The Cuckoos of Batch Magna

Batch Magna, slumbering the centuries away on is river, is threatened by the cold wind of commerce blowing from beyond the hills of its valley.

A Beginning

 

In his bedroom in Batch Hall, the old squire, General Sir Humphrey Myles Pinkerton Strange, lay propped up on his pillows, his breath struggling with the illness in his chest. On the bedside cabinet sat his copies of Surtees and Beckford, and the stud books he’d asked his housekeeper to bring up, pedigrees of hunters and hounds going back to his great-grandfather’s day.

As master of the Batch Valley Chase, in his old yellow hunting waistcoat, and with a threadbare shine on his ancient silk topper, the General had taken his last field through a covert four years before, sitting his hunter cavalry style as always, straight as a young dragoon. But had to be helped onto his mount to do it, bundled onto it, an old knight, stuffed with straw, and had seen the charity then, and the impatience, in people’s eyes. He never hunted again after that, and had felt age like a wound ever since.

A wound he suspected that, this time, he would not be getting up from. And serve you damn well right, he told himself.

His housekeeper said it would be the death of him. Standing about in a November drizzle after the Cenotaph service last year with all the other silly old fools, gossiping over the hipflasks as if in the mess, umbrella furled still because he was in town, the breast of his Gieves overcoat heavy with medals. Medals which went back to the pounded mud of Passchendaele, and a young moustachioed captain of the Cavalry of the Line eager to get there before Christmas, before it was all over.

When his father, Sir Cosmo Strange, the man who brought the paddle steamers to the village, died, the villagers and tenant farmers, and the heads of each estate department, including the senior master of the Cluny Steamboat Company, a half-pay Royal Navy captain from Cardiff, had followed his coffin, and the three shops the village had then had closed for the day. And soon it would be his turn. And who was there now, to follow him?

The General absently stroked his old gundog, Snipe, quietening him, the dog moving restlessly next to him on the bed, retrieving again perhaps in his sleep. Annie and Owain would look after Snipe, he had no worries there. It was the estate, or what was left of it, that concerned him now.

It was not how he had wanted it to be, how it should be. But he had outlived his three sons, losing one in the Second World War, another to a hunting accident in the Fifties, and the youngest at sixty, after a stroke. And his siblings and his wife had also died, had also gone before him.

He had two daughters alive still, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, boys among them, but the estate was entailed, and his will had to follow the rule of descent. That line, in this case, stopping at a great-nephew, someone he had never met. A stranger soon to be among them, soon to take what was left.

The General lay back on the pillows, feeling suddenly weary of it. An old man, left behind in a house full of the past. Outside the room the lost lands, and the cries of peacocks walking the ruined walls of the gardens. And a world that was all in his head now, the memories of it all that was left.

Christmases when it always seemed to be snowing, home from school in the holidays with his brothers, piled in the back of the covered game cart from Church Myddle station. The carols around the big outside tree, and liveried carriages and motorcars lining the drive, when the house was lit like a cake and waltzes were played, and the faces, all seen again, all danced with again, of the girls he fell in love with each year at the party in the servants’ hall.

Out on a winter river with his first gun, a Wesley Richards 28-bore he almost slept with, for wigeon and teal and snipe, and the Boxing Day coot shoot. And c**k pheasants on January mornings iron with frost, gloving his hands with the warm wings of the birds between drives, when the fires of the Stops burnt like polished copper through the trees.

And helping with the hay in summer, the carts of Home Farm piled high with it. Memories of dust and the heated scent of sweet vernal grass, and the bite of cider cooled in a jar.

He saw his wife again as if for the first time, across a dance floor in the London season, in a white presentation dress and Prince of Wales feathers. And on her favourite bay, clattering out of the stable yard in wide skirts and a bowler hat and veil, and rode again with her on a good scenting morning, with the hounds in full cry and a horn calling. And remembered walking the root fields on September afternoons with his head keeper, and his sons when they were young, out after a few early partridges or pheasant along the hedgerows, and teaching the boys to spin for pike.

And memories of his own father, happy as a boy himself among the hissing steam and coal dust, firing up a boiler on one of the paddle steamers, or pacing the landing stage, fob watch in hand, checking and rechecking the time with mysterious urgency. And opening up the steam whistle full throttle, as if to alert shipping, as they puffed importantly upriver, piling up smoke and stampeding sheep and cattle along the grazing meadows.

The Cluny Steamboat Company. Mad, all quite mad. And all such fun.

