A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

chalk bound with parish offerings of skimmed milk; up here, slaked-limestone putty damped just enough to stiffen. That’s about what it is.’
    â€˜You’re making fun of me. I’m not utterly stupid you know. An aunt once gave me a paint-box for my birthday: I recall it had a marvellous slab of purple.’ And then that spurt of laughter like a bell.
    â€˜I’m not making fun, Mrs Keach. Ask Mr Dowthwaite at the smithy – he understands having to make-do, flatten this, splay that, till it’s something not listed in the Ironmongers’ Catalogue. My departedcolleague’s lad (at 10 pence a week) would do his best with a slab of flat marble and scrape his knuckles grinding Spaynishe white, Baghdad indigo, Cornish malachite, terre verte. And he would need a tin bowl to break the skimpy eggs of his day: I’m told they were no bigger than a wood pigeon’s. Naturally he’d suck the yolk before stirring colour into the white. And my departed friend would yell down, “Hey you, Idle Jack, some more green. Which green? The cloak-lining green, fathead! The malachite! And look sharp; we’re on piece-work. We have to be off to Beverley first thing Tuesday and God knows what the roads will be like in those Holderness swamps.” ’
    â€˜Poor boy!’
    â€˜Lucky boy! He might have been soaking out on the plough-strips. He might have been having his backside whipped at the abbey school. Anyway, you of all people shouldn’t spare him a ha’porth of sympathy: he used your husband’s altar slab to do his grinding on.’
    â€˜Good gracious! How can you possibly know what the poor fellow did?’
    â€˜Found a tinge of red in an undercut of one of the consecration crosses.’
    That was how we talked. And, after a longer silence than usual, I would know she had gone.
    Before those few weeks of my stay in Oxgodby I hadn’t attended a place of worship since I was a boy. Looking back, I think that I became an unbeliever when I was eighteen, well maybe seventeen, and it can’t have been a momentous decision. My parents weren’t churchgoers but they’d had a church wedding, seen me baptized and, I fancy, believed vaguely in a hereafter. In the season, very early most Sundays, Dad used to go off coarse-fishing. He used to stick his head into my bedroom – ‘Just off to praise my Maker on the river bank: look after your Mum.’
    Well, up there in the North Riding, I was thrown back in at the deep-end, on Sundays shaken into consciousness when Mossop began to toll the bell above me, although I immediately shut my eyes again – the rope slipping up and down through my floor and ceiling made me giddy. And then half-hearing Keach’s eucharistic rites oozing up roundthe baluster. The evenings found me roaring away in the Ellerbeck pew with the Wesleyans because, although I had a standing invitation to have a bit of supper any Sunday at the station-house, I felt conscience-bound to earn my keep by turning up at the chapel. Frankly, I’m not at all sure that, once I got into the swing, if I didn’t enjoy it. Yes, I
enjoyed
it.
    It was a livelier performance than Keach put on. To begin with there was a different preacher each time – clerks, shop-keepers, one even was a yeast-salesman. But mostly they were pretty rough stuff, farmers or their labourers, men who’d left school at twelve or thirteen. Their convictions were firm as a bishop’s but, employing the vernacular in common usage behind Kilburn and Rievaulx, they might have been preaching in a foreign language, certainly in a tongue my southern ancestors had forgotten. Some of their English was so wild that even Kathy at the harmonium and those of the choir whose faces I could see, choked behind their handkerchiefs.
    I remember one old gent extolling his zeal. ‘T’missus and me, yam’s doon a claay laane, a lang claay laane, and roond ooor spot