ARTHUR

      Later I realized that I was being judged just as I was judging him, and that he was actually deciding what it was he should offer. If I had not met his own fairly severe criteria, it might have been only to come back next year to cut the grass. Finally lifted his shoulders in a tiny shrug, “I suppose I can do a bit of everything.”
     Never was there such a modest man. This was my introduction to one of the most important people in my life. Only a few have been men. I have not so much a great trust and liking of woman, but I am careful there in my friendships.
     Arthur was orphaned at the age of six. All that he really knew about his father was that he had been a dispatch rider and had been killed somewhere along the Menin Road: a long open causeway and a notorious slaughtering ground for troops coming up to the line and, if they ever got to leave it, going back. There was no cover except the ditches on either side and it was in range and well marked on the German gunners’ maps.
     Arthur used to dream of meeting his dad again. He had missed him greatly. Some years later he went to France to find his father’s grave. Because he knew no French, “not a word but wee and nun”, he took a map and because he believed he would never understand any answers to his questions, he walked from Calais to the war cemetery, found the grave and sat awhile beside it, and then walked back again.
      For two days he ate nothing, slept by the road, and was chased by a great white bull, “but ee couldn’t run as fast as I could”, and finally he found a pork butcher’s shop in a town he walked through and in the window was something he could recognize. From his description it must have been a pie big enough for a family of six but as he walked Arthur ate it all, and “Gor, that was good.”
     His mother died soon after his father, and he went to live with his aunt and to work for his uncle. The first time he told me this, I objected that no-one could go to work at the age of six! Arthur glared at me, as he always when he thought he was disbelieved. “I went to work,” he insisted. “If I didn’t do my work for the day, I didn’t get my supper.”
     His uncle and aunt live in Eynsham, just outside Oxford, one of those straggly Cotswold villages of grey stone and grey roofs that warm in the sunshine to a golden brown. Some were old when Oxenford was just a muddy river crossing. Edward the Confessor had built a palace at Islip nearby.
The uncle was a woodcutter and Arthur and his cousin both worked with him before they were ten. In those days, he told me, almost all the main Oxford streets were lined with trees, “and it was my uncle that cut most of them down.”
     When the old man had spent too long in the pub and was too drunk to steer, the two little boys would prop him between them on the front seat of his lorry and steer it home. Out in the woods beyond Bessel sleigh, which the uncle had contracted to clear, he left them alone one night with a great circular saw, driven by slapping leather belt from a stationary engine, and told them they should finish cutting all the branches into kindling before he came to take them home. He never came back that night, but the cousin and Arthur dared not stop. “So we cut and we cut, until we just could see the blade no more, except where the moonlight was catching on them wicked old teeth.” They cut until even this failed them and the engine’s exhaust was glowing red, and then they finally shut it down, crawled under the tarpaulin that had been left as its cover, and went to sleep.
     The boys were always hungry, and Arthur’s eyes would kindle in telling how they would catch the garden sparrows to eat. A round wooden stretcher from a chair would have a long length of twine tied to its middle and was placed at the end of the garden path. The twine went under the front door. Then the boys dropped a handful of crumbs on the path and waited, looking through the letter slit. Soon the crumbs would attract a fine mob of sparrows – and, if they were lucky, a blackbird or two, even a fine fat pigeon clucking as it sidled and danced.
And then?
     “Warl, then we’d pull on that string just as hard and as farst as ever we could, and the stick would come whizzin’ down the parth, and break all their legs: if we was lucky. Then we’d hang ‘em on a piece of thread by the kitchen fire where they’d twirl by themselves ‘til they was roasted through. Some of the small ones you could eat whole.” He licked his lips. “They was lovely.”
     Being an inventive, not to say parsimonious man, Arthur’s uncle cleaned his cottage chimney every year by opening up a cartridge for his twelve-bore, tipping out the shot, draping an old blanket across the opening, and then firing his gun up the chimney. One year he forgot about the shot and instead of the usual fog of soot and plaster shooting across Eynsham, after a momentary pause much of the lining of chimney fell through the blanket with a roar, broke the stove, and filled the kitchen with rubble.
     They were hard times. Arthur never had, or even expected I think, new clothes or boots until the vicar’s wife called him to the vicarage one day to see whether any clothes sent in a charity bundle would fit. But everything, she decided, was just too small, even the knitted pullover that she and Arthur had just managed to pull over his head. “I’m afraid it won’t do, Arthur”, she told him sadly. “You’d better take it off.”
