The Discovery of Nesting

by Barry Pain

THE DISCOVERY OF NESTING

By BARRY PAIN

THE little village of Nesting was within thirty miles of London, but civilisation had done very little to contaminate it. It was four miles from any railway-station, and was not on the road to anywhere. It possessed neither electricity, nor gas, nor main drainage, and its water supply was from wells. Most of its inhabitants had never been in London in their lives, and many of them had never been out of the village for a night. A narrow lane, uninviting to motorists, left the main road and, after about a mile, found Nesting; it then looked round in a despairing way and rejoined the main road further down.

The village possessed one shop, described as a grocery and general store, and controlled by Mrs. Elwood. She had sandy grey hair and mild blue eyes. She had no teeth worth mentioning, and drew in her thin underlip till it must have bumped against her tonsils. Her figure was flat with no noticeable waist-line. Personally she was not so unclean as some of the old ladies in Nesting, but cleanliness was not a hobby of hers. Had there been a competition in such things, open to the whole world, she would have taken the gold medal for General Inefficiency, and the first prize for Conversational Flow. She had a kind heart and was uniformly cheerful.

She kept no books. Her shop was in wild disorder, and she never knew where anything was. She rarely remembered the price of anything, but tried to ask enough. If she had to weigh anything, she generally found that she had mislaid the weight she required; the one-ounce weight roamed so frequently that it was understudied by a potato which had been tested to weigh one ounce or thereabouts. Children preferred the potato-weight to the cold, official variety. It gave two more acid drops for your money.

One or more of the articles she was supposed to stock would always be missing, and this gave her a strange satisfaction as evidence that business had been done.

“Bacon we are entirely out of,” she would say, almost as if she were proclaiming that she had conquered some bad habit, and would then become philosophical or at least talkative. “You may not have noticed it. but sometimes a thing lasts longer than it does others, and that is so specially about bacon. Now, that last side I had was off of Mr. Tewson, not ten minutes away. He’s black Berkshires, and breeds and kills himself. Home cures, too. And I'd sooner buy my bacon off of some pig as I knows personally. I can get it from the wholesale and put on the rail on receipt of postcard, but it's not the same thing, and you can't say it is. So when I can—and that's not always—I gets a side off of Mr. Tewson. But it never lasts me as long as I think it will, for the best things is the shortest, and all comes to an end if you keep on cutting at it. I did think of writing the wholesale yesterday, and then it crossed my mind that I might see Mr. Tewson coming out of church on Sunday morning, and then I could ask him if he had another side he could spare me, though not going into the figures till Monday, as the Fourth Commandment teaches us. So if you're passing one day next week, and are still in the same mind about bacon, I might let you have some. Now, if it had been cheese as you'd been wanting—oh, you noticed it, had you? Yes, I keeps it under the counter, being pressed for space. No need to show it, for it advertises itself. That’s a powerful-flavoured cheese, that is. When you eats that you knows you're eating something. I had a morsel of it with my supper last night, and it kept the roof of my mouth all of a tingle for an hour afterwards, just as if something had stung it.”

It may seem surprising that Mrs. Elwood ever made a living out of that shop, but she did, though it was not till after the discovery of Nesting that she became actually prosperous. If you lived in Nesting, either you dealt with Mrs. Elwood or you went four miles to the next shop. That was all to the good for Mrs. Elwood. The local products that she sold—bacon, eggs, honey, butter—were all excellent. The wild miscellany that she obtained from “the wholesale,” including straw hats, mouth-organs, and patent medicines, was not too bad for the simple and submissive natives of Nesting.

There is some dispute as to who was the original discoverer of Nesting. The honour is claimed by that eminent landscape-painter Edwin Sepal, R.A. There is no doubt that Mr. Sepal was a pioneer, and that he was very largely the cause of the extraordinary popularity that Nesting enjoyed for several years. But Sepal’s great Academy picture of Nesting bears the date of September in the year previous to its exhibition, and we have the artist’s own word for it that he began the picture within a week of his first chance visit to Nesting—the result of a motor breakdown. But, though Sepal did not know it, Nesting had already been discovered by a young journalist named Robert Boyes in the previous July, as the date of the issue of The Daily Monitor in which Boyes’s article appeared clearly shows.

Boyes was taking exercise on a push-bike with no settled objective. He thought that he was taking a holiday. As a matter of fact, he could never take a holiday, for the journalistic instinct never left him, and he saw everything in its aspect in print. It chanced that his eye fell on the signpost proclaiming that Nesting was one mile distant at the precise moment that he became aware of his desire for beer. So he turned down the cart-track. As he neared Nesting he met two farm labourers. They touched their hats respectfully and said “Good morning, sir.” Boyes nearly fell off his bicycle—nothing like that had ever happened to him before.

