ONE
‘He’s a bow maker. His name’s Willoughby,’ said Harold Newcombe.
Mavis Newcombe closed her book. ‘Bows?’ He doesn’t really look the type.’
‘What should he look like?’
‘Oh, I’d expect sort of bigger and stronger, more like our John.’ After a moment’s thought, ‘he looks more like a book keeper.’
‘Well, he’s not.’
‘Well, what’s he doing here?’
‘Anyone can come here, can’t they? Does someone have to be born in Northumberland to live here now? What about Giovanni – should he go back to Italy? How should I know why here’s here? Could be anything. Could be lost.’ Harold attempted unsuccessfully to plump up his pillow but given that it was aged kapok, it failed to respond. He slumped.
‘Of course, he can be here but it’s of natural human interest why he’s come here, though I’m sure I’m not surprised that you don’t know. Is he alone? Where in particular did he come from and why has he chosen our village?’ When there was no reply to these most pertinent questions, she continued, ‘You know none of these things but only his name and that he makes bows. Well, that’s something I suppose, but that’s why we have newspapers, Harold. If I relied on you for news I’d be simply starving.’
‘I’m turning out the light,’ her husband replied, and did so.
The following day, Mavis confided to Agnes and Hugh Popplewell at the greengrocer’s that their new neighbour in Walnut Cottage, made bows. His name she said, with grave emphasis, was Charles Willow. Agnes mentioned to Dr Morton Beavis, when she took her daughter Jill to have her ear checked, that the new tenant of Walnut Cottage was an archer. The doctor was interested, less because the new resident of the cottage was a potential patient but more because he owned a bow himself. He made a mental note to call by to introduce himself. No-one else in the village was interested in archery.
John Pike, the barman at The Whistling Duck, informed Paul Winstone, the clerk in the Post Office that there was a distinguished new person who made bows, moving into Walnut Cottage; who in turn remarked on the same to Jack Bates, the local auto mechanic. When Jack got home after closing his shop his wife, Jessica was preparing dinner. She paused from slicing beef for a casserole to wash her hands and to give her husband a hug. Jack kissed her cheek and said he’d sold two complete sets of tyres today, which was darn good. As he took up the newspaper and dropped into his chair at the dining table he also mentioned that there was someone moving into Walnut Cottage. ‘Willow…an archer. A famous archer, says Winstone, though I’ve never heard of him.’ Jack turned to the sports pages.
Jessica laughed, ‘You’ve never heard of anyone outside of football! He’s probably world famous!’
‘Well if he is, what’s he doing here? Who’s he going to sell his bows to? Where’s the market?’ Jack turned the page, ‘hard to see how you could make a living making bows here.’
‘Perhaps he’s a custom bow maker,’ she replied, tossing the meat into a hot buttered pan. When she received no response from her husband who was now engrossed in reading she continued, ‘perhaps he’s a competitive archer who just makes bows on request. What do you call that? I should know.’ She stirred the meat whilst she sliced vegetables and she thought it was a good thing that Walnut Cottage had a tenant again. Perhaps he’d bought the cottage? But whether, it was always good when someone new came. The village was so small and that was lovely of course because it was peaceful and it was very pretty. She loved the age of it. Hundreds of years old but it had never grown and she hoped it never would but on the other hand, the arrival or departure of just a few people could mean the life or death of a small country community. She turned to glance at Jack, ‘A new customer for you, Jack.’ He grunted but didn’t look up and she wondered whether the new man had brought a family, which would be even better. Perhaps he would be sending a child or two to her school. There was certainly room in a school that had a roll of seventeen! A few more children would be nice to teach but it would also help protect the school from being closed for ‘sound economic reasons’ and the children being sent to the nearby town.
Later, as they sat in companionable silence in their small sitting room and Jessica played Mozart on her gramophone but quietly so as not to disturb her husband, she took up a book.
‘Shall I read?’
Jack was pleased but stared at the mantle and frowned. He wasn’t at all sure about this book but he wouldn’t bail out, just as he hadn’t bailed out of ‘Eyeless in Gaza.’ He would listen to anything she read because he enjoyed listening to her and he respected whatever she selected from the library. The books he read himself were ‘Run Silent Run Deep,’ and the ‘Colditz Story.’ He especially liked stories about the War and even though he’d grown up thinking of the Germans only as The Enemy, among his favourite stories were those about Rommel or the U-Boats. He admired Guderian and the Panzers. He liked stories that were straightforward and as it was with many men his age, who had narrowly missed by dint of age from being able to serve, he wished he’d been there. But this book was different and it made him feel a little uncertain. It was interesting and it was about the War and yet somehow it wasn’t. It was about other things and it seemed crazy and yet in other ways it was not.
