Brensham Village (5 page)

He was also a keen ornithologist. I suspect that Mr Mountjoy, like another and greater parson-naturalist, took more interest in his feathered parishioners than his human ones, was less concerned with his Easter sermon than with
the arrival of various little migrants about that season. Certainly he spent more time in the fields and woods than in his church or rectory. He was inordinately fond of fishing, especially pike-fishing, and it was scandalously related of him that between christenings he would keep his live bait in the font. He was often in trouble with the stricter section of his congregation for offences of this kind; his churchwardens, for instance, objected to his fixing nesting-boxes over the church porch. They declared it was unseemly.' My dear fellows,' said Mr Mountjoy,' can you think of anything
less
sacrilegious than a pair of spotted flycatchers?' Sometimes, apparently, his parishioners took their complaints to higher authority; for he confessed to us once:' You won't see me tomorrow. I've got to go and take a wigging from the Bishop.' We feared greatly for him. ‘I wonder,' said Dick, ‘what the Bish will actually
do
to him?' But next day he was with us on the hill, unchastened and schoolboyish as ever, showing us the place where a hare ran through the hedge and telling Pistol with a wink: ‘If you have any respect whatever for my cloth you will refrain from setting your wires until I am out of sight.'

The keepers, whom Pistol, Bardolph and Nym delighted to deceive, looked after the northern face of the hill. The southern half, the side nearest Brensham, was owned by Lord Orris, who kept no keepers nor, had he done so, would there have been anything for them to keep. The Mad Lord's attitude to poachers was bewildering to respectable people and disconcerting even to the poachers themselves. If by chance he caught anybody unlawfully shooting his pheasants or netting his rabbits he would cheerfully wish them
luck and apologize for having disturbed them. ‘Carry on, my dear fellow,' he would say, ‘and take what you can get. God knows, it's little enough that I possess which is of any use to anybody; but out of my pittance you are welcome to anything you can find.' Curiously enough the poachers resented this invitation, because it did not accord with their notion of how a landlord should behave, and they perversely went off and poached elsewhere.

But the northern side of the hill was preserved most rigorously. There were numerous keepers, there was barbed wire, notices everywhere proclaimed that Trespassers would be Prosecuted by Order, mantraps, it was said were illegally set in the coverts at certain seasons. Naturally we wanted to know the name of the landlord who was so jealous of his rights and so ruthless in the defence of his boundaries; but we were told that he had no name, the northern slope of the hill was owned by a Syndicate. Even then, before we understood much about it, or guessed what a dangerous threat this strange anonymous ownership held for Brensham, we felt that there was something sinister and unpleasant about a Syndicate. It had no face by which you could recognize it, no voice to greet you, no ears to hear your argument or your excuses. Even its habitation was not known. It came and went mysteriously: ‘The Syndicate,' people said, ‘is coming down from town this week.' Then you would hear an innumerable popping and banging in the coverts at the top of the hill. ‘Ah, the Syndicate!' That was its only outward manifestation, that and the big cars with wooden-faced chauffeurs which swished by, hooting imperiously, whenever the Syndicate was about. But at other times its subtle and secret workings betrayed it, like mole-runs on a lawn even when there was no other indication of its presence. A man would be prosecuted for poaching and a lawyer whose face was unknown in Elmbury would get up in court: ‘I
represent, your worships, a Syndicate …' A hideous petrol-station was erected in a hamlet which was noted for its quiet loveliness. ‘The Syndicate,' people said, ‘put up the money.' And one day we found the gate into the larch plantation padlocked and surmounted by barbed wire. We hurried to tell Mr Chorlton. ‘The Syndicate held a mortgage on it,' he said, ‘and I suppose poor old Orris couldn't find enough money to pay the interest.' ‘Tell us,' we asked him, ‘exactly what a Syndicate is.' But Mr Chorlton was put out, and for once he failed to provide us with a ready explanation. ‘Oh, a damnable thing,' he said, ‘and there'll be no more sugaring in the larch plantation for us. But what's worse, I fancy it's got its claws into old Orris. Soon it'll put the squeeze on; and that'll be the end of him.'

