Brensham Village (7 page)

This, I think, is how I shall always remember him: with a grin on his red, raw face and his eyebrows and eyelashes ginger-blond, and ginger-blond too the lock of hair which always pokes out from under his cap: with ginger-pawed Rexy sardonically grinning at his heels; walking among the trees which bear proud names like Blenheim and Victoria, looking up into the dripping boughs and then glancing at the inscrutable sky and shrugging his shoulders as an old gambler does while he watches the desperate race, his fancy lying third, and still a hundred yards to go.

Jeremy Briggs, who helped Mr Chorlton to make our pitch one of the best in the West Country, was another craftsman. At his blacksmith's forge, when he was not shoeing horses, he would contrive you almost anything from a cigarette-lighter to a set of fire-irons or a pair of wrought-iron gates. On the cricket-field he lumbered about rather like one of those great slow farm-horses whose enormous hairy hoofs he cared for. Between matches he often mowed the ground for us, or patiently dragged the heavy roller to and fro, to and fro between the creases while Mr Chorlton with a pocket-knife dug up the daisies, and filled in the holes. These two, as they worked together, carried on an argument which never ended; for Briggs was a Socialist and Mr Chorlton, whose
wide classical reading had persuaded him that the political troubles of Athens and Rome were much the same as ours, believed that mankind was incapable of improvement and that no doctrine could save it from damnation. The argument continued from week to week and was abandoned in September only to be resumed in the following April. When Briggs' rolling took him down the pitch away from the crease where Mr Chorlton knelt before a daisy, Briggs began to shout; and Mr Chorlton shouted back, so that you could hear them in Magpie Lane, the one quoting Marx, the other Pericles. Our nearly-perfect cricket-pitch was really a by-product of their differences; for if they hadn't enjoyed arguing we should not have had two good groundsmen for nothing.

Briggs' smithy was next door to the Adam and Eve. There was no spreading chestnut tree, only a heap of old iron in the yard, with some broken carts, rusty farm implements and dismantled motor-cars. A notice-board announced: ‘J. BRIGGS, SHOEING ETC. SMITH. CONTRACTS UNDERTOOK; ODD-JOBING.' I once asked him what Contracts he Undertook; and it turned out that he had an arrangement with a market-gardener to shoe his pony all round twice a year in return for four bundles of asparagus and a pot of plums.

There was plenty of work for Briggs in Brensham. Most of the farmers' sons had their hunters and Point-to-Pointers, the district abounded with children's ponies, there was a riding-school at Elmbury, and the Hunt stables were only five miles away. Briggs, for whom the colour red had a very different connotation from that of pink coats, shod these Hunt horses somewhat reluctantly, pointing out to the Whips and Second Horsemen who brought them to his smithy that Hunt Servants were merely the misguided flunkeys of the idle rich. The Whips, secure in their certainty that jumping a stiff blackthorn or hollering a fox away as he crept
down the winter covertside was a very different thing from flunkeydom, merely smiled and wondered how a man who could handle horses so confidently came to believe in Labour. There was a close association, in their minds, between horseflesh and Conservatism.

But when it came to a question of working for the Syndicate Briggs stuck his toes in. The Syndicate kept horses for hacking; they did not hunt. They liked, we thought, to have their photographs taken on horseback when they came down from town for the weekend. Briggs, who merely disapproved of the Hunt, really hated the Syndicate. The Hunt, after all, performed its wicked Capitalist actions openly, publicly and indeed ostentatiously, with shiny top-hats and red coats and polished top-boots. It galloped over your holding and broke down your fences with a hurrah and a holloa. If you got in the way, and General Bouverie cursed you, you could curse him back; you could scowl at the elegant gentlemen and the great ladies and the fat smug farmers and the feckless farmers' sons and pleasantly contemplate stringing them up to the lamp-posts in the fullness of time. But the Syndicate worked in darkness and in disguise: it was the kind of Capitalism which pulled the invisible wires and made poor men dance to its tune. It was part of the monstrous mysterious Thing which sent up the rent of cottages and sent down the miner's wage; which contrived a glut of coffee in Brazil or a rice famine in Bengal by fiddling about in some unexplained way with Foreign Exchange. In some unspecified fashion, Briggs was sure of it, the Syndicate was associated with the terrible, powerful, nameless people whom he thought of as ‘They'. ‘They' had their offices in London and New York and Amsterdam; ‘They' were supernational; ‘They' played with Governments as if Governments were pawns, stood above Prime Ministers and Kings, and laughed cynically at revolutions, being confident
that ‘They' could easily corrupt the revolutionaries with the gift of a little illusory power. ‘They' was invisible, anonymous, unidentified; you couldn't curse them, break their windows, imprison them or hang them. Briggs had serious doubts whether even the Russian Communists had effectively got rid of Them.

