Early morning Christmas Day. Not sure why I couldn't sleep. Perhaps the takeaway curry from "Hamid's" or the drinks at John and Lorraine's house. More likely a phantasmagoria of Christmases past. Mum and Dad and my brothers. Or Ian and Frances as small children - "He's been! He's been!" The eager anticipation of gifts. An annual marker in the continually running sands of time. Christmas Day.
I lay there willing myself to sleep again but it just wouldn't happen. So I am downstairs with a big mug of tea and a mince pie but as I lay there trying not to disturb my Shirley, I recalled a story I wrote a month ago. It was inspired by the London Underground and it tells the tale behind the name of a certain tube station. And that station is...
Long ago, before motor cars and mobile phones, before aeroplanes and
factories, before computers and microwave meals, a shepherd lived near the
little town of London. His name was Humphrey and his humble home was a little shepherd’s hut made from willow sticks
and the old bones of dead sheep. Instead
of a carpet, he just scattered dry hay on his dirt floor.
Humphrey was employed by Lord Snotgrouse of Hammersmith who had a
luxurious mansion by the River Thames – on the very site of what is now the
Hammersmith Apollo Theatre. You might have seen it on the television - the Apollo I mean – not Snotgrouse Mansion
which was demolished early in the nineteenth century as London spread its urban
tentacles into the surrounding countryside.
Lord Snotgrouse and his house guests loved to eat meat. He insisted on
meat at every meal. And because in those
days there were no supermarkets or even any high street butchers, rich people
had to raise their own animals. Lord Snotgrouse always had important things to
do so had no time to look after his own animals. Instead, he employed a
swineherd, a cowherd, a poulterer (keeper of chickens), a rabbit catcher and a
shepherd. It was their job to make sure there was an endless supply of freshly
slaughtered animals for the kitchens of Snotgrouse Mansion.
Humphrey shepherded a flock of around a hundred sheep. Every day he’d
rise before dawn, put on his woolly jerkin and his sheepskin hat, grab his
spindly shepherd’s crook and venture out to check the flock. He’d move them to
new pastures or down to the River Thames to drink and all the time the stupid
sheep say would say “baa!” – all of them
together, a hundred sheep going “Baa! Baa! Baa!”. They made a helluva racket
and the noise often woke other residents on Lord Snotgrouse’s vast estate.
Day after day, Humphrey tended the flock. In summertime there were
fleeces to shear and In springtime there would be new lambs to keep up the
numbers as older sheep were swiftly dispatched with Humphrey’s sharp steel knife. He kept it in a leather sheath that
hung from his belt. It had been handed down to him by his father. When a sheep
was dead, Humphrey would sling it over his shoulders and, grasping its dangling
feet, carry it along the network of country paths that led to Snotgrouse
Mansion.
Humphrey never had a day off. For forty years he worked without a
single holiday. He didn’t even have time to go to church in the nearby village
of Fulham. He tended Lord Snotgrouse’s sheep from dawn to dusk, 365 days a year
and sometimes he’d even be up in the middle of the night, assisting ewes with their
lambing or chasing away foxes that loved to feast on fresh mutton. Yes,
Humphrey did his duty. He served his lord without complaint and maintained the
supply of fresh sheep for his lordship’s kitchen.
In all this long time, Humphrey had never even spoken to his master
though he had often seen Lord Snotgrouse riding Bombast - his big grey horse
towards the little town of London or to nearby
Fulham village. The rutted track that led there went right past
Humphrey’s humble hut.
When Humphrey was a young man of twenty five or so, he was guiding the
flock along the bumpy track to fresh pasture when Lord Snotgrouse rode by on
Bombast. It had been raining that morning and as his lordship trotted by, his
horse’s hooves splashed in the muddy puddles along the way. Humphrey stood on
the grass verge and bowed his head, close to a particularly large puddle. When
Bombast’s front hooves hit it, Humphrey was splashed from head to foot with
muddy brown lane water.
Lord Snotgrouse looked down from his saddle. He was a tubby man with
fat cheeks and thighs like hams. Seeing
poor Humphrey standing there dripping with mud and chocolate-coloured water,
his lordship roared with mirth – “Ha! Ha! Ha!” till there were tears of
laughter running down his blubbery face. Then he whipped his grey horse’s rump
with a leather riding crop and galloped through the baah-ing sheep still
laughing with cruel delight at Humphrey’s misfortune. Meanwhile Humphrey,
wiping away the muddy water, had to regather his now scattered flock as he
watched the diminishing figure of his greatly amused master making his way
along the old farmtrack to Fulham and
thence to London.
Years passed. Sheep came and went and Humphrey grew older. One dark
November night, he lay shivering in his shepherd’s hut beneath an old sheepskin
blanket he had stitched together when he was a young man. Wind and rain howled
together outside and he was glad that he’d taken the flock to the old sheepfold
that he and his late father had built over at Kensington. They were sheltered
from the worst of the weather there.
