The Limits of Enchantment Read online

  ‘That’s no good, as I can’t read. Give it to the girl.’

  I took the card. ‘“Dr Montague Butts,”’ I read aloud. ‘“Trinity College, University of Cambridge.”’

  ‘Means nothing to me,’ Mammy said. But I saw her cross her legs at the ankle and knew she was lying.

  Bennett blushed. ‘Indeed? But he assured me he’d met you on at least one occasion, you see. That he’d been here to this very cottage. How irregular!’ I made to return the card but he pushed it into my hand, so when his back was turned I threw it on the fire, where it flared in an instant.

  I poured tea and handed a cup to the visitor. Though I gave him a chipped cup.

  ‘I’d better explain myself then,’ Bennett said.

  ‘You’d better,’ Mammy said.

  Bennett held his cane and his hat in one hand as he leaned forward and described how Butts and himself were folklorists. More of a hobby than their true academic discipline, he explained, but one about which they were assiduous. That was his word: assiduous. He and Butts went about the country collecting what he called oral tradition and writing it down. He was looking, he said, for folk songs, folk tales, superstitions, hedgerow medicine … anything that might be of interest.

  Mammy stroked her chin. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m not much of a singer myself. Let me think.’

  Sometimes I marvelled at Mammy. I had to bite my lip.

  ‘No,’ Mammy said at last. ‘No, I’ve never been a great one for singing. Fern here might be better. She can hold a tune. Not that I have much time for these pop tunes and long-haired beatniks.’

  ‘Pop tunes are precisely what we don’t want,’ Bennett said, ‘and as a former army chap you’ll see I prefer a short-back-and-sides.’

  ‘Away you go,’ Mammy said to me.

  So I got to my feet and gave him ‘The Coventry Ploughboy’, and treated him to a version that had thirty-two verses and a two-line refrain. Throughout the rendition Bennett tapped his foot mildly, pretended to look enchanted beyond all understanding by my singing, and almost prevented his smile from locking, but didn’t quite. When I was done he put his hat and cane on the floor and offered genteel applause.

  ‘She’s got plenty like that,’ Mammy said. ‘And she’s bookish. That girl has read a hundred books. More than a hundred.’

  ‘Splendid,’ Bennett said. He took a notebook from his pocket and withdrew a tiny pencil from inside its spine. ‘And would you have anything in the way of hedgerow medicines?’

  ‘Give Mr Bennett a bottle o’ that elderberry wine, Fern. Go on, fetch it out of the pantry.’

  ‘That’s too generous Mrs Cullen, I couldn’t possibly accept it.’

  ‘No, you shall have it. And you shall call me Mammy as everyone else does round here. Go on, you call me Mammy. Go on now!’

  I passed him a bottle of cloudy elderberry wine. It was good, but we had too much of the stuff.

  ‘Why if you insist, Mammy. There’s a great modern interest, you see, in hedgerow medicine.’

  ‘That’s more like it. Hedgerow medicine? Let me see. I do know this elderberry wine is very good for keeping you regular. Do you have any problems not being regular?’

  ‘No, I don’t say I—’

  ‘Or that Mr Butts at Cambridge? Is he regular?’

  ‘Well I can’t speak for—’

  ‘Now I’ve never rubbed my back agin a college wall like you have done, but you take a tot o’ my elderberry each evening and you shall be regular. And that friend of yours, Mr Butts, he shall be regular too.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be very pleased.’

  ‘Write it down in your little book, then.’

  ‘Mrs Cullen?’

  I had to turn away and stuff a corner of my apron in my mouth while he wasn’t looking.

  ‘Make a note. Hedgerow medicine. Write down ‘‘Elderberry Wine. One tot per evening keeps your bowels regular.’’ ’

  Bennett made a note. Then he closed his book and leaned forward confidentially. ‘Mrs Cullen … Mammy … can we speak more generally, about hedgerow medicine?’

  But Mammy was already hauling herself out of her chair. She screwed up her face and pushed the heels of her hands into the small of her back. ‘I’ve to lie down now. It’s the arthritis, it gives me such pains if I sit a while. Fern, you look after our visitor, now.’ Mammy parted the curtain across the staircase at the back of the room and hauled her bulk up the creaking wooden steps.

