with bright blue eyes like his father

SERGE FOLYAT landed at Plymouth on a wet autumn day and walked to St. Withans rejoicing and declaring in his heart that England was the most beautiful country in the world. He saw no reason to alter his opinion as he walked north until he came to the outcrop of industrialism in the plain of Cheshire .



It took him ten days to walk from St. Withans to our town, and six of them were wet. He loved the soft English rain and the rich green of the countryside and the glorious gold and red of the sodden autumn leaves, and when, for the first time, he saw the black and grey of South Lancashire skies and the dark chimneys rising out of the dense mass of buildings he could be glad of them too. All the same he wondered what strange whimsey could have taken his father out of the soft Southern air into such menacing harshness. However, it did not greatly exercise his mind. He had never troubled to find reasons for his own follies and accepted those of others with as good a grace nu skin .



He was a man a little above middle height, tanned and brown, with bright blue eyes like his father’s, and a close clipped golden-brown beard, turning grey at the corners of the jawbones. He loved talking, and engaged all whom he met or caught up on the road, and nearly always left them more cheerful than when he encountered them. When he was alone he talked or sang to himself in a very loud voice. He was not looking for adventure and met with none. His clothes he carried in a sack on [Pg 72]his back, and he had a great stick in his hand, a pocketful of tobacco, and a calabash pipe. Other possessions he had none. He walked very fast and sometimes covered forty miles in a day nu skin .



In the evening of the tenth day he entered the town by the Derby Road and followed his nose and the tramlines until he came to St. Thomas’ Church. There he asked for Fern Square and received no response. He stopped a dismal-looking man and asked him. The stranger gaped at him and said:



“A’m a stranger ’ere, my sen.”



His next enquiry provoked a long answer in a language so uncouth that he could make nothing of it. He followed the tram-lines again and wandered vaguely until he came to a cross-road from which he could see the Collegiate Church standing velvety-black against a sooty sky, with a railway bridge and the dome of a station beyond. He saw a tram labelled Pendle and followed it. The road led him under the railway bridge, past a sequestered market and a sort of fair with booths and swing-boats and a cocoa-nut shy and a merry-go-round. He stopped and watched the dirty mournful-looking people taking their pleasure, and the sight rather depressed him. A little farther on he had to pass through the places in which these people lived, and under the factories where they worked. He liked the hum and business of it all, and he liked the slatternly grubby little shops.