The day trips to Water Lacy and back, the Two Shilling Dips, as they were called, the paddlers crowded with villagers and farm workers in their Sunday best, with bottles of beer and pop, and sandwiches made for the trip, churning the water white around Snails Eye Island. And the Moonlight Excursions, when courting couples found the shadows on deck and coloured lanterns lit the murmuring, soft summer darknesses. And in the last war, after the company had bankrupted itself, local men rode their decks in the uniform of the Home Guard, patrolling the river approaches, ready to stand between Batch Magna and the Nazi jackboot.

And now another enemy perhaps waited. And this time one the village could do nothing about.

A brittle winter sun lit the large, leaded bow window in the room, the curtains open on a view of the hills which sheltered his valley. Its light the colour of gemstones in the frieze of armorial glass along the top panes, and warming the centuries, the patina on floorboards of estate oak.

It had faded from the room by the time Annie Owen, the General’s housekeeper, carrying a tray of afternoon tea, entered it again. And by then the hand that had been stroking the last of his dogs, the veins standing blue on it, had been still for some time.

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

Phineas Cook woke in the bedroom of the Cluny Belle to the sound of a cow browsing on the other side of the river.

He got out of bed and pushed the bedroom window fully open. The cow, a large moon-faced Hereford, had made her way down the bank from the field there, and was in the shallows, among the reeds and budding water-lilies, champing on a few young stalks of meadowsweet, and up to her udder in a river mist.

The mist lagged the trunk of a goat willow uprooted during a recent storm, and hung in drifts above the meadow where the shapes of more cattle loomed. A moorhen croaked above the murmur of the river dawdling on its way to the fish weir, and something small made a splash. And in Mawr Wood next to the meadow, birdsong simmered, calling from the tender new green of sycamore, hazel and alder.

He could smell and feel it waiting in the mist, the promise of heat, of summer, at last.

He rummaged through the clothes piled on a chair, and pulled out a sweater and jeans. On the bed, Bill Sikes, six stone of white boxer with the face of the spike-collared dog in a cartoon backyard, lifted open a suspicious eye.

“Up!” Phineas told him. “And next time stay on your own bed,” he muttered as he went through into the sitting room.

He found the socks he wanted on a hanger, above the stove he’d had alight only yesterday against a river chill. The stove, large and pot bellied, sat in the centre of the room, its chimney fed into the paddle steamer’s original stovepipe funnel, sending up smoke again from it, and the heat banging and knocking through the pipes.

He marched back into the bedroom in wellington boots to pull Sikes off the bed, ignoring the pantomime curses, the fearsome-sounding growling and snarling, upper lip rigid over teeth polished with spittle.

Phineas paused, out on deck, out into a world wrapped in mist and silence. A dog somewhere on the other side of the valley barked steadily on into it, and in Mawr Wood on the opposite bank, rooks in the tops of the big sycamores stirred and bickered, damp-throated in the mist. And upstream of the wood, from one of the fields on the river that side, a horse whinnied, the sound  rearing in the still air, and he heard the drumming of hooves as it broke into a gallop, kicking up its heels and bucking because perhaps it was young and simply had to. Or, for all he knew, it was something that went on at first light every morning in summer. Placidly grazing or under a saddle for the rest of the day, for that brief time, perhaps, that brief summer dawn on the river, it ran and danced to a different tune.

The mist had rolled up to Batch Magna’s High Street, and as far as the castle above the river, the last grey wisps of it drifting among its ruined stone like cannon smoke, like the ghost of old battles. The trees on the lower slopes of the hills were ragged with it, and it was as if snow had fallen elsewhere, the hawthorn of the valley piled with blossom. A green and white scented world that seemed to have bloomed overnight.

The ground in front of the Cluny Belle had once been a small cider orchard. Some of its ancient trees stood still, mossy and lichen stained, and bent as if by winds. A few of them, brought down by the years and the weather, slowly growing back into the earth among nettles.

Home Farm had used it during lambing and it still had a few sheep out on it, fleece-fat ewes with their spring lambs, like stones in the mist.

Sikes ignored them. Head and scut of a tail down, he waited resignedly for Phineas to open the makeshift gate of a pallet top secured with orange baler twine, and went through it as if to his doom.

In the lane he headed for the next best thing that time of a morning to a bed or sofa, Phineas’s car, parked half up on the verge. An old Frogeye, a canary-yellow Austin Healey Sprite, made for summer and the top down. Sikes liked to see the world go by when he travelled in her, sitting upright in the passenger seat, and sticking out his head when they hit the open road, trying to bite the wind.

