Brensham Village (11 page)

This was the last over, and Bloody Bourton wanted two runs to win. Even the Colonel sat up tensely and put his flask away in his pocket. Everybody was on his toes with the solitary exception of Briggs, who was standing deep at long-on where for a long time he had had nothing to do. I noticed a faint blue haze hanging about him in the still evening air; I looked again, and perceived that Briggs was lighting his pipe.

Alfie came up to the wicket with his familiar hop, skip and jump, tousled fair hair falling into his eyes. The Bloody Bourton captain, whose success in hitting a six had gone to his head, ran down the pitch and hit the ball a full toss. He caught it awkwardly high up on the splice of the bat but it was a hefty clout all the same, and the ball flew towards long-on. Everybody looked at Briggs; but Briggs, with his big hands cupping a match, was still puffing at his pipe.
The whole team yelled at him. Sammy shouted terrible sea-oaths at the top of his voice. I shouted, the Colonel shouted, even Lord Orris shouted in his small piping voice. Only Goaty Pegleg, who had not yet tumbled to what was happening, remained silent. At last Briggs looked up, and saw the ball falling towards him. He did not move. Without hurry he put the box of matches into his left pocket and the pipe into his right pocket. Then, as one who receives manna from heaven he extended his enormous hands in front of him. The ball fell into them, the strong fingers closed as if they would squeeze it out of shape. Finally, still without hurry, he removed his pipe from his pocket lest it burn his trousers.

When the cheering was over there was a little silence while Joe Trentfield pulled up the stumps and the team came back towards the pavilion. Then Goaty Pegleg announced in a loud voice
urbi et orbi
: ‘He's caught it! We've won!' as if he were an astronomer who watches the stars through a telescope and sees, a hundred light years after the event, the flaming destruction of a far-distant sun which, at the moment of earth-time when he witnesses it, has long been black and dead.

So off go Bloody Bourton with perfunctory handshakes and insincere smiles and with black hatred in their hearts. ‘It was a good game,' we say, rubbing it in. ‘Just the right sort of finish,' they agree without enthusiasm. Mr Mountjoy hurries off to his Evening Service - he's two minutes late already. The Colonel mounts his motor-bike and chugs off towards the Swan. Lord Orris untethers from the gate Tom Pearce's grey mare and rides slowly back towards his ruined mansion. Goaty Pegleg stumps away, the girls wash up the tea-things, Mrs Hartley puts back her ham in its muslin bag. The persistent cuckoo, whose voice is breaking already,
calls his last throaty cuck-cuck-cuck-oo from the top of the willow tree.

‘And now,' says Sammy Hunt, wiping the sweat-beads off his bald head, ‘now for a pint at the Adam and Eve, and a game of darts!'

Three Pubs - The Adam and Eve - The Language of Darts - The Railway - The Compleat Engine-driver - Trains and Charabancs - The Trumpet - The Horse Narrow - The Landlord - A Social Revolution - Lord Orris' Daughter - We Do See Life - The Purge for Poetry - The Flood - We Band of Brothers

Some Bigoted mean-spirited calculating ass who had probably never stepped inside a pub in his life once wrote a letter about Brensham's pubs to the
Elmbury Intelligencer and Weekly Record
. He signed himself ‘Statistician' and his theme was that a single Licensed House should be sufficient for the drinking needs of what he was pleased to call ‘approximately one hundred adults of the male sex'. The other two pubs, he suggested, were ‘redundant'.

He seemed to suppose that the more pubs there were, the more we should drink, as if a man should say that the more petrol pumps there are by the roadside the more often will a motorist fill up his tank. It was sheer nonsense, of course; but we were very angry indeed at his suggestion that because we had the Adam and Eve, the Horse Narrow and the Trumpet were, in his horrible phrase, ‘redundant'.
All three pubs were different and each had a different atmosphere; you might prefer the Adam and Eve to the Horse Narrow or the Trumpet to both, according to your taste, or you might decide on any given evening that the Horse Narrow matched your mood whereas the Adam and Eve didn't. Each had its ‘regulars', old faithfuls who would never dream of going elsewhere, but most of us liked a change now and then. You might feel it was an Adam and Eve night, or a Horse Narrow night, or that the company at the Trumpet would be pleasantest; but it was very rarely that you wanted to visit all three. Only Billy Butcher did that, staggering from one to another, and then back to the first, upon his hopeless and terrible pilgrimage.

