Brensham Village (10 page)

These visitors must have carried away the impression that Brensham folk were curiously eccentric in the matter of clothes; for our third spectator, the Mad Lord, generally had the appearance of a scarecrow. Indeed, they always had difficulty in believing that he was a lord: an incredulity which they shared with the numerous creditors, duns, and bum-baillies who now perpetually plagued him. Poor wretches, they could never rid themselves of an uncomfortable suspicion that the tatterdemalion figure was not the lord, but the lord's cowman. Nor did his manner do much to reassure them, for he always welcomed them kindly and they were unused to friendly welcomes. ‘My dear fellow,' he would say, ‘I perfectly understand that you will have to stay at my house during the period of the distraint, but the trouble is there's simply nothing to eat except rabbits -
which grow rather freely upon die place as you can see - and I shall be positively ashamed of the wretched hospitality which is all I can offer you.' In any case there was precious little to distrain upon; for his furniture, it was said, remained only by the grace of a moneylender from London. The house and lands had been mortgaged ago After a brief look-round the duns like disapproved vultures took themselves off; and the bum-baillies soon grew tired of rabbit and reported to their masters that the proceedings were a waste of money. Somehow or other - we never quite knew how - Lord Orris kept out of the County Court and the Bankruptcy Court and, possessing practically nothing nor desiring anything more than he had, continued to live happily amid his ruin and his rabbits, ambitious to receive a few pounds from his quarterly rentals only that he might immediately give them away to the first beggar who came along.

About the time I am writing of he had just scandalized the village by making over three good pastures to a good-for-nothing fellow who was one of his tenants, In justification of this foolish action he had pleaded that the gift had cost him nothing; since the man had never in seven years paid him a penny of rent. He had also, during a hard winter, granted the right of collecting firewood to the Fitchers and Gormleys, who often camped in their caravans uninvited upon his estate; and those gipsyish families, taking him too literally, had not only cut down most of the coppice which adjoined his garden but had carried away the garden fence as well.

He lived alone, except for one old and decrepit servant; Jane had gone to school and she generally spent her holidays in the care of an aunt. The duns were his only visitors; for his relations, we understood, were extremely ‘sporting' and they measured happiness by the brace or by the pound,
according to whether they were shooting birds or fishing for salmon. They had long ago ceased to come to Orris Manor, where the sport was beneath contempt, the beds unaired, the plumbing primitive, and where the same dish of boiled or roast rabbit was likely to appear at almost every meal.

Perhaps, therefore, the old man grew lonely; at any rate he delighted to visit our cricket-matches, at which he would appear on horseback wearing on hot days a panama and on cooler ones a curious cycling-cap with a button on the top of it, which must have been contemporary with the Colonel's deerstalker. Beneath an ancient black coat, going green with age, he wore a yellow hunting-waistcoat and an old-fashioned cravat. His legs were clad in the most deplorable breeches, patched at the seat and in holes at the knees. His boots would have shamed a tramp.

Our visitors would turn their heads to gaze at him, and between overs would ask us:

‘Who's that old Guy Fawkes? Is he mad?'

Well, it depended, said Mr Chorlton, upon your standards of judgement; and his reply to the visitors' question, as he walked between the wickets, must have greatly puzzled them unless they knew their
Hamlet
.

‘I think,' Mr Chorlton would say, ‘that he's only mad nor'-nor'-west.'

It was delightful to watch these three extraordinary and lovable spectators sitting together on the bench that was only just long enough for them: Goaty Pegleg with his impressive white beard and his wooden peg held out straight in front of him, looking extremely salty and piratical although he'd never seen the sea, nor, in fact, travelled
more than twenty miles from Brensham; the Colonel in his green tweeds which merged into the leafy background so that his figure lacked definition and you only noticed the fire-red, gnome-like face, the badger-grizzled moustache, the bright humorous blue eyes; and scarecrow lord whose panama hat had not worn as well as the Colonel's deerstalker, so that he gave the impression of having, literally, straws in his hair.

