menu_book Chapter 20

chapter twenty of lift luck on southern roads by tickner edwards this librivox recording is in the public domain the amenities of coal heaving there was quite a string of traffic going my way out of winchester on monday morning standing under the great statue of king alfred that guards the southern approach to the town i let the first two or three vehicles go by as unsuited for my leisurely purpose finally deciding on a coal-cart partly because of its deliberate pace and partly because the driver looked more than ordinarily interesting twenty years experience of amateur vagrancy up and down england has failed altogether to account for one fact about country coal-heavers they are invariably gentlemen it would seem that there is something about coal dealing that refines and humanizes a man

i have only a small acquaintance with those who dig it out of mines and none with those who vend it in the great populated centres but in country districts i have never fallen in with a coal peddler without being morally the better for it and not only are they men of sound social parts very often you will find them possessed of knowledge that can be come by only through close observation and diligent reflection one will tell you the name of every bird in the hedgerow as you journey on by his side another may be deeply versed in weather-lore a coal-heaver who once gave me a lift on a starry night in devonshire told me the names of all the constellations and in his spare time amused himself by drawing horoscopes the winchester coalman made me a seat on his near shaft out of some empty coal sacks which he beat against the wheel until they were fairly clean

he himself rode on the other shaft his long legs dangling almost to the ground and before we had gone half a mile i was so impressed by his intelligence that i ventured to broach this very matter to him his first words put an instant new light on the subject coals said he is heavy stuff and dirty stuff and thirsty ain't the word for it then you sells them to women mostly then you takes em a long way miles into the country and you must sit and think or look about ye for ars together then there's good profit to it a man may keep a better home about him by coal-selling than by most other things if he can stand the life but that's just where tis tain't the coal as makes the man tis the coal that breaks him least ways all but one kind o him many try it but only one sort o man thrives at the work if you've naught but a strong back ye're no good at coal selling

you must ha head and heart as well as body there's the dust and the loneliness once let them drive you to the public house and you're done there's the women again you must be spry and politeful look clean under your dirt ullers ha the right word to each other and the right coal at the right time or trade will go to northen and there's the hardship and long hours out in all weathers and meals no time or any time now where will you find your coal man one here and there and a score may be i allah says as coal-sellers is bishops and prize-fighters spiled there's another thing he went on thoughtfully flicking his whip at the binds of traveller's joy that reached out to us from the hedgerows a coal man here's allah's passin the time o day wi folks come night-time tain't company as he wants but quiet and fireside a home not an inn

them as works alone in the fields gets together o nights over pipe and glass nature drives em to it but the coal-seller thinks o naught then but his own chimney-nook so he looks about him early to marry now when ye were wondering why coalmen are what they are did ye never think of looking at their wives i confessed i never had ah ye'd a learned more'n i could tell ye he said impressively women is wonderful discerning they looks before they leaps tain't the flash young labourin man with fifteen shillings a week as gets the best o em tis the home-lovin man as he's earnin good money there's your coal man all over you see tis a woman question in the main arter all that was my first lift for the day and i decided it should be the last one though the morning was as fine as ever the north-east wind remained so piercingly cold that brisk walking was a constant necessity

at the nearest village i left my coal peddler lustily shouting his wares down the street and pushed on alone i was now in the very heart of hampshire and well satisfied with my lot it was rolling open farm country with rich tracts of fine timber the foliage of the trees still wonderfully green the advance of autumn seemed here not merely arrested but turned back in its course though i had been steadily forging eastward since i had left the devon coast twelve days before there was no appreciable decline in the luxuriance of growth around me and here in hampshire there was something i had missed in the other counties traversed the ruddy warmth of red-brick wall and roof there are of course brick-and-tile buildings everywhere in the land but among southern counties i have seen them nowhere in such profusion as in this stretch of country lying between winchester and the sussex border

easton the first village i struck that day was principally of red brick and avington a few miles farther on lay smouldering in the same beautiful colour i have often thought that in one respect the tiled roof has a great advantage over the thatched roof inasmuch as it allows freer scope for one of nature's principal means of beauty giving from the modern housemaker's point of view the warping and sagging of timber is an unmitigated evil all his carefully wrought straight lines and true rectangles are destroyed his perpendiculars vitiated he cannot understand that a house which is newly built is as yet only like the babe just born after the building must come the growing sun and wind and rain must be allowed to work their will upon it and what a blessed thing the warping of timber really is can only be estimated by a study of these old tiled cottage roofs

