A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr Page A

t’claay’s claggy. Yan sabbath t’missus says “Faither, ah’ll nut be gannin ti t’chapel, t’muck’ll be ower me beeat tops.” “Nay,” I says, “thu maunt let a bit o’ muck keeap thee yam, ah’ll hump thi on me back an’ thu m’clag on till we git ower t’wast o’ t’claay …” ’
    Nowadays, I suppose comprehensive schools and the BBC have flattened that splendid twang with their dread stamp. But then, at the end of the horse age, each purveyor of the gospel had no exemplar other than some earlier preacher he had admired. Indeed, it was so with Mr Ellerbeck himself, who had left a village school at fourteen and had become a local preacher in his late teens. Though the mildest, most self-contained of men, once in the pulpit he became his own father who, it appeared, had been a passionately violent and irrational man.
    It’s not strictly true that climbing the pulpit stairs transformed him; he was mild enough when announcing hymns and only mildly extravagant in his tediously supplicatory obeisance at his oriental despot’s skirts. But once launched upon the waves and billows of his sermon, he roared and raved like a madman, now and then bashing down his big fist on the podium so that the water decanter leapt. The while, his wretched wife hung her head in shame and only her twitching fingers revealed suffering.Mercifully, once at ground level again, he came-to like one revived from a convulsive fit and not remembering it.
    Well, after their evening services, it was customary to repair to the station-house’s front-room where there was an American pedal organ, a fantastic confection with parts which glided in and out, parts that could be squeezed and swung, swell stops, mirrors, pillared flower stands, elbow-rests for baritones overcome by emotion, four brass candleholders that could be adjusted to cast advantageous light on both singer and song; and all this topped by a fretted parapet behind which glass and pot heirlooms were safely displayed.
    Anyway, after Sunday evening service, it was open house around this splendid machine and, between bouts of hymn singing, guests were invited to favour the assembly with a solo. In those long-gone days I rather fancied myself as a light baritone and, when my turn came, sang something that had always gone down well in barracks and clubs. It began,
‘There sat one day in quiet
In an alehouse by the Rhine
Three hale and hearty fellows
And quaffed the flowing wine …’
    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.
    â€˜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