But for a while the terrible Syndicate bided its time. Season by season the notice-boards which were its outposts advanced very slowly over the crest of the hill; the barbed wire and the keepers followed them, taking a field here, capturing a coppice there, as if they preferred to nibble away at the Orris land rather than gobble it wholesale. We came to think of the Syndicate as if it were some huge and shapeless elemental thing,
ingens et horribilis
, couched invisibly in the coverts above Brensham, looking greedily down upon the Mad Lord's ruined lands, licking its lips and awaiting the moment when it would pounce.

It was in January that the Syndicate bought or seized the larch plantation. (In subsequent years we noticed that most of the Syndicate's encroachments occurred shortly after Quarter Days, when the mortgage interest fell due.) At Easter we found the wood bristling with notice-boards and
were smartly chivvied out of it when we entered in search of a goldcrest's nest. We got our own back by springing, next day, a number of open steel traps which the keepers had set for vermin.

That Easter was the first occasion when I looked down on Brensham in blossom. In winter, as I have said, and indeed for most of the year, the landscape was a workaday one. It wasn't a ‘show' village; for although it had the same unselfconscious good looks as all our villages had, its immediate surroundings spoiled it, because the rich soil had long ago been broken up into market-gardens. Consequently the cultivations were patchy and higgledy-piggledy; the assortment of crops included leeks, asparagus, cabbage, sea-green sprouts and emerald-green lettuces, tangles of raspberry-canes and rows of gooseberry bushes. Upon almost every patch were the small haphazard slums of fowlhouses, chicken-runs, pigstyes and toolsheds which grow up wherever there is market-gardening.

Between the patchy cultivations and among them stood the orchard trees which were the main source of Brensham's prosperity: apple, pear and cherry, but mainly plum. The orchards ran a little way up the hill and stretched all round it, a green hem to its skirt; they went nearly to Elmbury on both sides of the road; and they marched down into the vale almost as far as the river, stopping only at the green water-meadows which marked the limit of the winter's flooding. Surely there wasn't another parish in England which possessed as many trees!

Thus the people of Brensham, who looked out for eleven-twelfths of the year upon the commonplace and uninspiring spectacle of sprouts, cabbages and the like, were privileged for the remaining twelfth to live amid a scene of surpassing beauty. Upon a day between the last week of March and the third week of April the spring snowstorm swept up the vale.
For a fortnight or so the orchards were transfigured by this brief precarious loveliness, and people even drove out from the big towns on ‘plum Sunday' to marvel at the prodigal blossoming. Before the frail plum-snow blew away, the lovelier bloom came out on the apple trees; and this was all the more exquisite because of the young green leaves which accompanied it. With cherry and pear, the apple blossom lasted for another week or two; then it faded, one day a fresh wind scattered the shell-pink petals and there was an end of May. Like a bride who packs away her wedding-dress and gets busy with her pots and pans Brensham went back to its green-and-brown ordinariness, taters, sprouts, onions, cabbages, beans and peas.

But on that Easter Sunday Brensham was dressed in white. The whole vale was carpeted with bloom under a dappled sky. It was a late season; the trees had all come out together, ten million, twenty million boughs had burgeoned on the same blue-and-white April morning. The flowery tide ran up the slope of the hill for a little way and then broke, where the orchards thinned into a mere sprinkling, a spatter of silver-white spray. In the midst of all this loveliness, half-submerged by it, were the thatched roofs of Brensham; the airy spire of the church and the three tall poplar trees rose as if out of a flood.

We stood on the roof of the Folly; for it had become a kind of tradition that we should let the Hermit take us up the tower whenever we climbed to the top of the hill. He had put on his straw hat, a sure harbinger of spring; and he looked prouder and grander than ever as he surveyed the flowery scene through the telescope (which must have made
the plum blossom seem as yellow as primroses) and, reckoning up the thousands of trees with their April promise of August wealth, dreamed no doubt that they were his.

