Humphrey

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.

Playing

In idle moments I have been playing around with a free online photo-edting website at http://www.tuxpi.com. It's easy to use and there are various interesting effects you can apply to your own pictures. See my Christmas card above and below you can see a "pencil sketch" of  the Earl of Trelawnyd with one of his hunting hounds on a motivational poster:-

Oxen

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

by Thomas Hardy (1915 - when he was 75)

The legend that cattle – descendants of the beasts that knelt in reverence at the stable in Bethlehem – would kneel each Christmas Eve at midnight was familiar to Hardy from childhood. This poem was written as the horror of World War One was really starting to be unveiled. One of his distant relatives was killed at Gallipoli that year.

The poem hints at Hardy's uncomfortable relationship with religion. The church had been important to him throughout his life. He wanted to believe and yet logic and a sense of our universe's great godless emptiness kept deepening his instinctive atheism. A "barton" was perhaps a barley enclosure and a "coomb" was a - short chalky valley - both familiar Wessex terms.

Confession

So frequently you see them just sitting there next to the toilet bowl. They come in different designs and colours. There are posh ones and dirt cheap ones. Usually they rest in little plastic or ceramic containers to catch the drips. I am talking about toilet brushes folks! What a fascinating topic!

I want to let you into a little secret. For the first twenty five years of my life, I never once used a toilet brush. I would see them sitting there in "rest rooms" like ornaments but I hardly gave them a moment's thought. I guess I assumed they were put there ready for cleaners to use. It never occurred to me that when you despoiled the virgin whiteness of a lavatory bowl you were meant to clean up with the brush yourself! Nobody had told me.

They probably just assumed that the purpose of a toilet brush would be obvious but to me it wasn't. In my view, alongside sex education and drug awareness, schoolchildren should be taught about the humble toilet brush. There'd be practical sessions followed by careful scrutiny by judges. In Design Technology the kids would design their own toilet brushes and in Music toilet brushes (clean) would be used as pretend microphones.

To anyone who may have followed me into toilet cubicles from 1953 to 1978, may I hereby apologise wholeheartedly for any unpleasantness I may have left behind. To repeat myself, I simply didn't know - even though most unfortunately ignorance is no defence in the eyes of the law. Have you got a toilet brush tale to tell?

Dictionary

I have in my possession a very battered old dictionary that smells of ancient tobacco smoke. Actually, that is not quite true because I have only the second volume (L to Z) of Samuel Johnson's famous "A Dictionary of the English Language" printed in 1778 (sixth edition). I can't make out the first owner's name. It was John something or other and he inscribed his name inside the front cover in 1789 along with a couple of pages of handwritten Ancient Greek.

I have just spent a happy hour flicking through the pages which as you might imagine, stealthily reveal differences between the world we live in now and the world as it appeared at the back end of the eighteenth century. Johnson's definition of "motor" is simply "mover" and there is only one word with the prefix "tele-" - and that is telescope. The words "penis" and "vagina" are not included and nor is "moron", "ski" or "lavatory". A "luncheon" is apparently "as much food as one's hand can hold" and the word was, it seems, derived from "clutch" or "clunch".

There are very many botanical words including "lustwort", "lungwort", "moschatel" and "scurvygrass". Another curious word I spotted was "swanskin" which was a kind of "soft flannel" - hopefully not actually made from swans!

We all know what the word "woman" means but did you ever use it as a verb? Johnson defines "womaning" as "making pliant like a woman". But a man who is accompanied by or united with a woman is "womaned". And we all know about the typical "womaniser" - Casanova, Errol Flynn or Eric Pickles - but in Johnson's dictionary to "womanise" simply means to emasculate, "to effeminate" or to soften - nothing concerning sexual debauchery.

A lovely word I had never heard before was the adjective "skimbleskamble" which meant "wandering" or "wild". I am not sure how it would have been used. Perhaps - "Earl Gray's skimbleskamble hens headed for the hedgerow" or "The skimbleskamble lane twisted its way across the moors."

"Reindeer" is spelt "raindeer" and rather lazily Johnson tells us it is a "deer with large horns which, in the northern regions draws sledges through the snow". No hint here of the close relationship between Lapps and the reindeer herds upon which their very survival depended.

To Johnson, "orgasm" meant "sudden vehemence" and a "thunderstone"  was "fabulously supposed to be emitted by thunder". "Tea" was a "Chinese plant of which the infusion has lately been much drank in Europe" and a "slabberer" was of course "one who slabbers - an idiot". "Slabbering" should not be confused with "slubbering" which is all about doing things lazily, imperfectly with "idle hurry" and a "slubberdegullion" was a "paltry, dirty, sorry wretch".

