Brensham Village (8 page)

‘We're very sorry to hear about your trout-pond!'
The old man smiled a queer and quizzical smile.
‘Dear me,' he said. ‘I shall have to try again.'

Once more he let in the water; and once more the pond was dry within twelve hours. And again, when people sympathized, Mr Hope-Kinglev gave them that queer little smile.

The next day, as it happened, was the King's birthday, and the honours came out in the paper. Somebody, glancing through the list of ‘Knights', read with astonishment:

‘To be Knight Commander of the Indian Empire: Gerald Devereux Hope-Kingley: For distinguished services in hydraulic engineering in India, Burma and Malay.'

Mr Chorlton and I were not altogether surprised, when we passed the trout-pond that evening on our way to fish in the river, to find that it was full; and this time the water was not running out. Hope-Kingley was pottering in his garden.

‘Sir Gerald,' said Mr Chorlton. ‘You've been pulling our legs.'

‘Dear me,' he said mildly. ‘You must forgive me. You must let an old man have his little joke.'

He asked us in to have a glass of sherry. He showed us the
rock-garden and the slug-bitten Alpines, and his draggled collection of butterflies and the tropical fishes in his aquarium which were dying off from some mysterious disease.

‘You see,' he said, ‘none of these things go right, do they? And I suppose that's because I'm such an awful potterer. For forty years I promised myself, almost every day, that when I retired I would give myself the pleasure of deciding over my early-morning tea what particular form of pottering I should practise after breakfast!'

I thought of the long uncomfortable years that had given him the right to potter: the steamy jungles of Burma and Malay, the high peaks of the North-west Frontier, the great watersheds above Nepal; the malaria and the insects and the damp heat which blurred the eyepiece of the theodolite; the great rains and the melting snow and the rivers thundering down and the agony of waiting to see whether the dam would hold.

Sir Gerald butted in upon my thoughts.

‘Next autumn,' he said, ‘I'm going to make a bird-table outside my study window. And then I shall rig up some sort of camera contrivance so that I can photograph the birds. One might invent an automatic one, don't you think, which would take a picture whenever a bird alighted on the table? It would amuse me when I'm kept to the house, which is pretty often; for I had too long in the tropics to stick an English winter well. I always promised myself that when I couldn't even potter I'd amuse myself with a bird-table and rig up a camera to photograph the birds.'

The last five or six places in our cricket-team were filled, generally at the last moment, by various unreliable and often
unwilling youths whom Alfie impressed out of the pubs: labouring boys, farmers' sons, and so on. The former, who toiled all the week in the fields and market-gardens, found no enjoyment whatever in chasing a cricket-ball in the hot sun upon their afternoon off; the latter, whose interest lay chiefly in fiery horses and powerful motor-bikes, had little enthusiasm for a game which offered no prospect of a broken neck. However, Alfie by his press-gang methods usually captured a few of them; and some, especially the farmers' sons, often slogged happily and heartily or took a few wickets with their murderous fast bowling.

We included in the category of ‘the boys', because they were equally unreliable, Billy Butcher the village ne'er-do-weel and Banks, the village policeman. We could not count on either: the former because he was almost always drunk and the latter because he was often on duty. On one occasion we lost both players through the same cause: Billy Butcher chose a Saturday afternoon to go roaring round the village merrily breaking windows, and Banks was called out to arrest him.

That must have been the only arrest Banks made in his first five years at Brensham. He arrived, as all our village policemen do, as a young, efficient and rather officious constable, eager for promotion, willing to go out of his way to look for trouble, and inclined to hang about in the neighbourhood of the pubs at closing-time. He had succeeded an elderly, easy-going fellow who knew our ways; and at first we regarded Banks with suspicion and dismay. But Joe Trentfield, the landlord of the Horse Narrow, who'd seen village policemen come and go for twenty years, laughed at our fears and said philosophically: ‘'Tis alius the same with new brooms. Wait a bit, and you'll see we'll tame him. Be they real tigers, Brensham alius tames ‘em in the end.'

And sure enough, we tamed Banks. We married him off, for one thing, to Joe Trentfield's daughter. We persuaded him to play for us at cricket and darts. Sam Hunt built him a boat and taught him to fish for chub. Soon he learned that the business of a village constable was concerned, not with criminals and crooks, but with foot and mouth disease and swine fever, straying animals and lost dogs: and that the nearest he was likely to get to dealing with a murder was his annual duty of quelling a row between the Fitchers and the Gormleys about a murder which had happened fifty years ago. He discovered (Joe Trentfield's daughter may have had something to do with the discovery) that the best way of making sure that the pub closed at ten was to drop in for a quiet drink with the landlord at ten-thirty. He found out that prosecuting people for having no dog licence or riding a bicycle without lights was not, after all, a short cut to promotion; and before very long the dream of quick promotion faded, and a different dream took its place: he began to save up towards buying a cottage with perhaps a little orchard and a couple of pigstyes, so that he could still live in the shadow of Brensham Hill when he retired.

Billy Butcher, at the age of thirty-five, was still the village's Problem Child. He was incorrigible and anti-social and I suppose that in the sort of society advocated by Mr Bernard Shaw he would have been told ‘We bear you no ill will, my dear fellow, but society must be protected' and popped into a humane and hygienic lethal chamber in no time. We, on the other hand, having a vague and unformulated belief that one of the fundamental Rights of Man was his right to go to the devil in his own fashion, bought him drinks, lent
him money, put up with his occasional bouts of window-smashing, and in fact allowed him to drink himself slowly towards a far more uncomfortable death than Mr Shaw would have devised for him.

Was society worse off in consequence, or better? I don't know. We should have been richer by more than a few pounds; for Billy was an expensive companion. But what are a few pounds compared with a lot of laughter, a lot of low comedy, a fragment of high comedy, an hour or two every week of wild and gorgeous talk? Billy gave us all that; for he was two other things as well as a drunkard, things which do not often go together: he was a clown and he was a poet. His clowning was spontaneous, irrepressible, and sometimes sublime. He didn't have to try to be funny, and his fooling was of the same nature as Sir Andrew Aguecheek's, it ‘came natural'. The truth of the matter was, I think, that for certain brief periods in the process of his drunkenness he saw the whole of life as an absurd and enormous comedy, and all he did then was to play his own part in it. If he made us laugh, it was simply because we, to him, appeared almost unbearably funny. Finding the whole world peopled with figures of fun, he did no more than adapt himself to his environment.

As for his poetry, that was a very different matter. It was not at all obvious, it was something which had its source deep within him, it dwelt in the secret places of Billy's heart where no doubt it teased and tortured and tormented him as such Daemons will. To quell it he drank whisky: more and more whisky, have another boys, well I don't mind if I do, down the hatch - and perhaps if he drank long enough the Daemon lay still. But sometimes the opposite thing happened. There was a Tom Tiddler's Ground, a no-man's-land between semi-drunkenness and complete drunkenness, in which shadowy territory Billy sometimes
found himself. Then for an hour, or half an hour, the poetry would bubble up. He became possessed. He talked sublime and airy nonsense. He quoted. His subconscious heaved - and brought up great undigested slabs of Shakespeare, gobbets of Swinburne, ill-assorted scraps and fragments from Chaucer, Skelton, Sir Thomas Browne. He was not showing off; it was sheer agony: the stuff gushed out of him. But the fit didn't last long. Let's have another, he cried almost desperately, another and another, as if the whisky were a sort of purge for poetry: and soon he was empty. Then we would see the sweat standing out on his forehead and the tears welling up in his eyes. ‘I can't bear it,' Billy would say.

‘Bear what?'

‘Everything.'

And then, leaning against the bar, with his head in his hands, he would cry his heart out, until some kindly person led him away.

