Blue Murder

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Friday was market day in Flaxborough. It was a somewhat tenuous survival, perhaps, but not yet an anachronism. Long departed, certainly, were the little wheeled huts—not unlike Victorian bathing machines—in which corn and seed chandlers shook samples from small canvas bags into the palms of farmers, each the size of a malt shovel, and invited them to “give it a nose”, whereupon the farmer would inaugurate the long and infinitely casual process of making a deal by observing unrancorously that he’d seen better wheat dug out of middens. Nor were animals any longer part of the market-day scene. The iron-railed pens and corridors; the weighbridge; the show ring, pooled with the pungent staling of bullocks and stained here and there with dried-off urine that looked like lemonade powder; the raised, half-round, open pavilion with a clock tower on top, where the auctioneers impassively interpreted twitches, nods and glances from the stone-faced butchers and dealers: all these had disappeared from the Market Place. So, too, had the drovers, those wondrously misshapen but agile men, who hopped, loped and darted among the sweating beasts and intimidated them with wrathful cries and stick-waving. In the long, black coats, roped around the middle, that they wore in all conditions of weather, the drovers of Flaxborough had looked like demented medieval clerics, bent on Benedictine and buggery.

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