A Month in the Country
J L Carr
IN THE SUMMER of 1920, a shell-shocked war veteran comes with a battered greatcoat and an old bag to a small church deep in the English Yorkshire country. There, news of world events is scarce, and whole villages meet for Sunday picnics. He has been hired to restore a "Doom" painting of Christ's last judgment, concealed for hundred of years on the church wall.
He is deeply scarred by grief and the horror of his experiences in the trenches, but as the summer moves on, he becomes a part of the local life; a young married woman warily -- and playfully -- draws him out of his isolation. He relaxes into the slow and comforting rhythms of the English countryside. The month in the country becomes a glorious summer.
-- from the publisher's blurb, The Folio Society.
A deeply personal and an intimate story of life and healing. -- Francis Chin
EXCERPTS
Summer's ripeness
There was so much time, that marvellous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage magic -- "Now you don't see; indeed, there is nothing to see. Now look!" Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I'd like to think) marvelling at this splendid backcloth. But it can't have been so; I'm not the marvelling kind. Or was I then? But one thing is sure -- I had a feeling of immense content and, if I thought at all, it was that I'd like this to go on and on, no one going, no one coming, autumn and winter always loitering around the corner, summer's ripeness lasting for ever, nothing disturbing the even tenor of my way (as I think someone may have said before me). -- p 62
It was that kind of day
Then she turned and went across to the south
window. For a while she stood without speaking.
Then she said, "So Mr Moon found it after all?"
Oh, why not? I thought. It's going to be
published anyway. So I told her what he'd
been doing and leaned forward to point out
the site of the Anglo-Saxon chapel. She also
turned so that her breasts were pressing
against me. And, although we both looked
outwards across the meadow, she didn't
draw away as quite easily she could have done.
I should have lifted an arm and taken her
shoulder, turned her face and kissed her.
It was that kind of day.
It was why she'd come. Then everything would
have been different. My life, hers. We would have
had to speak and say aloud what both of us knew
and then, maybe, turned from the window and lain
down together on my makeshift bed. Afterwards,
we would have gone away, maybe on the
next train. My heart was racing. I was breathless.
She leaned on me, waiting. And I did nothing
and said nothing.
She drew back and said shakily, "Well, thank you for showing me. I shall have to hurry away; Arthur will be wondering what's become of me. No, please don't come down." -- p116
The English are not a deeply religious people
The English are not a deeply religious people. Even many of those who attend divine service do so from habit. Their acceptance of the sacrament is perfunctory: I have yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord. Even when they visit their church in large numbers, at Harvest Thanksgiving or the Christmas Midnight Mass, it is no more than a pagan salute to the passing seasons. -- p 108
The way things were
We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever -- the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. -- p 121
