When the Green Woods Laugh Read online

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  When the Green Woods Laugh

  H. E. Bates was born in 1905 at Rushden in Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. He worked as a journalist and clerk on a local newspaper before publishing his first book, The Two Sisters, when he was twenty. In the next fifteen years he acquired a distinguished reputation for his stories about English country life. During the Second World War he was a Squadron Leader in the R.A.F. and some of his stories of service life, The Greatest People in the World (1942), How Sleep the Brave (1943) and The Face of England (1953). were written under the pseudonym of ‘Frying Officer X’. His subsequent novels of Burma, The Purple Plain and The jacaranda Tree, and of India, The Scarlet Sword, stemmed directly or indirectly from his experience in the Eastern theatre of war. Perhaps one of his most famous works of fiction is the best-selling novel Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944).

  In 1958 his writing took a new direction with the appearance of The Darting Buds of May, the first of the popular Larkin family novels, which was followed by A Breath of French Air (1959), When the Green Woods Laugh (1960), Oh! To Be in England (1963) and A Little of What You Fancy (1970). His autobiography appeared in three volumes, The Vanished World (1969), The Blossoming World (1971) and The World in Ripeness (1972). His last works included the novel The Triple Echo (1971), and a collection of short stories, The Song of the Wren (1972). H. E. Bates also wrote miscellaneous works on gardening, essays on country life, several plays including The Day of Glory (1945), The Modern Short Story (1941) and a story for children, The White Admiral (1968). His works have been translated into sixteen languages. A posthumous collection of his stories, The Yellow Meads of Asphodel, appeared in 1976.

  H. E. Bates was awarded the C.B.E. in 1973 and died in January 1974. He was married in 1931 and had four children.

  When the

  Green Woods Laugh

  H.E. Bates

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published by Michael Joseph 1960

  Published in Penguin Books 1963

  This edition published 2006

  1

  Copyright © Evensford Productions Ltd, 1960

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

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  978-0-14-193866-0

  When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,

  And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;

  When the air does laugh with our merry wit,

  And the green hill laughs with the noise of it:

  BLAKE: Songs of Innocence

  1

  After parking the Rolls Royce between the pigsties and the muck heap where twenty young turkeys were lazily scratching in the hot mid-morning air Pop Larkin, looking spruce and perky in a biscuit-coloured summer suit, paused to look back across his beloved little valley.

  The landscape, though so familiar to him, presented a strange sight. Half-way up the far slope, in fiercely brilliant sunlight, two strawberry fields were on fire. Little cockscombs of orange flame were running before a light breeze, consuming yellow alleys of straw. Behind them the fields spread black, smoking slowly with low blue clouds that drifted away to spread across parched meadows all as yellow as the straw itself after months without rain.

  ‘Burning the strawberry fields off,’ Pop told Ma as he went into the kitchen. ‘That’s a new one all right. Never seen that before. Wonder what the idea of that is?’

  ‘Everything’ll burn off soon if we don’t get rain,’ Ma said. ‘Me included. As I said to the gentleman who was here this morning.’

  Ma was wearing the lightest of sleeveless dresses, sky-blue with a low loose neckline. Her pinafore, tied at the waist, was bright yellow. The dress was almost transparent too, so, that Pop could see her pink shoulder-straps showing through, a fact that excited him so much that he gave one of her bare olive-skinned arms a long smooth caress, quite forgetting at the same time to ask what gentleman she was referring to.

  ‘Why I’m cooking on a morning like this I can’t think,’ Ma said. Her hands were white with flour. Trays of apricot flans, raspberry tarts, and maids-of-honour covered the kitchen table. A smell of roasting lamb rose from the stove. ‘I’d be watering my zinnias if I had any sense. Or sitting under a tree somewhere.’

  Pop picked up a still warm maid-of-honour and was about to slip it into his mouth when he changed his mind and decided to kiss Ma instead. Ma returned the kiss with instant generosity, her hands touching his face and her mouth partly open and soft, making Pop think hopefully that she might be in one of her primrose-and-bluebell moods. This made him begin to caress the nape of her neck, one of the places where she was most sensitive, but she stopped him by saying:

  ‘You’d better not get yourself worked up. That gentleman’ll be back here any minute now. Said he’d be back by half-past eleven.’

  ‘What gentleman?’

  ‘This gentleman I told you about. He was here just after ten. Said he wanted to see you urgently.’

  Insurance feller, Pop thought. Or fire extinguishers. Something of that breed.

  ‘What’d he look like?’

  ‘Dark suit and a bowler hat and a gold watch-chain,’ Ma said. ‘And in a big black Rolls. With a chauffeur.’

  ‘Sounds like a brewer,’ Pop said, laughing, and started to take off his biscuit-coloured summer jacket. Thinking at the same time that a glass of beer would be a nice idea, he paused to ask Ma if she would like one too.

  ‘Had two already this morning,’ Ma said. ‘Could face another one though.’