But as Boyes subsequently said in his article, when he entered the village of Nesting he went back at least a century. There was not a villa in the place. There were cottages with oak beams and thatched roofs. There were cottages with mellowed tiles. Beyond them, in a blue haze, were low ridges of hills, well wooded and with a waterfall sparkling in the sun. Immediately before him was the inn—“The Royal George.” A portrait of George the Third—and by no means a bad portrait—served as a sign, as, indeed, it had done since the end of the eighteenth century. On the bench in front of the diamond-paned windows of the inn sat an old shepherd. He wore a genuine white smock. He carried a genuine crook with a curved metal handle. His fingers were bent lovingly round the handle of a willow-pattern mug. His dog slept at his feet. Out from the door of the inn came the oldest inhabitant, bent at right angles with rheumatism, and walking with a stick. Ducks wandered leisurely down the street towards the pond under the trees.

“This cannot be,” said Robert Boyes to himself. “This sort of thing is only seen on the stage. It doesn’t belong to real life at all. I’ve gone mad from over-exertion on that bike, and I’m suffering from delusions.” The thought of over-exertion reminded him that he had now become appreciably thirstier, and he passed into the inn. The old shepherd touched his soft hat and said “Good day.”

A comfortable-looking landlord in a red waistcoat drew a pint of beer for him, and concealed the curiosity that he felt, for strangers did not come to Nesting. Boyes made himself comfortable on an old settle and looked around him. The sporting prints hung on the walls were absolutely genuine and worth a good deal of money. The beer was remarkably good, and he said as much to the landlord.

“Yes,” said the landlord, “this is a free house, and I buy where I like. It’s been in my family for four generations now. It's a good deal bigger really than we need here. You might care to step upstairs and see the banqueting-room. Parson makes a lot of fuss about that room, but we scarcely ever use it. Comes in handy when the cricket club holds its annual.”

The banqueting-room was, so Boyes guessed, about thirty-five feet by twenty. It was panelled, and the panelling was Jacobean. There were a few portraits in gilt frames, obviously of the late eighteenth century. Boyes had no special knowledge of antiques, but he found himself wondering how many thousands that room and its contents were worth.

Almost as if he had read his thoughts, the landlord said: “They do tell me that all this here might be worth money, if I cared to sell it. But I don’t like change. Nobody in Nesting does. I like to keep things the way my fathers had them before me.”

More and more amazed, Boyes asked if he would be able to get any luncheon at the inn.

“Well,” said the landlord, “there’s a cold sirloin I’m not ashamed of, and there’s an old Cheddar. I don’t know if you could manage on that.”

Boyes was quite sure he could manage on that. While luncheon was being prepared for him, he stepped across the road to Mrs. Elwood’s store to buy cigarettes, the legend on the door showing that tobacco was one of the things she was licensed to sell.

Mrs. Elwood nearly fell over when Boyes entered the shop—at least, so it appeared to Boyes at first. Then he recognised that this was really a prehistoric form of the curtsey. He had intended to be five minutes in that store. He was there for thirty-five, and when he left, Mrs. Elwood was still talking.

Cigarettes? Yes, Mrs. Elwood had them. She knew she had them, for they come in of the Tuesday of the week before. No, she wouldn’t tell a lie; it was not the Tuesday, but the Wednesday. And she’d took and put them somewhere where they’d be convenient. She couldn’t say exactly where that was, but she’d be able to put her hand on them, if Mr. Boyes would kindly take a seat. He kindly took a seat. She fetched a Windsor chair in from the parlour, mounted on it, and explored an upper shelf. She took down a box marked “Gents’ Half Hose,” and seemed pained and surprised to find that it contained socks. She did a little better with an earthenware teapot; it did not contain any of the cigarettes that had arrived last week, but it did contain a small packet of what may once have been cigarettes. She blew violently upon it to remove the accretions of age, and laid it on the counter.

“Pre-War?” suggested Boyes.

“Well, they are old stock,” said Mrs. Elwood truthfully; “but for that very reason, I should be willing to knock something off.”

“Oh? Well, you’d better knock the blue mould off the ends of them. It gives the show away. Let me have a look at the new stock. Did you put them in the window, by any chance?”

“Well, if you’ve not said the actual word! It all comes back to me now. Of course I did.”

So Boyes selected his favourite brand of cheap Virginians, left Mrs. Elwood still conversing, and returned to the inn for luncheon. He fared excellently and was waited upon by the landlord’s pretty daughter, who possessed the lost art of blushing. After lunch he inspected a picturesque old church of architectural interest and also that very creditable waterfall. And then he rode back to London.

As a man he wished to keep Nesting to himself, admitting, perhaps, a few of his personal friends who might be worthy of it, and exacting from them pledges of secrecy. But Boyes was also a journalist, and the journalistic instinct was too strong for him. Three days later his article “The Loveliest Village in England” appeared in The Daily Monitor. It extolled Nesting to the skies. It praised “The Royal George,” and the church, and the waterfall. It praised the inhabitants. And if it did not actually praise Mrs. Elwood, it said that the village shop and the old lady who presided over it were both unique, and should on no account be missed.

