Brensham Village (20 page)

I smiled.

‘So Brensham still hangs together,' I said. ‘How much does it cost to become a Vice-President?'

When I had paid my half-guinea Mr Chorlton said:

‘Seriously, the village is pretty hard up; and I'm worried about it for a particular reason. Lately there's been a long-nosed, evil-looking, squint-eyed snooping lawyer driving about the place in a large and expensive car. He seems to be on the look-out for any little property that might, in consequence of our poverty, come into the market cheap.'

‘He came to see me,' said Alfie. ‘Bloke in a bowler hat and black coat and pin-striped trousers—'

‘That's the one. Did he offer to buy your land?'

‘He said he thought he could put me in touch with a purchaser.'

‘That's the johnny. What did you say?'

‘I said I didn't want to sell. I'd rather wait till the bank sells me up.' Alfie grinned. ‘Who is he?'

‘I don't know,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘but I have a brother who's a stockbroker in London, and therefore has to meet some rather shady people from time to time. He was lunching, the other day, with some of these customers and they were talking about Brensham. So he perked up and listened knowing I lived here.'

‘What did they say?' I asked.

‘Not much, but it struck me as a little sinister. They said,' concluded Mr Chorlton ‘- in the hateful and blood-curdling language of their kind - they said they thought we were Ripe for Development, that's all.'

Death of the Rector - The Old Schoolmaster - The Groupers Arrive - The Garden-party - The Converts - No more Cakes and Ale — The Meeting — And Ginger Shall Be Hot i' the Mouth too - C. of E. — End of an Episode

For A Long while Mr Mountjoy had been growing more frail, more forgetful, and more haphazard in the performance of his parish duties. I believe there was no truth in the story that, having stored some live bait in his font in anticipation of a day's pike-fishing, he forgot to remove them before the next christening; so that the infant was sprinkled with minnows and baptized with bleak. But it was certainly true that he took snuff in his pulpit, pausing in the middle of his sermon to help himself from a silver snuffbox with a small silver spoon. And I know that he went fishing, not only in his biretta, but in his cassock as well; for the last time I saw him he was worming for perch, in this rather unsuitable dress, from the landing-stage below Sammy Hunt's cottage. He had found a shoal of these confiding fishes, and was happily engaged in pulling them out one after another.

‘Truly,' he said to me, ‘old Izaak Walton accurately
described them when he said they were like the wicked of this world, not afraid, though their friends and companions perish in their sight!'

It was a paradox that the more eccentric the Rector became and the more outrageous his behaviour grew, the better the village liked him; so that at the end even his churchwardens, who had frequently complained to the Bishop about his scandalous conduct, were heard to declare that for all his faults he was the best parson the parish had ever had. He died, from a failing heart, in late November. He had never, in all his long cure, made any special effort to persuade his parishioners to go to church, and for thirty years he had preached, rather badly, to half-empty pews. He might have smiled, therefore, if he could have seen the crowd at his funeral, which overflowed into the churchyard because there was not enough room for it. But he was one of the gentlest Christians I ever knew; and there would have been no bitterness in his smile.

He was succeeded by a man called Wilkinson who immediately astonished die villagers by smiting them powerfully upon their backs and shoulders and addressing them by such terms of affection as ‘Dear boy', ‘Old fellow' and even ‘Gaffer'. In his conversation, and sometimes in his sermons, he frequently used such expressions as ‘scrumptious', ‘ripping', and ‘awfully jolly'. He spoke with a slight lisp, and his Christian name was Cecil. When I asked Mr Chorlton what he thought of him, he hesitated before answering and eventually said:

‘What can one think about an overgrown Boy Scout who obviously means well? I suggest, however, that William Wordsworth described him beautifully in the worst line ever written by a great poet.'

‘And what is the line?' I asked.

‘“A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.” Simply that.'