Seeing in the Syndicate's workings a trivial, fragmentary manifestation of Their power, Briggs stoutly refused to shoe their horses and assaulted their Head Groom who apparently ‘called him names'. For this he was bound over by the Justices of the Peace for Elmbury. ‘What did he actually call you?' asked General Bouverie, who was Chairman of the Bench.

‘A bloody Bolshie, your Worship,' said Briggs.

‘Very provocative. I should have hit him myself,' said General Bouverie, who knew all about Briggs' politics. ‘In the circumstances I shall refrain from imposing a fine.'

Of course, Briggs could easily afford to refuse the custom of the Syndicate; he was an extremely prosperous tradesman. There is a mistaken notion that the blacksmith's is a dying trade; and those who are always moaning and mourning the departure of Ye Olde things, the William-Morrissy-arty-crafty people, will tell you that the village smith is disappearing, another craftsman-victim of ‘the thing we miscall Progress'. In fact I believe that Jeremy Briggs made a good deal more money than James Briggs his father, who owned the smithy before him. It is true that there were not so many farm-horses in 1930 as there were in late Victorian times (although there were more hunters); but the ‘odd-jobing' which he so proudly advertised more than redressed the balance. If there were fewer horses, there was more farm-machinery; and when the binder or the hay-sweep went wrong it was generally the blacksmith's job to put it right. Again, fewer horses meant more motor-cars;
and these motor-cars from time to time ran into each other head-on. When the drivers had been taken to hospital, and the vehicles had been towed to the garage, and the doctors, the motor-manufacturers and the garagemen had all levied their dues upon the insurance company, there often remained a kind of residue in the shape of two bent front-axles which found their way to Briggs' forge. Besides, being a skilled worker in most metals, Briggs made a good many profitable odds-and-ends in his spare time; the local builder alone gave him enough work to pay for the beer which he drank in enormous quantities. He certainly didn't deserve the pity of the arty-crafty crowd who went in for folk-dancing and played upon pan-pipes and taught long-suffering villagers to make useless things out of raffia.

Like most blacksmiths, Briggs possessed notable biceps, forearms and hands. When he was a young man he could tear a pack of cards in two. His palms were criss-crossed with old calloused scars, which were the consequence of his youthful foolishness in bending six-inch nails for the entertainment of the company at the Adam and Eve. In later years, becoming less reckless, he wrapped handkerchiefs round his hand before starting his demonstration.

At one time he was the terror of travelling showmen at the local fairs; for whether it v/as a matter of bending pokers or lifting weights, Briggs could always do it better than they could. When the Strongest Man in the World with painful effort and streams of perspiration had managed to give a slight twist to an iron bar, Briggs, pleading with affected innocence ‘Let me try that, mister! Let me have a go!' would mount the rostrum and without apparent exertion bend the bar almost double. All the Strongest Men in the World hated and feared him.

At Elmbury Mop he elected one night to try his strength upon one of those machines which you smite with a mallet.
He had had a great deal of beer, and what happened would have served as a good advertisement for the brewery. With his first shot, being as he freely admitted a bit unsteady on his pins, he missed altogether. The showman laughed; and this annoyed him. He took a lot of trouble over his next shot, his great hands which had clamped in their awful grip the kicking hoof of an angry stallion clasped the handle of the mallet, the muscles of his forearms stood out like the roots of an old tree, and Briggs smote. He hit the machine fair and square with such force that it fell apart; the head of the mallet flew off into the crowd. Satisfied, he shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

Yet at cricket he hardly ever hit sixes, but batted with a huge stolidity which would have done credit to a Lancashire stone-waller; his favourite stroke was what he imagined to be a neat and professional cut through the slips, off which he was generally caught in the gulley. And at darts he had a most curious style which seemed to be a flat contradiction of his great size and strength: he threw rather like a girl. He possessed a set of darts of his own, very tiny and, as one might say, sissy darts, which he picked up deliberately between his enormous fingers (which weren't half as clumsy as they looked) and propelled very neatly and primly into the particular double or treble he wanted.

