Brensham Village (13 page)

The landlord now began to grow jealous of the other two pubs, whose bars were full of darts players even on the wettest and coldest nights. So one evening when he had closed his bar promptly at ten - there were no customers to turn out of it - he took a walk down to the Horse Narrow and was gratified to find that the lights were still on in the bar. He peered through the window and saw Joe serving drinks, Mimi playing the piano, and a dozen villagers enjoying a sing-song. The clock over the bar stood at ten-twenty. Joe, who enjoyed the singing, had forgotten the time; and he was never very particular about prompt closing anyway.

The landlord of the Trumpet hastened back to his pub and rang up the police-station. His towny voice was sly and ingratiating. He believed in keeping in with the police.

‘Mr Banks,' he said, ‘I'm going to give you a tip.'

‘Oh, yes?' said Banks, surprised and on his guard. ‘What is it?'

‘Just take a walk down the street and you'll see.'

It was a beastly night, cold and drizzly, and Banks had been sitting in his slippers before a good fire. He said rather sharply:

‘I can't act on that. Tell me what's the matter and I'll go and deal with it,'

‘Well, it's like this, Officer,' said the wretched landlord.
‘I happened to be passing the Horse and Harrow a few minutes ago - ten-twenty to be exact - and I'm sorry to say that there's Goings On there. I don't like to let a fellow landlord down but what's fair for one is fair for all. There were drinks being served, and music.'

Banks remained silent. As he told some of us afterwards, he was doing a bit of quick thinking. After all, Joe Trentfield was his father-in-law.

‘Music
and
singing,' whined the landlord into the silent telephone. And then, losing his head a bit, perhaps, because he still got no answer, he made a most foolish and disastrous statement:

‘I thought,' he said, ‘
that you might like the chance of making a good cop.'

A good cop! ‘Leaving out altogether,' said Banks, when he told us about it, ‘the fact that I'd have copped my own father-in-law, did the fool really believe that I'd think it a good cop to get
any
landlord in the village into trouble - or anybody else for that matter?' Banks had been village policeman for eight years; Brensham had tamed him. So he said coldly:

‘Thank you for your information, but as it happens I know all about it. Mr Trentfield warned me that he was having a party tonight. It is perfectly in order.'

‘But he hasn't got an extension!' wailed the miserable wretch.

‘No,' said Banks firmly. ‘It's a private party. Nobody is paying for drinks.' He rang off. Next, day he went to see Joe and put the fear of God into him; he also visited the Adam and Eve and warned Jim Hartley to be careful. He wasn't very discreet; I think he felt that for once in a way discretion didn't accord with justice. So he said frankly: ‘I'm warning you only because we've got a tell-tale among us.' That was enough. Joe knew who it was, and Jim
Hartley guessed. Everybody in the village knew by closing-time that night.

Now Brensham was a remarkable village in this fashion: although it possessed, I think, as diverse a collection of inhabitants as you'd find anywhere in England, it was nevertheless more of an entity than any other community I have known. Its strange assortment of individualists had a way of getting together about any major issue and acting as one man. ‘They hangs together,' Pistol had said to me; and he was right. Brensham hung together now. The question wasn't debated in public; there was no common discussion or common agreement about it; but every individual in Brensham made his individual decision to boycott the Trumpet for as long as the treacherous landlord remained there. Even Billy Butcher, in his most drunken moments, staggered past it with his head in the air. The landlord never again sold so much as a half-pint to any of our villagers. He couldn't live on weekenders and we broke him in six months. When he left he had a sale, but no one belonging to Brensham attended it. The only bidders were two or three dealers from Elmbury who formed a ring between them and bought up his few sticks of furniture for a song.

The Trumpet's next landlord was as decent a fellow as you could find; but the pub remained an unlucky one. Its ‘regulars' had left it, and become ‘regulars' at the other pubs; being creatures of habit they were unwilling to make another change. It was more difficult to get the trade back than it had been to lose it; and when the new landlord's wife died, and he could no longer provide bed-and-break-fast for the occasional motorists, he was hard put to it to make a living.