I suppose I should say, if I tried to differentiate, that the Adam and Eve was the darts players' pub, the Trumpet was the place for a quiet pint and serious conversation, and the Horse Narrow was the rendezvous for those who wanted what we called a bit of jollity: a tune on the piano, a song by Mimi, a pint and a merry tale after closing time with Joe Trentfield. It happened that our cricket-team generally went to the Adam and Eve after matches, because we liked to play darts and because of the wonderful variety of the pickles which Mrs Hartley provided with her bread and cheese.

The landlord, at forty-five, was already a little Falstaff, with a belly which he could only just squeeze through the narrow door in his counter. This was no wonder to us because Mrs Hartley had curious notions about the constitution of men; she was convinced they would faint from starvation unless they devoured at least four enormous
meals a day. She also had her own definition of a snack; she thought it consisted of a brown cottage loaf, all crusty and new, with half a pound of fresh butter, yellow as buttercups, a great hunk of double gloucester cheese, piccalilli, pickled walnuts, cucumbers, and red cabbage, with spring onions, lettuce, and radishes if they were in season. After the cricket-matches, when she thought a snack would be insufficient, she generally added a meat-pie or two and a couple of thick slices of ham.

This was all very well for us, who only experienced her providence once or twice a week. Whether it was good for her husband was open to doubt; for she continually plied him between gargantuan meals, not only with her larger ‘snacks', but with such occasional titbits as chitterlings, faggots, cold tongue, or brains on toast, which the poor man was quite unable to resist. He became, in consequence, a trifle sluggish. Jim Hartley, you would say, was a very decent fellow but neither his brain nor his legs worked as quickly as they used to. This sluggishness was very much in evidence when it came to a question of turning out the Voluntary Fire Brigade, of which he was the captain. Luckily we had very few fires: a hot rick or two, a burning thatch on bonfire night, a smouldering beam in one of the old houses, made up as a rule the year's tally. On these occasions Mr Hartley would look very imposing in his shining helmet but by the time the old horse had been coaxed into its bridle and harnessed to the fire engine, and the engine taken to the fire and the water supply discovered and the pump set going, the Conflagration, as the
Intelligencer
invariably called it, was ‘well under control'. The neighbours had seen to that. However, there was a story that once, when the Colonel's old barn took fire, the
Intelligencer's
reporter and photographer, driving four miles from Elmbury, contrived to arrive upon the scene
before Mr Hartley's fire engine which was housed only four hundred yards away. The barn was blazing merrily and the Colonel in rage and frustration was dancing about in front of it like some ancient fire-worshipper. The photographer, whose news-sense was less developed than his tact, deemed it an inopportune moment to take his picture; he tactfully walked away up the road in search of the fire brigade. Shortly it appeared at the trot, with Mr Hartley in his shining helmet looking like Thor himself. The photographer politely asked if he might take a photograph. ‘By all means,' said Mr Hartley, whoa-ing the old mare. ‘Pose, men; and when he's ready don't forget to smile.'

Luckily the brigade from Elmbury, which possessed a motor fire engine, reached Brensham in time to save the Colonel's barn; and Mr Rendcombe, the Editor of the
Intelligencer
, displayed as much tact as his photographer and forebore to publish the photograph of Jim Hartley's smile.

Yes, a sluggish man: and yet in one respect he was an artist, excelling all others. Mr Hartley was the best darts player I have ever seen; and even at Brensham, where we prided ourselves upon our darts, he stood out like a Don Bradman in a village cricket-team, or a great lord among commoners. He was the only man I have known who would put three successive darts into the treble-twenty not as a rare accident, to be celebrated by drinks all round, but as a commonplace occurrence, not worth celebrating. He played darts not only with consummate skill and extraordinary accuracy but with the grace, the assurance, the artistry of a master. When he squeezed his pot-belly through the counter-door, and waddled towards the darts board, he was just a foolish fat oaf of a landlord whose wits had been dulled by too much roast beef and Yorkshire puddings; but as soon as he threw the first dart he was
transfigured. He was lordly, he was matchless, he dominated all.

