Read A Disturbing Influence for Free Online

and screams of William Johnson. I was, after all, only one in a succession of vicars, and no doubt many of my predecessors had gone through similar periods of despondency and known exactly the same sense of failure when they heard the cries of newly born bastards. Indeed, my scanty researches into the past seem to show that at least one early vicar of Cartersfield had some illegitimate children of his own.
    Sometimes Mrs Badham would come to collect Lindy after lunch, and I would hear her authoritative voice trying to coo over the baby. Then all three would parade proudly down the High Street, William in an old pram, Lindy pushing, Mrs Badham like a policewoman beside them. It was a spectacle which gave me much pleasure, though of course I could not approve it conscientiously. But my conscience tended to be quiet.
    Miss Spurgeon enjoyed a couple of Sundays’ protesting absence from church after William Johnson’s christening, but after a few months she was gossiping with as much malice and inaccuracy as ever, though with a new gleam in her eye that meant, unmistakably, ‘I told you so’. However, I gave her as little credence as before, and our brushes continued to sharpen both our spirits.
    It is autumn as I write, and I feel particularly strongly tonight that I was right that day, which now seems a long time ago, when I felt that my duty was to the things that are traditional to Cartersfield and to the English spirit. There is, after all, no telling what William Johnson may not grow up to be.

2. The Schoolmaster
    O URS is a small town. That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it always will be, unless it gets smaller, and dwindles away altogether. But I can’t see why anything should ever change here much—oh, a bit up now, a bit down now, but pretty well the same in the long run. Come to that, I can’t think why anyone comes here at all, unless it’s the complete lack of anything interesting to do or see; that could, I suppose, to certain minds have a sort of charm. It does to mine, as a matter of fact. One can be absolutely certain at any given hour of day or night what is happening in the house opposite, the house next door, the houses all over the town. Because this little place of ours is having one of its downs at the moment, it’s got lost, pushed aside by the great new road that whizzes its traffic a mile away beyond Chapman’s Wood. You see, Cartersfield began as a stop for coaches whenever itwas that coaches began to trundle regularly along the roads of England. You know the sort of thing—a pub, a place to change horses, to drop mail—all that stuff. And then the coaches didn’t come any more and cars started coming instead—few at first, of course, not that I can remember, but obviously it’s only since the war that things have got quite out of control and there have been more cars than roads to put them on. And the jolly old government decided a few years ago, about thirty years too late, as a matter of fact, that we were living in the age of the automobile now, the dog-cart was dead, and therewere many, many towns, like ours, which were a positive menace to navigation. By Jove, said one civil servant to another, look here, old boy, do you see that Cartersfield’s High Street is only three feet wide, and that High Street of theirs carries the main road from Slough to Reading? (Or rather, being a civil servant, and having, one likes to think, a wider view, from London to the west.) I say, old man, said the other civil servant, that’s a bit thin, what? And they both guffawed a bit, and then one of them said, I say, don’t you think we ought to say something to someone about this, old boy? I mean, now we have all this money to build new roads, wouldn’t it be a really jolly good thing to pull old Cartersfield High Street right off the map? And the other one said he thought that might be a little too strong, so they built us a by-pass instead, and our High Street is