Cox Villager

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-608-3
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life. In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill and writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a cult following. Two decades later, some teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor. Tom Cox's masterful debut novel synthesises his passion for music, nature and folklore into a psychedelic and enthralling exploration of village life and the countryside that sustains it.

Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cox, Tom

Leseproben

ME (NOW)

It’s a heavy day, and it hangs all over me. I’m deep in it. I’m so far in it, I’m technically invisible, unless you’re extremely near to me, and very few people are. I doubt that will change today, but tomorrow could be different. Days like this – the ones that stay heavy from beginning to end – are rare here. Yesterday, for example, started heavy, but became very light and boldly colourful, then was just a tiny bit heavy for the final part, in spurts and streaks. During the light, boldly colourful middle part everything radiated cleanliness, was so thoroughly fresh and laundered that you wondered where all the bad stuff it had washed away had disappeared to, what vast drain or waste tank the world could possibly possess that could have so efficiently put it out of sight and smelling distance. Small creatures woke up in the freshness, and were hungry, in a ferocious way. ‘Hangry’ I believe it is called nowadays by the young folk. A man walked through a dark corridor cut diagonally across a field of high late summer barley and got seriously messed up by horseflies, to such an extent that he increased his speed to a trot and then a run through the last third of the corridor, waving his arms like a crazy person who believes he is being attacked from both flanks by ghosts, until he reached a shady, thistle-dotted copse, which he decided, incorrectly, might offer some respite. The small mercy for him in all this was his confident belief that he had remained unobserved. The belief was misguided. I saw him and, I have to admit, I did have a good old cackle.

There’s a painting which I very much admire. I think it’s obvious that it’s of, or very much inspired by, the village, but I doubt the person who now has it on their wall knows that, unless they have ever visited here, which I happen to know for a fact that they haven’t. I doubt they even know the name of the artist, which was a faint scrawl in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in the first place and became fainter when the second of the painting’s four owners carelessly left it directly opposite a large south-facing picture window in a bungalow overlooking the Derbyshire spa town of Matlock Bath. The painter’s name was Joyce Nicholas, and she lived here in Underhill between 1958, when she arrived in Devon from the north of England as a widow and retired teacher, and 1969, when her daughter Eva installed her in a retirement complex close to the stretch of coast known, jokingly by some and more seriously by others, as the English Riviera. She completed the painting in 1960 and, although she did sell one or two other similar expressionist works at that point via small local galleries and a short-lived bookshop owned by a friend, Joyce – always very hard on herself – decided it was not a success, and put it away in the loft. It did not leave her family until 1983 when, after his wife had fled from him and their legal union in a state of antimaterialist haste, Eva’s daughter Jane’s exhusband Gerry gave it to the owner of a junk shop in Whitby, Yorkshire, free of charge. Gerry had hoped to receive a small sum for the painting but was hit with an uncharacteristic attack of guilt when, in examining a rug that Gerry was also hoping to rid himself of, the junk shop proprietor’s hand came into contact with some still quite damp excrement that had come out of the arse of Gerry’s bulldog The Fonz that morning, but which Gerry, in haste not dissimilar to Jane’s upon leaving him, had not spotted. The proprietor stared off into the middle distance of a deep back room full of broken clocks, grumbled inaudible quarter words and exhaled spouts of air from both corners of his mouth, and stated he wasn’t much interested in the painting. ‘The bottom has dropped right out of the market for this stuff,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a ton of it in my garage at home and can’t shift it for love nor money.’ He was, however, playing it cool, having quickly marked the painting out as something a little out of the ordinary and Gerry as an easily manipulated man whose main goal was to exit the building as quickly as possible. The proprietor had been the first to see any merit in Joyce’s landscape since a lodger who was living with Joyce, eight years after its creation. It now hangs above the stairway in a house in Edinburgh owned by two retired surgeons. Visitors remark on it more often than anything else in the house, apart from their cat, Villeneuve, who is white, fluffy and comically large.

