The Complete Uncle Silas Stories Read online

  The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

  BY

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  Foreword by Lesley Pearse

  A Note from the Family

  The Lily

  The Revelation

  The Wedding

  Finger Wet, Finger Dry

  A Funny Thing

  The Sow and Silas

  The Shooting Party

  Silas the Good

  A Happy Man

  Silas and Goliath

  A Silas Idyll

  The Race

  The Death of Uncle Silas

  The Return

  Sugar for the Horse

  The Bedfordshire Clanger

  Queenie White

  The Blue Feather

  The Foxes

  The Double Thumb

  Aunt Tibby

  The Little Fishes

  The Widder

  The Eating Match

  The Singing Pig

  The Fire Eaters

  Loss of Pride

  Shandy Lil

  A Teetotal Tale

  A Note on the Author

  Foreword

  I have always believed that H. E. Bates was the absolute master of short story writing. He managed to create a little world for you to enter into, and that soft focus world would stay with you long after you’d finished the story.

  When I first started writing I tried my hand at short stories, assuming quite wrongly it would be easier than attempting a book. Bates was my guiding light; there appeared to be a simplicity about his work that I sought to emulate. I did get a few short stories accepted by magazines, but they could never be in his league. I certainly never created anything as lovely as ‘The Watercress Girl’. Did any writer before or since? I think I found it in a magazine and read it curled up in my aunt’s spare room one wet school holiday and then went on to rush to the library to find more of his work. Fair Stood the Wind for France was the first book I borrowed and I was totally hooked on his work, but it was always the short stories I really admired the most.

  Lesley Pearse, 2015

  A Note from the Family

  My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

  My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them—especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets—a new lease of life.

  There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

  If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H. E. Bates Companion—a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found.

  I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

  Tim Bates, 2015

  We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes—you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

  The Lily

  My Great-uncle Silas used to live in a small stone reed-thatched cottage on the edge of a pine-wood, where nightingales sang passionately in great numbers through early summer nights and on into the mornings and often still in the afternoons. On summer days after rain the air was sweetly saturated with the fragrance of the pines, which mingled subtly with the exquisite honeysuckle scent, the strange vanilla heaviness from the creamy elder-flowers in the garden hedge, and the perfume of old pink-and-white crimped-double roses of forgotten names. It was very quiet there except for the soft, water-whispering sound of leaves and boughs, and the squabbling and singing of birds in the house-thatch and the trees. The house itself was soaked with years of scents, half-sweet, half-dimly-sour with the smell of wood-smoke, the curious odour of mauve and milk-coloured and red geraniums, of old wine and tea and the earth smell of my Uncle Silas himself.

  It was the sort of house to which old men retire to enjoy their last days. Shuffling about in green carpet-slippers, they do nothing but poke the fire, gloomily clip their beards, read the newspapers with their spectacles on upside down, take too much physic, and die of boredom at last.

  But my Uncle Silas was different. At the age of ninety-three he was as lively and restless as a young colt. He shaved every morning at half-past five with cold water and a razor older than himself which resembled an antique barbaric billhook. He still kept alive within him some gay, devilish spark of audacity which made him attractive to the ladies. He ate too much and he drank too much.

  ‘God strike me if I tell a lie,’ he used to say, ‘but I’ve drunk enough beer, me boyo, to float the fleet and a drop over.’

  I remember seeing him on a scorching, windless day in July. He ought to have been asleep in the shade with his red handkerchief over his old walnut-coloured face, but when I arrived he was at work on his potato-patch, digging steadily and strongly in the full blaze of the sun.

  Hearing the click of the gate he looked up, and, seeing me, waved his spade. The potato-patch was at the far end of the long garden, where the earth was warmest under the woodside, and I walked down the long path to it between rows of fatpodded peas and beans and full-fruited bushes of currant and gooseberry. By the house, under the sun-white wall, the sweetwilliams and white pinks flamed softly against the hot marigolds and the orange poppies flat opened to drink in the sun.

  ‘Hot,’ I said.

  ‘Warmish.’ He did not pause in his strong, rhythmical digging. The potato-patch had been cleared of its crop and the sun-withered haulms had been heaped against the hedge.

  ‘Peas?’ I said. The conversation was inevitably laconic.

  ‘Taters,’ he said. He did not speak again until he had dug to the edge of the wood. There he straightened his back, blew his nose on his red handkerchief, let out a nonchalant flash of spittle, and cocked his eye at me.

  ‘Two crops,’ he said. ‘Two crops from one bit o’ land. How’s that, me boyo? Ever heard talk o’ that?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And you’d be telling a lie if you said you had. Because I know you ain’t.’

  He winked at me, with that swift cock of the head and the perky flicker of the lid that had in it all the saucy jauntiness of a youth of twenty. He was very proud of himself. He was doing something extraordinary and he knew it. There was no humbug about him.