      “Don’t you worry about that, Missiz” was his reply. “This fits me just fine” ‘And I took hold of that old pullover, and pulled it down over me just as far as it would go until the stitches started to go. I wasn’t going to leave with nothing.’
     He had little time for religion in itself, or never talked about his beliefs, and he had a great distrust of doctors that I never understood until he told how another cousin had fallen from a tree and broke his pelvis, and when they tried to call the doctor he wouldn’t come quick enough because he was owed a previous fee, and so the cousin died. That may not have been the truth of the case, but that was how Arthur saw it. In his boyhood there was little romance in village life for those at the bottom of the social pyramid. He had even less liking for his uncle and his aunt when he was old enough to learn that his parents had left him a little money – but it was all ‘spent on his behalf’; as actually it probably was, but to Arthur it was also his last link with his parents that was lost. “And how did you get on with the other villages, Arthur?” I asked him to lift his mood, innocently expecting more tales of rustic harmony and comradeship as in Kilvert’s Diary, Lark Rise to Candleford, and so on. “Did you visit them often?”
     Arthur looked at me as if he could not believe his ears. “Other villages?” he snorted. “You didn’t go to any other villages in those days, unless you had a job of work to do; and then you’d do it and get out quick. That’s what you’d be asked, you know: what you doing ‘ere? And if you didn’t have an answer, why, you’d have the youngsters throwing stones at you ‘til you left.” I am reminded now of the remarkable story of Bunger Smith and the early retirement of the village policeman, but there is not space here for everything.
     As soon as he was old enough, Arthur got work for himself. At first he was as an apprentice carpenter, then - another step up - a cabinet maker. Basically, he told me, he decided to learn every trade that he could so that he might never lack some kind of work. Beyond the village school he had little formal education, but by the time I met him he had spent the war years building aircraft, and had risen afterwards to be a workshop inspector for Rolls Royce motor cars. And on the way, he had learnt every trade that he could.
     To me he was a gem. I was in awe of him, and - I began to realize - the most ridiculous thing was, that he was in awe of me. Whereas I, however, had come from the lower middle classes and had gone to grammar school and university, Arthur came from almost the lowest stratum of all. Not all people will admit the degree that privilege and other kinds of good fortune have helped them succeed, although in almost every instance luck is as essential as hard work. In Arthur’s case, however, there was almost no luck and almost all hard work.
     But it is men like Arthur who really make history. Genius, intellectual and artistic, may indeed be solitary, of course; and need not also be impractical. Newton ground his own mirrors; Faraday made his own apparatus. Great sculptors and artists are always also creative technicians. That list is endless. But very few of the men whose names we know as generals and explorers and leaders could have succeeded without the skill, determination, courage and sheer staying power of thousands of men like Arthur Green. They had to be there to turn their hopes and ideas and their inspiration into reality, and that list is endless too.
     He worked for me, whenever I wanted him, on mostly very ordinary tasks. He could apparently do anything I might ask with wood, metal, or stone. His invariable response to a request was “We can endeavour”, and whenever I asked him what I should pay him, the answer was always to the same. “You pay me what you think you can.” For a while I thought he must be an eccentric millionaire. I paid him, badly always, I know; but he never complained, or asked for more, and as I grew to know and admire the extent of his skills, we became friends.
I could fill a book with Arthur. Besides being a rare master craftsman, from childhood on he had also poached the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim estates so that he knew every covert and spinney. “I have had more pheasants and fish off of the Duke’s land,” he told me once with quiet pride, “than the Duke ever had.” One night he stood still so long that an owl flew out of the dark, perched on the barrel of his gun, and turned and stared at him.
Of all this history, I will be content with just a handful of tales. One of my favourites is the story of the wet fish shop.
     Fish, before refrigeration, were delivered in salty ice in wooden crates in which they had been packed. Although most shops had zinc-lined trays to show them off, the bulk of the fish were kept in these leaking crates, and soon the floors and the walls of the shops were reeking of fish, sodden with salt water, swollen with wet-rot.
      Young Arthur was now old enough to be entrusted with a task alone, and was sent to such a shop with a mate. The mate was an older man, but Arthur was in command and his orders to take out all the rotten wood and replace it with new.
     The shop, when they found it, was no simple shed on the edge of town. It was instead a far more elaborate emporium, behind its glass front were zinc-lined shelves and counters galore, and everywhere they looked the wood was rotten.