The article attracted several week-enders to Nesting. Boyes himself brought friends there. Edwin Sepal, R.A., arrived accidentally, but immediately made his arrangements with the landlord of “The Royal George” for a prolonged stay. Even if he was not the first of the pioneers, it is quite certain that his Academy picture in the following year fairly clinched the matter. All through the summer there was a continuous rush every week-end to Nesting. In the autumn the rush was considerably increased by myriads of Americans who wished to see the real thing, and admired enthusiastically in their own quaint language.

Meanwhile Nesting was perfectly aware that something was happening. It prepared to receive visitors and any money the visitors might have. The more important of its inhabitants gathered together and decided on a course of action. The landlord’s daughter had a few blushing words to say on these occasions, and owed that there might be a good deal of business beneath the blush. You could not, even with a subsidy, keep a shepherd with a genuine smock and genuine crook sitting on the bench in front of “The Royal George” all day, and arrangements were made for an understudy. The same remark applied to the oldest inhabitant. You had to have an oldest inhabitant pottering about the place while visitors were there, because they expected it. Several gentlemen aged from eighty to ninety agreed to keep the thing up properly.

And then Alice, the blushing daughter of the landlord, went into the pet lamb business. She also inquired the price of pale blue ribbon at Mrs. Elwood’s, and subsequently decided to get it by post from Schoolbridge’s. She equipped three little girls with three pet lambs, all led by a pale blue ribbon, and she arranged for the lambs to be properly washed every Saturday morning. When an American saw a pretty child in a sunbonnet and daisy-chain, leading a white lamb by a pale blue ribbon, money came into Nesting, and, as the landlord’s blushing daughter observed, Nesting could do with it.

The banqueting-room at “The Royal George” was crowded now every week-end. Alice decided that the price of luncheons should be raised, and it was raised. She decided further that the lane from the main road to Nesting should be made possible for motorists, and this was done. When Mrs. Elwood desired to put up an advertisement alongside the sign-post that said “To Nesting,” Alice permitted it. There was one misspelling in Mrs. Elwood's advertisement, and Alice added two more to keep the enthusiasm rolling. The common tripper did not get on at all well at Nesting. He did not like the prices, and he said so. And he met with a cold and dignified surprise. Quite early in the season he gave up Nesting. It acquired its own special clientèle—people who had money to spend, did not mind spending it, and thoroughly enjoyed the early part of the nineteenth century. They always got it. Alice saw that they always got it, and even supervised the erection of an extremely old gallows by extremely modern labour. She taught the children of the village stories about that gallows, which they could repeat if asked. Yes, she was fairly busy. But she found time to laugh, and even to blush with Mr. Boyes, the journalist, occasionally.

There was quite a good run for three years, and the thing has not died out yet. But it is very much diminished, and Mrs. Elwood is very much to blame. When Mrs. Elwood found that money was pouring in upon her, and that she could sell absolutely anything at almost any price, provided that she talked enough, her head became turned. She insisted on large plate-glass windows, on gilt letters that proclaimed Elwood's Emporium, and on absolutely competent assistants to take her place in the shop. She had never been interesting except as a curiosity, and nobody really wanted her in her commercial aspect. The pet lamb business became much overdone, and some sarcastic visitor made remarks in print about the existence and exhibition of twenty-three pet lambs attached to twenty-three pale blue ribbons, and guarded by twenty-three pretty children in twenty-three sunbonnets.

Boyes had a serious talk with Alice and with the father of Alice. For three years London dealers had been foaming at the mouth in their mad eagerness to acquire the treasures of “The Royal George,” and had been quietly told by the landlord that he wanted those treasures and did not want their money in the least. When a man does not want money, your only possible course is to offer him more of it. A sort of auction went on during those three years. At the end of them the landlord and his prospective son-in-law felt that the top note had been reached, and the dealers were allowed to take what they wanted at a price which made it unnecessary for Alice's papa to do any more work as long as he lived. He had had three very busy years keeping up the simple, old-fashioned village life in Nesting and taking the money for it, and he now sold the inn and retired to the comparative peace and quietude of the Fulham Road, London, S.W.

You can still go to Nesting if you like. But instead of Mrs. Elwood you will find Elwood's Emporium, and you will get what you want at too high a price, and with no compensatory conversation. At “The Royal George” you will find Italian waiters. The shepherd and his understudy have both died of drink. There are no pet lambs in the village, the profit of leading them about having been killed by excess. The waterfall is stopped up, and part of the church has fallen down. And nosy experts have examined the gallows and condemned it as a fake.

The worst of being discovered is that it never lasts. But neither Alice, nor Alice's father, nor Mr. Boyes is inclined to grumble about it.