The Complete Uncle Silas Stories by H.E. Bates

Author:H.E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

The Bedfordshire Clanger

My Uncle Silas was very fixed and very firm in the notion that women were no good to you. ‘They’re allus arter you, boy,’ he said. ‘Allus arter you.’

I was, at the time, very small, and it was much too soon for me to point out that Silas, on the contrary, was always arter them.

‘Like her,’ he said. ‘Take her. Allus arter me.’

At the age of ninety-one my Uncle Silas still had something of the look of a crusty farmyard cock. He gave a great sniffing sort of sigh, fixed his bloodshot eye on me in cunning reminiscence and whipped a dewdrop off his nose.

‘She wadn’ half a tartar,’ he said. ‘Everlastin’ arter me. Night and day.’

‘Doing what?’ I said.

‘Plaguing on me.’

‘For what?’

‘Tormentin’ on me,’ he said. ‘Whittlin’ me to death.’

His bloodshot eye had a crack of scarlet glee across it.

‘What was her name?’ I said.

‘Tutts,’ he said.

‘That’s a funny name.’

‘She wur a funny woman,’ he said. ‘She wur very near the death on me.’

Since my Uncle Silas had reached the nineties and looked, in his leathery and ruddy heartiness, good for another dozen years, it seemed a very good moment to ask how death by Miss Tutts had been avoided so long ago.

‘I give her gee-up,’ he said. ‘That’s how.’

It seemed a very good moment also to ask how he had given her gee-up, and if possible why and what with, but he surprised me a little when the answer came.

‘I laid her out with a Bedfordshire clanger,’ he said.

I did not know what a Bedfordshire clanger was, and it occurred to me for a moment that it was an awful sort of lie. But he said:

‘Sort o’ pudden. Suet. Hard as a hog’s back.’

We were sitting among the gooseberry bushes at the time, by the bottom of Silas’s garden, under the wood, where sun lay warm by a fringe of hazels. Gooseberries, ripe and golden-green and fat as plums, bowed down the branches of the squat trees, and now and then Silas lazily pinched one with crabbed fingers and split it open and shot its sweet jellied seeds on to his ripe and ruby tongue.

‘Kept a boarding-house,’ he said.

For some moments he squirted gooseberry seeds into his mouth and chewed through what I hoped were moments of reminiscence, champing at the sourer skin. His gills seemed to laugh up and down, from the acid of the gooseberries, like the gills of an old and crusty cock.

‘Them are the ones you want to be careful on,’ he said.

I bit on a gooseberry too. Silas fixed his eyes on a point somewhere far away and I could smell the strong odour of corduroys warm in the sun.

‘Young chap at the time,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Apprentice. Innocent young chap.’

It has always been difficult for me to conjure up a picture of my Uncle Silas at the age of innocence, but I did not say anything and he went on:

‘Me an’ Arth Sugars,’ he said. ‘We boarded together.’

I wanted to know who Arth Sugars was and he said:

‘Arth wadn’t all ninepence.

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