‘Ok,’ he said. He recalled the recent evening when she’d read the passage where Corporal Snark had admitted to putting laundry soap in the potatoes, and he’d felt compelled to remark, ‘I should choose the war stories,’ because this wasn’t a great fit with the world as he understood it. It was as though he’d opened the pantry door and found a toad squatting.
Jess told him it was described as a famous story. The librarian had especially recommended it.
‘Catch-22.’ It’s an odd name, isn’t it?’ he observed, ‘most stories have names you can understand.’ Still, he pondered Yossarian carefully, who clearly wasn’t even slightly like the Norwegian commando Jan Baalsrud and he was puzzled, because on the one hand he could easily understand and indeed admired how Baalsrud had cut off his own toes to stop gangrene, on the other it niggled at him that Yossarian’s preoccupation with escaping another mission, which made sense in one way, also diminished Baalsrud’s and even Rommel’s heroism; and though he instinctively rebelled against this notion, somehow this odd story threatened in an unwanted way, his entire understanding of the War.
‘Go on then,’ he said, settling back in his chair, ‘tell me what that Yossarian’s up to.’
She smiled and began to read.
*
The newcomer, who looked less like a bow maker and more like a book keeper, was Charles Willoughby, and he had moved to this quite remote village from London. On this sunny Tuesday morning, he stood on the grass verge outside Walnut Cottage and with some apprehension, he directed the truck driver and his assistant who were struggling to unload the heavy lathe that was to be installed in the workshop at the rear of the cottage.
It was just before noon, the unloading of all his worldly possessions was nearly complete and his spirits were beginning to rise with the temperature. It was early spring and so far, everything was better than he had anticipated. The cottage was pretty and clean and his workshop sat nicely to a view of the nearby hill. It wasn’t a high hill but it was enticing. Covered in bracken and wiry grass he estimated it wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to reach the brow. What lay beyond? The thought gave him considerable pleasure. He knew that the village, nestled here at the foot of the hill was the only habitation when one looked north, for many miles. Beyond the hill lay the wilds or moors. Too poor for farming they’d been largely left to look after themselves or to provide good habitat for the seasonal hunting of Red Grouse.
For now though, he concentrated on the task at hand, which was overseeing the moving of his workshop tools and equipment and his precious timber and other materials into the workshop. He had already designed the lay-out, so it was a simple matter of having each item placed in its assigned place. The racks on the wall had been installed by the landlord as requested so the bundles of precious Pernambuco sticks and Maplewood could immediately be put up and out of the way. Unlike the workshop in the city that he had just vacated, he placed his workbench so that he could look through the door to the back garden and thence to the hills. Where he had had no interest in a view from his old bench, here he relished the notion of being able to glance at the terrain on which he intended to spend much of his spare time.
The picture of the 19th Century French originator of the modern violin bow, Francoise Xavier Tourte was situated to the left of the door and the Homer Winslow The Fog Warning, to the right of the window. The timber racks were arrayed on the far wall and his metal working bench was to his left. The workshop was detached from and behind the cottage, which faced the lane. The workshop had only the single door and he understood it had at one time been used by a cobbler. Like the cottage, it was solidly constructed from stone and the roof was tiled but unlike the sleek slates on his recent city home – these tiles were heavier and in places heavily encrusted with yellow lichen. On the top, there was a weather vane in the typical form of a cockerel and presently it showed the slight breeze to be coming down the hill from the north. It carried the fresh scent of open country and so was remarkably different from the smells of the city that he now recalled with nostalgia and distaste alike.
A low stone wall faced the lane, about waist-high with a wooden gate painted dark green. The gate led up a narrow path formed from old moss-speckled bricks to a covered porch and a green door of the same colour as the gate. Both appeared to be freshly painted. There was a window on either side of the door with the same dark green joinery. A jasmine climbed the wall on the left and partially obscured the window, which was the one that provided daylight into his bedroom. Across the narrow hallway another door opened into a small sitting room with a fireplace facing the window. Down the hall on the left the bathroom was to be found and opposite, another bedroom so small it could barely accommodate a child. Charles decided to use this for storage and so it became the receptacle for boxes of books, several pairs of shoes, a wooden tennis racket, a vacuum cleaner and the tattered head of a stag with one ear.
At the rear of the cottage was the kitchen, as large as the sitting room it had a coal-fired range of green and yellow enamel that had not been used for many years and an electric range stood alongside an aged wooden bench into which was sunk a steel sink. The kitchen table was a perfect square and had four high-backed chairs, all of dark oak. From a window above the sink, the back garden and the workshop could be seen. Immediately outside the workshop was a small lawn that had recently been reduced by a long overdue cutting, to short bristles and Charles noted the wooden planks in rectangular form, some three yards wide and five long that contained what might be a useful vegetable patch but which at present was host to a munificence of weeds.
