is it for goodness sake?’

‘It’s all sorts of things, Mrs Keach. Item – blew bysse at 4s. 4d. the pound, item – one sack of verdigris at 12d. a pound, item – red ochre, 3 pounds a penny, item – 3 pecks of wheat flour … I suppose you could lump it all as tempera. And let’s not forget the wall itself – down in the sinful south, plastered with chalk bound with parish offerings of skimmed milk; up here, slaked-limestone putty damped just enough to stiffen. That’s about what it is.’

‘You’re making fun of me. I’m not utterly stupid you know. An aunt once gave me a paint-box for my birthday: I recall it had a marvellous slab of purple.’ And then that spurt of laughter like a bell.

‘I’m not making fun, Mrs Keach. Ask Mr Dowthwaite at the smithy – he understands having to make-do, flatten this, splay that, till it’s something not listed in the Ironmongers’ Catalogue. My departed colleague’s lad (at 10 pence a week) would do his best with a slab of flat marble and scrape his knuckles grinding Spaynishe white, Baghdad indigo, Cornish malachite, terre verte. And he would need a tin bowl to break the skimpy eggs of his day: I’m told they were no bigger than a wood pigeon’s. Naturally he’d suck the yolk before stirring colour into the white. And my departed friend would yell down, “Hey you, Idle Jack, some more green.

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