Brensham Village (4 page)

Below the Mad Lord's unkempt park the land fell steeply
towards the river: apple trees gave place to old and crooked willows, which grew along the banks of all the ditches and beside the river itself. Brensham's cricket-field was here, on the very frontier between orchard and water-meadow: a light-green square with orchards on two sides of it and small sallows on the other two. Brensham was famous for its cricketers; it had given a dozen good players to the County team within recent memory. Its wicket was easily the best for miles around; better, some said, than Elmbury's, which was tended by two groundsmen and upon which two or three times a season the County played its too-serious games. The men of Brensham practically worshipped their smooth impeccable oblong in the square shaven field. Its High Priest was Mr Chorlton, who marked it and mowed it and spent much of his time kneeling upon it looking for offending daisies. An acolyte, the Brensham blacksmith whose name was Briggs, rolled it every Sunday morning as a sort of religious rite.

Not far from the cricket-field was a backwater of the river among osier-beds, with a landing-stage which was called the Wharf: the hay-barges used to take on their loads there in the days when river traffic went on. That had ceased long ago; but the men of Brensham, whose village was situated so curiously between the hill and the river, had never forgotten that they were watermen as well as hillmen. You could count a score of boats at the Wharf and there were others moored up and down stream, little groups of boats tied together so that they looked like the fingers of an outspread hand, long black fishing-punts, handy clinker-built tubs, mahogany sculling-boats for hire to visitors, two or three sailing-dinghies with red-ochre sails, some Canadian canoes, a precarious Rob Roy … There were more boats pulled up on the bank for tarring or caulking, for mending or in process of building - for many of the Brensham
men still made their own. They seemed to hold these craft in common; oars and rowlocks were always left on board and if you wanted a boat at Brensham you just heaved the peg out of the bank, climbed on board, and rowed away - if the owner arrived later and found his boat missing he simply borrowed somebody else's. Indeed it was regarded as unmannerly at Brensham to chain your boat to a tree with a padlock as people did in less happy-go-lucky places. However, this easy-going practice applied only among the natives; strangers, whom the Brensham men called ‘foreigners' even though they came from only five miles away, must hire their craft from Sammy Hunt, who owned the cottage beside the Wharf and made his living in that fashion. He also owned the osier-beds, and cut the withies every year to sell them for basket-making. Sammy was rather a curiosity among the inhabitants of Brensham for he was a sailor born and bred and such as a rule like to settle down within sight of the sea; he'd been a Master in big tramp-steamers and small liners and had sailed all over the world. Yet here he was as near as he could get to the quiet heart of England, Master of no craft bigger than a fourteen-foot punt, with what must have seemed a mere trickle of water running past his cottage - you could throw a stone across the river easily - and the fat comfortable green fields all round him: like a land-locked salmon left behind by a flood. He still looked like a sailor, having a wrinkled mahogany face and sea-blue eyes, and he possessed a great store of tales about foreign parts and foreign peoples which he would tell you for hours while he caulked his boats or coiled down the painters all shipshape and Bristol-fashion in their bows.

Sammy had a sort of henchman called Abraham who helped him with his boat-building, and who wove the cut withies into baskets and putcheons for eels. Abraham also acted as ferryman, and would paddle you across the river in
a tarry black punt for a penny. He was a sombre silent old man who had the rare trick of driving his boat through the water without the slightest sound. He never spoke, and sometimes on still foggy days when I have seen his long punt glide silently towards me out of the murk I have remembered uncomfortably as I stepped aboard it that there was another taciturn Ferryman whose fee was also a penny.