one in particular that i chanced upon during that morning's ramble would have whitened the hair of any modern builder the old artificers brought their wood to the old adze green or dry just as the mood beset them and from this house a hundred years of shower and sunshine had banished the last trace of the rectilinear if this slur had ever indeed rested upon it the entire building had been moulded by time into a maze of gentle curves and subsidences in the outset not a timber of its massive frame could have been square or straight nor was there a cube in the brick filling that tallied with its fellows all these had gone the road of picturesque evolution in the same loving comradeship together but it was in the roof that this natural growth out of the original crude rough-and-ready handiwork was chiefly evident if it had been thatched there would have been at most twenty years of this influence visible

a good thatch will stand the score of winters but then it must be renewed and brought back to callow babyhood but a roof of british oak solidly laid together and tiled with the old porous tiles will come through centuries of storm and flood gathering upon it with each year only more grace and beauty looking at this old house it was difficult to escape the conclusion that either the house had shrunk or the roof got larger for the tiles drooped down over odd corners or overhung the windows in an otherwise inexplicable way from gable to gable the roof made a wavering hollow line intensely red against the blue sky some of the vertical beams had curved outward and some inward the horizontal rafters on which the tiles were hung festooned from beam to beam like a dew-laden spider-web and thus the tiles spread downward on the steep roof side in an ever-varying succession of ripples that seemed instinct with a gentle ebb and flow of life

it is not easy to convey a real idea of the beauty of mere shape and pattern that the warping of the timbers had brought to the old roof but to tell of its colour would be frankly beyond the reach of any words or perhaps of any palette november seized the awakening of the mosses and lichens into active growth and life after the long summer drought the sagging winding action of the old beams and rafters had opened thousands of tiny chinks and crevices between the tiles and from each of them some minutely beautiful plant stretched forth tentacles of gold and green modern architects are using the red roof tile everywhere in their building and so far their action is commendable but it is not enough to copy the ancients in this without harking back still farther the art of tile making seems completely lost nowadays the modern roof tile is a hard glassy thing that only blackens under sunlight and the stress of weather it holds no moisture and nothing can ever root in it

this old roof glowing in the autumn sunshine with a myriad soft hues of amber and umber and pearly grey owes its loveliness to the fact that the tiles hard and true burnt as they are still retain their original porous quality the lichen tendrils burrow into them and year by year make a braver show of beauty even slate can support some hardy forms of lichen life but the twentieth century roof tile is hopeless from the beginning nature can prevail against it no more than she can against corrugated iron towards the noon of that day i came down into what seemed to me the most silent deserted place in the world it was a tiny village lying at the bottom of a valley whelmed in shade and the sound of many waters but this incessant trickling near and far only served to intensify the silence that dwelt over it here and there a streak of blue smoke chevvied away on the breeze i saw a dog asleep in a barrel and one child on a doorstep

a solemn elderly child regaling on bread and butter who looked at me in mute appraisement as crusoe might have looked at a passing goat but no other human being was visible and as i wandered down the grass-grown street held by the slumberous quiet of the place its gloom the siren song of its waters there came over me the conviction that this child was indeed the sole representative of his race the eerie notion fixed itself in my mind perhaps he had never looked upon his kind before perhaps he had sat on that doorstep since the day some neglectful stork had dropped him there to munch and wait until he should be remembered and fetched away to somebody's cradle perhaps indeed he expected i had come to do it i turned at that thought and looked back with a sudden apprehension

the child had got to his feet he was toddling towards me holding out his bread-and-butter as though he offered it for passage money into the unknown the wind swept overhead with a derisive shrillness all about me the waters murmured their slow incantation the air of the place seemed to thicken with an imminent purpose against me and still the child came on these queer moments of obsession are very near to folly yet they are seldom the experience of fools you cannot waver belief in an abiding spirit to places if you go much in ancient human haunts and alone and here i felt the solitary little settlement deep in its grey cleft of valley to have got some mysterious and unholy leon upon me i took one more glance at the child stealthily creeping and peering towards me i saw now what i had not seen before a sallow craft the cunning of elfdom in his eyes

i knew him then for more than he seemed a terror of his bread and butter seized upon me i turned and fled up the woodland path towards the far-off blotch of sunlight that marked for me the safe normality of the open road End of chapter 20