The Day Thou Gavest

By GMW Wemyss

The beloved Village Tales continue: Four-and-twenty January hours, midnight to midnight, in the Woolfonts; foaling and the imminence of lambing season, births and deaths, plans, projects, and pints down the Boar.

Old friends: the duke (when pried away from TMS and the Test Match coverage), Canon Paddick, Sher Mirza, Teddy and Edmond, Gwen and the Breener (and the twins): and new, in the Downland parishes and on the little farms, go the noiseless tenor of their ways, as the sheep huddle and the beer is brewed and the modern steam locomotives shunt. Peace is upon the land, and the lighted windows of a Wintertide evening promise home and warmth.

Come: spend a day in the Woolfonts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Mar 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311008596

GMW Wemyss

Parliamentary historian, chronicler of Titanic’s sinking and Churchill’s ascent, annotator of Kipling and of Kenneth Grahame: GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the West Country’s beloved essayist; author or co-author of histories of the Narvik Debate, the fall of Chamberlain and the rise of Churchill, of 1937 – that year of portent – and of the UK and US enquiries into the sinking of Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of Kipling’s Mowgli stories and Kenneth Grahame.

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The Day Thou Gavest

GMW Wemyss

Bapton Books

About the Author:

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author of Cross and Poppy: a village tale; of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and of Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside; co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observation; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; '37: the year of portent; and of the forthcoming history, The Crisis: 1914; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

This is the third novel in the Village Tales series.

Mr Wemyss' Twitter account is @GMWWemyss. The Twitter account for Bapton Books is @BaptonEditor. The partners in Bapton Books maintain a Tumbler presence, to be found at baptonbooks.tumblr.com; the Bapton Books website is at www.baptonbooks.co.uk.

Other books by GMW Wemyss

from Bapton Books

baptonbooks.co.uk

Village Tales:

Cross and Poppy (the first volume in the Village Tales series)

Evensong (the second volume)

Bapton Books Annotated Classics (with Markham Shaw Pyle):

The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated

The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults)

Bapton Books History Selections:

The Confidence of the House: May 1940

When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

'37: the year of portent (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Essays:

Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside

The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Freedom, Fascists, Fools, & Frauds: Bapton Books Position Papers and Other Critical Pieces, 2011 – 2014 (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Other fiction:

Crafts and Assaults: Two Uncanny Tales for the Season (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Forthcoming:

Ye Little Hills Like Lambs (the fourth volume in the Village Tales series)

The Crisis: 1914 (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

The Annotated Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson) (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Britain by the Slice (in two volumes):

From Samphire Hoe to Saunton Sands (vol. I)

From Kinnaird Head to Dancing Ledge (vol. II)

Copyright © 2016 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for GMW Wemyss)

All rights reserved

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Contents:

About the Author

Other books by GMW Wemyss

Hora I: The Night Office: Matutinam, Vigiliae, et Nocturni

Hora II: Lauds, the Dawn Prayer: Laudes Matutinae

Hora III: Prime, the Early Morning Prayers: Hora Prima

Hora IV: Terce, Morning Prayer, Mattins in the Church of England: Hora Tertia

Hora V: Sext, the Prayers of Midday: Hora Sexta

Hora VI: None, Mid-afternoon Prayers: Hora Nona

Hora VII: Vespers, Evensong, at the Lighting of the Lamps: Vesperae

Hora VIII: Compline, ad initium noctis, the Night Prayer: Completorium

Author’s Afterword

From the next volume, Ye Little Hills Like Lambs

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Gen. i. 5, being a part of the First Lesson appointed at Mattins for the Sunday called Septuagesima, or the third Sunday before Lent

Hora I: The Night Office: Matutinam, Vigiliae, et Nocturni

Clocks glowed, or blinked, or ticked with hands jerking forwards. The Earth turned upon her axis; the minute changed, from midnight to the first minute of a new day. It wanted yet seven hours and sixteen minutes before dawn should first come to Britain, near Lowestoft, at Ness Point; and the land and circling seas were sunk in cold Winter sleep. Well to the Westwards of that Easternmost point, away West in the hidden heart of Wiltshire, where a few crumbs of snow clung to frost and ice and frozen rain which had sheathed the stubble and the pastures, where dawn should break only at seven-and-twenty minutes after seven, and sunrise should rejoice the day at four minutes past eight of the clock, a full nine minutes after sunrise at Lowestoft Ness, His Grace the duke of Taunton slept peaceably at Wolfdown House, his sleeping Clumbers sharing his apartments, sunk in dreams upon the Axminster. The duke, Charles, although descended of a Stuart bastardy, was a bachelor of upright life, a small and tidy man (if fierce and bristling of eyebrows and moustaches) with an anomalously, an incongruously, large and deep voice; and he was a bachelor of upright life. No bed-partner was thus disturbed by his basso and thunderous snores.

*****

The Woolfonts slept: Woolfont Magna; Woolfont Crucis; Woolfont Abbas which some old maps had called, after the Dissolution and the Restoration, in a belligerently Protestant time, Woolfont Ducis; and the hamlet of Woolfont Parva.

The nearest market towns – by charter, function, prescription, and law, if hardly by size – of Beechbourne and Chickmarsh, slept also.

The small villages and hamlets of the Downland parishes, always a part of the ducal demesne and but newly joined to the Woolfonts parishes in a combined benefice, slept in their fleece-wrapt silence this icy night: a broad chalk country of sheepwalk and curlew and illimitable skies: Somerford Tout Saints and dependant Lamsford; Somerford Mally and its satellite, Somerford Canonicorum or Canons; Cliff Ambries and her small, shy sister Shifford Ombres, cliff and sheep-ford since the days of Merlin and Arthur and Ambrosius Aurelianus, with Combe Woddley, or Waddlycombe in country speech, that ancient source of woad; Chalford Mallet with the Shrunken Mediaeval Village of Hawkesbourne, the hoggets' bourne, in its train; and Harstbourne Fitzwarren beside the harvest bourne, which nourished the willows of Harstbourne Sallis and watered Harstbourne Fratrum, or Friars, which the ancient shepherds, the lay-brethren of the Abbey's farm and flocks, had known.

Beside the Champion Country, North and South, slept the Cheese Country, cheese to the Downlands' chalk, North away beyond Chickmarsh and the Woolheads and Pebbury; and the cornlands and Butter Country of the Vale at the Southwards, centred upon Semelford Malet, Stoke Yarncombe with Yarncombe Mitton, and Wadhay.

At Luineag and Camserney, at Tidnock and Melverley and Clentwood, the other major ducal holdings slept, serene and peaceable. Even in sleepless London, Taunton House, W1, slept; in Bath and in Salisbury, Templecombe House and Malet House slept deeply in perfect peace.

Charles Taunton was regarded by many – by many of his friends as well as by his numerous enemies or detractors – as possessed of sleepless energy or, to those who disliked him, unsleeping malice; yet he slept, and the night was peaceful. The night was peaceful for all that wind and weather might do, and the wintry mix of weather overnight; the night was peaceful for all that the Woolfonts had known fire and flood; the night was peaceful for all that some even of his friends considered that His Grace, when bored, created crises so that he had crises to solve.

All was peace, and sleep.

Except, of course, that it was not, wholly, so; and never wholly is, and can never wholly be so.

*****

Midnight in the countryside is conceived, by country-dwellers as by townees, as a time for sleeping, and the countryside as a place which goes early to bed; it is in large cities that – it is thought – the nights are bright and long, restless and indeed restive.

This is not so; and those who live in the countryside ought best of all to know it is not so.

The land, and life, and the life of the land, go on together. They endure. They abide. And neither Sun nor clock rule their hours or their rhythms.