There - that's enough. I am sure if you're really interested in Johnson's dictionary you will be able to access it somewhere online.

Review

Three things motivated me to read "Black Diamonds" by Catherine Bailey. Firstly, fellow blogger Brian - exiled to Catalonia from his South Yorkshire homeland - had raved about it - mostly because it concerns the Wentworth Woodhouse estate close to his family's home in the former pit and railway village of Elsecar. Secondly, quite recently I went for a lovely country walk around Wentworth, taking in several of the locations mentioned in the book. Thirdly, my maternal grandfather and great grandfather were both coal miners at the New Stubbin colliery that was developed by the Earls of Fitwilliam - who for centuries inhabited the grand country estate where my mother had often rambled as a girl.

It's a book about changing times and the fall of one of the richest and most powerful aristocratic families in England. Though they had many more houses and estates, the mind-bogglingly wealthy Fitzwilliam family's proudest possession was Wentworth Woodhouse with its 365 rooms and the widest frontage of any private home in Europe. The house has never been open to the public and surprisingly, outside South Yorkshire few people have even heard of it.

The Fitwilliams' story is one of intrigue, the hiding of secrets, political and religious battles, blood lines and exploitation. Theirs was a world of foxhunting, race horses, debutantes, lavish dinners, the possession of "old masters" and they moved in the most privileged circles. Nonetheless, before the nationalisation of the country's coal industry they were unusual employers for they enjoyed the affection and respect of their "serfs" - the coal mining  and farming families that relied upon them for work even as they replenished the Fitzwilliams' bulging coffers. They looked after their people.

Kathleen Kennedy's grave at Chatsworth

American visitors to this humble blog may be interested to learn that in the late nineteen forties the married 8th Earl Fitzwilliam (Peter) had a passionate affair with Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy - sister to John F. Kennedy. Sadly, they died together in an eminently avoidable light plane crash in the South of France in 1948. "Kick" is buried at Chatsworth House - home to the Marquis of Hartington who had been her husband till his death on active duty  in World War II.

I liked "Black Diamonds", mostly because I was motivated to learn more about the subjects it covered . However, Catherine Bailey never seems entirely sure what she is writing. Is it history? Is it a romantic novel? It is a treatise on social injustice? Her attitude towards the aristocratic Fitzwilliam family often seems ambivalent. At times she is in awe of them and at other times she appears to deride their feudal extravagances. Even so the book was very well-researched - both in libraries and in conversations with old people who could recall those vanished times and I am pleased I read it. 

Howden

Howden Minster and the arch of the ruined abbey chancel.

It's nice to be able to share my England with overseas visitors to this blog. Our beautiful little country with its rich heritage and varied landscapes is much more than London or Stratford-upon-Avon or Oxford or York. Once I met a young American who thought that the words "England" and "London" were interchangeable. They meant the same thing. He's lucky I didn't biff him.

On Saturday I went over to Hull to see the mighty Tigers beat Huddersfield 2-0 in front of 17,000 supporters but before I reached that city of dreams, I made a little detour to the small East Yorkshire town of Howden which sits just north of the River Humber on a rich alluvial plain. Visually, the town is dominated by its medieval church's tower which rises from the ruins of a Norman Abbey and can easily trace its history back beyond a thousand two hundred years. 

The little town meant a lot to my parents because when they returned to England after World War II, my father gained his first primary school headship at the nearby village of Barmby-on-the-Marsh.  It was where my two older brothers were first raised and just three miles away, Howden was the closest place for shops and services. 

So I wandered around. There were children in the beautiful old Minster rehearsing a Christmas service and in  nearby Market Street, local people were doing their Saturday shopping. I saw several "accidental" meetings of friends and acquaintances  - for this is a town that very few outsiders would ever visit - especially in the wintertime. In one shop window I saw a fashion mannequin dressed as Mary with a plastic baby Jesus in her arms. It was a bit spooky.

Afterwards, I drove on to Hull via Eastrington and Gilberdyke, past the Humber Bridge and on to Clive Sullivan Way - parking half a mile away from the Kingston Communications Stadium - Hull City's home ground. Tony and Fiona had brought sandwiches and hot coffee for halftime. Returning home in the blackness of early evening, I noticed that the illuminated tower of Howden Minster was easily visible from the M62 motorway.

Mary and  Jesus in a gift shop window

Fruit, vegetable and flower shop on Market Street, Howden

Tomb of Sir Peter Saltmarsh (1280 - 1338) in Howden Minster