A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

Author:J.L. Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141905822
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

When I’d finished – and it ran to six verses – the roomful either looked uneasily past my neck, or at the pricked hearthrug: it was disconcerting. At last Mrs Ellerbeck said, ‘That was very nice, Mr Birkin. But not the drink part of it. It all sounds so romantic, but oh the misery and despair of many a wife and child!’ Well, that knocked my end in.

Afterwards, Mr Ellerbeck accompanied me up the lane towards the church. ‘You mustn’t be put out,’ he said, ‘Mrs Ellerbeck meant it for the best. Keep it q.t. but her dad was a boozer who didn’t know when to stop. You often find them like that, up on the Wolds: it’s the Danish blood in them. In fact, he had a long fair beard and blue eyes. I don’t think he ever liked me.

‘Living in London, I don’t imagine you know how most of them live in the East Riding. You go from one bedroom into the next, no passages. Then, as likely as not, the last bedroom has the staircase, very steep, no banisters and a door at the bottom held-to with no more than a sneck. From what they let drop, her dad got up in the middle of the night, in need of the chamber-pot, and drink confused him. So he fell straight down the stairwell and, being a big heavy man, straight through the door.’

Good Lord! What a picture! Utter stillness and then this frightful uproar as he banged from side to side clutching at nothing, first smacking down that door and then crashing with it into the black living-room, maybe a chair splintering beneath the avalanche. Then some strangled grunts, then his appalled family staring at the still blue eyes.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘of course I’m against drink, dead against it. But not to my wife’s extent.’

After that, I used to look at Mrs Ellerbeck with a more speculative eye. Before, she’d been just a pleasant homebody. But now – well, think of it. Cooped up in two or three rooms with this bearded giant who, when he was boozed up, became an unpredictable stranger, her mother struggling to conceal fear and contempt. Then this shattering end in the darkness! Remembering that silly romantic song, I felt terrible. And how lightly the poor woman had let me off because, when I put a hand into my coat pocket, I found a packet of beef sandwiches!

And, at the next gathering around that organ, she mercifully offered me redemption. ‘Oh, Mr Birkin,’ she said, ‘we did enjoy that tune you gave us. Can’t you change the words round a bit?’ And, to salve my soul, this I did –

‘There sat one day in quiet

In a tea-shop by the Rhine …’

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