  Bennett looked sadly in my direction. ‘I don’t suppose you have anything to tell me about hedgerow medicine?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I know another tune you may enjoy.’ And I got to my feet again and parted my lips in song.

  3

  I heard voices on the radio – American voices – talking about the first docking in orbit by a spaceship called Gemini 8. The astronauts would come back safely, they said, and the Russians were actually going to land a ship on the lunar surface. The speaker claimed that a man would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. Three years to go. It fascinated me that they could do these things. Mammy observed me listening hard, and opened her mouth to comment. She said all these things they were firing off into space were changing the weather, and for the worse.

  But before she could say it again she turned her good ear towards the window. ‘Hark! Was that the gate? Go and look, Fern.’

  Mammy thought she’d heard the gate hinge squeaking, but when I went to the window to look out there was nobody there. I thought perhaps she was expecting the postman, though you would just as likely see an astronaut coming up our path unless it was to deliver a bill. Mammy was anxious because money was short. She spoke of big trouble unless we had a good summer.

  Mammy garnered from various sources; too many she said, always bemoaning the fact that unlike other folk we didn’t have one steady source of income. The midwifery was irregular and Mammy was dependent on payment at the discretion of the women we attended. There was no fixed fee, nor could there be: Mammy didn’t have a certificate.

  There was a shadow at the back of her practice that had passed up all chance of proper qualification. Anyway the National Health Service offered a free and localised service to all pregnant mothers. The days of the jobbing midwife were long over and Mammy knew that only her strong local reputation kept her in any of that work at all. It was a tragedy because she loved it, and in that field she had no peer. She had the touch. She had the know. She just wasn’t allowed to use it enough.

  We kept scrawny chickens in the back yard, selling eggs and the occasional fowl for little more than it cost to feed. We bottled jams from the fruit of our tiny orchard and the berries of the heath. We stunk out the house making florescences and we sold those; and our fingers were swollen and numbed on needles when we took in sewing. We baked, for weddings and parties and the like, though for some reason we were being asked less and less. Sometimes we took in washing, though Mammy hated that more than anything. And even though our outgoings were parsimonious in the extreme, it was all never enough.

  The reason Mammy had been struck off the register was because sometimes she would do work for girls who were at the end of their tether. That was Mammy. Though she never let anyone go without a lecture, she never said no to a desperate girl.

  Meanwhile there was some gossip Mammy had gleaned concerning the hippies, or beatniks as Mammy persisted in calling them, who had moved into the tumbledown Croker’s Farm. Some of these hippies we’d already encountered fixing their van by the side of the road.

  No one in the village was much impressed by them. They didn’t work and by all accounts they were a bunch of soap-dodgers. But they couldn’t be moved because the property had been inherited by one amongst their number. The Stokes estate (which also owned our cottage, and Mammy felt that Lord Stokes – or his Estate Manager – was always looking for small excuses to turn us out) had tried to acquire the land. But the new owner had held out, and invited his fellow soap-dodgers to stay at the farm with him.
/>
  When Mammy had finished treating me to her views on beatniks and other scourges on the countryside, our conversation turned to whether we might help one Jane Louth. Before we had decided what to do, I left the table and nipped across the yard to the outhouse. I opened the toilet door and what I saw there made me scream. I slammed the door shut.

  Mammy came running out with her stick to see what the commotion was.

  ‘You know those hippies you was just talking about?’ I said.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘One of ’em is in our shit-house.’

  Mammy faltered, her huge bosom heaving again. Then she stepped forward and nudged open the outhouse door with her stick, as if there were a fat rat or snake inside. Sure enough, the young man we’d seen with the broken-down van was perched on the toilet seat. His trousers were round his ankles and he wore dark glasses that made him look like an insect, though I recognised him from his broken nose.

  So this was our second male visitor, though of course he wasn’t as formal as that chap from Cambridge University. ‘What you doing in there?’ Mammy said, still holding the door ajar with her stick.

