Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Higher Combe ·
The Ford of Two Crossings
A cart may cross the Combe ford twice on one crossing — loudly going, with the water's leave, and quietly returning without it.
- status: disputed
Below Higher Combe the lane goes into the water at the willows and comes out the far side exactly where it looks like it will, which is the only honest thing anyone says about the place. The custom at the ford is older than the lane and shorter: you cross loud or you cross not at all. Wheels rattled on the shingle, whip cracked over the axle, the driver calling his name and his load to the far bank in a fair carrying voice. Noise is the water's leave. On that much the whole combe agrees, and on nothing else.
Because the ford will also give you a second pass. The same cart, the same crossing, twice: once loudly, going, the leave asked and granted; and once quietly, on the return, without the leave — hooves landing no louder than a pen meets paper, the water flat and fish-still, and not one drop on the boards. Those who have had the quiet pass say it is not something you do. It is something done for you, the way a clerk turns out a fair sheet after the scrawl is safely filed.
Half the combe reads the quiet pass one way and half the other, and the halves will drink together amicably and still not agree. The wet-side houses hold that the second crossing is a receipt: the water docketed your going, has made you a fair copy of the journey gratis, and the account is square; leave the ford alone for a season and it stays square. The dry-side houses, the vestry end, hold harder: a quiet crossing is an entry made in somebody's book, and every entry must be balanced; a cart that has crossed loud and then quiet stands as two figures where one was agreed, and two figures stand open until they are made to answer.
The story both halves tell is the same story, which is the bothersome part of it. Albert Cullis carried the dairy's meal down that lane for thirty years, cart and mare, and his wife Nellie Dawes kept one rule about the ford: shout going and shout coming home, every trip, so the water need never be driven to use its own pass on us. In the February he took a bad cold on the chest, he obeyed the rule going and saved his voice returning, and he took the quiet pass home afterwards, dry-shod, and made a joke of it at the tap that same evening. Nothing happened to him. That is what he said, and the cart came up the hill dry, and he went on carrying the meal another nine years. The joke is that this is exactly what each half of the combe disputes. The ford-keeper's tally-board at the willows, which is notched for every loud crossing and never — not once in living memory — for a quiet one, came up that season with eleven notches where Albert's rounds made ten. The ford-keeper swears he cut ten and counts them on his fingers one at a time. The board says eleven. Neither party will plane the board down, because a tally is a tally and planing one is an admission.
And the paper carries it too, if you can get the parish clerk past his supper. The vestry book holds, for one November in the same decade, two entries in the same night for the same cart at the same hour: one marked WET and one marked DRY, in two different hands, neither of which will own the entry. The wet side is sure the vestry clerk wrote the DRY line to frighten tithes out of the carriers. The vestry end is sure the ford-keeper wrote the WET one to shorten his notches. Both forgery stories are perfectly plausible, and that is the trouble with both.
They tell it today on both sides of the water at once, as they always have: the ford-keeper's half from the willows with a tally-stick in hand at closing time, and the vestry half from the church steps just after ringing. Each half finishes on the same sum, which is the one thing the combe has ever managed to agree on, and they leave it hanging over the ford for the next cart to hear: when the quiet pass is also yours, then which of you crossed — and which of you was crossed?