I should probably pause to point out here, for those wondering, that I don’t know everything. I have big gaps, moments of doubt and humility, just like everyone else, just like Joyce. But I do know a hell of a lot.

I love Joyce’s use of colours in the painting. I suspect when she was mixing her palette she was thinking of a light day, or perhaps the light part of a day that had earlier been heavy, but certainly not an all-heavy day like today. The gradation of burnt umber to asparagus in the top left corner, then a suggestion of something darker, where the moor begins and stretches on for the next twenty miles or so. There’s a hint of something black and jagged here, some shapes that remind me of rusty barbed wire. And beyond, above this kaleidoscopic hillscape that could just as easily be California as Britain’s West Country, a swirling heaven or hell, a definite ‘beyond place’. Below that, I think I can make out the familiar valley, the way it funnels down into the village and the lane that becomes the steep high street. There’s no obvious sea or river in the painting but there is a suggestion that both are close. Houses? Joyce doesn’t paint anything as literal as houses, but there are shapes that we could decide are buildings where people live. There’s some interesting yellow and white blotching to the right, below that, which makes me believe Joyce was a big fan of the lichen you get on the rocks and older buildings – and even some of the newer ones – around here. The colours of the lichen are answered by the colour of the sun, in the top right-hand corner, or is it the moon… or is it some combination of both, some other unknown ethereal body representative of both day and night. Above this is what seems to me the most literal part of the painting of all: a patchwork quilt of what are surely farmers’ fields. What makes it less literal is the fact the patchwork is the sunmoon, and I wonder if this is Joyce’s comment on the topsy-turvy nature of the region, the habit the hills have of disorientating you, the knack weather has here of frequently being below you, as well as, or even instead of, above you, or if Joyce was just feeling a bit like tearing down the walls and breaking the rules that day. I like this side to Joyce a lot, the hidden side that only the brushes and canvas saw, beneath the scrupulous account books, the perfectly plumped cushions, the always-mown-on-time grass. Joyce was a person with more layers than her family and neighbours realised, I think, and much wilder, toothier nightmares. In the middle top of the canvas, if you look into that greeny-black, celestial moorscape, you’ll see what you might interpret as a wide, beatific, somewhat hirsute face. This is the part of the painting that possibly interests me the most.

I never did get any of the several art critic jobs I applied for.

Where does the moor start? That’s a highly debatable question. Where does the true north start? Where do moths end and butterflies begin? Where is the border between ‘sometimes fancies members of the opposite sex but doesn’t actually want to touch their sexual organs’ and ‘is definitely gay’? Who decides what’s soulful funk and what’s funky soul? There’s always some hard-bitten unimpressable bastard who’ll tell you, when you’re on the moor, that you’re not on the proper moor, no matter how far into the moor you are. But let’s not piss about. This – whether or not it’s ‘technically’ on the moor, as the map defines it – is a moorland village. You know, very firmly, when you’re in it, that you’re not in London, or Kettering, or Ipswich. You’re in Underhill. As you pass from the high ground down that funnel, so exquisitely depicted by Joyce, the air of the uplands remains in your nostrils, the trees have beards, the lanes have ferny green sideburns, and your hair is made of rain. , you pedantic bastards. I should know. I’ve been here long enough.

For many years, the first sign of life you’d see when you came down that funnel in Joyce’s painting was an old blacksmith’s cottage, but that fell into disrepair several decades ago, the more interesting parts of its structure gradually appropriated by passing opportunists in or around the building trade. The road bends sharply just at this point, with no warning, and once every couple of years you’ll see a mangled, abandoned bike, formerly owned by someone who got carried away with the gradient and didn’t quite judge the turn. The blacksmith’s cottage was replaced during the 1970s by the Molesting Station. Despite society’s disapproving eyes and the nature of its purpose being far less fashionable than it was during its outset, the Molesting Station isn’t shy about telling you what it is. It even announces it publicly. ‘MOLESTING STATION’ it says in big letters, on the front of the building. OK, I’m not giving you all the facts here....