  Pop put the maid-of-honour in his mouth and started to move towards the fridge. Ma, who was rolling out broad fresh flannels of dough, looked up suddenly from the pastry board as he came back with two iced bottles of Dragon’s Blood and laughed loudly, her enormous bust bouncing.

  ‘You look a fine sketch,’ she said. ‘Better go and look at yourself in the glass before your visitor arrives.’

  Pop, looking into the kitchen mirror, laughed too, seeing his face covered with flour dust where Ma had kissed him.

  ‘Good mind to keep it on,’ he said. ‘Might frighten this fell
er away.’

  He was, he thought, in no state for visitors; it was far too hot. He also had it in mind to ask Ma if she was in the mood to lie down for a bit after lunch. Mariette and Charley were at market; the rest of the children wouldn’t be home till four. There wouldn’t be a soul to disturb the peace of the afternoon except little Oscar.

  ‘Well, you’d better make up your mind one way or the other quick,’ Ma said, ‘because here comes the Rolls now.’

  Pop sank his Dragon’s Blood quickly and Ma said: ‘Better let me get it off,’ and lifted the edge of her pinafore to his face, wiping flour dust away. This brought her body near to him again and he seized the chance to whisper warmly:

  ‘Ma, what about a bit of a lie-down after lunch?’ He playfully nipped the soft flesh of her thigh. ‘Feel like it? Perfick opportunity.’

  ‘Don’t get me all excited,’ Ma said. ‘I won’t know where to stop.’

  In a mood of turmoil, thinking of nothing but how pleasant it was on hot summer afternoons to lie on the bed with Ma, Pop reluctantly walked into the yard. It was so hot mat even the turkeys had given up scratching and were now gathered into a panting brood under an elderberry tree from which black limp inside-out umbrellas of berries were hanging lifelessly. Over in the strawberry fields lines of flame were still darting and running about the smoking straw and from the road the sound of the Rolls Royce door snapping shut was as sharp as a revolver shot in the sun-charged air.

  It was in Pop’s mind to dismiss whoever was coming with a light-hearted quip such as ‘Not today thank you. Shut the gate,’ when he stopped in abrupt surprise.

  Ma’s visiting gentleman in the dark suit, bowler hat, and gold watch-chain had suddenly turned out to be a woman in a white silk suit covered with the thinnest of perpendicular black pencil-lines and with a small black-and-white hat to match.

  She came across the yard, plumpish, blonde, chalky pink about the face and pretty in a half-simpering rosebud sort of way, with outstretched hands.

  ‘Mrs Jerebohm,’ she said. ‘How do you do?’ She spoke with the slightest of lisps, half laughing. ‘You must be Larkin?’

  Pop, resenting the absence of what he called a handle to his name no less than the intrusion on his plan for a little privacy with Ma, murmured something about that was what he always had been and what could he do for her?

  Lisping again, Mrs Jerebohm said, with a hint of rapture:

  ‘Mr Jerebohm simply couldn’t wait to see the house for himself. So that’s where he’s gone and he wants us to meet him there. I hope that dove-tails all right? You know, fits in?’ It was not long before Pop was to discover that dovetailing was one of Mrs Jerebohm’s favourite and most repeated expressions. She simply adored things to dove-tail. She simply loved to have things zip-up, buttonhole, click, and otherwise be clipped into neat and unimpeachable order.

  ‘If we like it I hope we’ll have it all zipped-up this afternoon,’ she said. ‘That’s the way Mr Jerebohm likes to do business.’

  Silent, Pop feigned a sort of ample innocence. What the ruddy hell, he asked himself, was the woman talking about?

  ‘They told us at the inn you wanted to sell and the minute we heard we had a sort of thing about it.’

  Inn? Pop could only presume she meant The Hare and Hounds and at the same time couldn’t think what that simple pub had to do with her constant lisping raptures. She fixed him now with eyes as blue as forget-me-nots and a quick open smile that showed that two of her front teeth were crossed. That explained the lisping.

  ‘Could we go right away? I mean does that dove-tail and all that? We could go in the Rolls.’

  Pop, bemusedly thinking of roast lamb and mint sauce, cold beer, fresh apricot flan, and Ma lying on the bed in nothing but her slip or even less, suddenly felt a spasm of impatience and used the very same expression he had once used to Mr Charlton, in the days when he had been as eager as a hunter to collect taxes.

  ‘You must have come to the wrong house, Madam,’ he said. ‘Or else I’m off my rocker.’

  ‘Oh! no.’ When Mrs Jerebohm flung up her hands with a rapturous lilt, which she did quite often, it had the effect of stretching the white suit across her bust, so that it momentarily seemed to puff up, tightly. It made her, Pop thought, with her smallish blue eyes and crossed teeth, not at all unlike a white eager budgerigar.

  ‘Oh! no,’ she said again. ‘That doesn’t fit. There can’t be two people who own Gore Court, can there?’

  It had hardly occurred to Pop, quick as ever in reaction, what she was talking about before she fluttered lispingly on:

  ‘You can show us over, can’t you? You do want to sell, don’t you?’