Upstream of Sammy's cottage was the Lock, and an old mill with a wooden water-wheel, which still ground corn; and beyond was another of our landmarks, the Murder House, a stark ruin, itself rather like something that had been murdered, with its blind glassless windows and its pale rafters like ribs showing through the broken red roof. We had explored it hesitantly at first, half-expecting to find bloodstains although fifty years had passed since the murder. A man called Fitcher had cleft the skull of a man called Gormley with a hatchet; and we played in a desultory way at being Fitchers and Gormleys, ‘reconstructing the crime'. Soon, however, we heard a scrabbling in the attic, and Dick shinned up there to find a barn-owl's nest with two young birds. This interested us much more than any murder, and thereafter our concern with the place was purely ornithological. The villagers told us it was haunted, but we scoffed at them. ‘The ghost is just an old barn-owl,' we said. Our curiosity about natural things was so large that we had none left over for the supernatural.
Dracula
, which we read about this time, bored us stiff; for we kept as a pet a real bat, captured in the Folly, and unbeknownst to our parents took it to bed with us, fleas and all.

The murder, after fifty years, might have been forgotten but for the fact that both Fitcher and Gormley belonged to huge gipsyish families whose numerous progeny refused to forget it. The original quarrel, we were vaguely told, had been ‘something to do with a woman' and Mr Fitcher, having split open his rival's head, had sewn a quantity of lead into his clothes and pitched him into the river. Soon afterwards there was a flood, which carried the body down to Elmbury where, as it happened, some of the man ‘s relations owned and operated a salmon-net. Heaving in this net, and remarking that it was exceptionally heavy, they dragged out the remains of Uncle Gormley, which must have been both a shock and a disappointment to them, for he had been in the river a long time and they had expected a draught of silver salmon. Mr Fitcher was subsequently hanged; and the small shrill children of the Gormleys thereafter would call out to the Fitchers whenever they encountered them:
What's in the salmon net today?
This rhetorical question was taken by the Fitchers to be a deadly insult; indeed it was unwise to mention salmon or nets in their presence. From time to time a drunken Gormley would encounter a truculent Fitcher and utter the fatal words; and then the trouble began.

Fortunately the two families did not often meet. The Fitchers for the most part lived in tumbledown cottages on the Brensham side of the hill; the Gormleys were encamped, mainly in caravans, on the other side. Both got their living in a precarious and gipsy-like way by hiring themselves to farmers for seasonal work such as pea-picking and fruit-picking; and since no farmer was so foolish as to employ both families at the same time the risk of an encounter was fairly slight. At Christmas-time, however, and especially on
New Year ‘s Eve, the Fitchers and the Gormleys were apt to foregather simultaneously in the pubs of Brensham (whose landlords dreaded and hated them both impartially). There they would sit in separate groups, glaring at each other, and waiting for somebody to mention salmon-nets, or even accidentally to use any of the other words, such as ‘hatchet' or ‘rope', which were taboo because of their association with the fifty-year-old crime. This was sure to happen before closing-time, and then the Fitchers and Gormleys would stream forth into the peaceful village of Brensham like Montagues and Capulets into the streets of Verona. Both sides would call up reinforcements which appeared miraculously from nowhere; and for half an hour or so the running fight would go on all the way from the Horse Narrow to the Adam and Eve, the men punching each other, the women scratching each other, the small children biting and kicking. Nobody came to much harm, though the noise was terrifying; and the village policeman generally contrived to keep out of the way, knowing that his intervention was the only thing in the world capable of uniting the Fitchers and Gormleys, who would immediately make common cause against him. The sum of the damage was generally a few black eyes and bloody noses and some broken glasses in the pubs; the brief disturbance subsided as suddenly as it had begun, and the Fitchers and Gormleys relapsed into a state of mistrustful armistice until the season of peace and good-will came round again.

We were the delighted witnesses of one of these battles, which occurred upon Boxing Day at the time when the pubs were closing in the early afternoon. A rout of Gormleys
came scampering down the road pursued by Fitcher males with sticks and Fitcher females with umbrellas. Later, however, we discovered some small Gormley boys endeavouring, apparently, to gouge the eyes out of some small Fitcher girls, so honours were even. Shortly afterwards the Hunt came galloping by and old General Bouverie the Master yelled in a terrible voice to Gormleys and Fitchers impartially:
Have you seen my fox, damn you?
and in a helter-skelter of red coats, horses, shouting men, screaming women and children crying
What's in the salmon-nets today-ay?
the whole fantastic riot melted away and the violated village returned to its usual mid-winter quietude.

