Brensham Village (3 page)

Then Mr Chorlton gathered up his net, his lantern and his killing-bottle and we set off up the hill. It was dark when we got to the plantation; the rabbits which scampered away from our steps were disembodied white scuts, the first owls were calling, the bats squeaked as they chased flies. Mr
Chorlton took a paintbrush out of his satchel and proceeded to smear the treacly mixture on the tree-trunks. You could smell the rum a dozen yards away. ‘That ought to fetch ‘em,' he said. ‘One of the most endearing things about moths is that there are precious few damned teetotallers amongst ‘em!'

When he'd finished painting the trees he lit a pipe and we waited beside the stile while the dusk deepened. It was tremendously exciting; for it was the first time we had ever been in the woods at night. We listened breathlessly to the scurryings and squeakings of small anonymous nocturnal things. Mice chirrupped; something - was it a blue-bellied adder? - rustled at our feet, something else went by in the air with a whisper of wings like a short gasp.

Gradually the darkness crept in upon us; we could almost see it advancing yard by yard, narrowing the circle. Mr Chorlton said something about ‘the circumambient night'. He never talked down to us, never mitigated a phrase or a quotation to make it more comprehensible, but paid us the extraordinary compliment of supposing we should either understand or ask for an explanation. He always treated boys as if they were his equals; and this was not, I believe, a technique of his teaching but simply part of his all-embracing courtesy. Therefore we never thought of Latin and Greek as ‘lessons' but as fun, like fishing and rabbiting and sugaring and learning the names of moths, which as it happened were composed of Latin and Greek words too. ‘Lessons' were geography, taught by a parrot who repeated to us biweekly something he had learned by heart long ago about Isobars and Isotherms; or English, taught by a pedant who compelled us to ‘parse'
the quality of mercy is not strained;
or History, taught by a fool who made us repeat Dates. But when Mr Chorlton discussed Virgil or Plato it was as much an adventure as being out in the woods at night; and we
did not associate it with our desks and inkpots since he did it impartially both in and out of school. I still remember after thirty years the fragment from the
Aeneid
which he quoted to us that evening when our minds were set on moths and our young bodies were a-quiver with the novelty and the delight and the terror of the inward creeping dark.
' Nox atra cava circumvolat umbra
,' he said.' Light the lanthorn! We'll see what visitors have come to our feast!'

Brensham on that occasion provided no rarities; but all was rare to us, as we followed behind the white beam and peered over Mr Chorlton's shoulder at the centipedes, woodlice, beetles, and huge horrific slugs which, as well as moths, were drawn to the strong-smelling sweetness. I think I remember an Elephant Hawk, its pink-and-olive wings beautifully incandescent in the rays of the lantern; and I am sure there were numbers of Red Underwings, great moths with forewings of delicately-shaded grey which they drape over hind wings of flaming scarlet; so that when the wings are raised for flight it is as if a dowdy old woman lifts her skirts to show the red flannel petticoat beneath.

However, we certainly didn't think of that simile at the time; for Mr Chorlton as always used the Latin name which was Linnaeus' lovely one,
nupta:
so for us it was a wedding-dress which the grey moth wore. When he spoke of creatures and flowers by their proper scientific names Mr Chorlton made us feel like men, or indeed like professors; so we did not trouble our heads with the English names but talked like naturalists from the very beginning. Thus we were enabled, at the age of ten or twelve, to disconcert a learned and pompous entomologist who came to give a lecture at our school. ‘We call this,' he said, exhibiting a Cabbage White Butterfly - ‘we call this
Pieris brassicae
.' ‘So do we!' chanted four impertinent little boys in unison.

It was midnight when we finished the last round of the sugared trees. Brensham Hill at midnight! - with the harvest moon coming up through the black feathery branches of the larches, and Brensham Folly upon the summit looking like the Dark Tower in the poem! That was where the Hermit lived; we should have been frightened, perhaps, if Mr Chorlton had not been with us for the Hermit was a savage-looking man, with a dirty grey beard, who bedded himself down like an animal upon a heap of straw in the dark cobwebby chamber beneath the Folly. And it was true that he caught rabbits with his hands; he crept up to them where they couched in the tufts of long grass and pounced on them with a horrible pounce. (Thus murderers, thus assassins, thus the following footsteps which suddenly begin to run!) It was true too that he ate them raw, although we were somewhat disappointed to discover that he skinned them first. An eccentric old creature, as unhygienic as Black Sal and even crazier, for he had made his own slum at the top of Brensham.