How fortunate, I thought, were the people of Brensham, to live in such a village, their very roofs awash in the foam of the flowers! I was aware suddenly of the first curiosity about what went on beneath the thatched roofs. In Elmbury I had learned a little, perhaps more than my years warranted, about the teeming life which frothed and bubbled in the wide streets and the narrow streets, the crooked alleys and the tumbledown back lanes. But until now I had thought of people in terms of a pageant or a parade; the characters went by in endless procession, the merry ones, the solemn ones, the colourful ones, the drab ones, the respectable ones, the disreputable ones, the eccentrics, the fantastics, the drunks, the scroungers: all different, all fascinating, yet unrelated to each other. But now as I looked down from the Hermit's eyrie at the brown-and-yellow thatch of Brensham among the blossoming branches I had my first inkling of the existence of a community. From street-level you see only disconnected fragments, bits of the jigsaw puzzle, unrelated men and women going by; but when you see the roofs you see the place whole, houses, shops, pubs, churches, mills, gardens make a pattern and then the people who dwell in them, buy and sell in them, drink, worship, work in them, must surely compose some sort of a pattern too.

At all events, perched on the parapet with Dick, Donald and Ted while the Hermit surveyed his imaginary domain through the broken telescope which blurred all objects so that they appeared as misty and insubstantial as his dream, I perceived a kind of pattern in the straggling roofs of Brensham and my awakened curiosity about people was like a sharp pricking in my brain. I was possessed all at once by a huge inquisitiveness. Down there dwelt the
Colonel and the Mad Lord and the parson-naturalist and Mr Chorlton, Sammy Hunt with his boats and his osiers, the Fitchers and the Gormleys in perpetual strife, Mrs Doan, the pub-keepers, the cottagers, the market-gardeners, the labourers. Somehow I realized dimly that these ill-assorted, contrary and individualistic elements formed a community which perhaps was different from other communities. At any rate I decided that I wanted to know about Brensham, and about what went on under the roofs.

Honorary Villager – The Cricket–ground – The Captain – The Secretary – The Blacksmith – The Potterer – The ‘Boys' – The Drunkard – The Scorer – The Helpers – The Spectators – The Match against Woody Bourton

Perhaps I should never have got to know much about Brensham but for the accident that I was not a very good cricketer. When I left school I returned to Elmbury and was articled to my uncle, who was an auctioneer. I joined the Elmbury Cricket Club, which played competent and rather solemn games on Saturday afternoons and which didn't take long to discover that my rightful place in the batting-order was last. But so competent and solemn were the earlier batsmen that they very rarely got out; and in practice I hardly ever batted at all.

Now Brensham, whose parson was tolerant and broad-minded (as was to be expected of one who kept live bait in his font), sometimes played cricket on Sundays; and one day Mr Chorlton invited me to join the team. The Brensham standard was not so high as Elmbury's; and I was put in fifth wicket down. Moreover the previous batsmen, whose approach to the game was light-hearted and happy-go-lucky
smote the ball hard, high and often so that before long they were all caught in the deep. Within half an hour of the start of the innings I found myself walking to the wicket. This unfamiliar experience was so intoxicating that I was heartened to swipe the first ball over the bowler's head for six. The next one bowled me middle-stump; but I had had my fun and I walked back cheerfully to the pavilion where Mr Chorlton, Briggs the blacksmith, and Sammy Hunt were chuckling and clapping. ‘That's the sort of innings we like to see at Brensham,' they said. After the match we all went to the Adam and Eve and played darts; and I drank more beer than a seventeen-year-old is supposed to be able to carry. Sammy Hunt, who was the captain of the team, invited me to play for it regularly; and since whatever loyalty I possessed to the Elmbury Club had been dissipated by beer I gladly accepted.

Thereafter, on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer, I made my way to the small square cricket-field which lay between the orchards and the river; at first by bicycle, later upon an old ramshackle Triumph, and once or twice when the Triumph broke down, on horseback. The spectacle of a young man in blazer and white flannels, carrying a bat, trotting down the village street on a lanky chestnut didn't at all surprise the people of Brensham; for almost everybody in the place was a horseman, and the neighbouring farmer's sons would often ride to the village dances in white waistcoats and tails. And already I was accepted as belonging to the village; for they had known me as a boy, buying cattie-lackey at Mrs Doan's shop or wandering over the hill where the keepers employed by the Syndicate spoke of me and my three friends as ‘they young Varmins'. In the Adam and Eve after a cricket-match, an old man wearing the traditional velveteens came up to me grinning and said: ‘I knows thee. Thee be one of they young Varmins.'
So although I was technically a ‘foreigner' (for I lived four miles away, and even the people of neighbouring Dykeham, just across the river, were considered foreigners) I was permitted a sort of honorary membership of the Brensham community.