where to come if you ever need a new walking stick—or a wooden leg.” She flashed me a grin.
I did as I was told.
Inside, there were three men working—one man and two boys, really. But they were not what drew the eye. What you couldn’t help but notice was what was on the walls. Those walls, made of old, long, brown bricks, were covered in every type of tool you could imagine. All pegged to the brickwork in a neat arrangement, each with its place—where the workmen knew how to find them—were the most beautifully crafted implements: planes, in shiny polished wood, bradawls, bodkins, drills, awls, hammers with different kinds of heads, prongs, small pickaxes, knives of varied shapes and sizes, chisels, spokeshaves, cleavers, adzes, whittles, naked blades, and rasps. The overall effect was like the huge abstract collages I had seen in Munich.
“How did you stumble across this?” I asked.
“There’s a woodwork teacher in school. He brought me here. I love tidiness. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Not in Stratford,” I said. “Someday I’ll tell you about my time in Munich. But this is stunning, stunning.”
We waved good-bye to the three men.
Gradually, we worked our way back to the Crown. Sam knew one of the waitresses there, who was introduced to me as Maude, and she gave us a good table with a view of the yard, where, in the old days, the coaches would have unloaded. The yard contained a number of barrels—empty, I presumed—which were waiting to be exchanged for full ones the next time the brewery made a delivery.
There wasn’t much choice on the lunch menu—it was wartime, after all—but it was a good deal less brown than the canteen at the Ag and I remember the hotel actually served a fish course after the soup: very civilized.
I don’t remember too much about the Crown itself on that occasion because by now I was totally smitten with Sam. I have only fallen in love once in my life and it happened immediately, totally, and right there in the back alleys and dead ends of Stratford. Sam, I realized, was trying to keep her distance even as I was trying to get closer. As we had poked about the hidden side of Stratford she’d spoken as if she were a guide and I a paying tourist. Had she given Wilhelm this treatment to begin with? I put it out of my mind. During our “tour” there were no intimate little glances or smiles, there was no squeeze of my arm, no physical contact of any kind. But I could tell she was not indifferent to me either. She was seeing how I responded to what she had to say, how I dealt with the difficulties she was putting in my way. And yes, she was a bit shy. I was just glad to be with her.
Before lunch we both had a sherry. With the food I had a pint of bitter and she drank shandy—half beer, half lemonade. By now she had taken off her coat, to reveal underneath a white frock, buttoned down the front. When she shook off her coat, she also released more perfume. This, plus the fact that the frock was a shade—though no more than a shade—too small for her, was the most alluring experience I think I had ever had to that point, not excluding the Eleven Executioners cabaret in Munich, or Crimson. It was, conceivably, the most erotic moment of my life.
During the first part of lunch she said it was my turn to talk, that she was talked out after our tour of the town. I wasn’t sure that was the truth—she was still keeping a distance from me—but I was happy to let it go. So I did what lovers (or would-be lovers) do at times like that. I gave her my life story, or an edited version of it, designed to make her think well of me.
I told her how I had grown up in the Cotswolds, not on a farm exactly—we lived in a large house next to the church in a small hamlet—but otherwise surrounded by farmland and the beech woods of the wolds.
“So, from an early age I was familiar with which mushrooms could be eaten and which toadstools were poisonous, where the badgers came out at night, and where the bluebells formed their plush, iridescent carpet in spring. I remember even today the damp smell of bluebells in the beech woods in