Growing Up

CHAPTER I-4

“Mutta Kundra, sir, nineteen-fifteen,” said Mr. Hamp.

By a delightful coincidence Sir Harry had also been at Mutta Kundra in ’fifteen, so when Lady Waring came back in the black skirt she was surprised to find her husband and her local tailor in animated converse, while Mr. Hamp delicately picked the fluff out of the turn-ups of the General’s trousers.

“Funny thing, my dear,” said Sir Harry. “Hamp was at Mutta Kundra in ’fifteen. Mustn’t keep you, Hamp, her ladyship is ready.”

Mr. Hamp, swivelling round on his knees, quickly made the small adjustments necessary and Lady Waring went back to her room to extricate herself from the pin-larded skirt with Selina’s help.

“Now, Hamp, about this business of the trouser-pends,” said Sir Harry, who hated to leave a job unfinished.

“Well, it’s this way, sir,” said Mr. Hamp. “A gentleman’s instep is higher than the back of his foot, leastways than the place on the back of his foot that the trouser comes to, if you follow me, so the bottom of the leg has to be graduated like. And that way, with sloping and all, you’ll find you’ll cut into the material something cruel; cut to waste as we say. Besides which it takes a tailor as is a tailor to cut that line. Talk about those ready-made tailors, sir. They haven’t the art. If I’ve cut one pair of trousers, sir, I’ve cut a thousand, and it’s the personality as counts in each. Now, sir, if the Government was to put the Master Tailors in charge of this cloth rationing business, men as do know their job, well, it’ud make a lot of difference, sir, and go a long way towards winning the war. At least that’s my humble opinion.”

Selina now came in with the skirt which she delivered to Mr. Hamp.

“Her ladyship’s just going to have her bath, Sir Harry,” she said, “and dinner’s at a quarter past eight I was to say.”

Sir Harry glanced at the clock, saw he had half an hour to wait, and resigned himself. Mr. Hamp, with the skirt in its winding-sheet looking like a soft mummy, was now preparing to go.

“Good night, Hamp,” said Sir Harry. “Interesting about those trouser legs. I must get you to give some of mine a press one of these days.”

“Very pleased to be of any service to you, sir,” said Mr. Hamp, the top of his head going bright purple as he reflected on the glory this connection would shed on him at the Woolpack, many of whose habitués were ex-soldiers. “And if you are speaking to any of those Parliamentary gentlemen, sir, perhaps you’d bear in mind that the master tailors haven’t had a fair deal this war. If a young gentleman as has just got his commission goes to one of these ready-made houses, sir, for establishments I reelly cannot call them, well, he may get rigged out, for tailored is a word I reelly could not use not in this connection, but what will he look like, sir?”

Sir Harry, rather wishing the fellow would stop talking and go, said he thought a lot of the young officers got their things off the peg.

“Begging your pardon, sir, the young gentlemen may do so, but that is not the point I wished to make,” said Mr. Hamp. “The point is, have their uniforms that natty look that a gentleman’s uniform had ought to have? I know to my cost, sir,” said Mr. Hamp almost tearfully, “the difficulty there is with the shocking, shoddy suitings we have to use nowadays, but there is always the Cut, sir, and I’ve got a few rolls of pre-war material that it’s a pleasure to get the shears into.”

There seemed to be no reason why Mr. Hamp should ever stop talking, especially as Sir Harry could not use his orderly-room manner for fear of offending the tailor who spared his wife various tiring journeys to London. He was wondering if he could offer him something to go and buy a drink, or if this would be against the Master Tailors’ code, when Selina came back and by plumping up cushions, emptying ashtrays, and picking up the pins that had fallen from Mr. Hamp’s mouth, managed to create a small whirlwind that enveloped him and drove him out of the room.

“Talks a lot, that tailor,” said Sir Harry.

“Oh yes, he does, Sir Harry,” said Selina. “But I’m so sorry for poor Mr. Hamp, Sir Harry. His son was such a pride to him and he can’t get over it.”

“Killed? Or missing?” said Sir Harry. “Poor fellow.”

“Oh no, Sir Harry, he’s got a lame leg and he’s in the Home Guard, but he’s taken a very good job in The People’s Tailoring Limited, and poor Mr. Hamp is so upset. He’d set his heart on his son taking over his business,” said Selina, her eyes liquid with sympathy, “and now he says when he dies it’s the end of the firm. It does seem hard, Sir Harry. Excuse me, Sir Harry, it’s the bell.”

She went out, but Sir Harry had not had time to settle to his newspaper again before she was back.

“It’s Mr. Margett, Sir Harry, about Private Jenks and poor p***y,” said Selina.

“Oh, all right, show him in,” said Sir Harry, wishing not for the first time that the war were over and he comfortably installed in his own house with an office to see the outdoor men in; or better still that there had never been a war at all. But such repining was useless, so he got up and braced himself to meet his old keeper.