The stone wall that bounded the front of the property continued down the boundary that faced the hill and a Privet hedge separated the workshop from the cottage occupied by the retired couple, Harold and Mavis Newcombe. On the Newcombe side the hedge was neatly trimmed at head height but on the other, it was unkempt with numerous branches pushing against the wall of the workshop. Charles was pleased that he had only one neighbour, rendered invisible by the hedge. From the lane and around the other boundaries there lay open fields and as he paused to wait for the movers to bring in another load, he listened to the skylarks singing high above and sighed. He wasn’t yet sure how he would acclimate in such a place but at this moment and perhaps for the first time since he had decided to move, he felt he may have made a good decision. If so, he considered, this was possibly the first in many months. Indeed, the first since that fateful exchange with the odious Henshaw.
The two had been sitting on the garden seat outside Charles’s workshop in the early evening as they often did, sharing a rosé. Then Henshaw, staring at the yellow rose that climbed over the small pergola above the goldfish pond, had said apropos of nothing, ‘What do you love most in all the world?’
Without hesitation and not a great deal of forethought, Charles had replied, ‘music.’
‘Not Frances?’
‘Of course, Frances,’ re-joined Charles with a hint of annoyance and even now, the mere recollection of this apparently innocent small talk caused him to flush.
‘Over here,’ he directed, ‘please be careful with that!’ He raised a hand in consternation as the band saw was inadvertently bumped against the doorjamb. It would be a relief when it was all over. Emptying the old workshop had been stressful, as had been the packing of his personal belongings and the few pieces of furniture he could reasonably take – the chair he’d bought in an auction in Kensington, a wooden chest and the wardrobe he’d owned even before he met Frances. He had added a few other items such as a short leather sofa, an additional easy chair and a small sideboard.
Charles Willoughby, bow maker and self-sufficient man; divested of so many of the trappings of his old life, including now his wife and erstwhile close friend, Toby Henshaw, faced optimistically towards the north and looked to explore. Done with his regular walks on the Common that was little more than a suburban park when all was said and by comparison with the grand countryside that began on the other side of his stone wall, a mere playground for children.
How will it affect your business, asked his accountant, way out there? What about your clients? Your income may suffer. Charles understood this was good advice and he contacted several clients to ask their opinion. Most were delighted. There was a country pub with accommodation? It would be a perfect excuse to get away. My income may reduce he told his accountant but my overheads will be lower. My material needs are slight – I never buy clothing, at which they had both laughed. I believe, said the accountant, I’ve been there. I remember going there with Helen years ago, and we stayed the night. It’s a lovely spot. You won’t get lonely? I don’t know, Charles replied, perhaps I’ll come running back next month but somehow, I think it will suit me well. I’m not really a social animal. I’ll be fine, he concluded.
Even so, every night since he had wondered and he continued to wonder even as he watched the transfer of his belongings from the small truck into the cottage. Could they not have found a way?
‘I hope it works out for you Charles. You know I really want it to.’ Frances had stood uncertainly in the doorway of his city workshop attached to their elegant two-story home but she wouldn’t come closer. The space between them might have been a bed of hot coals.
‘Thank you,’ said Charles stiffly. What else was there to say? And he had looked down at his work and waited until she turned and left. Then he wept as he had wept more times than he might have thought possible. Soundlessly but blinded by the tears running down his cheeks and he had risen to blow his nose and stare, blinking as his vision returned, at Winslow’s halibut fisherman. A man alone on the sea with his fish, rowing desperately for the distant mother ship but the sea was rising and the clouds were thickening and it was more than evident that the fisherman’s struggle might be for nought. A man alone on the sea who might die alone, unseen and unheard; a man who would be remembered fondly by a wife and children and a few mates and all would wonder about his last moments on this earth; and they would think about the storm and how the sea lifted ominously and changed from green to slate grey and the wind rose until it was as loud as the waves and they would know how the man would be unable at last to keep the bow into the wind and sea and finally, exhausted he would let go the oars; and a larger wave would swing the bow around so violently he had to seize onto the gunwales with all of his remaining strength not to be thrown over the side; and the first water from the breaking waves would sluice into his boat and the big halibut would slide about his legs with its dead eye looking. Long after he had lost sight of the big boat with its crew scanning anxiously and with increasing fear the white-capped sea, he would lie, wedged against the thwarts and he would pray fervently; and he would pray that he might not drown; and in the end he would pray that his wife and family would be looked after when he was gone; and at last in the blink of an eye the boat would be hurled upside down and the fisherman and the halibut would be together in the deep sea and both would soon be dead. A man