‘But of course,' remarked Mr Chorlton later on. ‘You mustn't take much notice of what I say; for I am getting to an age when a man has an abhorrence of new régimes and when every trifling change seems to be a reminder of mortality. I cling to my old books, my old port and my old friends as if they were rocks amid the shifting sands of the world. The example of History tells me that there will be books written as wise as Plato's, Burgundy produced as good as the Romanée-Conti of which I once possessed a dozen, and claret as good as Chateau Lafite 1870; and that new friends might prove as true as old ones. And I answer, This is certainly so, but I am sixty-six next birthday, and my eyes get tired with reading, my digestion is worn out with experimenting, and my temper is quickly exhausted by fools. I have no time to go whoring after new things.'

Mr Chorlton was in a mood of deep depression, which was very rare with him. He had recently retired from his job as Assistant Master at the preparatory school near Elmbury where he had taught the Classics for nearly forty years. He hated giving it up; but the old Head Master, who had been as a brother to him, had died, and the school had been sold to a young man, who, as young men will, at once began to make radical changes. ‘I knew he was a mathematician as soon as I looked at him,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘and I knew that he would have no respect for tradition in consequence.' He substituted rugger for soccer in the Easter term and the English Hymnal for Hymns A and M in chapel. He revised the old-fashioned syllabus and introduced new subjects such as Physiology and Modelling. (‘As if' said Mr Chorlton, ‘a country boy were incapable of discovering for himself about the sex-life of butterflies and as if he had to be
taught
to play
with plasticine!') However, these reforms did not seriously affect Mr Chorlton himself and he carried on contentedly enough with his teaching of the Classics until one day the Head Master decided that the school must adopt the New Pronunciation of Latin.

‘This was too much,' he told me afterwards. ‘I had no choice but to resign.' And indeed it was impossible to conceive that Mr Chorlton, who had begun the spring term every year for forty years with
Arma virumque cano
… should adapt himself to saying
Weerumque
.

‘I should have had to pronounce the accusative plural of
causa
,' he said, ‘as if I were referring to the behind of a cow. I should have had to tell my boys that Julius Caesar, a hooknosed tough, reported his conquest of England in a sort of sissy's squeak of
Wayny, weedy, weeky
! No: I am too old for such nonsense. I had to go.'

But now that the holidays were over and yet he remained on holiday, he was restless and lonely and the years of his retirement, which he had often looked forward to, stretched in front of him empty and grey. Certainly he had plenty of hobbies to amuse him: his entomology, reading, cricket, wine; but there remained a gap in his life unfilled and he missed, I think, the things which old schoolmasters so absurdly miss, the scamper of feet in the corridor, the chatter of young voices, the rows of dull or lively faces which never change nor grow old although the piece of Unseen through which Williams Major blindly fumbles his way is the same passage which his father, then Williams Minor, clumsily stumbled through in the same form-room twenty-five years ago.

Brensham had put up with the Rector's back-slappings, shoulder-thumpings, and schoolboyish endearments for about three months when he held his first ‘house-party' and let loose upon the astonished village some two-score members of the Oxford Group.

There wasn't room for them all at the Rectory, so the overflows were boarded out at the Horse Narrow, the Trumpet, and the Adam and Eve. The landlords of all three had had a bad winter, and they were very glad to make a few pounds by letting their rooms so early in the season. ‘Whatever you says about the Parson,' said Joe Trentfield, ‘he's the first parson I've ever heard of who was good for trade.' However, I don't think even Joe bargained for the remarkable assortment of visitors who arrived at the Horse Narrow on Friday evening. He didn't know much about the Oxford Group, but he had vaguely expected some sort of grave ecclesiastical conclave: if not of clergymen, at any rate lay brothers or foreign missioners or the kind of prim elderly ladies who organize Scripture readings or arrange for copies of the Bible to be placed in the bedrooms of commercial hotels. He was somewhat taken aback, therefore, when he discovered that his quota of guests included two bouncing gym-mistresses, a Lett who spoke little English and a Lithuanian who spoke none, and a middle-aged American lady who talked about Gard with ease and assurance but rather in the way she would speak of a President of the United States.

After closing-time Joe took a walk up the village street and called on Jim Hartley at the Adam and Eve.

‘What kind of queer fish has the Rector sent
you
?' he inquired.

