LANE OF JANES

It’s a good place to exercise them. You see if we go on the field path there are cows to be chased. On the moorside -- well, there’s sheep. On the lane, traffic, but the little cemetery is O.K. Walled and safe. Crowded certainly but by the sort of crowds who are long past chasing or being chased, which in the circumstances is an advantage.

Is it quite in order that the dogs should take short cuts over the grassy mounds? Is it pretty awful that they should fling up a hind leg and casually spray a headstone (and hush!) often the headstone of none other but Galaliel Winterbottom himself! Well, no offence meant, all you Winterbottoms, Wentworths, Skegsons, Batesons and Timms. No offence, I do assure you.

But one gets a bit intimidated. These Winterbottoms, for instance, they do dominate the place rather. Galaliel eldest of the clan (old top dog, him), Timothy James, Titus Charles, John Ezra and the others, and all living to ripe old ages while their wives, on the other hand, with no exception, all died young or youngish.

"Galaliel, you old so-and-so," I say to myself (daren’t say it out loud, too frightened), "Galaliel, why did your Amelia Rose, dark-haired, plump little Amelia Rose (like a robin, I imagine) peg out at the age of thirty-five? Why did Martha Jane leave this world at thirty-eight, you John Ezra? And why, Timothy James and Titus Charles, did your respective wives, Lucy and Biddy, fold their work-worn hands at thirty and thirty-five?"

While Sue and Becky bustle around examining with quivering noses every rotten old twig and dead leaf, I brood over this question, and I seem to hear the voices of bygone friends and neighbours chanting a sad chorus -- "Wor’ out, . . . they were wor’ out." And I bet there were never truer words spoken. "Wor’ out" with the baking and mending and scrubbing and scouring up there in Ducket Row where the same cottages still stand. "Wor’ out" with Galaliel and John Ezra and Co, powerful in prayer, strong in whisker and not backward in reproof; and "Wor’ out", mark this, in producing their Williams and Toms and Alfreds and Arthurs and Matthews one after another. And yet, in spite of all this, when little Amelia Rose dies (Amelia Rose who had no doubt gallantly pulled on the roller towel at the bed-end no less than eight times, result being five boys and three girls), old Galaliel has the cheek to have inscribed under her name these words: SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD. Just that. Can you beat it? "Thank you for those kind words," I say under my breath, "you condescending old cuss." And then, to make my gorge rise further, I look at Galaliel’s own epitaph (put there by the sons, no doubt, thirty years later), and read the following: WORK, PRAY, AND REST, ALLELUIA. This quotation may have been one that Galaliel was fond of repeating ("Me Dad wor always sayin’ it") -- and after he had clumped in, eaten his tea, pushed his feet into his slippers and lit his pipe, out would come -- "Ay well, folks -- we work, we pray and we rest, Alleluia." Or into bed at night, the mattress creaking and swaying under his weight, Amelia Rose still shuffling around drawing curtains, putting out the cat, peeping at the children -- "Work, pray and rest, my lass -- Alleluia" (from the bed). "You’re telling me," Amelia probably thought grimly, or words to that effect.

Of course I’m sorry for all the wives. Martha Jane may have been a bit prim and inclined to keep a hold on the egg money, but who could blame her. Biddy to gossip with the neighbours and thereby run the risk of burning the porridge, and Lucy -- well, I have a feeling about Lucy. I think perhaps she was pale and slender and green-eyed and I fancy she wasn’t quite so prompt with her responses when Timothy James read the daily portion. Inclined to dream a little and arrange her pale hair before the mirror.

Could there, I ask myself, have been anything between her and one Bert Sloane? Now Bert Sloane, lone male, and by his name a stranger to the district, lies just under the stone wall opposite the Winterbottoms. He died, it appears, two months before Lucy. Could there have been any connection? Was he a charmer? Did Lucy die of a broken heart? (So my imagination runs.) Did she peep at him from behind her kitchen curtains as he passed? More, did she steal out at night and meet him at those quiet cross-roads that lead on to the common . . . ("Eeee -- you Bert Sloane, give over, do. Tha’s got a tidy cheek . . . . Nay, give over . . .")? Perhaps Timothy James found something out or perhaps old Galaliel saw something -- and told? Who knows?

Eventually the Winterbottoms begin to thin out, though seeing that everyone here is related in devious ways to everyone else -- Winterbottoms, Wentworths, Skegsons, Batesons, Timms, etc., all shuttling in and out over and over again, one can never be said to really leave any of them. Take the Skegsons for instance. I’m wandering now amongst quite a gathering of them. Rather a saddish lot, these Skegsons, I feel. There’s a regular "lane" of them just here, all Janes. Eliza Jane, Jane Martha, Jane Elizabeth, Beatrice Jane, mainly spinsters it seems. I see them in my mind as having anxious expressions and long droopy noses which were inclined to develop permanent drips during cold weather. There’s one amongst them,

though, whose nose wasn’t long and drooping. No, no, it
would almost certainly have been round and snub, and her fragment of an upper lip would have resembled a bent flower petal (from profile view). True, she is a Jane and a spinster, but a very young spinster. She lies in a doll-size grave alongside her sad aunts and cousins, and on her small headstone it says: SUSEY-JANE SKEGSON, with DILLY in inverted commas underneath, DIED AGED 6 YEARS AND 3 MONTHS. ONLY LENT . . . .

Graveyards can be pretty creepy places at any time, I suppose, and particularly at sunset, and more particularly when they are surrounded, as this one is, by moor and fen (like the hymn), and it doesn’t help when sheep from the surrounding hillsides decide to chime in with their desolate outlandish cries. This is when I begin to think of the remarks I made to start with about the crowds here not being of the sort that can chase or be chased. Well, don’t be too sure. Have you never heard of ghosts chasing anyone? After all, I’ve been making some wild guesses about dear old Galaliel and the others. Maybe I’ve caused them to turn in their graves, as they say. For of course, I could have been wrong. Perhaps they were noble and kind and true like Adam Bede? Perhaps their wives nagged and neglected them? SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD, for instance, may have been the most charitable thing Galaliel could say for his dear Amelia? Lord, one could go on like this forever, and it’s all pure guesswork.

But you, little Susey-Jane, "Dilly" for short, I’m sure that your piping treble would often have been heard on the top lane there, when you came trudging along in your small clogs, you and your schoolmates, and I’m sure that you did swing on the huge oak beam in the barn at Worlds End Farm, for "theer’s bin a swing theer ever sin’ theer’s bin a barn" (quoting old Joe) and when you grasped your slate and laboured over your letters I think you must have stuck out the tip of your pink tongue while you worked, and if you hadn’t have been a captivating little wench you’d never have been nick-named "Dilly", I’m certain. Ah, poor Dilly . . . . Well -- come on, dogs.