     That was not the problem, however. The problem was that this shop was one of a row beneath several storeys of brick-build tenements in which families were living. They had arrived so early that all the families were asleep. It was very soon clear that except for the front window every sodden plank and beam would need to be replaced. But if they did remove them all, the same law that kept the moon in the sky would cause every course of brick and every tile and every home and family to fall into the space they made.
     It was an impossible task. They had two days to do it. “And you couldn’t go home in them days and say the work could not be done. You would just get your cards and they’d send another man.”
     So whilst Arthur measured and planned, his mate went down to the railway to borrow four massive timbers. Once these were delivered, they punched four holes in the floor, set the timbers upright on the basement floor beneath, and “chocked them up” with wedges below. Each swinging a hammer, they drove overlapping wedges together from either side under the lower ends so that the upper ends reached the floor beams of the tenement above, until finally their uprights held up everything above the wet fish shop. Then they removed the wet fish shop, all but its still splendid window and the internal stair on one side.
     Although none of this, almost unbelievably, seems to have disturbed the occupants above, there was soon an attentive crowd of passers-by in the street below, together with a policeman, to whom Arthur showed his orders. When finally the families above became aware of their predicament it was not so much by the size of the crowd below, as by its behaviour. Silent and serious they stood. No-one talked above a murmur. No-one laughed. It was as if they were expecting some inevitable, appalling, human disaster. Slowly it dawned on the families that this was a disaster that could only involve them. Eventually they sent an embassy down to complain that this death or glory venture was not of their choosing and should not continue, although I doubt if he used exactly those words.
     “It’s too late for that now”, Arthur told him, and there was no-one to contradict him, just as no-one could deliver any pronouncement with such absolute conviction, totally unperturbed at having levitated twenty or so people, besides several dozen tons of masonry, above nearly twenty feet of empty air. “and there’s nothing to go wrong. You know what your wainscotings are?” He meant the strip of wood along the bottom of an internal wall. The ambassador agreed that he did. “Well, then,” went on Arthur, “you back upstairs and have your breakfast, and keep an eye on that wainscoting. And if it moves as much as this,” he held up a grimy pinch of space towards the other’s nose, “You come on down right quick, and tell me.”
     And then Arthur and his mate - equally glorious, sadly unknown - replaced all the timbers of the wet fish shop, took away their props as it bore the weight, and finally went home.
     Poaching was not a sport for Arthur. Well, it was a sport too - there was no mistaking the gleam in his eye when he told of his adventures - but for the poor of the village it was at times an economic necessity, and was always a kind of denial of the justness of the social order. The village men were mostly in service during the last war, whilst Arthur, as an aircraft worker, was in protected employment, so during every leave Arthur would take an evening bus at least once down to Salisbury Plain and lie up on the Downs all night waiting for the rabbits to come out to feed in the morning.
By the end of the morning he would be back on the bus. By now so many rabbits would be hanging under his coat on a string around his waist that he could not sit down and would travel all the way standing up. But nor could he sit going down to the Plain either, for down one trouser leg hung the barrel of his gun with the lock and the stock down the other. “War wounds,” Arthur would explain to conductors, and they would let him stand. The next morning a pair of gutted rabbits would appear on every gate of every family in the village whose man was in uniform and away.
     He had of course an eye for the beauty of the animals he killed, although it rarely protected them from his rifle. It was silenced with a neat tube silencer that he made himself, and he was a fine shot. As he lay in wait one morning a fine red dog fox trotted into his killing zone. “He was a beautiful animal,” said Arthur reflectively. “So I shot him. But then I waited, for a dog fox goes nowhere without his missiz close behind. And, sure enough, as he lay out there, she appeared, and came forward and up to him to see what was amiss. She was a beautiful animal too.” He paused. “So I shot her as well, and skinned them both with the razor I had with me, and took the skins home, and my missiz had them made as a stole.”
For Arthur that was just the way things were. Life had always been hard for him. He had the dignity of a man who never depended on the opinion of others to support his own. Full of self-doubt as I was, his admiration for me and his very occasional advice, were to me hugely valuable. It is not enough just to say I liked him. I loved him. He was the only man I ever knew whose approval of me was unconditional. How could I not love him? He had himself no time for false sentiment and he was as honest as it is possible to be, but when I asked him why this was, he did not fool about with cant. “A poor man” he replied, “has to make a choice early on what kind of reputation he wants to have. For me it was always more valuable to be known to be honest than to gain by being crooked. That’s why.”