We sometimes called at his pub after cricket-matches, out of friendship and because we were sorry for him; but although he looked after his beer well and kept his bar clean
we were never entirely at ease there. It had neither the homeliness of the Adam and Eve nor the boisterous gaiety of the Horse Narrow. It was just a place for drinking in; and although that may be the teetotallers' idea of a pub, it was very far from being ours.

Nor was it Joe Trentfield's. It had been his ambition all his life to be an inn-keeper; and the reason, as he truthfully said, was because he liked to see people enjoying themselves. He had saved up during nearly twenty years of soldiering in order that he might gratify this simple ambition when he retired. Now he had his reward; for none but a churl or a misanthrope could fail to enjoy himself at the Horse Narrow. The atmosphere in the bar was rather like that of a large family party; and what was particularly enchanting about it was that the family obviously enjoyed it as much as the guests. Joe's round red face positively shone with happiness; Mrs Trentfield's bosom heaved with laughter like a balloon spinnaker filled with wind; Mimi giggled and sang, Meg giggled and strummed. No Happy Family could have been happier.

‘I likes to see people having fun,' said Joe. ‘I likes to see a bit of life,' said Mrs Trentfield. They weren't very finicky about what constituted Fun and Life, so long as it warmed the cockles of their hearts. Mrs Trentfield enjoyed a bawdy joke or a naughty song as much as anybody; and, when she listened to either, the balloon spinnaker filled and shook and swelled and billowed as if it would burst. As for Joe, he was in the habit of declaring: ‘The Horse Narrow is Liberty ‘All.' Even when Billy Butcher, being in the destructive stage, took him at his word and started pitching
glasses at the darts board, Joe merely laughed, and Mrs Trentfield's only comment as she swept up the pieces was: ‘Well, we do see Life.'

The very structure of the Horse Narrow matched its landlord's free-and-easy character. There was a great apple tree outside it, which dripped pink petals on the doorstep in spring and tapped with its twigs upon the top-storey windows whenever there was a wind. The half-timbered, deep-thatched building had been added to from time to time by various local builders, so that it had a crooked, lopsided and rather comical appearance. The eaves jutting out over the small bedroom windows looked like beetling eyebrows; and Joe had beetling eyebrows too. The crazy inn sign, with its horse and arrow, completed the impression which the place gave of belonging to phantasy.

The same sort of delightful disorder was apparent within. There were numerous low beams in awkward places, upon which strangers were apt to bang their heads. When they did so, Joe roared with laughter. His catholic notion of what constituted Fun included all minor misfortunes of that kind. Generations of happy-go-lucky builders had contrived the various additions and alterations in a spirit of rough humour which beautifully matched Joe's. Some of the doors were too narrow, and opened the wrong way; when Mrs Trentfield's bosom became jammed in them, Joe nearly split his sides. The only bathroom was placed on the opposite side of the house from the bedrooms; in order to get to it visitors and members of the family had to pass through the bar. The sight of Mimi scampering through in her dressing-gown, or Meg running the gauntlet of the young men with her hair in curlers, was an unfailing source of merriment for Joe. Another was associated with a freak of the plumbing. Every time the lavatory plug was pulled, it emptied a tank immediately over the bar, which
refilled itself with a curious gurgling noise. Joe called it Minnie haha, Laughing Water; and it never failed to set him going so that the chuckle in the ceiling seemed like an echo of his great gusty laughter, it was as if the very building shared his mirth.

The walls of the bar were decorated with the strangest assortment of pictures and curios. There were coloured photographs of Mimi and Meg in their exiguous pantomime dresses, looking very pink and shiny and as unreal as an adolescent's dream; yet if you glanced at Mimi and Meg you realized at once that the photographs were likenesses, the sisters were indeed an embodiment of the image in the mind of the awakening boy: a sort of synthesis of girls.