I remember a match at which I too was a spectator, and sat on the grass at the feet of these three, because I had sprained my ankle in a fail from my motor-bike. I remember it better than all the other matches, perhaps because the looker-on sees most of the game, or perhaps because it had such a comic and glorious ending, or perhaps again because it happened on the loveliest June day you could possibly imagine, a day of blue and green and gold, and of light breezes, gillyflower-scented, and lullaby sounds of bees, wood-pigeons and faraway cuckoos. The sky was immaculate, hedge-sparrow-egg-blue; the mowing-grass rippled in all the water-meadows along the river and like green foam were the leafy orchards on the lower slopes of the hill. Buttercups along the unmown edges of our ground were a frieze of gold which gilded white cricket-boots and the turnups of flannel trousers.

The match was against a team called Woody Bourton and it was a match we particularly wanted to win; for the plain reason that we detested Woody Bourton, whose captain was a dull humourless stone-waller, whose one-eyed umpire had never been known to give an lbw against his own side, and whose wicket-keeper appealed almost ceaselessly in a cracked voice like that of a raven prophesying doom. Do not let yourself be misled by romantic writers into the belief that village cricket is played in a cheerful, ‘sporting' spirit of ‘Never mind who wins', I have said that when we took
the field we were Brensham going to war. Therefore we minded very much who won. And especially we should mind if we were defeated by Woody Bourton who were known to us as Bloody Bourton. They had beaten us (or, as some said, their umpire had beaten us) the previous year; and we thirsted for revenge.

But from the first ball, which took Mr Chorlton's off stump out of the ground, things went ill with us. Sir Gerald Hope-Kingley, who was next in, ran out Mr Mountjoy, who shortly afterwards ran out himself. (‘Like two old hens scampering up and down the wicket they are,' commented Dai.) Sammy Hunt batted for a while with the heroic determination of one who maintains a crumbling citadel against an innumerable enemy; then the wicket-keeper appealed for a catch and up went the loathed umpire's cigarette-stained finger. Sammy walked slowly back, his bald head bright scarlet, which meant, we rightly guessed, that he was furious about the verdict. Alfie went out, had his stumps knocked flying, and returned to spread alarm and despondency among ‘the boys'. ‘He's bowling helluva fast,' said Alfie, who frequently employed this curious adjective. Banks, who batted next, was so cast down by Alfie's report that he jumped out of the way of his first ball, which took the bails off.

So far we had lost five wickets for thirty runs, most of which were byes off the fast bowler. Then there was a brief gallant stand by Briggs and Billy Butcher. Briggs for once in a way forgot his ambition to chop every ball County-fashion between the slips; he threw caution to the winds, took hold of his bat by the top of the handle as one would hold a sledge-hammer - and used it as a sledge-hammer. He had a private reason for disliking the Bloody Bourton captain: the man was Conservative Agent for the constituency. So when Briggs smote the ball, he felt that he was smiting the
Tories. Thus inspired he walloped it three times to the boundary and once over the willow trees: three fours and a six, twenty-four runs for Brensham, four hearty blows struck for the proletariat.

Billy, as it happened, v/as suffering from an appalling hang-over: he'd had a bad bout which had lasted three days and hadn't yet, we suspected, come to an end. But he cocked his cap at a defiant angle and jauntily took his guard, brandished his bat at the first ball in a devil-may-care gesture, missed it altogether, and received the ball on the inside of his thigh. It came quick off the pitch, and it must have hurt badly; but Billy only grinned, pointed his bat at the fast bowler, and called out: ‘Hey, mind my courting tackle, if you please!' This made the bowler laugh, and brought a faint smile even to the sombre face of the Bloody Bourton captain. The next ball was a loose one, and Billy cut it over slip's head for an accidental four. Encouraged, he began to play the fool, and his clowning provoked, irritated and thoroughly put off the opposing players, who dropped him twice and let him make several runs from overthrows. Then, unexpectedly in the middle of his clowning, the poetry appeared. Billy would have been a very fine batsman indeed if he could only have achieved the necessary coordination between hand and eye; the whisky got in the way of that. Today, however, he suddenly pulled himself together and made three successive strokes in which the timing was quite perfect. They were sublime: they were a poet's strokes. The first was a drive through the covers which flowed like a slow river with lovely, lazy grace. The next was a cheeky glance to leg carried out as casually as if it had been an impertinent aside during a serious conversation. The third was a glorious pull off his middle stump made with a sort of despairing gaiety, a laughing challenge to the gods, a wild unorthodox defiant shot which you realized,
if you knew him well, was Billy cocking a snook at the world. The ball went sailing over the brook and into the buttercups beyond. ‘Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely!' cried Lord Orris, clapping his thin pale hands. The Colonel, wiping the mouth of his flask, muttered: ‘By God, I'll have a drink on that one,' and did so. A full half-minute later Goaty Pegleg, travelling slowly in the Fourth Dimension, declared loudly: ‘He's hit a six.'