  He smacked his lips, once. ‘I’ll give you three guesses,’ said the hippie, ‘and if you can’t come up with the answer between you, then you’re both thick.’

  ‘I’ll call the police on you, I will.’

  ‘What you gonna tell ’em? I stole a bucket of shit?’

  He did look a sight in his sunglasses, debagged, pale as a ghost and his hair stuck to his face. He was sweating heavily.

  ‘You’ve no right,’ Mammy said. ‘Going in places as don’t belong to you.’

  Now he took his dark glasses off and looked Mammy in the eye. ‘I’d love to debate this. Any chance I can finish my business first?’

  Mammy let the door swing shut. We stood off a bit and waited. After a few minutes the man came out. ‘How do you flush it?’

  ‘You fill the bucket from the pump,’ Mammy said. ‘Don’t you know anything at all?’

  ‘You’re living in the Dark Age.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you’re coming all superior you can shit in the street.’

  He cast me a look as old as time. Sweat trickling from his brow, he swung the bucket under the pump and cranked the handle. Then he took the bucket back inside the outhouse and flushed the toilet. He let the empty bucket clang on the cobbled yard. ‘I’m living at Croker’s Farm.’

  ‘I know.’ Mammy folded her arms. She was suddenly enjoying this.

  ‘We all got sick. I was walking by your house and I was caught short. I should have asked but I was in a hurry.’

  ‘He’s sweating, Mammy,’ I said.

  ‘I can see that. Have you been drinking from the spring up there?’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘It’s contaminated by old slurry. You should have asked someone about it.’

  ‘Can it be put right?’

  ‘Not unless you dig a big trench to take off the slurry and let the spring clear. In the meantime you shall have to fetch and carry your water, just as we always used to.’

  The man sniffed. ‘Can we use your pump then? To fetch water?’

  Mammy stuck out a judicious bottom lip. ‘You can. Long as you understand it ain’t right to barge into no one’s home unasked.’

  He took out his tobacco and began rolling a cigarette and he did that same thing of looking at me while he licked the gummed paper. ‘Cool.’

  Mammy blinked. I don’t think anyone had ever cooled her before. ‘Fern, go and get him some o’ that riot. You planning to stay up there at Croker’s?’

  ‘I own it. Well, we all do. We’re going to farm it.’

  ‘Ha! You’ve got your work cut out,’ Mammy said.

  When I returned to give him a bag with a mixture of dried herbs, he looked at it a bit suspicious. ‘Just make a tea o’ that. Don’t let it stew too long. It’s meadowsweet and sage and other things if anyone wants to know. It’ll stiffen your guts for you.’

  The man opened the bag and took a deep sniff of the contents. ‘That’s so far out. By the way I’m Chas. Maybe we can be friends.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mammy said. ‘Be on your way.’

  Chas was taken aback by Mammy’s bluntness. He shook his head slightly, turned to walk away and held a hand trailing through the air in a farewell gesture.

  ‘Beatniks,’ Mammy said after he’d gone. ‘Can’t be doing with them.’ I wondered what there was in her history to give her any kind of opinion about beatniks. Mammy did have history. She was known in the town and in the villages. They even sent clever fools out from the universities to speak with her, though for what good it did them. It was just that Mammy didn’t want her history known.

  Jealously guarding all the details, she seemed to regard speaking of her personal experiences as a dangerous act. ‘Information is power,’ she would often say. Not that I was a blabbermouth, if she told me any of it. I’d learned caution from the old woman, and glad of it I was, too. But I’d had to piece together what little I knew about Mammy’s past from stories told by others, from distant family members, from hearsay, from rumour; and from the rare moments when Mammy might slip into unexpected revelation. Mammy was the apostle of the Don’t Tell, preaching the gospel of the Say Nothing.

