Open Writing

Professor James Lucas was a crusty middle-aged bachelor. Professor of Linguistics at Bradchester University, he lived in the first-floor apartment of a huge converted house in a faded Victorian suburb of the city, taken over by academics like himself.

Other suburbs had been taken over by immigrants from Asia and elsewhere. As a result, the old Victorian parts of the city, which survived the whole-scale demolition of the 1960s still retained their character. A bit faded but still there, compared with the faceless mess the mid-20th century builders threw up.

A tall, spare man going bald and wearing spectacles which slipped continually down his nose, James Lucas had spent a lifetime studying the English language, especially dialects. He'd achieved a modicum of fame with his Changes in English Dialects over the Past Fifty Years, and regularly published scholarly papers in The Journal of Contemporary English.

He spoke as he wrote, precisely and pedantically, rarely using slang. When he did, it was the slang of his youth, which dated him immediately.

A solitary man with few friends, he lived alone with his books and a large collection of classical music. He listened to the radio a good deal and occasionally broadcast himself. He shunned television except for programmes relating to his studies and his favourite sports: cricket and rugby. He'd been a keen sportsman in his youth.

His holidays were spent walking by himself and researching his beloved dialects in various parts of Britain. His favourite haunt was Shropshire, walking among the hills and listening to the local speech.

The county was still very rural and had a wealth of dialect spoken in it. Telford, away to the east, was the only sizeable industrial conurbation. Shrewsbury, the county town, managed to remain the principal market town and there were smaller ones scattered about the county: Oswestry, Ludlow, Whitchurch and Ellesmere, all of them locked in their own age-old time warps.

Some miles south of Shrewsbury was the hamlet of Cruckgate. A tiny self-contained village, it had once boasted a nearby coalmine, but when it packed up, the village shrunk and the half-timbered houses were converted into retirement homes by the end of the century, complete with bulls-eye windows and brass lanterns.

Two of its three pubs also became private dwellings. However, the third, an old coaching inn, together with the church remained as a relics of a past age.

The Bridgeman Arms still took in residents as well as being the village pub. Lucas loved it. It was so different from his flat in Bradchester. His snug room was well away from the public bar, where he spent his evenings and which he could leave at closing time to go straight to bed.

He spent the days walking the Shropshire Hills and noting down words and phrases old and new. He was in his element going into town on market days, calling in at country pubs and listening to the locals yarn, or chatting to any fanner he met.

He was down there one weekend when he heard the local hunt drawing a coppice near the village. When the hounds put up a fox, their baying could be heard for miles as they took off after their quarry. So could the huntsman's horn.

When the huntsmen returned in the evening for a meal and drink, he was surprised to see how young they all were, sturdy, ruddy-faced sons of farmers and gentry who lived in the area. There were only twenty-five of them and, except for the gentry, they spoke in dialect, the dialect of an older generation.

Even the Standard English of the gentry was old-fashioned. Life over the previous century, it seemed, had made no impact on their way of speaking, and that interested Lucas greatly. Time had simply passed them by.

Throughout the evening, they were full of high spirits and good humour which flowed freely with the ale. Their comradeship was complete. There was no class distinction, and tenant and landlord drank and spoke at ease with each other as equals.

Lucas was at once attracted to a young man with a commanding voice and rich dialect. He was Jack Fisher, kennel man to the hounds. He'd been born and bred locally and used words and phrases long gone. Lucas found him a mine of information and chatted with him most of the evening, listening to his tales from local folklore, of ghosties and the like.

"Reg'lar spookie lot they'm 'ere. Any amount o'tales they have," Jack said with the ghost of a smile. His eyes twinkled as he spoke, and Professor Lucas wasn't quite sure if he was pulling his leg.

And another thing; friendly though they were, there was something odd about the lot of them. Full of good humour, they seemed at the same time serious and grave. More than that, Professor Lucas sensed that at times they were having some private joke at his expense though he couldn't say how or why. He left them still chatting and laughing when he retired to bed in the early hours of the morning.

It was when he went down to breakfast the next day that he learned the truth. To begin with, the barman was different from the previous evening; no longer the jolly publican who'd served him the night before, but a very straight-faced manager, whose English was 'proper', affectedly refined.

When Professor Lucas told him about the jollifications of the previous night, he stopped what he was doing at once and looked sharply across at him. "So you've seen them, sir," he said slowly.

The professor looked puzzled. "Of course I saw them. I was with them all night."

Then he explained. And what he told Lucas startled the professor. "The inn was closed last night, sir. We close it every year at this time, except for residents. You are our only resident. I went to bed early and heard nothing, sir. There was no one here," said the manager, clearing away Lucas's breakfast things.

"But they came back after the hunt...." the professor insisted.

"Oh, they were here yesterday all right. They always are. That's why we close the pub. They were heard hunting hereabouts all afternoon, as they always are. They've gone but they'll be back next year from wherever they are now."

"What do you mean?" asked Lucas dumbfounded.

The other didn't answer directly. All he said was, "Look at the board on the church wall, just above the choir stalls. Then you'll understand why we close the pub one night a year." Then he returned to the kitchen.

The professor visited the church before he left for home. On the memorial board donated by the Mid-Shropshire Hunt just after World War I were the names of twenty-five officers and men of the Shropshire Yeomanry Volunteers, all killed in action the same day in 1917 in Flanders.

In twenty-four hours the village and surrounding farms had lost a whole generation. Professor Lucas glanced at the names. Halfway down the list was the name of the man he'd been speaking to the previous night: "Trooper Jack Fisher, aged twenty-four, Cruckgate Kennels."