Free Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore

bread-and-butter with a pecking magpie—Bassett’s birds were all stuffed. He was the local taxidermist; and he had a strange limitation for although he could skin a bird or an animal both quickly and cleverly—he taught us the trick of it—he was absolutely incapable of stuffing them in a lifelike way. To sit for long among the birds and beasts in Bassett’s back room was to indulge in a palæontologist’s nightmare; those finches, gulls, hawks, kingfishers, jays did not belong to the present, but to some dark and remote past, they were the prototypes, the remote amorphous ancestors of our birds, those badgers, squirrels and stoats had a lizard quality, they belonged to the forests of the Coal Age rather than to our English woodland. They all suffered from the same kind of distortion, as if you looked at them in a concave mirror—for they were all to a ridiculous degree attenuated. They looked as if they had been starved for months and then for weeks painfully extended on a rack. In particular the stoats and weasels, by nature tenuous, at Bassett’s hands became almost eel-like; they were dreadful. And there was a heron with its long thin neck stretched out so that it looked like a pterodactyl.
    Yet Bassett was proud of these creatures of his fantasy. He never tired of showing them off to us. In particular he was proud of a peregrine falcon which he had shot himself. If you have ever seen a peregrine, or any other kind of hawk, you will know that the most striking thing about it is the beauty of its eyes. But the artificial eyes which Bassett had seen fit to insert in his peregrine’s head could not by any stretch of imagination be said to resemblea hawk’s; they might perhaps have looked realistic in a stuffed goose. The effect was too terrible for words. Bassett had a box of “assorted eyes” which he had bought from a dealer; and he pulled them out at random, without respect for the size or nature of the creature he was stuffing. In consequence most of his birds had the appearance of bleary drunkards or squint-eyed lechers.
    But we always enjoyed having tea at his house, although to Mrs. Bassett the parlour must have seemed a Chamber of Horrors indeed. There were fishing-rods everywhere, with hooks dangling down haphazard so that they were likely to catch you as you passed by. A damp fishing-net smelling of waterweed leaned against the table. A bucket of live-bait provided a hazard in the doorway. On the floor lay a basket with half a dozen moribund eels. A side-table was littered with scalpels, scissors, skulls, skins, and cakes of arsenical soap, to say nothing of a stick of cyanide for taking wasps’ nests. (Yet Bassett’s six grubby children all survived.) There were sure to be wasps’ grubs, maggots, and worms in tins, and pike-spinners with more random hooks to catch the unwary.
    And elsewhere, all over the room, on the mantelpiece, on bookshelves, wherever there was space, the frightful creatures of Bassett’s myth extended snake-like necks and stared with glazed and terrible and dissipated eyes. On the hearth two parodies of badgers sat up and begged. In a glass case were squirrels on a tree-trunk, a kind of set piece which one might describe as an extravaganza on the theme of squirrels. Over the fireplace a crested grebe, with outspread wings like a Phoenix, looked backwards from its tortured neck and gaped with open beak at the wall.
The Scholar Fisherman
    Bassett taught us the hard discipline of angling; Mr. Chorlton soon taught us its beauty, when he took us up the river on calm summer evenings and showed us how to throw a fly. He was careful not to suggest to us that this method of fishing wasnecessarily superior to any other, so we grew up without any silly snobbery about floats and worms; instead we took the sensible view that the purpose of fishing is to have fun. We were equally happy, therefore, whether we were catching bleak with