Letters from Berringford 5 'Shoemakers'
Erewhon
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 can leave home in bright sunshine and return
home an hour later soaked by a sudden shower of rain. 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.
I said goodbye to Henry and
closed the shop door with its little bell on a spring over the door that rings
you in and rings you out. As I left, 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, the possessor of a skill, whose hands fly over what
we would bodge at. All men without a
trade secretly envy that ability. The plasterer is always speckled with flecks
of his plaster. What I would give though, to be able to transform a wall as he
does! 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 to do
with 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 and throw away, that is no bad thing. Out here we take this making things do 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. To me 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
fifty 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 fifty years old if it’s a day!’ And this
is the secret of eternal youth: you just change all the parts.
Anyway, here, in passing, is
a toast to the repairers of the world, to those who spend time making things
last a little longer and who keep the open jaws of the garbage bin waiting a
little longer. They age usefully, as I
hope I will.
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 in youth, and in age we retire earlier and earlier. Perhaps this will change. I don’t know.
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