At the time when I began to play cricket for Brensham, the elderly, sick-looking, sallow-faced man called Hope-Kingley was a newcomer there; and the village didn't quite know what to make of him. He was shy and extremely reserved; and he never talked about himself. He had a quiet, pleasant, middle-aged wife and one small son. We knew he had lived
abroad for most of his life, but that was all. Jeremy Briggs said he was a very good example of the Idle Rich who had nothing better to do than potter about; and although there was no evidence that he was rich we all agreed that he was a Potterer. He started pottering as soon as he was settled in his house. He began to build himself a rock-garden, and left it half-done to make a lily-pond. He went in for Aquaria. He bred Sealyhams. He planted expensive Alpines in the unfinished rock-garden, and the slugs devoured them. He tried without much success to grow asparagus and prize sweetpeas.

He seemed to do nothing very well. You would meet him wandering about with a gun under his arm and he would tell you that he was Pottering after Pigeons; but it was very rarely that he shot anything and when he did so he was generally more embarrassed than pleased. I once saw him haloed as it were with a cloud of pale grey feathers, blood spattered all over his face, and a pigeon's head in one hand, its body in the other. ‘I wounded it,' he confessed miserably, ‘and I didn't know how to kill it. I wanted to put the poor thing out of its misery, so I tried to screw its neck; and then as you see I panicked.'

Encouraged by Mr Chorlton, he even took to butterfly-collecting; but he wasn't very good at that either. I have stood and watched him chasing Clouded Yellows, which are as fleet as Atalanta, among the tall thistles at the edge of a field of lucerne, and he has reminded me,” as he pranced about, of a rather battered and elderly faun. I confess I laughed; and of course he didn't catch any Clouded Yellows. In the end he had to employ Johnnie Perks, Alfie's son, who got him half a dozen in ten minutes.

Children loved him. They didn't seem to notice his tiresome ineffectiveness. Although he wore thick glasses and had rather bleary eyes it seemed that he was able to find birds'-
nests which even schoolboys failed to find; and during the nesting season you hardly ever saw him without three or four of the village brats at his heels. One day we heard that he had actually shinned up a tree, in search of a magpie's nest, and had become stuck there. Magpies generally build in the thickest and thorniest of trees and poor old Hope-Kingley hung there like Absalom. The attendant children rescued him, of course, and the incident merely strengthened their conviction that he was some kind of hero. For our part we remarked that the old boy must be getting into his second childhood; and Jeremy Briggs said it would have served him right if he'd broken his neck.

At cricket, as at everything else, he simply pottered. He bowled a bit and batted a bit (though he was extremely liable to run out himself or his fellow batsman) and he fielded with sublime ineptitude for though he was incapable of catching or picking up the ball himself he frequently contrived to collide with anybody else who was about to do so. If he did get hold of the ball he threw it in with great force several yards wide of the wicket-keeper, so that it went to the boundary.

However, he apologized so nicely for all his mistakes, and seemed to enjoy the game so much, that Sammy hadn't the heart to drop him from the team. In any case we were generally two players short by noon on Saturday and would have gladly fielded a blind man if he'd offered to turn out for us.

One summer - it must have been Hope-Kingley's second at Brensham - the old potterer tired of his rock-garden, his lily-pond, his Sealyhams, his goldfish and his butterflies and determined to dam the stream which ran through his orchard and to make a big pool which he could stock with rainbow trout. He undertook this task himself, and would accept no advice or assistance from anybody. He carried it
out, so it seemed to us, in a very slipshod and amateurish way, and we warned him that his dam wouldn't hold, the water would run out of it. ‘Dear, dear!' he said. ‘Perhaps it will. How foolish I am!' And sure enough, he let the water in that night, and the new pond was dry again by breakfast-time. Briggs, who had prophesied this, spent most of his dinner-hour leaning on the orchard gate and grinning at the muddy morass. Other villagers, more polite, told Mr Hope-Kingley: