All Things Wise and Wonderful Read online

  We finished the bunch with hardly any help from the little man, and as we left the pen and came out into the yard Mr. Daggett wiped his brow. It was a raw November day but he was sweating profusely and for a moment he leaned his gaunt six foot frame against the wall as the wind from the bare moorland blew over him.

  “By gaw, he’s a useless little beggar is that,” he grunted. “Ah don’t know how ah put up with ’im.” He muttered to himself for a few moments then gave tongue again. “Hey, Ned!”

  The little man who had been trailing aimlessly over the cobbles turned his pinched face and looked at him with his submissive but strangely expectant eyes.

  “Get them bags o’ corn up into the granary!” his boss ordered.

  Wordlessly Ned went over to a cart and with an effort shouldered a sack of corn. As he painfully mounted the stone steps to the granary his frail little legs trembled and bent under the weight.

  Mr. Daggett shook his head and turned to me. His long cadaverous face was set in its usual cast of melancholy.

  “You know what’s wrong wi’ Ned?” he murmured confidentially.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know why ’e can’t catch them calves?”

  My own view was that Ned wasn’t big enough or strong enough and anyway he was naturally ineffectual, but I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “Why is it?”

  “Well I’ll tell ye.” Mr. Daggett glanced furtively across the yard then spoke from behind his hand. “He’s ower fond of t’bright lights.”

  “Eh?”

  “Ah’m tellin’ ye, he’s crazed over t’bright lights.”

  “Bright … what … where …?”

  Mr. Daggett leaned closer. “He gets over to Briston every night.”

  “Briston …?” I looked across from the isolated farm to the village three miles away on the other side of the Dale. It was the only settlement in that bleak vista—a straggle of ancient houses dark and silent against the green fellside. I could recall that at night the oil lamps made yellow flickers of light in the windows but they weren’t very bright. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well … ’e gets into t’pub.”

  “Ah, the pub.”

  Mr. Daggett nodded slowly and portentously but I was still puzzled. The Hulton Arms was a square kitchen where you could get a glass of beer and where a few old men played dominoes of an evening. It wasn’t my idea of a den of vice.

  “Does he get drunk there?” I asked.

  “Nay, nay.” The farmer shook his head. It’s not that. It’s the hours ’e keeps.”

  “Comes back late, eh?”

  “Aye, that ’e does!” The eyes widened in their cavernous sockets. “Sometimes ’e doesn’t get back till ’alf past nine or ten o’clock!”

  “Gosh, is that so?”

  “Sure as ah’m standin’ here. And there’s another thing. He can’t get out of ’is bed next day. Ah’ve done half a day’s work before ’e starts.” He paused and glanced again across the yard. “You can believe me or believe me not, but sometimes ’e isn’t on the job till seven o’clock in t’morning!”

  “Good heavens!”

  He shrugged wearily. “Aye well, you see how it is. Come into t’house, you’ll want to wash your hands.”

  In the huge flagged kitchen I bent low over the brown earthenware sink. Scar Farm was four hundred years old and the various tenants hadn’t altered it much since the days of Henry the Eighth. Gnarled beams, rough white-washed walls and hard wooden chairs. But comfort had never been important to Mr. Daggett or his wife who was ladling hot water from the primitive boiler by the side of the fire and pouring it into her scrubbing bucket.

  She clopped around over the flags in her clogs, hair pulled back tightly from her weathered face into a bun, a coarse sacking apron tied round her waist. She had no children but her life was one of constant activity; indoors or outside, she worked all the time.

  At one end of the room wooden steps led up through a hole in the ceiling to a loft where Ned slept. That had been the little man’s room for nearly fifty years ever since he had come to work for Mr. Daggett’s father as a boy from school. And in all that time he had never travelled further than Darrowby, never done anything outside his daily routine. Wifeless, friendless, he plodded through his life, endlessly milking, feeding and mucking out, and waiting, I suspected with diminishing hope for something to happen.

  With my handle on the car door I looked back at Scar Farm, at the sagging roof tiles, the great stone lintel over the door. It typified the harshness of the lives of the people within. Little Ned was no bargain as a stockman, and his boss’s exasperation was understandable. Mr. Daggett was not a cruel or an unjust man. He and his wife had been hardened and squeezed dry by the pitiless austerity of their existence in this lonely corner of the high Pennines.

  There was no softness up here, no frills. The stone walls, sparse grass and stunted trees; the narrow road with its smears of cow muck. Everything was down to fundamentals, and it was a miracle to me that most of the Dalesmen were not like the Daggetts but cheerful and humourous.

  But as I drove away, the sombre beauty of the place overwhelmed me. The lowering hillsides burst magically into life as a shaft of sunshine stabbed through the clouds, flooding the bare flanks with warm gold. Suddenly I was aware of the delicate shadings of green, the rich glowing bronze of the dead bracken spilling from the high tops, the whole peaceful majesty of my work-a-day world.

  I hadn’t far to drive to my next call—just about a mile—and it was in a vastly different atmosphere. Miss Tremayne, a rich lady from the south, had bought a tumbledown manor house and spent many thousands of pounds in converting it into a luxury home. As my feet crunched on the gravel I looked up at the large windows with their leaded panes, at the smooth, freshly-painted stones.

  Elsie opened the door to me. She was Miss Tremayne’s cook-housekeeper, and one of my favourite people. Aged about fifty, no more than five feet high and as round as a ball with short bandy legs sticking out from beneath a tight black dress.

  “Good morning, Elsie,” I said, and she burst into a peal of laughter. This, more man her remarkable physical appearance, was what delighted me. She laughed uproariously at every statement and occurrence; in fact she laughed at the things she said herself.

  “Come in, Mr. Herriot, ha-ha-ha,” she said. “It’s been a bit nippy today, he-he, but I think it’ll get out this afternoon, ho-ho-ho.”

  All the mirth may have seemed somewhat unnecessary, and indeed, it made her rather difficult to understand, but the general effect was cheering. She led me into the drawing room and her mistress rose with some difficulty from her chair.

  Miss Tremayne was elderly and half crippled with arthritis but bore her affliction without fuss.

  “Ah, Mr. Herriot,” she said. “How good of you to come.” She put her head on one side and beamed at me as though I was the most delightful thing she had seen for a long time.

  She, too, had a bubbling, happy personality, and since she owned three dogs, two cats and an elderly donkey I had come to know her very well in her six months’ residence in the Dale.

  My visit was to dress the donkey’s overgrown hooves, and a pair of clippers and a blacksmith’s knife dangled from my right hand.

  “Oh, put those grisly instruments down over there,” she said. “Elsie’s bringing some tea—I’m sure you’ve time for a cup.”

  I sank willingly into one of the brightly covered armchairs and was looking round the comfortable room when Elsie reappeared, gliding over the carpet as though on wheels. She put the tray on the table by my side.

  “There’s yer tea,” she said, and went into a paroxysm so hearty that she had to lean on the back of my chair. She had no visible neck and the laughter caused the fat little body to shake all over.

  When she had recovered she rolled back into the kitchen and I heard her clattering about with pans. Despite her idiosyncrasies she was a wonderful cook and very effi