  ‘Going to pull the whole shoot down one of these days,’ Pop said, ‘when I get the time.’

  Mrs Jerebohm expressed sudden shock with prayerful lifts of her hands, bringing them together just under her chin.

  ‘Oh! but that’s awful sacrilege, isn’t it? Isn’t that awful sacrilege?’

  Pop started to say that he didn’t know about that but the first words were hardly framed before she went lisping on:

  ‘But we could just see it, perhaps, couldn’t we? At the inn they assured us you were keen to sell. You see we’re mad to have a place in the country. Absolutely mad. So when we heard –’.

  ‘Big place,’ Pop said. ‘Fifteen bedrooms.’

  ‘That would suit us. That would fit all right. We’d want to have people down. My husband wants shooting parties and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Ah! he shoots does he?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘but he’s going to learn.’

  A sharp, searching fragrance of roast lamb drifted across the yard, causing Pop to sniff with uplifted nostrils. Ma, he thought, must be opening the oven door, and with relish he also remembered maids-of-honour, raspberry tarts, and apricot flans. He wondered too how many vegetables Ma was cooking and said:

  ‘Couldn’t manage nothing just now, I’m afraid. My dinner’s on the table.’

  ‘Oh? Not really?’

  ‘Ma’ll be dishing up in ten minutes and she won’t have it spoiled.’

  ‘Oh! be an angel.’

  The appeal of the small forget-me-not eyes was too direct to resist and Pop answered it with a liquid look of his own, gazing at Mrs Jerebohm with a smoothness that most women would have found irresistibly disturbing. It was like a slow indirect caress.

  On Mrs Jerebohm it had the effect of making her retreat a little. She seemed to become momentarily cool. She showed her crossed teeth in an unsmiling gap, much as if she had realized that her fluttering ‘Oh! be an angel’ had gone too far into realms of familiarity.

  ‘I can wait for you to finish your lunch,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly content to wait.’

  ‘Oh! come in and have a bite,’ Pop said. ‘Ma’ll be pleased to death.’

  Mrs Jerebohm gave an answer of such incredible frigidity that Pop almost felt himself frozen in the hot July sunshine.

  ‘No thank you. We never eat at midday.’

  Pop could find no possible answer to this astounding, unreal statement; it struck him as being nothing but a fabulous lunacy. It couldn’t possibly be that there were people who didn’t eat at midday. It couldn’t possibly be.

  ‘I will wait in the car.’

  ‘Have a wet then. Have a glass o’ beer,’ Pop said, his voice almost desperate. He was feeling an urgent need for a glass, perhaps two, himself. ‘Come and sit down in the cool.’

  Mrs Jerebohm, already cool enough as she surveyed the piles of junk lying everywhere across the sun-blistered yard, the now prostrate brood of turkeys and the Rolls Royce incongruously parked by the muck-heap, merely showed her small crossed teeth again and said:

  ‘Have your dinner, Larkin. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  Turning abruptly, she went away on short almost prancing steps towards the road. Instinctively Pop gazed for a moment at the retreating figure in its pencilled white skirt. The hips, he thought, were over-large
for the rest of the body. As they swung fleshily from side to side they looked in some way haughty and seemed frigidly to admonish him.

  Going back into the house he felt something more than thirst to be the strongest of his reactions. The morning had suddenly become unreal. In a half-dream he poured himself a glass of beer, drank part of it and then decided he needed a real blinder of a pick-me-up to restore his sanity.

  Ma was busy laying the lunch table as he concocted a powerful mixture of gin, whisky, and French vermouth, a liberal dash of bitters and plenty of ice.

  ‘Been gone a long time,’ Ma said. ‘What did he want after all?’

  In a low ruminative voice Pop explained to Ma that his visitor was, after all, a she.

  ‘Wants to buy Gore Court. Wants me to show her and her husband over after dinner.’

  ‘What’s she like? No wonder you been gone a long time.’

  Pop swirled ice round and round in his glass, moodily gazing at it. He drank deeply of gin, whisky, and vermouth, waited for it to reach his empty stomach and then in tones of complete unreality revealed to Ma the shocking news that he had just met someone who, believe it or not, never ate at midday.

  ‘Can’t be right in her mind,’ Ma said.

  ‘Fact,’ Pop said. ‘Invited her in to lunch but that’s what she said. Never eats at midday.’

  ‘Why? Does she think it common or something?’

  Pop said that could be it and drank solidly again. A moment later Ma opened the oven door and took out a sizzling brown leg of lamb surrounded by golden braised potatoes, so that the morning at once woke into new excruciating life, with pangs of hunger leaping through Pop like a pain.

  ‘You hear something new every day’ he said, ‘don’t you, Ma? Something as shakes you.’

  Ma said you certainly did and then suddenly, with no warning at all, popped the leg of lamb back into the oven again.

  ‘You mean she’s still waiting out there? She’ll faint off or something.’

  More than likely, Pop thought. Yes, she was waiting. Depressedly he poured another couple of inches of gin into his glass, hardly hearing Ma say: