The bus dropped us both off in the shade of the great manor yews, near his house and mine.
I said, “Peter.”
He stood to attention, like a cadet or a boy in a reformatory, threw back his head, and said, “Sir!” As though expecting at the very least a slap; and at the same time not truly intending apology or respect. In that reaction, which made me nervous, I felt I had a glimpse of his past, and saw his need for aggression, his only form of self-assertion. I didn’t know how to go on with him; I didn’t particularly want to. I didn’t say any more.
He was odd man out on the bus, and like an intruder in the village. In fact, there were no other boys of his age around; people with growing families tended to move out. And though there were a number of young children, the dairyman’s younger boy was also a little strange. Among the children from the infant schools on its route, the school bus picked up two or three near idiots. The dairyman’s younger son, delicate and small, attached himself to one of these: a fat little boy, thick-featured, with a heavy, round head, a boy dressed in startling colors, bright red sometimes, bright yellow at other times, with pale-blond eyelashes and eyebrows that, oddly, suggested someone dim-sighted. This fat child was restless on the bus. He moved from seat to seat and — as though knowing that the constrictions of school were over — spoke insults casually through his thick wet lips at people on the bus, innocently spoke obscenities, in a tone of voice which permitted one to hear the older person from whom the words had been picked up. This was the friend of the dairyman’s younger son.
They were being saved by the job, their life in the valley that so many people wished to live in. But they stood out. And they were wrecking the garden of the pretty pink cottage they had taken over. It wasn’t (as with Peter on the bus) a wish to offend; it was ignorance, not knowing, not beginning to imagine that the way they lived at home could be of interest to anyone. Part of their new freedom was the country secrecy, the freedom from observation, which (like me, at the beginning) they thought they had found in the dark empty road and the big empty fields.
Out of that freedom, that new, ignorant pleasure in country life, some curious gypsy or horse-dealing instinct came to the dairyman. He bought a run-down white horse and kept it in a small field beside the public road. The animal was a wretched creature, and was made more wretched now by its solitude; it had soon cropped the grass of its small field right down. It was spiritless, idle; people on the bus commented on its state.
And then something else occurred to make the dairyman talked about. His cows broke loose one evening. They wandered about the road, trampled over fields, a few gardens, and the lawn of the manor, in front of my cottage.
And then one day, again in front of my cottage, down the path on the other side of the lawn, the dairyman led a hairy brown and white pony, thick-legged and thick-necked, to the paddock at the back. And there one afternoon (after schooltime) the dairyman and his son Peter gelded and mutilated the pony and then they led the bleeding animal back past the windows of my cottage to the white wide gate, past the churchyard, to the dark lane below the yews and then to the public road. Did they know what they were doing? Had they been trained? Or had they just been told that the gelding was something they should do?
I never actually heard, but I believe the pony died. It was the cruelty of the man who looked after animals. Not absolute cruelty; more a casualness, the attitude of a man who looked after lesser, dependent creatures, superintending the entire cycle of their lives, capable of tenderness, yet living easily with the knowledge that though a cow might have produced so many calves and given so much milk, it would one day have to be dispatched to the slaughterhouse in a covered trailer.
Cows and grass and trees: pretty country views — they existed all around me. Though I hadn’t truly seen those views before or been in their midst, I felt I had always known them. On my afternoon walk on the downs there was sometimes a view on one particular slope of black-and-white cows against the sky. This was like the design on the condensed-milk label I knew as a child in Trinidad, where cows as handsome as those were not to be seen, where there was very little fresh milk and most people used imported condensed milk or powdered milk.
Now, not far from that view, there was this intimate act of cruelty. The memory of that mutilated, bleeding pony, still with the bad-tempered toss of its head and mane, being led to the white gate below the yews by the two big-headed men, father and son, was with me for some time.
They had been “saved,” that town family. (Was it Bristol they had come from? Or Swindon? How fearful those towns seemed to working people here! And fearful to me, too, though for different reasons.) But their life in the country was not as secret or unobserved as they might have thought. They were more judged now than they had perhaps been in the town. And the feeling began to grow — I heard comments on the bus, and more comments were reported to me by the couple who looked after the manor — that it was time for them, so noticeable, causing so many kinds of offense, to leave.
From Bray, the car-hire man, their near neighbor, who liked being odd man out a little himself, I heard the only thing in their favor. Bray came one evening to rescue a starling that had got into the loft of my cottage and couldn’t get out again. Bray did the job easily. Then, talking of his neighbors, he said of the dairyman’s elder boy, “He’s very good with birds, you know.”
Bray was holding both his hands around the frightened, glossy, blue-black bird he had brought down; holding both heavy hands together so that the bird rested on his broad fingers and the bird’s head protruded from the circle formed by his index fingers and thumbs. The two hands could have crushed the bird with one easy gesture; but only Bray’s thumbs moved, stroking the bird’s head, slowly, one thumb after the other, until the bird appeared to be looking about itself again. Bray — though he had turned the ground in front of his house into a motor mechanic’s yard — was a countryman. His talk about birds and their habits seemed to come from his childhood — almost from another age. And I wondered how an understanding of birds, like Bray’s understanding, could have come to the dairyman’s son.
In place of the white and red-brown pony in the paddock there came a very tall, elegant horse. It was a famous old racehorse, I heard. I don’t think its appearance in the paddock had anything to do with the dairyman. Some local landowner — perhaps even the man who, indirectly, was going to get rid of the dairyman — might have been responsible.
The name of the animal and his great fame I didn’t know. Nor, from simply looking at him, could I tell his great age. But he was very old; he had only a few months or weeks to live; he had come to the valley to die. He still looked muscular and glossy to me; he was like certain sportsmen or athletes who even in age, when strength and agility have gone, retain something of the elegance of the body they trained for so long.
And hearing about the fame of this animal, his triumphs and great record, I found myself indulging in anthropomorphic questions when I considered him in the paddock. Did he know who he was? Did he know where he was? Did he mind? Did he miss the crowds?
I went one day to the very edge of the manor grounds to look at the horse, past the tall grass, the big spread of stacked-up, wet beech leaves slowly turning to compost, the mossed-over, mildewed apple trees, with a glimpse of the rest of the forested orchard to one side. The old racehorse turned its head towards me in a curious way. And then I saw, with pain and nervousness, that it was blind in its left eye. As I approached, it had had to swivel its head to look at me with its bright and trusting right eye, still to me not at all like an old eye.