When Miss Dempsey had left the room – her knees had become stiff, owing to the wet weather, and she was obliged to take her time – Father Angwin said, ‘Do you mean the decade of burying the hatchet, by any small chance?’
‘The decade of reconciliation,’ the bishop said, ‘the decade of amity, the decade of coexistence and the decade of the many-in-one.’
‘You’re talking like a person right outside my experience,’ Father Angwin said.
‘The ecumenical spirit,’ the bishop said. ‘Don’t you feel it in the breeze? Don’t you feel it wafted to you on the prayers of a million Christian souls?’
‘I feel it breathing on my neck.’
‘Am I ahead of my time, or what?’ the bishop asked. ‘Or is it you, Father Angwin, closing your ears and deaf to the wind of change? And you might pour the tea, for I can’t abide tea stewed.’
When Father Angwin had poured the tea, the bishop picked up his cup, and jiggled it in his hand, and took a scalding gulp. Standing before the fireplace, he turned his toes out more widely, and placed his superfluous arm behind his back, and breathed in a noticeable way.
‘Exasperated,’ Father Angwin said, speaking in a low voice, but not to himself. ‘Exasperated with me. Tell me, is that tea hot enough? Good enough? Whisky in it?’ He raised his voice. ‘I hardly understand you at all.’
‘Well,’ said the bishop, ‘have you heard of the vernacular Mass? Have you thought of it? I think of it. I think of it constantly. There are men in Rome who think of it.’
Father shook his head. ‘I couldn’t be part of that.’
‘No choice, my dear man, no choice; in five years, mark my words, or a little more than five…’
Father Angwin looked up. ‘Do you mean,’ he said, ‘that they could understand what we were saying?’
‘Exactly the point.’
‘Pernicious,’ Father muttered audibly. ‘Arrant nonsense.’ Then, louder, ‘I can well understand if you think that Latin’s too good for them. But the problem I have here is their little grasp of the English language, do you see?’
‘I take account of that,’ the bishop said. ‘The people of Fetherhoughton are not on a high level. I would not claim that they were.’
‘Then what am I to do?’
‘Everything conspires to improve them, Father. I will not refer to council housing, as I know it is a sore point in this district…’
‘Requiescant in pace,’ Father murmured.
‘…but have they not free spectacles? Free teeth? In the times we live in, Father Angwin, everything that can be done to improve their material welfare shall be done, and it is for you to think of improving them in the spiritual line. Now, I have some hints and tips for you, which you will kindly accept from me.’
‘I don’t see why I should,’ Father Angwin said, quite loudly enough to be heard, ‘when you are such an old fool. I don’t see why I can’t be a Pope in my own domain.’ He looked up. ‘Consider me at your disposal.’
The bishop stared; it was a pebbly stare. He pursed his lips and said nothing till he had drunk a second cup. Then, ‘I want to look at the church.’
At this early point, the topography of the village of Fetherhoughton may repay consideration. So may the manners, customs and dress of its inhabitants.
The village lay in moorland, which ringed it on three sides. The surrounding hills, from the village streets, looked like the hunched and bristling back of a sleeping dog. Let sleeping dogs lie, was the attitude of the people; for they hated nature. They turned their faces in the fourth direction, to the road and the railway that led them to the black heart of the industrial north: to Manchester, to Wigan, to Liverpool. They were not townspeople; they had none of their curiosity. They were not country people; they could tell a cow from a sheep, but it was not their business. Cotton was their business, and had been for nearly a century. There were three mills, but there were no clogs and shawls; there was nothing picturesque.
In summer the moorland looked black. Tiny distant figures swarmed over the hummocks and hills; they were Water Board men, Forestry Commission. In the folds of the hills there were pewter-coloured reservoirs, hidden from sight. The first event of autumn was the snowfall that blocked the pass that led through the moors to Yorkshire; this was generally accounted a good thing. All winter the snow lay on the hills. By April it had flaked off into scaly patches. Only in the warmest May would it seem to vanish entirely.
The people of Fetherhoughton kept their eyes averted from the moors with a singular effort of will. They did not talk about them. Someone – it was the mark of the outsider – might find a wild dignity and grandeur in the landscape. The Fetherhoughtonians did not look at the landscape at all. They were not Emily Brontë, nor were they paid to be, and the very suggestion that the Brontë-like matter was to hand was enough to make them close their minds and occupy their eyes with their shoelaces. The moors were the vast cemetery of their imaginations. Later, there were notorious murders in the vicinity, and real bodies were buried there.
The main street of Fetherhoughton was known to the inhabitants as Upstreet: ‘I am going Upstreet,’ they would say, ‘to the Co-op drapers.’ It was not unprosperous. Behind window displays of tinned salmon, grocers stood ready at their bacon slicers. Besides the Co-op draper, the Co-op general store, the Co-op butcher, the Co-op shoe shop and the Co-op baker, there was Madame Hilda, Modes; and there was a hairdresser, who took the young women into private cubicles, segregated them with plastic curtains, and gave them Permanent Waves. There was no bookshop, nor anything of that sort. But there was a public library, and a war memorial.
Off Upstreet ran other winding streets with gradients of one in four, lined by terraced houses built in the local stone; they had been put up by the mill-owners towards the end of the last century, and rented out to the hands. Their front doors opened straight on to the pavement. There were two rooms downstairs, of which the sitting room was referred to as the House; so that in the unlikely event of anyone from Fetherhoughton explaining their conduct in any way, they might say, ‘I cleaned miyoopstairs this morning, this afternoon I am bound fert clean the House.’
The speech of the Fetherhoughtonians is not easy to reproduce. The endeavour is false and futile. One misses the solemnity, the archaic formality of the Fetherhoughtonian dialect. It was a mode of speech, Father Angwin believed, that had come adrift from the language around it. Some current had caught them unawares, and washed the Fetherhoughtonians far from the navigable reaches of plain English; and there they drifted and bobbed on waters of their own, up the creek without a paddle.
But this is a digression, and in those houses there was no scope to digress. In the House there would be a coal fire, no heating in any other room, though there might be a single-bar electric fire kept, to be used in some ill-defined emergency. In the kitchen, a deep sink and a cold-water tap, and a very steep staircase, rising to the first floor. Two bedrooms, a garret: outside, a cobbled yard shared between some ten houses. A row of coalsheds, and a row of lavatories: to each house its own coalshed, but lavatories one between two. These were the usual domestic arrangements in Fetherhoughton and the surrounding districts.
Consider the women of Fetherhoughton, as a stranger might see them; a stranger might have the opportunity, because while the men were shut away in the mills the women liked to stand on their doorsteps. This standing was what they did. Recreational pursuits were for men: football, billiards, keeping hens. Treats were doled out to men, as a reward for good behaviour: cigarettes, beer at the Arundel Arms. Religion, and the public library, were for children. Women only talked. They analysed motive, discussed the serious business, carried life forward. Between the schoolroom and their present state came the weaving sheds; deafened by the noise of the machines, they spoke too loudly now, their voices scattering through the gritty streets like the cries of displaced gulls.
Treeless