‘There ain’t gin’ to be no rain before evening.’ Ole Jimmy had repeated, looking at Rummins; and Rummins had stared back at him, the eyes glimmering with a slow anger.
All through the morning we had worked without a pause, loading the hay into the cart, trundling it across the field, pitching it out on to the slowly growing rick that stood over by the gate opposite the filling-station. We could hear the thunder in the south as it came towards us and moved away again. Then it seemed to return and remain stationary somewhere beyond the hills, rumbling intermittently. When we looked up we could see the clouds overhead moving and changing shape in the turbulence of the upper air, but on the ground it was hot and muggy and there was no breath of wind. We worked slowly, listlessly in the heat, shirts wet with sweat, faces shining.
Claud and I had worked beside Rummins on the rick itself, helping to shape it, and I could remember how very hot it had been and the flies around my face and the sweat pouring out everywhere; and especially I could remember the grim scowling presence of Rummins beside me, working with a desperate urgency and watching the sky and shouting at the men to hurry.
At noon, in spite of Rummins, we had knocked off for lunch.
Claud and I had sat down under the hedge with Ole Jimmy and another man called Wilson who was a soldier home on leave, and it was too hot to do much talking. Wilson had some bread and cheese and a canteen of cold tea. Ole Jimmy had a satchel that was an old gas-mask container, and in this, closely packed, standing upright with their necks protruding, were six pint bottles of beer.
‘Come on,’ he said, offering a bottle to each of us.
‘I’d like to buy one from you,’ Claud said, knowing very well the old man had little money.
‘Take it.’
‘I must pay you.’
‘Don’t be so daft. Drink it.’
He was a very good old man, good and clean, with a clean pink face that he shaved each day. He had used to be a carpenter, but they retired him at the age of seventy and that was some years before. Then the Village Council, seeing him still active, had given him the job of looking after the newly built children’s playground, of maintaining the swings and see-saws in good repair and also of acting as a kind of gentle watchdog, seeing that none of the kids hurt themselves or did anything foolish.
That was a fine job for an old man to have and everybody seemed pleased with the way things were going – until a certain Saturday night. That night Ole Jimmy had got drunk and gone reeling and singing down the middle of the High Street with such a howling noise that people got out of their beds to see what was going on below. The next morning they had sacked him saying he was a waster and a drunkard not fit to associate with young children on the playground.
But then an astonishing thing happened. The first day that he stayed away – a Monday it was – not one single child came near the playground.
Nor the next day, nor the one after that.
All week the swings and the see-saws and the high slide with steps going up to it stood deserted. Not a child went near them. Instead they followed Ole Jimmy out into a field behind the Rectory and played their games there with him watching; and the result of all this was that after a while the Council had had no alternative but to give the old man back his job.
He still had it now and he still got drunk and no one said anything about it any more. He left it only for a few days each year, at haymaking time. All his life Ole Jimmy had loved to go haymaking and he wasn’t going to give it up yet.
‘Your want one?’ he asked now, holding a bottle out to Wilson, the soldier.
‘No thanks. I got tea.’
‘They say tea’s good on a hot day.’
‘It is. Beer makes me sleepy.’
‘If you like,’ I said to Ole Jimmy, ‘we could walk across to the filling-station and I’ll do you a couple of nice sandwiches? Would you like that?’
‘Beer’s plenty. There’s more food in one bottle of beer, me lad, than twenty sandwiches.’
He smiled at me, showing two rows of pale-pink, toothless gums, but it was a pleasant smile and there was nothing repulsive about the way the gums showed.
We sat for a while in silence. The soldier finished his bread and cheese and lay back on the ground, tilting his hat forward over his face. Ole Jimmy had drunk three bottles of beer, and now he offered the last to Claud and me.
‘No thanks.’
‘No thanks. One’s plenty for me.’
The old man shrugged, unscrewed the stopper, tilted his head back and drank, pouring the beer into his mouth with the lips held open so the liquid ran smoothly without gurgling down his throat. He wore a hat that was of no colour at all and of no shape, and it did not fall off when he tilted back his head.
‘Ain’t Rummins goin’ to give that old horse a drink?’ he asked, lowering the bottle, looking across the field at the great carthorse that stood steaming between the shafts of the cart.
‘Not Rummins.’
‘Horses is thirsty, just the same as us.’ Ole Jimmy paused, still looking at the horse. ‘You got a bucket of water in that place of yours there?’