Brensham in winter, apart from such occasional liveliness, presented a workaday landscape; for the fields were full of sprout-stalks which stank sulphurously as they rotted, the orchard-trees were black and bare, the market-gardens were littered with the left-over debris of late autumn, and the smoke from a score of squitch-fires made blue streaks across the land like smudged chalkmarks: a miniature industrial haze. The river, every month or so, crept out over the water-meadows, licked the bottom slopes of the hill, lapped the doorsteps of a few low-lying cottages, and then sullenly went back, leaving a brown scum on the fields. The people of Brensham paddled about in gumboots and cursed their rich dark soil which made such sticky mud.

But it would have taken more than mud to keep us away from Brensham Hill, and we were up there, I dare say, on the first day of the holidays and almost every day thereafter for the next three weeks. However rough the weather or sharp the season we never failed to find fun or mischief in the quarries and coverts. Mr Chorlton, who was apt to call us Beastly Little Barbarians, read us a passage from a very old play,
The Play of the Wether
, which he said summarized our whole attitude to life:

‘Forsothe, sir, my mynd is thys, at few wordes,
All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes,
And makynge of snow-ballys and throwynge the same …
O, to se my snow-ballys lyght on my felowes heddys,
And to here the byrdes how they flycker their wynges
In the pytfall! I say yt passeth all thynges.

‘That,' he would say, ‘was written about 1540. It is a sobering thought to an old schoolmaster that in spite of four hundred years of education boys haven't improved one whit since that time!'

Mr Chorlton, who detested winter walking, refused to accompany us at this time of year. There were no moths to lure him up to the larch plantation, so he stayed at home, rearranging his collection, reading Aeschylus, Horace, and the wine-merchants' catalogues, and drinking port. This gave him his annual attack of gout which always lasted from Christmas until the first butterflies came out at Easter. Instead of him, we had for companions the bird-catcher, Jim Mellor, who despite the Wild Birds' Protection Act still carried on a profitable illicit trade in goldfinches; the fisherman Bassett, who took us live-baiting for pike whenever a frost kept the river within its banks; the three musketeers, who brought rabbit-nets and graciously allowed us to use our ferret, Boanerges, to bolt the rabbits; and - most unexpectedly - the old Rector of Brensham, who turned out to be a fine naturalist and was delighted to show us badgers' and foxes' tracks when the first light snow covered Brensham Hill.

This good and gentle clergyman, whose name was Mr Mountjoy, remained sufficiently boyish at the age of seventy to borrow our catapults for an occasional pot-shot at a sitting rabbit or crow. (‘I deplore blood sports,' he said, ‘but you can scarcely call it a blood sport if you never hit anything.')
He was not in the least embarrassed to be seen in the company of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, who shamelessly used his cloth as cover for their poaching, disappearing into the bushes to set their wires and hastily returning to his side if the keeper came into view. ‘What are you men doing up here?' asked a keeper once, knowing only too well. ‘A-walking with His Reverence,' they growled. ‘His Reverence invited us to come for a stroll.' For a long time we thought that Mr Mountjoy in his very great innocence was unaware of the three scoundrels' frightful reputation; we were somewhat surprised, therefore, when one day he turned to Pistol with a diffident smile and said in his precise way: ‘I'm going to ask you a question and I hope you won't mind answering it to satisfy my idle curiosity:
What's the food really like in jail?'

One of his hobbies was keeping bees. He had about fifty hives in his garden, and told us that their total population was nearly four million. ‘That's as many bees as there are people in a great city. What a vast kingdom I rule!' On the first spring days he would stand contentedly for hours watching the workers sally forth and come back with the yellow crocus-pollen upon them; but at high summer he would often load some of the hives in the back of his small open car and go prospecting far afield for patches of beanflower or clover or saintfoin, and then beg the owner's permission to leave a hive or two there so that his bees could gather the honey. It was a familiar sight to see the Rector driving down the lanes with half a dozen skeps occupying the back seat while a little swarm of his turbulent passengers rose from them like a thin smoke and swirled about his head.