A COUNTRY VILLAGE

1 0 3 R A C O U N T R Y V I L L A G E P A U L W E S T ‘‘Kid’’ or ‘‘Squire’’ is what Mr. Gaunt the butcher calls you when you buy his sliced ox tongue, a squashed-pea paste called mushy, or shoulder pork baked in a pastry case. ‘‘Kid’’ is informal, implying, perhaps, that meat can keep you young. ‘‘Squire’’ is for when he is feeling a bit subserviently medieval, though in a mutinous way. He will even say ‘‘sir’’ or ‘‘madam’’ with a rich man’s leer under his Ronald Colman mustache, but his most outrageous mode of address is ‘‘darling,’’ popped at either sex with a mixture of sangfroid and prankish insolence befitting a stand-up comic. Somehow, in rosy-cheeked Mr. Gaunt (what a name for a butcher, anyway), a highly developed sense of station has gone awry in the age of unisex, punk, and socialist peers. He finds all salutations equally valid, equally silly. He does the honors at his shop in di√erent voices, only truly at home with the cut-up hogs, cows, and sheep that cross his threshold fresh from the backyard cooler. Mostly, the blu√, cordial folk of Eckington, a Derbyshire mining village, address strangers as they have addressed them since Shakespeare’s time. ‘‘Eigh-up, serry,’’ they call out to you, as to one another, meaning: I have noticed you, sirrah. Or, regardless of sex, they call you ‘‘love’’ or ‘‘duck,’’ reserving for intimates such words as ‘‘flower’’ or ‘‘bonnie.’’ Sometimes you need an interpreter. A 1 0 4 W E S T Y man is a mester. Busy is throng. A candy is a spice. Food is snap. To be jiggered is to be tired out. And to cut cake or carve roast untidily is to chavel it; this rough-and-ready society has words for things unfussed-about elsewhere. Among so many words that sound like gongs, there lurks a sly finesse, a cryptic delicacy, you would never guess at if merely passing through rather than spending a week. Eckington, the locus of these linguistic time warps, was founded by the Romans in the middle of the land now known as the Midlands . The local dialect is close to Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, but one village only a mile away is called Frecheville, while twenty miles west lies Chapel en le Frith and some sixty miles to the south, Ashby de la Zouch, in Leicestershire. Normans as well as Vikings came here and stayed. Roman logic survives at the village center (‘‘The Cross’’), from which branch out two opposite thoroughfares, called Northgate and Southgate. The crossroads’ other limb does indeed run west, uphill to the Top End, and east, down to the Bottom End, but there was never a Westgate or an Eastgate. The vital artery was north–south, a point renewed and made large when British Railways revised its system by abolishing crosscountry services galore but leaving the north–south ones largely intact. Here in the middle of England, just about as far from the sea as you can get, you are between the Derbyshire dales to the south and the Yorkshire moors to the north. You are among the symbolic roses too. Not far away, they fought the Wars of the Roses (Lancaster versus York), a sporadic fifteenth-century rivalry perpetuated in dour cricket matches between the Red Rose county Lancashire and the White Rose county Yorkshire. The rose of Derbyshire happens to be yellow, and Derbyshire disdain for the things of Lancaster or York is chronic; the natural a≈liation of Derbyshire folk is with Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest, which lies across the Nottinghamshire border. People come here to walk, to admire country mansions such as Chatsworth and Haddon Hall, to watch the local wells being dressed with flowers or local hearties playing Shrovetide Football – a pagan ceremony marking the end of the winter solstice, but possibly a violent echo from a Saxon victory over the Danes or the Romans, in which even the ball was someone ’s head. Or you come here to savor famous quotations, from Sir Arthur A C...