How did he come to live in the Folly? It was said that he had simply squatted there, constituting himself its unpaid caretaker, and that the lord who was himself mad hadn't the heart to turn him out. Local authorities were more tolerant in those days than they are now, and Medical Officers of Health rarely climbed up Brensham Hill; nor would the workhouse have welcomed such a disquieting inmate, for who knows what he would stalk and pounce upon if rabbits were denied him? Certainly he was harmless enough, he troubled nobody in his eyrie on Brensham; and in summer, on Sundays and Bank Holidays when visitors were to be expected, he even dressed himself up in an
ancient clerkish black suit, and a straw boater with a black-and-yellow ribbon, and conducted tourists up the steps to the top of the Folly, charging them a fee of threepence for the privilege.

The tower had been erected by an ancestor of the Mad Lord. It was large enough to contain a narrow winding staircase of stone leading up to the roof. A long inscription in bad Latin, carved spirally upon the interior wall, followed the course of this staircase so that the climber read it word by word as he mounted step by step:

UT TERRAM BEATAM
VIDEAS, VIATOR,
HOEG TURRIS DE LONGE SPECTABILIS
SUMPTU BUS
RICARDI ORRIS
DOMINI MANORII
AD MDCGLXV
EXTRUCTA FUIT OBLEGTAMENTO
NON SUI SOLUM
SED VICINORUM
ET OMNIUM

We used to chant this as if it were a psalm as we climbed the stairs behind the Hermit, who for his part would always count the number of steps aloud, as if he wanted to make sure that there were always fifty-two. When we reached the top, puffing triumphantly
et omnium
, we entered a small dark chamber with slits for windows in which perhaps the altruistic Richard Orris had been accustomed to delight his neighbours with views of the blessed earth even on wet days. But now only bats inhabited the little room and slept, caring nothing for panoramas. When the trap-door in the roof was opened, letting in the light, they stirred uneasily with a slight dry crackle, like a crumpling of parchment.

The Hermit, observing with satisfaction: ‘Fifty-two: that's as many stairs as there are weeks in the year,' would now insinuate his head and shoulders into the oblong hole where the trap-door had been and with grunts and groans would heave himself through it. Dick, Donald, Ted and I followed like a pack of pirates emerging from a ship's hold. Now we were on the roof. Upon the parapet another Latin inscription confronted us. From this elevated place, it said, when the sky is untroubled by cloud nor mists lurk in the low places thou canst see, O Traveller, twelve rich counties, four great cathedrals, and sixteen abbeys. There was a camera obscura which didn't work and a telescope with a broken lens. This telescope had the remarkable property of imparting to all objects seen through it the colour of bright yellow. Nevertheless the Hermit would put it to his eye and sweep it round in a gesture as proud as if he had been Nelson counting his ships before Trafalgar. When he stood thus upon the Folly roof the Hermit seemed to gain both in stature and in confidence. His beard and his long grey locks streamed out in the wind; he had something of the witless grandeur of Lear. He leaned upon the parapet, telescope to eye, slowly turning his head and reckoning up the counties spread beneath him nor caring, apparently, that they were yellow ochre instead of green. He smiled slightly with satisfaction, as a farmer who numbers his sheep and says to himself: ‘Mine, all mine!' And then he beckoned to us and handed us the broken telescope and waved his filthy hand with its long talon-like fingers in lordly fashion as if to say: ‘Mine, all mine; but you can look at them if you like.'

‘Mine.' God knows, perhaps the poor crazy creature really thought so.

We weren't very interested in the twelve counties, nor in the small smudge or speck which to the eye of faith represented a distant cathedral. We liked, it was true, to glance briefly beyond the serpentine Severn and the small silver glint of Wye to the mountains of Wales which looked Black indeed when the red sun was sinking behind them; but always before long our eyes came back home, to the roads we already knew and the lanes we were learning, to Elmbury among its fat green meadows and Brensham village among its leafy orchards.