Men and women are to be clad and fed and housed; and if they are to be housed and fed and clad, other men and women must sacrifice sleep, and rest, and must sometimes even risk sacrificing their lives and safety, to make it so. Hauliers rumble through the smallest and most secret hours of the night. Farmers and vets may in the watches of the night be called in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from their beds to struggle and to strive. Nurses and medicos must be ready for the call at any hour to save a life; rectors and their curates, in a flash, at a trumpet crash, to save a soul, or to absolve one and speed it onwards, a poor potsherd made immortal diamond, when nurse and medico have failed at the last: as at the last they must.

*****

His Grace slept; but – being an old Int Corps officer who had preferred doing close OPINT support in the field to faffing about with maps at Brigade – he slept with one eye and both ears open and alert.

At forty-eight minutes after midnight, his subconscious noted, as nightly, the faint sound of the wireless coming on as programmed, and the last notes of 'Sailing By'.

'And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at 0015 today, Friday, the 15th of January. There are warning of gales....

'... Viking, Forties, Cromarty, Forth ... low Humber 995 ... or snow … occasionally gale … cyclonic … severe gale 9 later … increasing … veering ... backing … snow showers … Tyree Automatic … recent freezing rain … rising more slowly … twenty-seven miles … slight showers … inshore waters of … Isle of Man....'

The comforting, familiar rhythms rose and fell with the surge of historic seas, until, at the last, the pips sounded, and the National Anthem, and the wireless cut itself off. Charles Taunton should be ready for the 0520 Shipping Forecast and the day ahead when he should fully wake. For now he slept, storing his appalling energy against the day.

*****

Vistilia was beginning to sweat with the onset of labour. The sensors marked the fact, and alerted those charged with her care: Anne Macey, who had never, since she was quite small, had any higher ambition save to do just this for her living, and Tony Ford, who was apprenticing.

There was no need to ring up Mr Trulock: not yet, certainly; and no need to disturb the Hon. Gwen, who, this season, was, actually, for the first time in many years, giving over to Anne and Tony and the lads and lasses; for the Hon. Gwen (Mrs Brian) Maguire had her own concerns now, the twins, three months old and demanding with it and so dear no one minded in the least that they were.

She wanted sleep and rest, said the stables to a lass and lad, did the Hon. Gwen. Mr Trulock merited it also; but Anne had a perfectly well-founded suspicion that Mr Trulock was, at his own instance, subsisting on cat-naps, and eager to be present at any time, day or night, in this season of new beginnings.

The fact of the matter was.... Well. The Rector, that 'Becks in a biretta' Fr Noel Paddick SSC, a canon nowadays for all his youth, cherished Winter as he cherished Autumn, Summer, and Springtide, each day a grace, and filled, pressed down and running over, with Grace; yet Winter rejoiced him for its consonance with the seasons of the Church, the Little Lent of Advent, the Feast of the Nativity, the showing-forth of Epiphany. His curates relished their days in much the same manner, with their own characteristic quiddities added on. Fr Campion remained even now a rowing-and-rugger sort, a sort of young Jonny Wilkinson in a dog-collar, mysteriously called to a cure of souls, without ever losing his hearty, undergraduate manner – or looks. Fr Bohun was … Fr Bohun: in full, although no one dared say so save in the most formal circumstances, the Rev'd Sir Gilbert Bohun Bt MC, late Major, the Blues and Royals, a spare, almost severe, ascetic man to whom iron discipline, and self-discipline first of all, was rather first than second nature, and who found in Winter's stillness and simplicity an answering mood to his own character, pared and stripped to the essentials. And comfortable old Fr Gascelyn Levett, donnish and amiable and fubsy, the UK's leading expert on ecclesiastical architecture, finishing his long run as a Fellow of Clare College (Cantab) to join, quite soon, the benefice, liked the Wintertide for its having always, in a sense, stripped the altars, removing leaf and grass and flower to reveal whole and in the round the noble architecture of the churches he was now soon to serve: although he was also the sort of man who enjoyed Winter as underlining by piquant contrast the good fire within and the homely comforts of muffins and tea.