But the effort of coordination had been too much for Billy. He failed to see the next ball until it hit his pads, which were plainly in front of the wicket. ‘Howzat?' croaked the Raven, and Joe after a moment's hesitation to show Bloody Bourton that he could have got even with their umpire if he had liked, reluctantly gave Billy out. After that the innings soon ended; three hobbledehoys, unlucky victims of Alfie's press-gang, made three runs between them and Briggs, trying to hit another six for Labour, was caught in the deep. Brensham was all out for seventy-nine and the teams came in to tea.

I remember the cuckoo which called all teatime from a willow tree in Cuckoo Pen; and the background of bees and wood-pigeons and gillyflower scent on the soft light air. I remember the Colonel's Ionian laughter at some remark of Billy Butcher's, and old Orris' gentle manners and gentle smile. I remember Mrs Hartley's ham with the golden breadcrumbs on it, and a ridiculous garden-party hat which Mimi wore, and Meg confiding her film ambitions to Mr Chorlton who listened gravely and didn't smile even when she said: ‘They told me I was ever so photogenic' I remember Sally Doan plying Billy with meat-pies and whispering to him urgently: ‘Now you must
eat
' - and I remember wondering if she were in love with him. How absurd and disastrous if she were! But then Joe Trentfield, who'd been a Sergeant-Major before he took the Horse
Narrow, looked at his watch and said: ‘Come along, boys! Late on parade!' and Sammy led our team out into the field.

Now Bloody Bourton had an hour and a half in which to score eighty runs. They could have done it easily; but being Bloody Bourton they scratched and scraped and niggled and fiddled about, as Dai put it, so that half past five - we drew stumps at six, which was opening-time - they had only scored forty for the loss of four wickets. The game looked like ending in a dreary draw; but Bloody Bourton, realizing too late that they would have to score much faster in order to have a chance of winning, suddenly began to hit; and hitting was not in their nature. After Mr Mountjoy had missed an easy catch, because he was listening to the curlews and the drumming snipe in the meadows beyond Cuckoo Pen, Alfie Perks took two wickets in the same over. And still the Bloody Bourton batsmen went out for the runs. A curious sort of desperation had overtaken them; for they delighted as a rule to make pernickety shots along the ground, to score in singles, and to keep their opponents running about in the hot sun for two or three hours while they enjoyed themselves in their prim puritanical way. But now they waved their bats wildly at every ball and called each other frantically for short runs. I heard Mr Chorlton say to Mr Mountjoy between overs:
Quem Deus vult perditur, prius dementat;
and sure enough next ball he was able to stump a batsman who had run halfway down the pitch to one of Alfie's leg-breaks and missed it altogether.

Six wickets for fifty-one, and twenty minutes to go! Sammy, who must be in the forefront of the battle always, put himself on to bowl, pounded down to the wicket with his bald head flaming, and yorked his man with the last ball of the over. Then Billy missed a catch; and our hearts sank. ‘It iss the whisky and the pubs and the profane goings-on,'
said Dai primly, ‘that iss the ruination of cricket in Brensham!' We suffered another set-back a moment later, when Mr Chorlton appealed for a catch and the one-eyed umpire (who might have been blind in both eyes, and stone-deaf as well, for all the notice he took of our appeals) remained motionless as if rooted to the ground, stared stonily in front of him, and took no notice. The Bloody Bourton captain, taking heart, scored a couple of fours, and sixty went up on the score-board. Things looked bad; but a few minutes later Sammy took another wicket for a yorker and at twenty past six the ninth man was stumped by Mr Chorlton. The last man walked out to the wicket as slowly as he dared and as eagerly as if he went blindfold towards the scaffold, snicked a two and a four off Sammy, and got a present of another four from one of Sir Gerald's overthrows. The score was seventy-two when Alfie bowled a long hop to the Bloody Bourton captain, who astonished even himself by hitting it for six.