[Mrs Bradley 50] - Late, Late in the Evening

our names. It was always: 'Hoy, you young Oi say! Come on out o' that brook. Your auntie's 'olleren for you,' or, 'Hoy you young Oi say! Tuck them trousis up 'oigher, else you be goen to get 'em wet, and then you won't arf get an 'oiden.'
The brook was our chief plaything. It conveniently ran alongside The Marsh at the bottom of our grandfather's acres, so that Kenneth and I could cross on to The Marsh by way of an iron gate and a broad plank bridge, both of them grandfather's property, whereas all the other children had to walk to the end of the village and cross by a bridge which spanned a culvert. It never occurred either to us or to them that they should take the short cut across grandfather's land. Perhaps they, like ourselves, went in awe of him, for he was in all respects the village patriarch and owned more than half its cottages.
Apart from giving easy access to the brook, his grounds were a paradise for young children. There were raspberry canes and currant bushes which we were allowed to plunder as we pleased. There were pigs, ducks, chickens, sometimes a calf and there was also a stable containing a vicious mare named Polly whom we were forbidden to approach.
Best of all there were Uncle Arthur's whippets, Floss and Vicky. Floss was a graceful fawn-coloured animal, a bitch in every sense, for she had a most unpredictable temper, loving you one minute and, for no apparent reason, viciously snapping at you the next.
Vicky, on the other hand, was a liver-coloured little love, the sweetest-natured creature that ever allowed young children to dress her up in their sweaters, almost smother her with clumsy caresses and take her for walks with an undignified piece of string tied to her collar. Her affection for us was boundless and was as sincere as it was touching.
We had little in common with the ducks or chickens. The latter pecked us when we turned them off their roosting boxes to collect the eggs, and we were nauseated by the former when we saw two of them disputing possession of a frog. We rescued the frog and Kenneth took it over to the well, but in dropping it in he slipped and went in, too-luckily feet first. He managed to clutch the edge of the brickwork and I held on to him and bellowed for help. Fortunately this happened to be at hand in the person of Uncle Arthur, who was boiling tiny jacket potatoes in an outside copper for the pigs. As a reward for saving Kenneth's life I claimed and was given as many of the pigs' delicious potatoes as I could eat.
We took all our meals at Aunt Kirstie's. She was a better cook than Aunt Lally and a much more indulgent person than grandfather, who found children a nuisance at the table because he said we chattered. We would have liked to stay altogether with Aunt Kirstie and Uncle Arthur, but two of their upstairs rooms were given over permanently to a lodger, a snuff-taking, silent old gentleman named Mr Ward, who (so we heard) was some connexion of the Kempsons up at the manor house. So far as I remember, he never addressed a word to us, but sometimes we would come upon him out on The Marsh or at the foot of Lye Hill near the sheepwash. He would be digging, but for what purpose we had no idea.
He was not the only person in the village about whom we speculated. Another was Mrs Grant. She was always to be found seated on the doorstep of her respectable little cottage and she never seemed to cease rocking herself to and fro and declaiming to anybody who was passing, 'I hab de ague, bery bad, bery bad.' She claimed to be Maltese and the widow of an English sailor. The village children used to mock her. We were neither old enough, nor courageous enough, to take her side against their tauntings, but at least we never joined in the teasing. I think now that she was not a Maltese, but an African. She was certainly darker-skinned than the Maltese I have seen since, and her lamentations had an air of African fatality about them. The village children would shout,
'Black-pudden! Black-pudden!' as they passed her; but, as Kenneth said to me:
'Black-puddings are very nice, and I expect she'd be nice, too, if we ever got to know her.' (We did, in a way, later on because of the murders.)
Further down the road lived the Widow Winter, whose sole occupation, once she had whitened her doorstep, seemed to be to spy on the rest of the village from behind a barricade of flowering plants. She believed, I suppose, that these hid her prying eyes from passers-by while she watched from her parlour window, hour after hour, the comings and goings of her neighbours. I have no doubt that she knew exactly how often the people across the street washed their lace curtains, how long Miss Summers spent in her daily dallyings with the baker and exactly what was in everybody's string bag when people came back from their weekend shopping at the Co-op in the town. Everybody did the big weekend shopping at the Co-op because of something mysterious called the divvy.
From these Saturday expeditions we could always expect a pleasant surprise on Sunday mornings, for on the bedside table in Aunt Kirstie's room would be sugar mice in pink or white with tiny black eyes and their tails made out of string, or there might be sugar pigs or a bar of chocolate cream. Another joy was bathtime. At that age we were bathed in the large zinc tub Aunt