  It was like a passion trapped in the heart, all this secrecy. All this resistance to letting it spill. But Mammy had taught me that just like opening your legs, opening your mouth would get you into trouble one day. Whatever these beatniks or hippies were, they triggered some kind of sympathy for them in Mammy. This in turn released pictures in my own mind, images that were a close neighbour to imagination but with a different quality. They formed out of the wrinkle I had heard in Mammy’s voice. Those wrinkles shook themselves out into an alphabet, a language of guesswork and insight. Not an exact science, but arriving with a jolt of confirmation, linking, the way coal trucks shunt up against each other on the railway sidings. A smack of truth. So clear that Mammy saw how it worked for me, too; which accounted for her momentary nastiness, because she couldn’t stop it from being seen. After a lifetime of concealing, Mammy knew that in me she’d adopted a child who could sometimes shred the curtain.

  After all, what would it matter if Mammy let go of a few details? If she said this or that happened, what would it matter, and isn’t that how a young girl should learn, by being told by one who knows? And of course I wanted to know everything, warts and all and warts on the warts. Because it seems to me that some of the best fun in this world is in hearing a story and telling a story in turn; a whisper, a gossip, a tattle, a rumour, a breaking of news, the turning of a tale. Mammy was a tightwad, a skinflint, a miser with all the detail that gloried the garden. I resented it. I was determined not to grow up so defensive and wizened and dried up, but I had to fight against my training as it were.

  ‘Are we to walk all the way into town together with that frown on your face?’ Mammy said to me. ‘Knock that devil off your shoulder.’

  We each carried a hated basket of completed sewing. It was all I could do to stop malice being stitched in the cotton at three shillings an hour. ‘You’re the one who turned the morning sour,’ I retorted. ‘Being sharp when you sent that chap away this morning.’

  Mammy cracked a smile at that, and took up her walking stick. ‘Liked the look of him, did you? That beatnik?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Come on my little vixen,’ Mammy said more tenderly, ‘let’s get along before the day is vanished.’

  To change the subject, or maybe to make a point, Mammy told me she had recently been approached in the market place at Market Harborough by Jane Louth, the newsagent’s daughter. ‘How far gone is she?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Says she’s only missed her first bleed, but she’s sick and she knows she’s knocked up all right.’

  ‘Makes it easier. You going to help her?’

  ‘Told her what I always tells ’em.’

  ‘Ask the mistress?
’

  ‘Ask the mistress. Though I don’t know why I bother. I seen it in her eye, and she’ll be back tomorrow. And I shall say, well did you ask the mistress, Jane Louth? Oh yes Mammy, she’ll say, I asked her ever so. And how did the mistress appear to you, Jane Louth? Eh, what’s that Mammy? And how did she appear when you asked her? Well she were just there, Mammy, when I asked her. Well was she on her back, or full o’ water, or fighting west or east, or swollen belly? Oh Mammy I don’t know of these things. And I shall say Jane Louth, you didn’t even look at the mistress, did you?’

  ‘But you’ll still help her.’

  ‘Dare say I shall. But I despair when it’s done without thought. I shall help any girl, but not without thought.’

  ‘Mammy, if they don’t come to you they go down to Leamington, to see that dwarf with his knitting needles.’

  Mammy shuddered, and clicked her tongue against her teeth. And I wished I hadn’t said it.

  4

  The following day I heard a knock on the door from a timid hand. Jane Louth wore a pink miniskirt, tan-coloured nylons and white patent-leather boots up to her knees. I know these girls think I’m a frump but I couldn’t help shaking my head. Her concession to stealth had been to pull a fake-ermine white hood up around her ears. She’d made herself as well-camouflaged as a pink rabbit.

  Well sometimes I’m glad I’m a frump, if that’s what I am. I asked her in. Jane had a head of barley-coloured hair and only a slightly pug nose. That and a hunched manner, by which she folded her arms and pressed her knees together when sitting, locking her ankles one around the other. What distracted me most was a set of huge fake eyelashes inexpertly glued to her eyelids. I mean, why wear those furry beasts when going to see another woman about a thing like this? I don’t understand my own sex.

  Though she was my elder by a year, I knew that Jane was afraid of me. After I’d told her that Mammy would be back within the hour, she settled to a cup of tea, glancing around at the herb bunches pinned to the rafters, and through the open curtain of the pantry, with all its jars and bottles and pots.