The story is short, very short, and tightly focused. With that delightful quality of a type of short story, nothing much happens. An English family of rural labourers, father, son, mother, and baby daughter, walk over a hill. The father, 'slightly drunk', berates 'his little son' for losing a sixpence. I don't want to spoil it by saying much more, but if you have ever heard someone being relentlessly, repeatedly berated by someone whom they cannot answer back, you will appreciate the awful, sustained oppression in this tale.
Coppard's rural England has the same hard edge as Cormac McCarthy's border wilderness, his characters the same dogged, unswerving agendas. He paints a poetic landscape, 'the silken barley moving in its lower fields with the slow movement of summer sea', but that is 'a notion' for 'some victim of romance'.
There's a climax in this story, a revelation that takes your breath away at first encounter, and which does not lose its poignancy on a second reading, but it is not the end of the story. Coppard goes deeper. The question of how it has come to this, for this family, for this particular father, runs unanswered through the story like an undereground stream, faintly heard beneath the surface.
I love this story, for its conception, and for its execution. I can see these characters so clearly. I hear their voices. I recognise the landscape they inhabit, even though the near century since the story was first published has eroded it. I can feel their agony, and their struggle. Coppard is one of a handful of English writers, writing about an English experience, from an English perspective, and more specifically he is not writing 'down' about his characters, nor to me.
Brindley Hallam Dennis
Brindley Hallam Dennis has published the novella A Penny Spitfire (Pewter Rose Press, 2011), and That’s What Ya Get! Kowalski’s Assertions (Unbound Press, 2010), and around 100 short stories. As Mike Smith he has published poetry, plays and critical essays. He blogs at http://Bhdandme.wordpress.com/
Stories Written: "The Rage" (read by Martin Lamb), "Hecho a mano" (read by Susannah Holland),"The Workers on the Cross" (read by Steve Wedd), "Sal and Me, and Big D's War" (read by Tom Sykes), "Consommé" (read by Jennifer Aries), "When You Are Gone" (read by Kevin Potton), "Wheel ruts in the snow" (read by Tony Bell), "The Cold Blue Morning of Gidley Jones" (read by Lin Sagovsky), "Product Placement" (read by Louisa Gummer).
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