That lanky faun Teddy Gates, the Celebrated Hipsta Chef and proprietor of The Woolford House Hotel and its galaxy of stars and awards, liked Winter for the challenge: stored fruits, root vegetables, game coming on after five months' hanging from the Glorious Twelfth or after as the seasons opened; warming stews, startling and subtle cassoulets, unexpected heartiness.... (In this, Teddy held precisely the view held, although on a less rarefied and sometimes precious level, by Mr Simon Kellow, the vast, jovial landlord down the Boar, with regard to the Boar's pies and 'winter warmers': Mr Kellow being in any case built more for Winter than for Summertide heat.) Chef Gates' partner, indeed newly his (civil) husband, Edmond Huskisson, simply rejoiced in the season as The Season: for he had been a Premier League striker in his day, and looked it even now, and Edmond eat and drank and breathed football quite as much, and marginally less annoyingly, than he did activism.

Sher Mirza, that disgustingly attractive Deputy Headmaster and English and Music master at Beechbourne Free School, saw Winter as he naturally saw much of life: through the lens of English letters and poetry and the English choral tradition; yet he shared, also, the Rev'd Henry Gascelyn Levett's exultation in the affirming contrast between a warm hearth and a full teapot withindoors, and cold and wet and wind without. And, of course, whenever possible, that hearth and that teapot should be the Rectory hearth and teapot, where he and the Rector, Canon Noel Paddick, watched over with motherly kindness by the Rectory housekeeper Rose James, could relish one another's company: for they were chaste and celibate, and had never so much as kissed nor ever should, renouncing eros in favour of their honour and their duties to their religions and to God, and contenting themselves with the other three loves; and they were even so, to their own lasting surprise (and the widower Canon's not least), the most tightly bonded couple in all save deed in the whole of the diocese. And the best-looking, although Edmond did not concede the palm he felt was due to him and Teddy.

The ever buoyant and insufferably boyish Brian 'The Breener' Maguire, that mad and madcap Kerryman who'd been capped for England and had – until his knees had given out and given him out – been the greatest of England wicketkeepers, didn't mind Winter at all, at all. Wasn't it a time to rest? And wasn't there always something doing at the Woolbury Stud, his dear Gwen's domain-een? And wasn't he a da, now, and two wee babs t' him to dote on? Sure and he didn't mind Winter, but.

His Grace, whose blue blood was Oxford Blue (and who was one) and who bled in the eggs-and-bacon colours of the MCC, likewise regretted Winter as an interruption to Home cricket; yet he savoured it all the same, for he was a man who rejoiced in wild weather, thrumming like a plucked string to Aeolian gales. And if Winter meant a lamentable, an intolerable, want of cricket, it meant also, balancing the scale, the Boxing Day Meet (the Duke of Taunton's Hunt, HG the duke of Taunton, Master) and similar excitements (shootin', for one). Even now; even in the age of nought save drags. (Charles Taunton was happy to tell anyone who asked, and anyone who didn't, that he was damned if he'd bastardise huntin' and the noble art of falconry, both, simply owin' to a damned idiocy of a nonsense of an Act put through by middle-class urban poons and that sebaceous bugger Blair, damn it all, sort of people, if you could call the buggers as people, which he begged leave to doubt, who'd happily see every hunter in the country turned into dog's meat and every hound in the Three Kingdoms – and the Principality, damn his soul – put down all so that they might engage in virtue-signallin' at their appallin' little parties in Islington and Notting Hill, damn it all, until of course they began to realise they were payin' a longish chalk more for free-range organic chickens and that sort of thing, with the foxes runnin' rampant, damn it all....)

