Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore Page A

liked. He had two buxom daughters; and one morning these young women dressed themselves up in green jerseys and tight breeches and went off to work on the land. Double Alley, which had witnessed many shocking things, was never so shocked as by this tomboyish gesture. Where indecency was commonplace, the trousers were regarded as the height of indecency. The outraged neighbours came out in a bunch to stare.
    â€œThe hussies!” exclaimed Old Nanny, as we too stared from our window. “They’ll never dare to go back there!” she added; and of course they never did. You wouldn’t go back if you’d lived in a farmhouse and worked in the green fields. The emancipation of the Misses Perkins had consequences, as we shall see. It was abreak with Double Alley’s tradition; and it was the beginning of the end of Double Alley itself.
    That must have been about 1916. Thereafter the war grew sterner. Officers who were billeted on us from time to time stayed for shorter periods, and always it seemed only a few weeks after they left us that we heard they had been killed. My father, aged fifty, and sick unto death, put on a red armlet and drilled twice a week with a Boer War rifle, or guarded railway bridges against imaginary and ubiquitous “spies.” Recruiting posters became more frequent and began to betray a slightly hysterical note. Recruiting marches took place in the town.
    Even Pistol, Bardolph and Nym were caught up in the maelstrom. These battered veterans of forgotten and possibly apocryphal skirmishes always went about together and generally got into trouble at the same time. They drank, begged and stole as a trio; recently the tall thin one, Pistol, abetted by the others, had knocked a policeman’s helmet off, in private spite, while the policeman innocently stood directing traffic at Elmbury Cross. They were still tolerated, although they were such a nuisance, because of their humour, or I suppose I should say “humours” in the Elizabethan sense; they were “characters.”
    Now one day, as we watched a military band marching bravely down the High Street, on one of the frequent recruiting parades, with a smart squad of carefully-picked soldiers behind it, and behind them a rag-tag-and-bobtail of sheepish-looking civilians who had taken the King’s shilling, we were astonished to see Pistol, Bardolph and Nym bringing up the rear. It must have been almost the last time we looked through the Tudor House window; my father had died, and the lovely house was to be sold. Already the auctioneer was busy cataloguing the furniture, posters advertising the “desirable residence” were stuck up on the walls.
    It was high summer, the last summer of the war. The band blared, and the soldiers marched stiffly at attention, left, right, left, right, never a foot wrong; then came the newly-recruited rabble, shuffling, out of step, looking curiously ashamed, not, Ithink, because they had joined up, but because they had held back for so long. Somebody from the entrance of Double Alley called out: “There goes young Bert—at last!” and there was a ripple of laughter. Then came Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. They wore their medals; and they looked like soldiers. They threw their shoulders back, and they cast away all the infirmities which their flesh had inherited from their folly, and they marched. A passing policeman stared at them in astonishment and they shouted some piece of merry rudeness at him. We couldn’t hear it, but he roared with laughter and shouted back: “Now we shall have a bit of peace for a change!”
    I suppose they were the dregs of England’s man-power. Nym was lame from a wound he got at Mafeking; Bardolph suffered from rheumatics; and Pistol was lame also, but this was not, as he asserted, from the thrust of an assegai, but through falling off a fence, and breaking his leg, while trying to escape from a keeper who had caught him poaching.