Letter from Berringford 5

Skye Cottage

Berringford

1 May, 1978

Shoemakers

Today is May Day.  We don’t celebrate it here, but we enjoy it.  May is a welcome step forward from the uncertainties of April when you leave home in bright sunshine and return home soaked an hour later.  Some villages celebrate with dancing around the maypole and Morris dancing, and at Oxford the choristers sing at 6 o’clock on May morning on Magdalen Tower.  Here, for some reason, we have never celebrated in this way.  We do, though, enjoy the month May.  The gardens have never been so beautiful, and in May all England is a garden. 

‘Oh to be in England now that April’s there’ said Browning.  He’s right, of course, and April is fine, but May is even finer. 

But to the point.  A couple of letters ago I mentioned Henry, the shoemaker.  I have just collected an old pair of brogues that he has stitched up for me.  They will, he says, ‘go on a little bit longer’. Henry is a shoe repairer really, but everyone here calls him a shoemaker.  This is fair enough because he makes new shoes out of old.

As I said goodbye to Henry and closed the shop door with its little bell that rings you in and rings you out, it struck me that all shoemakers look the same. There is something, a glance, a smile or a stoop, that all shoemakers seem to share.  They all have the greying hair and the leather apron and they all wear glasses, short-sighted from years of bending over upturned soles in a corner of their shop. When the door opens and the little bell rings, they get up, straighten their back slowly and blink at the visitor, a fresh arrival from the sunlight, and they rub the world of gnomery from their eyes.  They are not quite banished from the efficient city.  They hang on in the ‘heel bar’ hidden away on the top floor of the department store, which with its plastic and chrome is the poor best that this age can manage. There, despite the plastic, you can still enjoy watching a man at his trade, hands moulding and cutting, as you sit on your swivelling stool.

People’s trades wear into them.  This is not just that confidence of being master of a trade, possessor of a skill, whose hands fly over what we would bodge at, which all men without a trade envy.  The baker always looks a little floury, and the plasterer is always speckled with flecks of his plaster.  With the shoemaker, though, it is not just the way he looks.  It is his character too. He is always it seems, a benevolent person, a retailer of good news, and a user of old proverbs and sayings as well-worn as the boots that are brought to him.  Have you ever heard of a vicious shoemaker?

It must be something in their trade.  Perhaps it is because they belong to that great fraternity of those who make things do, who help things go a little further, who patch up, glue, nail and tie, so that something old can grow older and still be useful.  In these days of buy, use, throw away and buy again, that’s no bad thing.  Out here we take this to extremes.  Last Friday, when the sun came out just after lunch, I was chatting to old George, who has been old to us for as long as I can remember.  He looks the same now as he did when I was a child. He was brushing the stone path that leads from his garden gate, covered with nasturtiums, to his front door.  ‘This brush’, he said, ‘is over thirty years old. Of course, I’ve changed the head a couple of times and the handle once or twice, but look how it’s gone on!  It’s thirty years old if it’s a day!’ And here is the secret of eternal youth: you just change all the parts.

Anyway, here, in passing, is a toast to the repairers and the makers-do of the world, to those who spend time making things last a little longer and age usefully, as I hope I will, and who can keep the jaws of the garbage bin waiting a little longer.

And, when you come to think of it, in the odd sober moment, aren’t we all thrown out on the scrap heap a little early?   We spend more and more years in training, we retire earlier and earlier.   

Henry, the shoemaker does not fit into this scheme.  He will, he told me, be repairing soles when he is 80.  I hope he will, and so here’s to him, and to all like him, the menders and the patchers up, the fixers and the carriers on.