It was not at all surprising, therefore, that the Adam and Eve should be famous throughout the district for its darts. Jim Hartley attracted the darts players to him like a magnet. In his long tap-room we played all our matches, and from there we set off, on winter evenings, to visit pubs elsewhere whose teams had challenged us, the Shakespeare or the Barrel or the Coventry Arms at Elmbury, or the Salutation Inn at Adam's Norton where the darts-match always ended in a sing-song, because the men of Adam's Norton were born to singing as thrushes or nightingales, and the music in their hearts would out, willy-nilly, whenever they had a few pints of beer.

If you knew nothing about the game, you would have had a job to understand the talk of the darts players in the spotless bar out of which Mrs Hartley with her duster chased every mote and speck twice a day. For darts has its own esoteric terminology, some of which is common to the whole country and some of which is probably local. It is a language of association, with a bit of rhyming slang mixed up in it. Thus if you score a hundred and eleven - one-one-one - you say ‘Nelson': one eye, one arm, and one (let us say) ambition. But if your score is sixty-six it is ‘clickety-click', which is simply rhyme. Ninety-nine is ‘the doctor': obviously. Twenty-six is ‘bed and breakfast' because two and six, in happier days, was the cost of bed and breakfast at a country inn. The left-hand side of the board is known, rather obscurely, as the married side: sixteen and upwards. Thirty-three is ‘fevvers' and the
reason for that is very obscure indeed; it must have originated in a joke about somebody who couldn't pronounce the sound ‘th', for if you ask why thirty-three is associated with ‘fewers' you get the strange reply: ‘Firty-free fevvers on a frush's froat.' But why a thrush's throat should be supposed to possess thirty-three feathers, or who took the trouble to count them, I haven't the faintest idea.

A hundred is a ‘ton', of course, all over England. Two twos is Jews and two fours is two whores and two tens is two hens and so on. And all over England, surely, if at the end of the game you leave yourself the ‘double one' at the top of the board, you are said to be ‘Up in Annie's room'. Who was Annie? I wonder; and over what bar did she dwell, and hear the darts thudding on the wall beneath, and what happened up in Annie's room which made the young men and the old men chuckle when their darts flew high?

Pubs have characters like people; and there was a factor other than the fame of its darts players which gave individuality to the Adam and Eve and made it different from the other pubs in the village. The main line of the railway ran past it, and Brensham's little station was only a hundred yards away; so the Adam and Eve was not only a village pub but also a railwaymen's pub. The station-master had his morning and evening pint there, pulling out his great turnip-watch every time a train went by; our only porter spent a good deal of time there, as he could afford to do, since the even tenor of his life was interrupted by only four stopping trains a day; and at noon the gangers came in and ordered pints of cider, sat down in the corner and had their bait.

Since Brensham lay in a backwater, well away from the main road which passed through Elmbury, the railway was its principal means of contact with the urban world. When the villagers travelled far afield they went by train; and our summer visitors, mostly anglers from Birmingham who held their fishing contests in our river, generally arrived by train instead of by charabanc. Now whereas the impact of charabancs upon a village is a defiling thing, for they are devouring monsters which destroy the rural atmosphere without putting anything in its place, the impact of the railway has a very different result. The railway is not sterile like the charabancs; it does not, like them, destroy and then vanish, mosstrooper-fashion, but it remains to become part of the village, bringing indeed new life to the village, in the shape of the community which serves it. Thus Brensham wasn't urbanized by the railway; instead the railway at Brensham was made rural. The station master married a Brensham girl and cultivated a typical Brensham garden, all hollyhocks, peonies, and rambler roses, with gillyflowers on the wall. The porter had been born in Brensham, and so had many of the platelayers and gangers; others, who walked each day down the line, tapping the rails, inspecting the sleepers, trimming the hedges along the top of the cutting, were men from neighbouring villages who spoke our speech and thought our thoughts and often played darts with us in the Adam and Eve. Thus the railway had become an integral part of the pattern of Brensham life, with the orchards, the market-gardens, the river, the cricket-field, and the pubs.