Rain bucketed upon Humphrey’s roof and outside the thunder rumbled.
Then he heard a horse on the nearby lane – its hooves pounding like coconut
shells. Suddenly, there was an enormous crack of lightning that must have lit
up the entire parish. He heard the frightened whinnying of a horse and then a
man’s voice – “Steady Bombast!”. There was another explosion of light. The man
yelled “Aaargh!” and there was a heavy thump as the horse galloped off down the
lane at a hundred miles an hour.
Even though the rain was still lashing down, Humphrey got up to see
what had happened. He put his sheepskin blanket over his head and ventured down
to the lane. There was something there –
like a sack of turnips, just lying in the road – and then in another blinding
flash of lightning, he realised that it was the crumpled body of his master –
Lord Snotgrouse, just lying there as dead as a doorpost. He surely must have
hit his head on a rock or tree root when the horse threw him.
But Humphrey didn’t know for sure that his master was dead so he dragged
his lordship back to the little hut and laid him on his humble bed in his
humble shepherd’s hut where he lit his only remaining candle stub. Then it
became clear that the bloated nobleman’s life had ceased. Humphrey surveyed his
flabby body, noting the fine silk pantaloons, the braided velvet jacket and the
shiny shoes with golden buckles. And suddenly - there on his lordship’s belt he
noticed a calfskin money bag. It appeared to be bulging with coins.
Humphrey knew it was wrong but he couldn’t help himself. He untied the
money bag and poured out its contents. Good heavens! There must have been fifty
guineas or even more – in gold and silver coins. Humphrey was astonished. As a
shepherd, he earned a solitary threepenny bit a week with an extra sixpence at
Yuletime and here on the floor of his hut was an absolute fortune. If it was
his it would be like a modern day person winning the National Lottery with their
six magic numbers!
Humphrey was tempted. A demon inside in him said “Take the money!” and
he listened to that demon rather too hard as the little angel’s voice inside
him was reduced to a tiny whisper – “No Humphrey! It’s wrong!”
The storm was passing by now. Hanging next to Humphrey’s door was an
old spade that he had once used to dig the foundations of the sheepfold at
Kensington and sometimes used to crack trapped foxes’ heads. He took it down and dug a hole a few
yards away from his hut. It was a man-shaped hole. The soil was stodgy with
rainwater but after three hours of digging and with dawn beginning to lighten
the eastern horizon, the hole was done.
He went back inside the hut and grabbed his lordship’s feet – buckled
shoes and all and he dragged the fat corpse outside to the hole which seemed to
fit Lord Snotgrouse nicely. He landed at the bottom with a heavy wallop then
huffing and puffing, Humphrey refilled the hole, stamping the earth down with
his sheepskin boots. “Ug! Ug!” he grunted with the physical effort of the awful
job he had just finished.
Then Humphrey went back into his humble hut and counted the coins from
the leather moneybag. Sixty two guineas, four shillings and ninepence! He
counted it again. Yes – he had been right first time! A flaming fortune! His
eyes bulged with excitement. And then he boiled some thin sheep’s head gruel
before beginning yet another day as a country shepherd - as if nothing out of
the ordinary had happened.
He heard from Dave the swineherd that his lordship’s grey horse had
been found down by the river. Rumour had it that his lordship must have been
tossed into the Thames during last week’s thunderstorm. Perhaps Bombast had
panicked and thrown him. By now the
tubby lord’s body could easily have been
washed out to sea.
A week or so later, some
redcoats passed along the lane, returning from Snotgrouse Mansion. They had
been making enquiries about his lordship’s disappearance. As they reached the
old shepherd’s hut, they saw an old man planting a Yuletide hollybush next to
his humble home.
The captain yelled out, “I say old fellow, did you see Lord Snotgrouse
on the night of the storm?”
“No sir. I were sound asleep in my bed. I heard nothing. Nothing at
all,” lied Humphrey looking down humbly at the blade of his old spade.
After the redcoats had galloped away – back to their barracks in
London – Humphrey tamped down the little hollybush with the heels of his boots.
He had planted it directly over the place where Lord Snotgrouse was buried.
In the next few years, that hollybush thrived, growing to twenty feet
or more and every Christmas its branches bulged with bloodred berries. Passers
by sometimes stopped to admire what became such a fine bush – right next to the
old shepherd’s shack. But Humphrey never saw
his shepherd’s bush flourish for just days after the redcoats had ridden
by, he put the calfskin moneybag inside
his sheepskin jerkin and began what turned out to be a very long walk to the
south coast.
He arrived in the seaside village of Brighton on Christmas Day where
he took lodgings in “The Three Tuns Tavern” and ate a hearty meal of roast
swan, boiled turnip and tender mutton. Then he bought “drinks all round” for
the other Christmas revellers who, taking Humphrey’s lead, toasted “his
lordship” before Tom the fiddler played Christmas carols on his violin deep
into that frosty night.
And that, my friends, is how Shepherd’s Bush got its name.