  Sitting in the low shade of the garden hedge I watched him, waiting for him to finish digging. He was a short, thick-built man, and his old corduroy trousers concertina-folded over his squat l
egs and his old wine-red waistcoat ruckled up over his heavy chest made him look dwarfer and thicker still. He was as ugly as some old Indian idol, his skin walnut-stained and scarred like a weather-cracked apple, his cheeks hanging loose and withered, his lips wet and almost sensual and a trifle sardonic with their sideways twist and the thick pout of the lower lip. His left eye was bloodshot, a thin vein or two of scarlet staining the white, but he kept the lid half-shut, only raising it abruptly now and then with an odd cocking-flicker that made him look devilish and sinister. The sudden gay, jaunty flash of his eyes was electric, immortal. I told him once that he’d live to be a thousand. ‘I shall,’ he said.

  When he had finished the digging and was scraping the light sun-dry soil from his spade with his flattened thumb I got up languidly from under the hedge.

  ‘Don’t strain yourself,’ he said.

  He shouldered his spade airily and walked away towards the house and I followed him, marvelling at his age, his strength, and his tirelessness under that hot sun. Half-way up the garden path he stopped to show me his gooseberries. They were as large as young green peaches. He gathered a handful, and the bough, relieved of the weight, swayed up swiftly from the earth. When I had taken a gooseberry he threw the rest into his mouth, crunching them like a horse eating fresh carrots. Something made me say, as I sucked the gooseberry:

  ‘You must have been born about the same year as Hardy.’

  ‘Hardy?’ He cocked his bloodshot eye at me. ‘What Hardy?’

  ‘Thomas Hardy.’

  He thought a moment, crunching gooseberries.

  ‘I recollect him. Snotty little bit of a chap, red hair, always had a dew-drop on the end of his nose. One o’ them Knotting Fox Hardys. Skinny lot. I recollect him.’

  ‘No, not him. I mean another Hardy. Different man.’

  ‘Then he was afore my time.’

  ‘No, he was about your time. You must have heard of him. He wrote books.’

  The word finished him: he turned and began to stride off towards the house. ‘Books,’ I heard him mutter, ‘Books!’ And suddenly he turned on me and curled his wet red lips and said in a voice of devastating scorn, his bloodshot eye half-angry, half-gleeful:

  ‘I dare say.’ And then in a flash: ‘But could he grow goosegogs like that?’

  Without pausing for an answer, he strode off again, and I followed him up the path and out of the blazing white afternoon sun into the cool, geranium-smelling house, and there he sat down in his shirt-sleeves in the big black-leathered chair that he once told me his grandmother had left him, with a hundred pounds sewn in the seat that he sat on for ten years without knowing it.

  ‘Mouthful o’ wine?’ he said to me softly, and then before I had time to answer he bawled into the silence of the house:

  ‘Woman! If you’re down the cellar bring us a bottle o’ cowslip!’

  ‘I’m upstairs,’ came a voice.

  ‘Then come down. And look slippy.’

  ‘Fetch it yourself!’

  ‘What’s that, y’old tit? I’ll fetch you something you won’t forget in a month o’ Sundays. D’ye hear?’ There was a low muttering and rumbling over the ceiling. ‘Fetch it yourself!’ he muttered. ‘Did ye hear that? Fetch it yourself!’

  ‘I’ll fetch it,’ I said.

  ‘You sit down,’ he said. ‘What do I pay a housekeeper for? Sit down. She’ll bring it.’

  I sat down in the broken-backed chair that in summer time always stood by the door, propping it open. The deep roof dropped a strong black shadow across the threshold but outside the sun blazed unbrokenly, with a still, intense midsummer light. There was no sound or movement from anything except the bees, droll and drunken, as they crawled and tippled down the yellow and blue and dazzling white throats of the flowers. And sitting there waiting for the wine to come up, listening to the bees working down into the heart of the silence, I saw a flash of scarlet in the garden, and said:

  ‘I see the lily’s in bloom.’

  And as though I had startled him, Uncle Silas looked up quickly, almost with suspicion.

  ‘Ah, she’s in bloom,’ he said.

  I was wondering why he always spoke of the lily as though it were a woman, when the housekeeper, her unlaced shoes clip-clopping defiantly on the wooden cellar-steps and the brick passage, came in with a green wine-bottle, and, slapping it down on the table, went out again with her head stiffly uplifted, without a word.

  ‘Glasses!’ yelled my Uncle Silas.

  ‘Bringing ’em if you can wait!’ she shouted back.

  ‘Well, hurry then! And don’t fall over yourself!’

