Read Portrait of Elmbury for Free Online Page A

already confirmed and incorrigible rogues. Magistrates and police despaired of them. And yet there was nothing mean nor sordid about their misdemeanours. Sheer mischief and a sort of impishness illuminated all their crimes. They had an air and even a kind of grace in wrong-doing; and although officially Elmbury had to regard them as a pest, the majority of people were inclined to look upon them as licensed jesters whom we should be sorry to lose. At Christmas-time they always formed themselves into a ragtime band, with tins and penny-whistles, and held the passers-by to ransom, and went begging from pub to pub until they were too drunk to continue any farther. On these occasions they always made their first call at Tudor House, since it was opposite their starting-point in Double Alley, and they would kick up a great and merry row outside the front door, beating on their tins and catawauling their seasonal song:
    â€œArise arise and make your mincepies!
A frosty night and a col’ morning!”
    Then my father would go out to them and give them half a crown accompanied by a short lecture on their bad behaviourduring the past year; and they would sweep off their caps and cry, “God bless you, Mr. Mayor, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to your good self and the Missus and the little ones; and so help us you’ll never see us in the dock again!” But of course at the first Court after the holiday they’d be up before the Bench once more and my father with a twinkle in his eye would admonish them: “Your promises are like piecrust, made to be broken. … Seven days.”
The Town Scoundrels
    One annual pageant which gave us much pleasure was the slow and ponderous procession of the Town Council as they marched in a body to church on Mayor’s Sunday, which I think was the first Sunday after the election of the Mayor. It was traditional that they should attend on that day at whichever place of worship the Mayor belonged to; and you could pick out by their long faces the Nonconformists who were marching towards the Church of England and
vice-versa
; they had the air of men who know that their reluctant steps lead them towards the dangerous slopes of Hell, yet stern duty compels them on.
    Whichever church it went to, the procession, which started at the Town Hall, had to pass our window. It was preceded by the Town Band, which came only second to the Fire Brigade as a comic turn to delight the inhabitants of Elmbury. Behind the band shuffled the Mayor, Aldermen, and Councillors in their appropriate robes; the Town Clerk in his wig: the Town Crier, the Beadle and other officials; and behind them, and out of step (for nobody could march behind the Council and keep step) came the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Wolfcubs, Brownies, Church Lads’ Brigade, and that despised handful of Territorials who were destined so soon for immortal glory.
    On these occasions Double Alley, and the other alleys nearby, would disgorge their ragged hordes, and Black Sal and Nobbler Price, the Hooks and all the rest would line the pavement and laugh till they nearly split their sides. Their laughter was notreally unkindly and I think the councillor who wrote to the local paper complaining about “the cheap jibes and shallow mirth which travestied a solemn occasion” was talking through his cocked hat. Far from being shallow, the mirth sprang from one of the most ancient and most profound of all the sources of mirth: Dressing up. Deep down at the origins of kingship, deeper still at the dark roots of religion and magic, lies the notion of Fancy Dress: and the idea that Fancy Dress may be the symbol of an office, marking a man out from his fellows by virtue of his putting it on.
    Now there is nothing very funny, if you believe in magic, in the Witch Doctor’s mask; or if you believe in religion, in the Cardinal’s hat; or if you believe in monarchy, in the King’s crown; but all would probably seem