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The Cuckoos
of Batch Magna
by
Peter Maughan
A Beginning
In his bedroom in
Batch Hall, the old squire, General Sir Humphrey Myles Pinkerton Strange,
lay propped up on his pillows, his breath struggling with the illness
in his chest. On the bedside cabinet sat his copies of Surtees and Beckford,
and the stud books he'd asked his housekeeper to bring up, pedigrees of
hunters and hounds going back to his great-grandfather's day.
As master of the Batch Valley Chase, in
his old yellow hunting waistcoat, and with a threadbare shine on his ancient
silk topper, the General had taken his last field through a covert four
years before, sitting his hunter cavalry style as always, straight as
a young dragoon. But he had to be helped onto his mount to do it, bundled
onto it, an old knight, stuffed with straw, and had seen the charity then,
and the impatience, in people's eyes. He never hunted again after that,
and had felt age like a wound ever since.
A wound he suspected that, this time, he
would not be getting up from. And serve you damn well right, he told himself.
His housekeeper said it would be the death
of him. Standing about in a November drizzle after the Cenotaph service
last year with all the other silly old fools, gossiping over the hipflasks
as if in the mess, his umbrella furled still and the breast of his Gieves
overcoat heavy with medals. Medals which went back to the pounded mud
of Passchendaele, and a young moustachioed captain of the Cavalry of the
Line eager to get there before Christmas, before it was all over.
When his father, Sir Cosmo Strange, the
man who brought the paddle steamers to the village, died, the villagers
and tenant farmers, and the heads of each estate department, including
the senior master of the Cluny Steamboat Company, a half-pay Royal Navy
captain from Cardiff, had followed his coffin, and the three shops the
village had then had closed for the day. And soon it would be his turn.
And who was there now, to follow him?
The General stroked his old gundog, Snipe,
asleep next to him on the bed. Stone memorials to all his dogs down the
years stood under the horse chestnuts on the lawns. Annie and Owain would
look after Snipe, he had no worries there. It was the estate, or what
was left of it, that concerned him now.
It was not
how he had wanted it to be, how it should be. But he had outlived his
three sons, losing one in the Second World War, another to a hunting accident
in the Fifties, and the youngest at sixty, after a stroke. And his siblings
and his wife had also died, had also gone before him.
He had two daughters alive still, and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren, boys among them, but the estate was entailed,
and his will had to follow the rule of descent. That line, in this case,
stopping at a great-nephew, someone he had never met. A stranger soon
to be among them, soon to take what was left.
The General lay back on the pillows, feeling
suddenly weary of it. An old man, left behind in a house full of the past.
Outside the room the lost lands, and the cries of peacocks walking the
ruined walls of the gardens. And a world that was all in his head now,
the memories of it all that was left.
Christmases when it always seemed to be
snowing, home from school in the holidays with his brothers, piled in
the back of the covered game cart from Church Myddle station. The carols
around the big outside tree, and liveried carriages and motorcars lining
the drive, when the house was lit like a cake and waltzes were played,
and the faces, all seen again, all danced with again, of the girls he
fell in love with each year at the party in the servants' hall.
Out on a winter river with his first gun,
a Wesley Richards 28-bore he almost slept with, for wigeon and teal and
snipe, and the Boxing Day coot shoot. And cock pheasants on January mornings
iron with frost, gloving his hands with the warm wings of the birds between
drives, when the fires of the stops burnt like polished copper through
the trees.
And helping with the hay in summer, the
carts of Home Farm piled high with it. Memories of dust and the heated
scent of sweet vernal grass, and the bite of cider cooled in a jar.
He saw his wife again as if for the first
time, across a dance floor in the London season, in a white presentation
dress and Prince of Wales feathers. And on her favourite bay, clattering
out of the stable yard in wide skirts and a bowler hat and veil. He rode
again over the hunting fields, and heard the hounds opening on a good
scenting morning, and a horn calling. And remembered walking the root
fields on September afternoons with his headkeeper, and his sons when
they were young, out after a few early partridges or pheasant along the
hedgerows, and teaching the boys to spin for pike.
And memories of his own father, happy as
a boy himself among the hissing steam and coal dust, firing up a boiler
on one of the paddle steamers, or pacing the landing stage, fob watch
in hand, checking and rechecking the time with mysterious urgency. And
opening up the steamwhistle full throttle, as if to alert shipping, as
they puffed importantly upriver, piling up smoke and stampeding sheep
and cattle along the grazing meadows.
The Cluny Steamboat Company. Mad, all quite
mad. And all such fun.
The day trips to Water Lacy and back, the
Two Shilling Dips, as they were called, the paddlers crowded with villagers
and farmworkers in their Sunday best, with bottles of beer and pop, and
sandwiches cut for the trip, churning the water white around Snails Eye
Island. And the Moonlight Excursions, when courting couples found the
shadows on deck and coloured lanterns lit the murmuring, soft summer darknesses.
And in the last war, after the company had bankrupted itself, local men
rode their decks in the uniform of the Home Guard, patrolling the river
approaches, ready to stand between Batch Magna and the Nazi jackboot.
And now another enemy perhaps waited. And
this time one the village could do nothing about.
A brittle winter sun lit the leaded windows
of the room, the curtains open on a view of the hills which sheltered
his valley. The light glowing in the frieze of armorial colours along
the top panes, and warming the centuries, the patina on floorboards of
estate oak.
It had faded from the room by the time
Annie Owen, the General's housekeeper, carrying a tray of afternoon tea,
entered it again. And by then the hand that had been stroking the last
of his dogs, the veins standing blue on it, had been still for some time.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
The rights of Peter Maughan to be identified as the author has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and patents act 1988
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