Free The Pritchett Century by V.S. Pritchett Page B

upstairs. We longed to see it, but the girl took us off to the blacksmith’s where we had to stay. More promises were made but we never saw the body. But we were allowed to play in a barn and watch the country people coming to the funeral feast. We avenged ourselves by opening six or seven bales of rag strips which Aunt Lax used for her winter occupation: making rag hearth-rugs. We threw them all over her orchard.
    She was not very vexed. There was a lot of questioning of us afterwards in York and in London about who had come to the funeral, for Aunt Lax was supposed to have added to her wealth by Miss Smith’s death, and everyone was trying to guess if there would be a fourth or whether other relations were on the prowl. She grew to be rather witch-like.
    The moorland life was eventless. Every so often Aunt Lax would dress up in a heavy grey tweed costume, put on her hat and go off to Kirbymoorside Market, sitting by the carrier. It was a state visit. She would go there to buy cloth, or stones of flour and other things for herbins, and to see her lawyer. Once a week a pedlar would come round or a man selling herrings from Whitby and she gossiped with them. She understood boys. She told us of all the local crimes and knew the sites of one or two murders. She sent us down to the mill because a man had murdered his wife there years before. One year when I was nine I came up from London terrified with street tales about Jack the Ripper and I tried to get her to tell me he did not exist or had at any rate died long ago.
    “Nay,” she said. “He’s still alive. He’s been up here. I saw him myself at ‘Utton-le-’Ole last market day.” (None of our Sawdons had “an aitch to their names.”)
    This cured me of my terror of the Ripper: the fears of childhood are solitary and are lasting in the solitariness of cities. But in villages everyone knows everything that goes on, all the horrors real or imaginary; people come back from prison and settle down comfortably again; known rapists drink their beer in the public house in the evenings; everyone knows the thieves. The knowledge melts peacefully into the general novel of village life.
    But one alarming thing occurred when I was five or six, in Appleton. It had the Haworth touch and it showed the dour, dangerous testing humour of the moorland people. We all set out one afternoon in a gig, my grandparents, Aunt Lax and myself, to a farm, a lonely stone place with geese, ducks and chickens fluttering in the yard. A few dark-leafed trees bent by the gales were standing close to it. We had tea in the low ceilinged kitchen and the farmer noticed that I was gazing at a gun which hung over the mantelpiece.
    “T’lad is looking at yon gun of yours, Feyther,” said his wife.
    “Ay,” said the farmer. “Dost know what this is lad?”
    “A gun. It shoots.”
    “Ay. And what does it shoot?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Would ’ee like to see it?”
    “Eeh. He’d be fair capped to touch it,” said my grandmother. The farmer got the gun down and let me touch it, then (helping me, for it was heavy), he let me hold it.
    “Dost know how it works?”
    I murmured.
    The farmer broke the gun, showed me where the cartridges went, closed it, clicked the safety catch and the trigger. He gave it to me again and allowed me to do this. I was amazed.
    “Would ’ee like to see the cartridges?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes please,” said my grandmother.
    “Please,” I said.
    He got a couple of cartridges from a drawer and loaded the gun.
    “There you are. It can shoot now. Hold it.”
    “Ready! Present! Fire!” said my grandfather. “You can shoot a rabbit now.”
    The farmer steadied the gun which swayed in my small hands.
    “Ay,” said the farmer. “Take offt’ safety catch. Now if you pull t’ trigger now it’ll fire.”
    I trembled.
    “Would it kill rabbits?” I asked.
    “Ay,” laughed the farmer. “And people. Come, Mother, come Grandma and Mrs Lax, stand over against the