Phineas called him away, and waited then, when he saw the bulky figure of Owain Owen ambling along Upper Ham from the direction of his own boat further downriver, beyond the pub. Owain was carrying a rod and an old wicker fishing creel on his back, Bryn, his Welsh collie, quivering with anxious excitement at his heels.

“Like a bloody heron, you are, Phineas, standing there,” Owain said when he came upon him, Phineas’s tall spare figure in the mist.

Phineas nodded at the gear. “Off after a drop of breakfast, Owain?”

“Chub, boy. You got to be up early to catch a chub. I spotted �" Bryn! Doolally bloody animal you, heel!” Owain growled, his dog all over Bill Sikes in a demented burst of energy, while the boxer stood there, glumly.

Rod or 12-bore, both in his master’s hands had the same effect on Bryn. The collie went into the water for the fish Owain caught, bringing them in alive and flapping, and dropping them like pheasant at his feet. It was Owain’s boast that when it came to fish or bird, his dog had a mouth as soft as a woman’s.

“I spotted a likely-looking chub hole the other day. Up past Padford Bank.” Owain lowered his voice as if the fishes could hear. “And the water’s settled again now. Be clear as gin under that lot. And that’ll be lifting soon. Then it’ll be a hot ‘un. And what about you then, boy? What got you out of bed this time of the morning? Somebody set fire to it, did they? Or haven’t you been in it yet, is that it?”

He peered over at Phineas’s bedroom, bolted like the rest of the living quarters on to what was left of the PS Cluny Belle’s upperworks. “On your way back, is it, from somebody else’s?” he said, and raised his bushy eyebrows a couple of times suggestively.

Phineas smiled as if indulging him. “No, Owain, I’m on my way out,” he said patiently. He nodded at Bill Sikes. “You’d think I was taking him to be shot, but we’re actually off for a walk. A spot of shore leave after all that weather. Now summer’s decided to turn up. And as you say, it will be hot later. No, all that other sort of business is in the past now, Owain,” he said, shaking his head with a chuckle, as if gently chiding him for not keeping up.

“Quite frankly,” he added, regarding his friend earnestly, “I don’t think it’s overstating it to say, Owain, that you see before you a changed man.”

“Oh, ah,” Owain said.

“A more adult, responsible model, even if I do say so myself.”

“Oh, ah,” Owain said again.

“Sally, Sally has made �" you’ve met Sally?” Phineas broke off with a small quizzical frown, his tone suggesting that if Owain had met her then no further explanation should be necessary.

“Ah, at the pub,” Owain said.

“Yes, well,” Phineas said simply, “she has made me see things differently.”

“Oh, ah,” Owain said.

“Made me more … well, more adult and responsible.”

“Where is she, then? Still in bed? Knackered, is she?” Owain said, peering past him again at his bedroom, his eyebrows going up as if at the thought of one woman heroically supplying all that Phineas had regularly been getting from what at times seemed like a steady stream of them.

“No, she’s not in bed! Here or anywhere else. If you must know, she’s on a week of nights, helping out at Kingham General. Ministering to the sick. What I meant was, was that she’s made me see things in a different light, simply through being the sort of person she is �" a mature, responsible woman. Mature and responsible. There’s comfort in those words, Owain. Words to come home to, a rest for one’s weary head after slogging away on the primrose path, as Shakespeare had it. A puffed and reckless libertine who reaks not his rede. Well, whatever a rede is, I’ve decided it’s about time I reaked it.”

Owain was staring at him. “You’re not thinking of getting married again, are you?”

Phineas looked startled. “What! No �" no, I’m not thinking of getting married again. No, it’s simply as I say, these days I’m taking a more adult approach to life. There are people, Owain,” he went on confidingly, his tone suggesting that Owain might find this hard to believe, “who have expressed the view that I lack a sense of what they describe as responsibility. That, in their assessment, it’s about time I started taking life a bit more seriously. The weightier approach is called for, that seems to be the general consensus. In short, they consider that it’s about ruddy time I grew up. And what’s more, Owain, quite frankly, they’re right! They are right. I see that now,” he added into the middle distance, the light of the new maturity in his eyes.

  “Well, I don’t know. And what’s Pugh the Pew going to do? He’ll have to start buying the News of the World.”