(Of course, His Grace took also a curious pleasure in damning some Winter weathers, as this past Christmas, when he'd left it to his sister-in-law to act as Master for the Boxing Day meet, he having put in the briefest of appearances on Christmas Day itself to indulge his niece and nephews before battling his way Northwards once more – accompanied by half STETHEL and a number of eager Old Gurkhas who were having the time of their demobbed lives – to help fight floods at Melverley and, yet more so, at Mallerstang. For a man raging against the elements, various agencies, and the iniquities of successive governments, he'd seemed oddly happy, which, Charles being Charles, wasn't odd in the least, really.)

The duke's nearest, dearest, and oldest friend (he had not been at the same prepper with Charles, as the Archdeacon had been, but he was much closer to Charles and always had been, the future duke and the future archdeacon having always been the best and fondest of enemies) – the duke's nearest friend, then, and, in their day, his vice-captain of the Eton 1st XI, 'Tics, and Blues, in succession – HH the Nawab of Hubli, that elegant and aquiline prince, had a private theory, that everyone had, in addition to his own country and nationality (or, as in his own case, two), a country of the heart as well; that people were, in their characters, characteristic of another nation as well as of their own: sometimes one with which they shared ancestry, and, quite as often, not. Teddy Gates, for one, was in many ways inherently French, indeed, specifically Parisien, as chefs not infrequently are. He himself was, considered His Highness, of a Byzantine cast of mind. (The duke knew of this notion of his old friend's; and was inclined to smile. Nobby was, remotely, descended of the Byzantine purple; but the man was, confided His Grace, most fundamentally an absolute khan of the Golden Family at all points and not merely by deep ancestry, whatever he liked to think.) And dear old Charles.... The Nawab quite agreed with the ducal theory, that what annoyed many people – including many Americans – about the American character, a character as likely to be shared equally by the newest arrival from halfway 'round the world as by Americans whose families had been there four centuries, now, was, That Americans in character were simply the heirs of Hawkins and Raleigh and Drake, the sort of men and women Milton had, a generation after, imperturbably called as and believed to be 'God's Englishmen': Elizabethans quick to quarrel and to make grand gestures, cut-throats in torn lace on a mission from the Protestant God. And there was, considered the Nawab, something quite American about Charles Taunton in many lights. And yet, if dear old Charles had a spiritual home outwith Britain, as a matter of deep affinities, it was in Austria, or, rather, and quite specifically, in Vienna, in the days of the Dual Monarchy.

No one could be more thoroughly British than could that Most High, Noble, and Potent Prince, the Right Honourable His Grace the duke of Taunton KG GCB GCVO KBE MiD TD (briefly and displeasingly replaced by the VRSM, without post-nominals, though Charles was always grandfathered-out) PC JP DL MA (Oxon) FRHistS, marquess of Templecombe, earl Fitzwarren, earl of Dilton, viscount Malet, baron Daubeny, baron Chard, baron Beechbourne, baron Marden and Widham, Major (Ret'd) the Intelligence Corps, and Fellow of All Souls, otherwise Charles Arthur Donald Ivor Waldemar Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet; otherwise Charles Taunton, 'Tempers' to the Nawab and others of his Eton cricketing contemporaries of long ago: a Pelham and a Holles, a Scudamore, a Vaux, a Pitt, a Rivers, a Penruddocke, a Clare and a Malet and a de Clifforde, and above all a Fitzjames bearing the Stuart Royal Arms of the second James within a bastard's border compony. And yet....

And bloody yet.... The nawabal view, privately held, was that there was that in the ducal character, and specially so in Winter, which somehow dreamt yearningly of that mad, dreamlike city in a time long gone, all white and gold within, and, without, in Winter snows, of marzipan and spun sugar all compound, with its marches like waltzes dancing into the night and through the day, and its Christmases folding imperceptibly in, like meringue, to the heedless, airy torte of Carnival.