‘Rum ‘uns,' said Jim. ‘They may be very religious but they're certainly rum. I've got a Frog and a couple of Huns, and a pretty little piece who looks like an actress, and one of those huntin' shootin' women, and - Joe—'

‘Yes, Jim?'

‘I've got a bloke with his head close-cropped who always talks out of the corner of his mouth. What'd you say about him?'

‘I'd say he'd probably just come out of jug.'

‘And I should say,' said Jim with awe, ‘that it won't be very long before he goes back there!'

Next day, as it happened, we played the first cricket-match of the season; and after the match we went to the Adam and Eve for our usual game of darts. The bar, however, was so full of the Rector's guests that there was no room for us, and we went on to the Horse Narrow. Joe's bar was crowded too, but we decided to make the best of a bad job and stay there. Before we knew what was happening we found ourselves involved in conversation with a number of hearty young men and women who told us that their Christian names were Alan, Mabel, Betty, Ernest, Sigrid and Harry, and asked us to tell them ours.

Within a few moments Mr Chorlton had been captured by an attractive-looking if slightly hysterical girl who discoursed to him on the subject of Absolute Truth; another girl was talking earnestly to Alfie upon some matter which seemed to cause him the profoundest embarrassment; Sir Gerald listened courteously to a blond youth who told him gravely: ‘I assure you, sir, even my lawn-tennis has improved since I brought religion into it.' As for me, I was cornered by the Lett whose English appeared to be limited to a single and ambiguous phrase. ‘Yes, by damn, no!' he shouted enthusiastically, in answer to every question; ‘No, by damn, yes?' he would interrogate me by way of variation
if for a few moments through sheer exhaustion I fell silent.

There was such a great deal of chatter, so much high shrill laughter, so many boisterous cries of ‘Old Boy' and ‘Dear Fellow' that you could hardly hear Mimi's strumming upon the piano at the other end of the room. When Joe passed me a beer across the counter he whispered:

‘I likes to see 'em enjoying 'emselves, but ‘tis a wonder to me how they does it, on ginger-pop.'

I now perceived that none of the Groupers drank beer, but consumed numerous fizzy drinks such as lemonade, Cydrax, or raspberry squash.

‘Tell me,' I said to the Lett, ‘are you all teetotallers?'

He clicked his heels and bowed.

‘Yes, by damn, no!' he yelled.

Over his shoulder the blond tennis-player spoke up to inform me:

‘It's not a matter of principle, old fellow; nothing priggish or Blue Ribbon about it; but if God tells you, in your QT, to give it up, well, you give it up, that's all. He told me to stop smoking, too.'

‘QT?' I asked, bewildered. ‘What's QT?'

‘Quiet Times, old man. After breakfast.'

‘It's like being on the transatlantic telephone,' said the American lady, ‘but you never get a wrong number from Gard.'

I glanced at Billy Butcher, who was standing next to her and he gave me a slow wink. He was in one of his clowning moods and I watched him put on his rather vacuous Andrew-Aguecheek look before he announced innocently:

‘Really, I ought to try it. I'm the most frightful hopeless drunkard that ever was.'

They gathered round him at once like wasps round a pot of honey.

‘No, honestly, you aren't
really
?' said the attractive girl who had been talking to Mr Chorlton.

‘Honestly, I'm afraid, incurable,' said Billy. ‘No medicine in the world can do me good.' (I thought: by God, that's true, and I wonder if he really knows it.)

‘But
our
medicine,' said the American lady, her eyes shining, ‘is not of this world at all, it comes from Gard.'

I edged away, and left Billy to his fooling. It was his own business, I thought, if he liked to pull their legs; but I found it, somehow, a trifle embarrassing and I was glad of the opportunity to slip away into a corner and talk to David Groves about the plague of rabbits in the railway-cutting. The Groupers, no doubt, were just silly and adolescent and probably harmless; but they were alien to Brensham and to the Horse Narrow and our pub wasn't the same, our cricket-evening was utterly spoiled, because of their presence. Almost everybody, except the Groupers, looked a bit uncomfortable and constrained; and only Sammy was entirely happy, for he had got hold of the Lithuanian who couldn't speak English and was telling him, without the least risk of interruption, the story of the geisha girl at Yokohama.