“That gossip shop. It’s only because nothing ever happens here. Elsewhere I’d be regarded as being near celibate.”

“Oh yes,” Owain said with interest. “Where would that be, then? London, is it?”

“Anywhere with a bit more to it than one shop and a pub. Where people are too busy living their own lives to concern themselves with those of others.”

“Oh, you’re right there, boy. Nothing to bloody talk about, they haven’t, some people round here. Or think about. Sex on the brain, they’ve got. Sex on the bloody brain. But what do you think of the old suit, then?”

Owain pulled in his stomach to get a better look himself, peering down at the lovat-green tweeds he was wearing. “It was the General’s. Sarah, his granddaughter,  she gave it me. Gave me all his shooting clothes. Savile Row, they are. Savile Row. In London. And they fit. Well, apart from the sleeves, that is. And the trousers, like. He were a big man, the General. Still, Annie’ll sort it all out one of these days.”

The sleeves came nearly to his knuckles, the waist, even on Owain’s ample front, tied like a sack with a large buckled belt.

Owain pointed at his Wellingtons, the tops of them turned down. “And these socks I have on are hand knitted. Like walking on moss, they are. He liked to look after his feet, the General did. Pity he didn’t pay the same heed to the rest of him. God bless him.”

Owain’s Welsh-dark liquid eyes turned mournful. “The old love. It’s not the same round here without him. Not the same.” He shook his head. “I never thought I’d be that sorry to have a glass in my hand.” Owain, who had been a head keeper on the estate, and the General’s loader until the old man had to give up shooting, had been invited up the Hall with Annie, his wife, after the funeral.

Phineas had drunk to the old man himself, along with most of the village and valley in the pub that day, remembering him with affection. And like those who had known him all their lives, he realised that he had somehow come to believe that he would always be there.

“Has the estate been settled yet?” he asked.

“Well, the valuers have all finished, like. But no, no one seems to know yet what’s happening. Myself, I reckon Sarah’ll get it. Everyone else is either dead or too old. There’s no money as such, so I don’t see the boys being interested, except maybe to sell what there is left. Something the General would have thought of, you can be sure of that. And Sarah’s not only the eldest grandchild, she knows her way about, like. She practically ran the place when she was working in the office. She’d sort things out. She nagged him enough about it when he was alive. So did I, about the sporting interests, and that. But as long as the old man could get out with a gun and had a drop of something left in the cellar he just didn’t care, not after Lady Phylldia died. God bless ’em. And he would know he could trust Sarah. Oh, she might have to sell off a bit more land or whatever to pay death duties, and all that. But everything else would stay as the General wanted, I’m sure of that.”

Phineas looked doubtful. “I’ve yet to meet a woman, Owain, who was content to leave the furniture where she found it.”

“Well, we’ll see. Tell the truth, I don’t see it mattering to us much who’s in charge of things. I mean, all this’ll still be here, no matter what.” Owain’s hand carelessly took it all in, the greening hills of the valley growing out of the mist, the sleeping village, and the castle on a hill. And their home, the river.

“Anyway, if I do get something in the bag, come and have a bite later. Wasting away you are, according to Annie.”

Phineas thanked him. “As long as I can bring the wine,” he added.

Owain laughed. “Annie’s bloody medicine! Have a drop of this, she says, do you good. Must have got half the village legless on it in her time. The old vicar as well on a couple of occasions,” he said, not without pride.

During a recent gathering on the Owens’ boat, the Felicity H, Annie had brought out some of her home­made stuff, bottles of blackcurrant whisky, rhubarb brandy, cherry and apple port, and red mead, all innocently labelled, like jam.

Phineas had been there before with Annie’s brews, and not for the first time in his life told himself afterwards that he should have known better.

This time he’d managed to get back to the Belle without falling into the river, either off their deck or tacking into it off the bank, but he had no memory of doing so. He’d come to on his sofa, looking up with a sort of wonder at Bill Sikes looking down at him, the dog’s breath friendly with the smell of one of the bones he had buried, the folds of his face like a fall of warm gentle snow.

After leaving Owain, Phineas went past Batch Hall and up Roman Bank, a lane running between fields, the verges, in front of hedgebanks cut with slate and dry stone, tall now with summer, with cow parsley and hemlock and goutweed, and with a smell to them like wet iron in the damp and mist.

And from somewhere behind him a cuckoo called abruptly, an urchin sound, like a bit of street corner mischief, following him mockingly. And he heard in it as he always did the taunting, near demented glee of a bird that knew something nobody else yet knew, but any day now would.

