“Yes,” Teddy said politely. Did he? A vague recollection, in the dentist’s waiting room, distracting himself from the imminent removal of a rotten tooth, dental care not having been a priority in the POW camp.
“Because I’m looking for someone to write the Nature Notes,” Bill Morrison said. “It’s just a few lines every week—it won’t keep you in bread, let alone bacon, even if you could get your hands on any. We used to have a man did the Nature Notes, went by the by-line Agrestis. That’s Latin. Know what it means?”
“A rustic, a countryman.”
“Well, there you are.”
“What happened to the old one?” Teddy asked, while digesting this unexpected offer.
“Old age took him off. He was an old-style countryman. He was a difficult bugger,” he said affectionately.
Rather shyly Teddy mentioned his own agricultural curriculum vitae, the Northumberland lambs, the Kentish apples, his love of hill and vale and water. The pleasure to be had from the cup and saucer of an acorn, the unfurling frond of a fern, the pattern on the feather of a hawk. The transcendent beauty of the dawn chorus in an English bluebell wood. He omitted France, the solid blocks of colour, the hot slices of sunshine. They would not be to the taste of a man who had fought on the Somme.
Teddy was judged sound, even though he was a southerner.
“There were two men,” Bill Morrison said as they dug into the Stilton. It took Teddy a moment to realize that this was the rather ponderous introduction to some sort of witticism. “One of them was from Yorkshire, God’s own country. The other one wasn’t a Yorkshireman. The one not from Yorkshire said to the other” (Teddy began to lose track at this point), “ ‘I met a Yorkshireman t’other day,’ and the one from Yorkshire said, ‘How’d’ tha know he were from Yorkshire?’ And the one not from Yorkshire” (now Teddy began to lose the will to live) “said, ‘Because of his accent,’ and the Yorkshireman said, ‘Nah, lad, if he’d been from Yorkshire it would have been the first thing he told you.’ ”
“Try putting that in a Christmas cracker,” Nancy said when Teddy attempted to relate it to her that evening after rolling home, somewhat foxed. (“Oh, my, you reek of beer. I quite like it.”) “And you have a new job, on a newspaper?”
“No, not a newspaper,” Teddy said. “Not a job either really,” he added. “Just a few shillings a week.”
“What about the school? You’ll still teach?”
The school, Teddy thought. This morning was already the past. (Oh, teach me how I should forget to think.) He had absconded, he said. “Oh, you poor darling,” Nancy laughed. “And this will lead to more, I know it will, I can feel it in my waters.”
It did. October with its autumn colours, mushrooms and chestnuts and a late Indian summer. November brought “Mother Nature tucking in her charges” for the oncoming struggle, and December was of necessity holly and robins. “Find something heart-warming,” Bill said and so he wrote about how the robin got his red breast.
They were pedestrian pieces but that was fine by Bill Morrison, who wasn’t “looking for erudition.”
Another boozy lunch just before Christmas and he was offered the job of “roving reporter.” The previous incumbent of the post had died during the war. “Arctic convoys,” Bill Morrison said briskly, not wanting to dwell, and he too would be dead soon, he said, if he kept racing around doing the job of two men.
“Are you happy now?” Nancy asked as they hung up the holly and mistletoe they had picked in the woods.
“Yes,” Teddy said, giving the answer perhaps more consideration than the question had demanded.
The blasted snowdrops.
“There are some who consider it bad luck to pick these brave little heralds of Spring and will not let them in the house. Perhaps this is due to their profusion in churchyards.”
Sylvie always picked the first snowdrops at Fox Corner. It was a shame because they wilted and died so quickly.
“The white of the snowdrop and its association with untaintedness has always given this humble flower an aura of innocence (who remembers now the ‘Snowdrop Band’ of young girls of the previous century?).
“There is a German legend—”
“Oh, Lord,” Nancy muttered under her breath.
“What?”
“I dropped a stitch. Go on.”
“—which relates that when God created all things he told the snow to go and ask the flowers for some colour. All but the kindly snowdrop refused and in reward the snow allowed it to be the first flower of Spring.
“Great music has the power to heal. Germany is no longer our enemy and it is salutary for us to remember her rich store of myth and legend and fairy tale, not to mention her cultural heritage, the music of Mozart—”
“Mozart was Austrian.”
“Yes, of course,” Teddy said. “I don’t know why I forgot that. Beethoven, then. Brahms, Bach, Schubert. Schubert was German, wasn’t he?”
“No, another Austrian.”
“Haydn?” he hazarded.
“Austrian.”