     In all these years - and there were many occasions to deserve it - I never once heard Arthur swear. He did however explain the meaning one day of a particularly nasty English expression. It does seem especially English, although America has certainly now learnt to use it. Having always had the greater freedom in all things sexual, the English upper classes use it with particular relish. “It was en ebsoloot cockep” they will say, with either suppressed hilarity or sometime open anger. But you will hear it too in the lugubrious tones of the North of my youth. “Eet wur ah reet cockoop” a Northerner will claim. The meaning is the same: some action requiring special attention, delicacy, or skill, has been spoilt because someone’s male generative organ has distracted too much, so to speak, from the task at hand.
     When my son was older, the three of us were having lunch one day, in silence, for Arthur rarely began a conversation, when I asked him to tell us how one might take pheasants without a gun in daylight. Was it possible?
     Arthur finished his mouthful. “Warl”, he began, “it’s more difficult because the keepers can see you, even before you see them; and they know who you are and where you’ve come from, and what you’re after on their land.”
     “But then you know pheasants live in families. They move around together depending on the time of day. Night-time they’ll be roosting up in the branches. But as it gets light in the morning they’ll come down to the edge of the fields to feed. And as it get brighter still, then they’ll creep into the bushes and sit there all together as quiet as mice. Unless you know where they are, you’ll never find ‘em then.”
     He let us imagine how hard it must be to see a little family of dull brown hens, crouching in the shade and the leaf litter, as quiet as mice.
     “So you have to make sure they will be where you want them to be, at a certain time of day, and as far away as possible from where the keepers are. “Course,” and here came his ghost of a smile, “keepers has got routines, just like them hens.”
     “You go for a walk every day around the woods, all innocent like, with a pocketful of good fruit cake: dark cake, and when you pass a likely looking bush, or brambles most likely, that’s what they like, you drop a handful of crumbs right there.”
“This is what you might need to do this several times, more than a week, until you starts to see that those pheasants under you bush. Just sitting thar.” His accent always crept back as such scenes as this became more real to his listeners and to him.
“Then comes the day when you know that the keepers is far away having their tea, and then you go out in a good long strong coat and your boots and just as you’re passin’ that bush,” his eyes gleamed and his voice slowed and deepened, “you drapes your net over it, and then you falls right on ‘em all quick, like this”, he jerked his elbows and knees so violently that cutlery flew from the table, “and you smother them all with your coat.”
     “But,” he went on, jabbing his plate for even greater emphasis, “you must be sure to get that old cock-bird first. For, if you don’t get him straight off, he’ll let off such a ‘Coccup!’ that the keepers’ll hear it all over the wood.”
     I stared at this. “What did you say?”
     Arthur glared. Impatiently, and to Alexander’s delight, he began to follow his first cry with all the panicked energy of a terrified cock-pheasant shooting to freedom like a gaudy bullet, and leaving all his dowdy wives behind: “Coccup-coccup-coccup-COCCUPP!”
     “That’s what he sounds like,” he explained. “Do it again,”` Alexander requested happily, and they both did it again. This quite restored his humour.
     It’s wonderful. Pheasants have been bred for only a few hundred years for shooting. Before this they were always netted. It can be no accident that the British upper classes, who learnt and liked the phrase because it sounds so sexual, apparently never learnt why their poor tenants and neighbours used it. It does indeed describe an action requiring great skill and patience being spoilt by clumsiness. But the noise is the result. It has nothing to do with the cause. On the other hand, it is surely better that the owners of all those plump pheasants imagine sundry cocks being up whatever they fancy, so long as they do not guess how many coccups their neighbours have avoided, and how of their birds are eaten netted, and not shot.
     Arthur died under his car in his garage as he was preparing for his annual journey to visit his old wartime landlady in Scotland. His son Robert rang me and spoke three words, “He’s gone.” I knew what he meant at once. I never went to his funeral. I was too afraid of blubbing in front of his family. I also thought it would embarrass them as much as me. I have often regretted my cowardice, but I have never seen his grave. He enriched my life and left me with a store of memories. Somewhere I must tell the story of Bunger Smith; of Arthur and the great Scottish nugget; Arthur and the Baby-Doll; Arthur and the Eels; oh, and more, many more.

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