Mr. Margett was one of the three families, Margetts, Polletts and Pattens, who were the real life and fibre of that part of the county and had probably been so long before Barsetshire was carved from forests and downs and river valleys. Of old Anglo-Saxon stock they had intermarried as far back as church registers existed, rarely taking wives from among the foreigners, but from time to time allowing a gipsy man who wanted one of their girls to come into the clan. Jasper Margett belonged to this mixed race, his grandmother, half-gipsy by blood, being a witch who lived in Golden Valley towards Skeynes Agnes, and in her younger days had frequently been met as a large black hare. In his youth Jasper had hesitated between poaching and running away to sea. His mother, the witch’s only child, longed passionately for her son to be respectable, perhaps the more because her husband, one of the most accomplished poachers in the district, and the village ne’er-do-weel in his spare time, wished his son to follow his own profession. Young Jasper very naturally wished to disobey the wishes of both parents, and at twelve was well on the way to inheriting the position of ne’er-do-weel which his father had forfeited by falling down the front steps of the Woolpack after closing time and breaking his neck, when Providence intervened in the shape of the head keeper at Beliers Priory who wanted help with the pheasant chicks. As soon as Jasper Margett saw the young birds he knew that no life would be worth living that did not include the handling and rearing of such pleasing objects. He was taken on approval. His hereditary instincts made him as clever and gentle with birds as he was quick with a gun. The head keeper reported favourably to Sir George Waring, father of the present baronet, Jasper was formally engaged, and in time became head-keeper at the Priory, and a silent or acrimonious devotee of the whole family. Harry Waring, then at Oxford, became the chief object of his devotion. Little George Waring had had his first lessons in shooting and fishing from Jasper. Now the under keeper and the other men had gone, but Jasper still kept watch over the woods, a taciturn man, smitten to the heart by the decay of landed estates and game preserving, seeing no possible successor in his craft. The village, which felt kindly towards him, for he had often been lenient to their boys, did a little poaching from time to time to cheer him up, but were grieved to find that he did not respond. When young Alf Margett, brother of Bert Margett the porter at Worsted, home on leave from the tanks, snared six fat rabbits and sold them to the convalescent home at the back door, Jasper merely fought him in the backyard, knocked him down and took him out to shoot young rooks next day.

“You’ll never make a poacher nor a fighter, young Alf, nor a shot neither,” were his parting words. “Better stick to them tanks,” a remark which caused Alf to feel small for the first time in his very cocksure life.

“Well, Jasper, it’s about Matron’s cat, I suppose,” said Sir Harry. “Sit down. Selina, have we any beer? Then bring a bottle, please. You’ll have a glass, Jasper, won’t you? It’s all we can get now. Her ladyship is getting quite a taste for it.”

Selina brought a tray with bottles and glasses. Jasper lifted his glass, uttered an unprintable toast to the German Chancellor, and drank it at one draught.

“I’m all with you there,” said Sir Harry. “Have another, and tell me the trouble.”

By long experience Sir Harry knew that Jasper found it difficult to express himself on most subjects, and particularly difficult when he was in the Priory. The four walls of a room were always a cage to him. His dark eyes glanced restlessly from door to window as if calculating the chances of escape, and he would have found it easier to submit to Red Indian tortures than to say what he had come to say. After drinking the best part of two bottles of beer he so far relaxed his caution as to admit monosyllabically that he had come about the subject he had come about.

“Selina says Private Jenks thought the cat was a squirrel, and that was why he shot it,” said Sir Harry. “He must be quite a good shot then, if it was dusk. Selina said after tea.”

Jasper nodded.

“Why on earth did you let him have a gun?” said Sir Harry. “It isn’t safe to let any of those fellows have guns. You remember those evacuees we had here, and the father that came down to see them and told you a tall story about being a good shot and all he did was to pepper his own children.”

Jasper was understood to say that it served them right, with a rider to the effect that they were thieving varmints and were well known to eat pheasants’ eggs. “Besides, they weren’t his,” he added after a pause. “They were his wife’s. And the lodger’s.”

Slightly taken aback by these revelations Sir Harry repeated that it was not safe to let any stray soldier have a gun.

“Might have been mine in a manner of speaking,” said Jasper, thawing a little, “if I’d a listened to that woman, but I’ve never listened to a woman yet.”

Sir Harry, ignoring these interesting confessions, repeated that guns must on no account be lent to convalescent soldiers who had probably only shot at fun fairs.

“Not Tom Jenks,” said Jasper. “Lord Pomfret’s head keeper, that’s his father.”

“Lord! old Jenks with the broken nose,” said Sir Harry. “I remember old Lord Pomfret telling me his boy was a remarkable shot. Well, well, I must see what I can do. But don’t let young Jenks have a gun anywhere near the house again. I shall have the dickens of a time about it. Selina says Matron is coming over after dinner. By the way, young Jenks seems to have told Selina he’d never shot a squirrel before.”