 

 

At the top of the hill, Phineas left the road and crossed the two humped fields called Peny Brin, Bill Sikes, with a sudden show of interest in the morning, scattering rabbits feeding among the moon daisies and buttercups, Phineas’s boots shining like wet tar in the dew. And up into Cutterbach, a stretch of ancient woodland flushed each September by the Batch Valley Chase, home to badgers and owls as well as foxes, and fallow deer, relics of an ornamental deer park and a time when the Strange family and the village were young still.

   They were on the very edge of the wood overlooking the valley, on a ride rutted with the recent weather and punched with the hooves of horses, when with no hint of its coming, the sun rose, and hung there, burning the trees on the skyline black, before ballooning above them as if released, a c**k somewhere below crowing as if caught napping as its light swept across the valley.

Phineas felt it touch his face, warming it like a cow’s summer breath, fragrant with flowering grasses and meadow herbs and clover. With all the scents of summer ripening in the valley, under a creamy, blue and white marbled sky.

He stood looking down at the scene, as if coming on it for the first time. A field of buttercups seemed to slide, glistening, off the side of a hill, as if melting under the sweep of the sun, and among the trees above them the pale fire of rhododendrons. The meadow grasses falling away below him glinting here and there under frail webs of dew and mist, catching the light like things hidden. And the river, smoking in the sudden warmth, with the houseboats, the four paddle steamers that had once plied the home waters and a Victorian Thames, now tied   permanently to the land, held there on their ropes, and the island called Snails Eye sitting at the heart of the river, where it bulged on a meander like a lake.

The small black and white farms of the valley among orchards, and the houses and half-timbered cottages of Batch Magna, a Marcher village, the cross of St George, flown from the Steamer Inn, a riposte to the red dragon of Wales above the door of the Pughs’ post office and shop. The cricket field and pavilion behind the churchyard, and the great, immemorial yew, the centuries in its vast girth corseted with rusting iron bands, shading a church which bore in its nave the marks of Norman chisels, and among its gravestones a sundial which told the time in Jerusalem.

And the tall, star-shaped chimneys and gabled black and white timbers of Batch Hall, home to the Strange family for over four hundred years, set with Elizabethan ornateness in what was left of its park, its lawns, under horse chestnuts heavy with bloom, running down to the Cluny. And the castle, a fortress once against border incursions and the forces of Cromwell, open now to Welsh rain and rabbits, the archers’ loopholes in the ruined towers blinded with creeper, its red sandstone turning to coral in the sun.

The forgotten country, this part of the Marches had been called. A country largely ignored by the rest of the world, apart from a trickle of tourists on their way to somewhere else, and the odd company rep who had taken the wrong turning, in a place with need for few road signs. A valley lost among its ancient wooded hillsides and winding high-banked lanes, on a road to nowhere in particular.

Phineas had arrived there by accident, after taking a wrong turning himself, when on a road to nowhere in particular. Falling into the valley, as he came to see it, like Alice, and five years later was still there.

He thought occasionally, in a vague sort of way, about moving on, getting back to what he vaguely thought of as the real world. But there never seemed to be any particular hurry to do so.

And that of course was the trouble with the river, as he’d had occasion to point out before, to himself and to others, sparing no one. Whether boating up and down it, or simply sitting on it, there never seemed to be any particular hurry to do anything.

Well, now he had the feeling that all that was about to change. That now, with the General no longer at the wheel, they stood exposed to more unsettled weather. That the real world, which had always been over there somewhere, beyond the blue hills, was perhaps about to come to them.

He whistled for Sikes, busy putting up a few panicking pheasants and the smell of wild garlic as he blundered through the undergrowth after the scent of fox or badger.

They had walked this wood together in all the seasons. In autumn, when it ran like a damp fire through the trees, and in weather that had shrivelled Sikes’s testicles as he padded warily through undergrowth crackling with ice or got himself buried in snowdrifts along the rides. The winter bareness like a ruin now in early summer, overgrown with new growth, letting in the sun and with the sound of birdsong up under its roof.

The sunlight lay among the drifts of bluebells and red campion, and reached with long slender fingers deep into the wood, where the new grass and ferns were tender in the shade between trees. And above him, high in the green and golden heart of an oak, a blackcap opened in sudden song. The sweet, poignantly brief notes flung, carelessly, on the morning air like a handful of bright coin. 

Author's Note

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