  She came back a moment or two later with the glasses, which she clapped down on the table just as she had done the wine-bottle, defiantly, without a word. She was a scraggy, frosty-eyed woman, with a tight, almost lipless mouth, and as she stalked out of the door my Uncle Silas leaned across to me and said in a whisper just loud enough for her to hear:

  ‘Tart as a stick of old rhubarb.’

  ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ she said at once.

  ‘Never spoke. Never opened me mouth.’

  ‘I heard you!’

  ‘Go and put yourself in curling pins, you old straight hook!’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ she shouted.

  ‘Leave!’ he shouted. ‘And good riddance.’

  ‘Who’re you talking to, eh? Who’re you talking to, you corrupted old devil? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you weren’t so old I’d warm your breeches till you couldn’t sit down. I’m off.’

  She flashed out, clip-clopping with her untied shoes along the passage and upstairs while he chanted after her, in his devilish, goading voice:

  ‘Tart as a bit of old rhubarb! Tart as a bit of old rhubarb!’

  When the house was silent again he looked at me and winked his bloodshot eye and said ‘Pour out,’ and I filled the tumblers with the clear sun-coloured wine. As we drank I said, ‘You’ve done it now,’ and he winked back at me again, knowing that I knew that she had been leaving every day for twenty years, and that they had quarrelled with each other day and night for nearly all that time, secretly loving it.

  Sitting by the door, sipping the sweet, cold wine, I looked at the lily again. Its strange, scarlet, turk’s-cap blossoms had just begun to uncurl in the July heat, the colour hot and passionate against the snow-coloured pinks and the cool larkspurs and the stiff spikes of the madonnas, sweet and virgin, but like white wax. Rare, exotic, strangely lovely, the red lily had blossomed there, untouched, for as long as I could remember.

  ‘When are you going to give me a little bulb off the lily?’ I said.

  ‘You know what I’ve always told you,’ he said. ‘You can have her when I’m dead. You can come and dig her up then. Do what you like with her.’

  I nodded. He drank, and as I watched his skinny throat filling and relaxing with the wine I said:

  ‘Where did you get it? In the first place?’

  He looked at the almost empty glass.

  ‘I pinched her,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Never mind. Give us another mouthful o’ wine.’

  He held out his glass, and I rose and took the wine-bottle from the table and paused with my hand on the cork. ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘tell me.’

  ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘It’s been so damn long ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I forget,’ he said.

  As I gave him back his wine-filled glass I looked at him with a smile and he smiled back at me, half-cunning, half-sheepish, as though he knew what I was thinking. He possessed the vividest memory, a memory he often boasted about as he told me the stories of his boyhood, rare tales of prize-fights on summer mornings by isolated woods very long ago, of how he heard the news of the Crimea, of how he took a candle to church to warm his hands against it in the dead of winter, and how when the parson cried out ‘And he shall see a great light, even as I see one now!’ he snatched up the candle in fear of hell and devils
and sat on it. ‘And I can put my finger on the spot now.’

  By that smile on his face I knew that he remembered about the lily, and after taking another long drink of the wine he began to talk. His voice was crabbed and rusty, a strong, ugly voice that had no softness or tenderness in it, and his half-shut, bloodshot eye and his wet, curled lips looked rakish and wicked, as though he were acting the villainous miser in one of those travelling melodramas of his youth.

  ‘I seed her over in a garden, behind a wall,’ he said. ‘Big wall, about fifteen feet high. We were banging in hard a-carrying hay and I was on the top o’ the cart and could see her just over the wall. Not just one—scores, common as poppies. I felt I shouldn’t have no peace again until I had one. And I nipped over the wall that night about twelve o’clock and ran straight into her.’

  ‘Into the lily?’

  ‘Tah! Into a gal. See? Young gal—about my age, daughter o’ the house. All dressed in thin white. “What are you doing here?” she says, and I believe she was as frit as I was. “I lost something,” I says. “It’s all right. You know me.” And then she wanted to know what I’d lost, and I felt as if I didn’t care what happened, and I said, “Lost my head, I reckon.” And she laughed, and then I laughed and then she said, “Ssshhh! Don’t you see I’m as done as you are if we’re found here? You’d better go. What did you come for, anyway?” And I told her. She wouldn’t believe me. “It’s right,” I says, “I just come for the lily.” And she just stared at me. “And you know what they do to people who steal?” she says. “Yes,” I says, and they were the days when you could be hung for looking at a sheep almost. “But picking flowers ain’t stealing,” I says. “Ssshhh!” she says again. “What d’ye think I’m going to say if they find me here? Don’t talk so loud. Come here behind these trees and keep quiet.” And we went and sat down behind some old box-trees and she kept whispering about the lily and telling me to whisper for fear anyone should come. “I’ll get you the lily all right,” she says, “if you keep quiet. I’ll dig it up.”’