River Diary by Ronald Blythe

Author:Ronald Blythe [Blythe, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848257238
Publisher: Hymns Ancient & Modern
Published: 2014-06-28T05:00:00+00:00

The Death of Miss Helen Booth

13th June

I am walking to Helen’s funeral. The afternoon air is moist and still. Birds sing loudly. Where the lane twists the hedge grows invisible under a mat of wild rose and traveller’s joy. Fine stands of agrimony and mallow rear on its banks. Cars whisper by. Helen’s cars, beginning with a Bullnose Morris and continuing with Estates, make ghostly journeys. She ceased counting after the very public centenary and withdrew to her slip of a bedroom, and was comfortable enough. Her mind revisited where she had been, who she had been. We visited her, myself careful not to harp on her age, for the worst thing about being over a hundred is being told how wonderful it is. It is not wonderful at all – just the persisting heart-beat and life not knowing when to stop. Just another day announcing itself through the thin curtain and jumping into one’s consciousness like a jack-in-the-box.

We were old, old friends and Helen and her sister hardly more than middle-aged when I took my manuscripts to the post office. They would place them on the scales, give a start, and tell me apologetically, ‘I’m afraid it will be Three and Six.’ Behind them rose shelves sparsely arrayed with balls of string, celluloid windmills, silvery baking tins, greaseproof paper and towering pot-plants. They were the last of the Great War entrepreneurial women whose smallholding skills – and failures – were plotted across the English countryside. In 1926, when they were in their twenties, their father had sensibly put them out to grass, so to speak, giving them seven acres and a couple of clapboard cottages, sure that they would make a go of it. And they did. Although never in any sense mean, they were mistresses of the stretched funds of the interwar years. There was no tragedy in their lives. They were not war-widows or war-bereaved fiancées but they did join the army of men-less women which, with few qualifications, had to make ends meet. Chicken-farms spread. It was a land of wire-netting and chirping huts. Ladies in breeches lived on shillings. They were the originators of today’s farm-gate sales, with their trays of vegetables and eggs at the roadside.

Helen and her sister, Win, began with chickens and ended with cocker spaniels. In between there were ducks, geese and goats. But it was by their kennels that most of the world of country businesswomen knew them. They would show me their Box Brownie snaps. There they were, being tugged along traffic-less lanes by six dogs on a lead, their handsome faces turned upwards, coins in their bags, and maybe their lips learning lines for the current Dramatic Society play. For in those days one had to be artful to a degree to escape having a part in Dear Octopus or The Mousetrap. The world is divided between these who seek a part and those who pray to God every night not to be given one. Moreover, Wormingford in

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