Could we make out Tudor House where I lived, in Elmbury High Street? or Donald's house at the end of the town? Dick's and Ted's with lawns running down to the river? We often thought so; for there were the awful unmistakable alleys and slums, tight-packed tiny roofs which looked like rows of pigstyes (and, almost, they were). There was the cattle-market, an oblong open space which seethed like an anthill on Fair days. There was the Swan Hotel where the Colonel, if it was open, would be drinking whisky, and there the flour-mills with the rivers winding past them, rivers which wound about the town so crookedly that they seemed to tie it up in an untidy parcel. And there, rising over all, was the Abbey with its fine tower which always caught whatever light there was and glowed reddish-gold or tawny because long ago a great fire had enveloped it, marking it for ever where the red tongues had licked.

Then in search of more landmarks the eye crept back towards Brensham village, following the white unmetalled road which was our way from Elmbury to the hill, tracing our familiar route past the church with the tall delicate spire, the three poplar trees, the Horse Narrow, the Bell, Mrs
Doan's Post Office, the Adam and Eve, the railway station close beside it with the bright-glinting track running through it straight as a steel rod.

Look: the Colonel's farm. Ayrshire cows in the meadows, beautifully pied, hardly distinguishable sometimes from cloud-shadows; piebald horses; Gloster spot pigs; weird unfamiliar dappled sheep from Spain; a flutter of Plymouth Rock hens in the orchard - for everything that walked upon the Colonel's farm, including his dogs and even the cats, had to be pied. It was one of his fads, we were told. His house, like most of our houses, was half-timbered. His farm wagons, his drays, his larger implements, were painted cream-and-black. Even the petrol-tank of his old motorcycle was striped like a zebra. Crazy, people said: crack-brained as a Brensham hare. But to us, as we looked down upon his Noah's Ark farm, it seemed entirely reasonable that a man should indulge such a pleasant whim if he wanted to.

These easy, simplified judgements of our elders often dismayed and bewildered us. There was, for example, the matter of the Mad Lord. Round the shoulder of the hill - you could only just see it from the Folly roof - was the big, beautiful Georgian mansion where he lived. The original Orris Manor had been burned down two hundred years ago; the present one dated from 1760. It was built in the semblance of a castle but with a grace and lightness which no genuine castle possesses; and it was tumbling down. Turrets and parapets were crumbling away, a chimney leaned drunkenly and some broken panes in the top-storey windows had been repaired with brown paper so that they looked like empty eye-sockets staring blindly down towards the village. Several trees were down in the park, the arch which bridged the moat had collapsed into the water, a dam had burst and turned half the garden into a bog. Nor was this
surprising for the moat had been made in the steep hillside by damming a stream and contained its muddy water in flat defiance of the laws of hydraulics.

It was incredible that a lord should inhabit such a ruin; but when we inquired the reason we were told simply: ‘You see, he has no money.' That was another shock to us; we had always thought that lords and great wealth were inseparable. However, it was explained that he had possessed some money once, but he hadn't known how to look after it, cheats and moneylenders had robbed him of it, rascals had ‘borrowed' it, beggars had begged it; there was hardly any left. Poor as a church mouse and mad as a hatter was the Mad Lord Orris of Brensham. We asked wonderingly: ‘In what
way
is he mad?' and got the puzzling answer: ‘You see, he doesn't think money matters; he actually doesn't mind being poor.' We pondered this
obiter dictum
and I am glad to say that even at the age of ten we were able to see the flaw in it. Our secret friends of the Elmbury alleys, Pistol, Bardolph, Nym and their kind, hardly ever had a penny to bless themselves with nor seemed to care for money at all - whatever they got by begging and scrounging they spent in the pub within a few hours; and yet it was apparent to us that they were completely sane. Therefore, we reasoned, the Mad Lord was probably sane too; he was merely a more eminent Pistol, a refinement of Bardolph, a lordlier Nym. We remembered how he had swept off his hat to us when we opened the gate for him, how he had smiled at us as he rode away, and we decided that, mad or sane, he came into our category of Special People, which included the three musketeers, a bird-catcher who taught us how to make bird-lime and set springes, Mr Chorlton, a professional fisherman called Bassett, the Colonel, and the Hermit, who was Special because he could catch rabbits with his hands.