If Billy had been a newcomer, I suppose we should have been less tolerant of him; but he was a native of Brensham, born in the pleasant house called Gables which Hope-Kingley now owned. He was the son of Colonel Butcher, a stiff moustachio'd warrior-scholar who had spent his last ten years in our village writing a grammar of the Urdu language. His wife had died in India, and the boy ran wild as a Brensham hare. While the old gentleman worked in his study, young Billy at the age of seventeen was discovering the queer dirty little pubs in the back streets of Elmbury and flirting with alley-wenches at Elmbury Mop. There was some trouble, when Billy was eighteen, over a girl in the village; and Colonel Butcher briefly interrupted his study of Urdu to deal with the situation, which he did by packing Billy off to a crammer for the Army. Six months later the boy was back; no princely fee, said the crammer, would compensate him for the disgrace and ill-fame which Billy's
presence brought upon his establishment. So the Urdu grammar suffered another set-back while its author made arrangements to dispatch his son to West Africa. ‘At least,' he said bitterly, ‘you will find no blonde housemaids there.' This was doubtless true; but Billy found something much more dangerous. When his father, having completed the grammar, died of boredom and old age, Billy came back to Brensham and we knew at once that the whisky held him in its power as no woman could ever do. We could see him hurrying down to the Trumpet or the Adam and Eve at a quarter to ten in the morning, in order to be there exactly at opening-time; we would watch how his hand shook as he lifted the first glass, how it became curiously steady after the third; we would notice the bulge in his pocket as he tottered home after closing-time. A few well-meaning people tried to help him: but most of us knew that it was already too late and we accepted Billy for what he was: a hopeless, incurable, incorrigible drunkard. His father had left him a good deal of money, and he spent it in a few years. Then he sold the house, and the library, and the furniture, and took a room above Mrs Doan's shop. Then he sold his car and bought a motor-bike; sold the motor-bike; borrowed from moneylenders; and in his last extremity borrowed from his friends. At this juncture, when everybody was saying that he had come to the end of his tether, he received a lucky windfall: an uncle died and left him some money but, knowing Billy, appointed two trustees to prevent him from squandering it. These hard-hearted men (as Billy described them to us) doled him out the sum of three pounds a week and by dint of borrowing, sponging, and forgetting to pay Mrs Doan (who adored him) he contrived to keep himself headed for a toper's grave, though of necessity his pace towards it became slower. In the fruit season he hired himself out, for he had no silly pride, to the farmers for
plum-picking and cherry-picking. On one hot July day, being extremely drunk, he fell off a twenty-rung ladder on to his head. A sober man would have broken his neck; but the only effect it had on Billy was to make him slightly more lachrymose after his outbursts of poetry and slightly less controllable when the whim took him to break people's windows.

Brensham possessed another poet; but this one was serious and sober, shared none of our easy-going ways, was alien in speech and spirit, and had brought with him across the border the dark and twisted puritanism of the dark valleys. He was the postman; as he called himself, Dai Roberts Postman, using his function as a surname in the Welsh fashion. He had come holidaying out of some black village in the spring of 1919, when miners had money to spend, and had fallen in love with our green hill and our snowy orchards and with one of our pink, plump village girls, so he never went back. I think he fell in love with the Syndicate's pheasants also; he was a better poacher than a postman. However, he insisted that his true calling was neither of these: he was a poet. Long ago, in his bleak black valley, in the slate-roofed horrible Hall next to the tin bethel, an Eisteddfod had taken place; and Dai had recited a long poem before the minor bards on the theme of Sodom and Gomorrah, which had frightened them into giving him the prize. Since then he had rested upon his laurels, though he once told us that he was contemplating an epic, longer than the Mabinogion, upon the subject of The Approaching End of the World. But the great project hung fire. In our flowery countryside there were no Eisteddfodau: we indulged in
profane pastimes, cricket on the village green, darts matches in the pub, dances in the village hall. The flesh-pots corrupted us, said Dai; and true poetry blossomed only in the cold slatey valleys and in the hearts of the small dark singing men.

Dai never entered any of the pubs; to do so, he believed, meant certain damnation. Nor would he ever take his plump, cheerful wife to the whist drives and dances which enlivened the winter evenings for so many of the villagers; a Baptist Minister had assured him long ago that a girl who went to dances was a sister of the Devil, and he still believed this. On Saturday afternoons, however, he was willing to watch our cricket-matches, and although he did not play the game he generously admitted that ‘he could see no great harm in it, upon a week-day'. Before long he was persuaded to score for us; and as the seasons went by the casual job became a permanent and official one, so that we took Dai with us when we played away matches and he ‘followed' Brensham as the ardent spectators of football ‘follow' the Arsenal or the Spurs. He kept our batting and bowling averages from match to match throughout the season, and did not forget to tell us if they were unsatisfactory. ‘One hundred and sixty runs your bowling has cost,' he would chant, ‘for only four wick-ets! That iss an average of fifty-three point three recurring!' Indeed in his eagerness that Brensham should win he became sharply critical of all the players. ‘Mr Moore,' he told me, after I had most painfully missed a high catch in the deep, ‘you will not mind me saying that you would catch the ball better if you did not first let it bounce off your breastbone.' Of Mr Mountjoy, whom he held to be idolatrous, he declared: ‘He flicks at the ball as if he were sprinkling it with holy wat-er!' He disapproved of Mr Chorlton's harlequin cap (which provoked him, apparently, in the same inexplicable way as Douglas Jardine's provoked
the Australians), of Sammy's bald head - ‘A sunstroke he does deserve for being so fool-ish!' - of the placing of the field, the choice of the bowlers, and the batting order. It was a wonder that he could bring himself to score for us at all, since our antics drove him into such despair. In any case the duties of scorer are dull and exacting. We asked him, one day, what pleasure he got out of it.