powder.
– Here’s yer polish, and did y’know that in Bampton three lasses are pregnant, they say sharing t’same father? I wunder, will they be sharing t’ring too? Molly Lincoln has thrown her husband out on tu t’street. Well, yer put two and two together … Dun’t tek much gissin’.
In her yard was a hutch filled with scruffy brown chickens that sporadically produced eggs for her to sell, but were capable of laying only if she told them stories and news about the district, so she said. A well-informed hen was a happy, productive hen. She fed them bacon grease, which was no cheap meal, and dandelion leaves, muttering about affairs and deaths, local controversies, as she scattered the food, and when there were no recent shenanigans to mention she resorted to renditions of the old border myths and long-ago frictions of the area. Her rooster, she claimed, was eighteen years old, and still a fine fellow. He crowed only during the evening hours and had twice survived being shot with an air rifle, though the second pellet had blinded him in the right eye.
The shop itself half ran on a system of exchange and barter,with the swapping of produce as it was needed by each customer. Carrots for eggs, smoked ham for cigarettes or tobacco, apples for the occasional postage stamp.
Measand Hall stood off at the outskirts of Mardale, as grand halls and manor houses are in the habit of separating themselves from the drudgery of village life, and it had almost as much acreage as any of the tenant farms on the slopes of the valley. There was no aristocracy living in the great hall, nobody of such lofty heritage, though it was still owned by the Earl of Langdale. Unlike much of the estate, it had not been sold off to settle the recent crippling death duties. The building itself, old and in need of much repair, had been inhabited for the past fifteen years by an artist, a landscape painter by the name of Paul Levell. Levell was from Northumberland and in another incarnation he had been a war artist, active in the fields of France, who in peacetime had retired to the quiet valley to concentrate on landscapes and remake his sanity. Several of his Great War paintings had been accepted at the National Gallery in London, with their torn scenery broken down into primary shapes and colours, abstract, despairing, as if released from an awful, nightmarish dream.
After the war he began painting with startling realism, almost photographic accuracy, an exposed clarity which seemed to resist any interpretation other than that which was most apparent, like the bones of a carcass picked clean. Where once a broken plane wing stood for a ruptured human skull, now a mountain was just a mountain. And yet his work always remained violent and unromantic, if exceptionally beautiful. There was an impossibility to the perspectives of his high mountains, breathtaking verticals, paths fractured up over cliffs, pulling at the stomach and suggesting rapid currents of air during a freefall down to the eye of a dark tarn.He pushed the limits of Lakeland geological existence. Stony ridges disappeared into thunderous, sudden stormclouds. Edges appeared suddenly and without regard for the safe grassy flatlands in the foreground of a picture. Humans were, without exception, banished from the bleak, natural scenes, as if unable to survive or simply not welcome in the wilderness created by Levell’s brush, save for a suggestive form in a rock, a woman’s back surfacing in a river as a stepping stone, the curled torso of a man, moulded into the spine of a barren outcrop of granite. Figures were swallowed up by the land, subsumed. There was no harmony of man with nature or the human conquest of environment which the Lakeland artists of the day favoured. In Levell’s work, life was brutal, distinct and pure.
Paul Levell himself was a tall, bearded, wild-looking man, who blinked constantly and spoke rapidly in broken sentences, with every second word seeming to be
– Here’s yer polish, and did y’know that in Bampton three lasses are pregnant, they say sharing t’same father? I wunder, will they be sharing t’ring too? Molly Lincoln has thrown her husband out on tu t’street. Well, yer put two and two together … Dun’t tek much gissin’.
In her yard was a hutch filled with scruffy brown chickens that sporadically produced eggs for her to sell, but were capable of laying only if she told them stories and news about the district, so she said. A well-informed hen was a happy, productive hen. She fed them bacon grease, which was no cheap meal, and dandelion leaves, muttering about affairs and deaths, local controversies, as she scattered the food, and when there were no recent shenanigans to mention she resorted to renditions of the old border myths and long-ago frictions of the area. Her rooster, she claimed, was eighteen years old, and still a fine fellow. He crowed only during the evening hours and had twice survived being shot with an air rifle, though the second pellet had blinded him in the right eye.
The shop itself half ran on a system of exchange and barter,with the swapping of produce as it was needed by each customer. Carrots for eggs, smoked ham for cigarettes or tobacco, apples for the occasional postage stamp.
Measand Hall stood off at the outskirts of Mardale, as grand halls and manor houses are in the habit of separating themselves from the drudgery of village life, and it had almost as much acreage as any of the tenant farms on the slopes of the valley. There was no aristocracy living in the great hall, nobody of such lofty heritage, though it was still owned by the Earl of Langdale. Unlike much of the estate, it had not been sold off to settle the recent crippling death duties. The building itself, old and in need of much repair, had been inhabited for the past fifteen years by an artist, a landscape painter by the name of Paul Levell. Levell was from Northumberland and in another incarnation he had been a war artist, active in the fields of France, who in peacetime had retired to the quiet valley to concentrate on landscapes and remake his sanity. Several of his Great War paintings had been accepted at the National Gallery in London, with their torn scenery broken down into primary shapes and colours, abstract, despairing, as if released from an awful, nightmarish dream.
After the war he began painting with startling realism, almost photographic accuracy, an exposed clarity which seemed to resist any interpretation other than that which was most apparent, like the bones of a carcass picked clean. Where once a broken plane wing stood for a ruptured human skull, now a mountain was just a mountain. And yet his work always remained violent and unromantic, if exceptionally beautiful. There was an impossibility to the perspectives of his high mountains, breathtaking verticals, paths fractured up over cliffs, pulling at the stomach and suggesting rapid currents of air during a freefall down to the eye of a dark tarn.He pushed the limits of Lakeland geological existence. Stony ridges disappeared into thunderous, sudden stormclouds. Edges appeared suddenly and without regard for the safe grassy flatlands in the foreground of a picture. Humans were, without exception, banished from the bleak, natural scenes, as if unable to survive or simply not welcome in the wilderness created by Levell’s brush, save for a suggestive form in a rock, a woman’s back surfacing in a river as a stepping stone, the curled torso of a man, moulded into the spine of a barren outcrop of granite. Figures were swallowed up by the land, subsumed. There was no harmony of man with nature or the human conquest of environment which the Lakeland artists of the day favoured. In Levell’s work, life was brutal, distinct and pure.
Paul Levell himself was a tall, bearded, wild-looking man, who blinked constantly and spoke rapidly in broken sentences, with every second word seeming to be
Similar Books