There was also a photograph of Joe as a Regimental Sergeant-Major, and one of Mrs Trentfield on her wedding-day which suggested that Mimi's taste in hats might be hereditary. There was a pair of antlers, one of Joe's trophies from Africa, which he had seen fit to decorate with an old top-hat. There was an improbable-looking stuffed pike in a glass case and a live parrot in a cage, and there were a number of innocently-vulgar postcards, chiefly showing fat women in bathing dresses, which the unerring instinct of Joe's best friends had prompted them to send him from Weston-super-Mare. Upon the shelf behind the bar were some more of these postcards, the ones which Joe deemed unfitted for display upon the walls, and a piece of wood-carving representing the Long Man of Elmbury who was in some ways an even more impressive figure than the better-known Long Man of Cerne Abbas. On this shelf also there was generally a collection of malformed potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes, and vegetable marrows which local gardeners had brought to the Horse Narrow in the certainty that they would make Joe laugh. A potato shaped like a manikin, a parsnip resembling a mermaid, a Pompeian
broad bean or cucumber - these curiosities would afford him endless delight and he would hold them up to show his customers, or demonstrate their peculiar qualities to his wife, with such a happy grin on his red face that even a prig or a Puritan would be bound to join in the laughter. Up from- his very boots would come Joe's deep chuckle and Mrs Trentfield heaving in front like a pouter pigeon would laugh till she cried, and the Echo in the ceiling perhaps would answer them, so that their laughter before it died away was reinforced and renewed. It was the laughter, surely, of Chaucer and Rabelais; for it was of the earth earthy, like the comic misshapen vegetable in Joe's hand.

For all his happy-go-lucky manner, Joe took his job as landlord very seriously. He worked far longer hours than most of us; as he said: ‘A pub ties you worse nor a dairy herd, for a man can generally find somebody to milk his cows' - whereas it took an expert to milk those casks in the cool dark room behind the bar. Besides, there is more to pub-keeping than that. Joe fulfilled a function in the village much larger than that of mere provider of beer. He was a sort of secular Father Confessor; for if a man wanted to share his troubles or ventilate his grievance or tell a funny story it was ten to one that he'd make his way to the Horse Narrow. There he was certain to find Joe standing behind his well-polished counter, always ready to listen patiently and nod his head understandingly and at the end to put in a wise or comforting word, or if it were appropriate to gladden the storyteller's heart with his thunderous laughter.

And when the talk was general, and the pub became, as
it often did, a sort of village parliament - when the discussion concerned perhaps some question of village politics such as a right-of-way or the water-supply or the drains, Joe found himself in much the same situation as the Speaker: he must keep the peace without taking sides. He never forgot that he was the host and his customers were guests, that all shades of opinion were represented among them, and that it was part of a host's duty not to give offence. I have heard him when the debate became heated sum up both arguments as impartially as a judge.

He had other, more definite duties. For example, he was the village banker; he cashed our cheques, and looked after our savings through the ‘club' which held its annual share-out at Christmas. He was also secretary of the local branch of the Sick Benefit Society whose members came to the Horse Narrow every Monday to pay their contributions or draw their sick pay if they were, as the phrase went, ‘on the club'. Thus he knew more than the District Nurse about the state of health of everybody in the village; and he was often more prompt than Mr Mountjoy in visiting the sick. If he was too busy to go himself he would send round one of the girls; and if the sick person was badly off they would generally take a present of a pat of butter or half a dozen eggs. Mimi might look like a chorus-girl, and Meg simulate in her dress and make-up the latest film star, but surely no village under the sun possessed two more warm-hearted almoners.

Despite all this, Joe was a ‘publican' and therefore in the eyes of the law eternally suspect. He knew well that the merest accident could lose him his licence and his livelihood. He must contrive at all times to diagnose each of the dozen signs of incipient drunkenness, to nip a dangerous argument in the bud, to recognize a child under age (and refuse to serve some chit of a girl who'd larded her face with
make-up until she looked older than her mother!), to persuade his customers to leave peacefully at closing-time. It would be a black mark against him at the licensing sessions if the Fitchers and Gormleys had a serious fight in his house; if ‘the boys' too obviously played solo or cribbage for money; if Mr Sparrow the bookie's runner from Elmbury was caught outside the pub with a pocketful of betting-slips; or even if some fool of a lorry-driver who had stopped for a drink at a dozen other places had his last one at the Horse Narrow and then ran into a telegraph pole.