*****

It was Winter, and the land slept, and the duke slept; but it was Winter, and Mr Giles Trulock was not disposed to sleep.

Priests and schoolmasters, dukes and cooks and activists and old cricketers, might sleep, as might villager and farmer – when they might. Mr Jeremy Trulock MA, Headmaster of the Free School, Mr Giles' brother, might sleep.

But Mr Trulock, Mr Giles Trulock FRCVS, loved Winter with unsleeping devotion: for Mr Giles the Vet loved without reservation horses above all. Sheep and cattle were a daily joy and as frequently a daily vexation. Dogs and cats and small animals … he regretted that, in his lifetime, even in the countryside, he more frequently and increasingly saw rather house-pets than sheepdogs and ratters, farm cats and farm dogs, doing what they were bred to do and happier and healthier for it by far. But horses....

In the Winters of 2009 – 2010 and 2010 – 2011, Trulock the Vet had, like the late Sir Ben Salmon RA, so rejoiced as to risk seeming to batten on the misery of his neighbours. Sir Ben had been rapt by the skies and landscapes, and had painted in ecstasy; but Ben, and Giles Trulock far more, had been made happiest by the cessation, the blest stilling, of motor traffic for a time, and, in its stead, snow-muffled or bell-clear on a cold pure windless day, the ancient companionable sound of hooves and jingling horse-brasses.

Winter and early Spring could be a lasting misery in a wet lambing season. But for Mr Giles, whose Fellowship was based upon equine expertise and abiding interest, Winter was sacred and beloved because it had January in it; and January meant foaling.

It was not needed that he be rung up; it was not wanted that he be present; but Mr Giles had a sixth sense in these matters, and it surprised not a soul at the Woolbury Stud that within the hour of Vistilia's first signs of foaling, Mr Giles, yawning but radiating contentment, had Happened To Drop By and be present at his own charges for the arrival of a new Thoroughbred foal.

*****

Moonset: the first-quarter moon, lingering the more as the Sun crept Westwards in ambush and night.

*****

Jack Stamford, father to the Rector's late wife Pauline, who had spent his working life at Banks's-cum-Marston's until ducally recruited to the Woolfonts from his beloved Wolvo – ostensibly to aid in the establishment of the community real ale and real cider brewery in Parva (in fact, simply to be, with Betty his wife and with Steve and Mary Paddick, near to his clerical late son-in-law) –, was ware and waking, and in fact at the Woolfont Brewery by 1.0 am.

This is not atypical of brewmasters, which he now was. It was by no means a daily occurrence; but the hours before the morning Mash-and-Malt, in the cereal redolence of the Brewery with most of its noisier machinery stilled, were a lovely time, once in a way, to breathe in one's work, plan for the future, measure quality, and think of new varieties one might conjure into being, seasonal ales or new entrants into the regular stock. He chuckled to himself: the duke, 'e had a good nose and a wise palate, and was a warm man in business for all his being a duke, and … well, there were none better when it came to ideas, and names. Too much so, it might be: times it were needful to sit a bit on His Grace, when he took a notion which, whatever its merits, might be a bit too nigh anunst the knuckle anyroadup. Sher-lad'd won a music award for something baroque-like, and Noel ('Our Kid', always, to his proud father Steve, and the same, really, to Dad Stamford, even now) had been raised to being a canon, and His Grace'd'n't wasted a moment, suggesting – for all that the duke detested the idea of un-British beers – there was a new beer wanted: 'Bock Canon', he'd quipped.

Well, that wasn't going forwards. Not with Sher's being a Muslim, and a recovering alcoholic, and Noel's not wishing to brag; and damn' surely not with the risk of uninformed comment linking the lads in a way they'd always been careful to stay on the windy side of. But with the new Downland parishes being folded into Noel's benefice, and Somerford Canons – old Somerford Canonicorum – amidst 'em, there wasn't no gainsaying the duke's point on that. There were going to