Brensham Village (9 page)

‘Like a sonnet the well-kept score-sheet iss,' was his astonishing answer.

As I have said, we were proud of our cricket-teas and of the pretty girls who served them. Alfie used both as bait for ‘the boys' when he was trying to make up the team at the last moment. ‘Sally Doan will be there,' he'd remark casually. Sally had honey-blonde hair and soft brown eyes and a sideways look for any respectable youth. Or to the older, the more sedate, and the married men, Alfie would say: ‘They tell me we're going to cut a two-year-old ham, the best they've ever cured at the Adam and Eve.' By such stratagems we managed to field a complete team at almost every home match throughout the season.

Mrs Hartley, the landlord's wife from the Adam and Eve, was the organizing genius of the Helpers. It was she who provided the hams, the salads, the meat-pies, the home-made pickles at the very small cost of one and threepence a head. She was a plump good-looking bustling girl whose chief delight in life seemed to be providing huge meals for other people. Her husband, a comparatively slight fellow when he married her, now turned the scale at sixteen stone. Great sides of bacon, hams weighing twenty-five pounds apiece, hung from the ceiling of her immaculate store-room; and
upon a score of long shelves were rows of jam-jars, bottling-jars, pickle-jars, all neatly labelled in her round hand: Piccalilli 1921, Black B. and Apple, Pickled Walnuts, cucumbers and so on. There were great quantities of homemade wine as well, likewise labelled: Sloe Gin 1917, Elder-flower 1919, Parsnip 1920, Dandelion May 1921 - as if these were the proud titles of famous vintages, which indeed for the inhabitants of Brensham they were.

To assist her with the sandwich-cutting, the pouring out, and so on, Mrs Hartley had roped in, as well as Sally Doan, the two youngest daughters of Joe Trentfield of the Horse Narrow. (The eldest was already married to Constable Banks and must mind the police station when he was playing cricket.) At the time I am writing of they were aged fifteen and seventeen and they were already as flirtatious a pair of little hussies as you could possibly imagine. Their names were Mimi and Meg. They both had corn-coloured hair, blue eyes, rather snub noses, pink cheeks, high breasts, and irrepressible giggles. When I first saw them together I was troubled with an old memory; I knew it was something to do with my childhood, and yet I could not define what it was. Dolls, perhaps? But it wasn't dolls; the flesh-and-blood was too palpable in Mimi and Meg. Suddenly I had it. The chorus at the Pantomime! The first pantomime I ever saw; and a row of little girls who appeared, to me, to be astonishingly naked, with pink faces and big eyes, prancing down the stage and kicking their legs in the air and singing in tinny voices:

‘Hell-lo every-body! Hell-lo every-body!'

and then, a moment later:

‘We are the Fairies, dancing on the Green,
But hush! Who comes? ... It is the Fairy Queen!'

My heart had sunk at that; I was not at all interested in the Fairy Queen or in the little pink-cheeked girls with their pink tights which were somehow more fleshy than flesh; I wanted to see the conjurer. But the memory stuck, and when I met Mimi and Meg it popped out of the mysterious attic in which all such junk is stored.

Then a remarkable thing happened. One November afternoon, coming back from hunting, I called at the Horse Narrow for a drink. It was long before opening-time but in Brensham that didn't matter; I tethered my horse in the back-yard and went into the living room. There was an unusual air of bustle and excitement. Fat Mrs Trentfield, whose enormous bosom bounced whenever she moved - would the girls look like that thirty years hence? - was brushing Meg's hair. Mimi, in front of the looking-glass, was simultaneously powdering her nose and practising the steps of a mincing dance. Joe Trentfield was coming downstairs with two large suitcases. ‘Excuse the mess,' said Mrs Trentfield, ‘but the girls are just off.'

‘Off?'

‘Why, didn't you know? They're going to Birmingham, to act in the Pantomime,.'

Mimi said:

‘We had an audition. The producer was ever so nice.'

‘Ever so,' echoed Meg. ‘He's put us in the chorus.'

“Twill turn their heads,' said Joe, sombrely but not without pride.

‘Sing Mr Moore that song you've been practising,' said Mrs Trentfield. ‘It's ever so nice.'

Meg sat at the piano. Mimi stood beside her. I waited hopefully, half-expecting to hear ‘Hello, Everybody'; but it was a trivial tinkling song about Thinking of you When skies are blue. It was terrible, and Mimi sang it terribly.

‘Pretty, isn't it?' said Mrs Trentfield. ‘But sad.'

Then the taxi arrived. The girls rushed upstairs to see if they'd left anything behind. Mrs Trentfield bustled and bounced. Joe pronounced unheeded valedictory warnings against Young Men. Squeaking with excitement, the girls came scampering downstairs. They kissed their mother and father. Then they kissed me. I was aware of two successive gusts of a sweet and dreadful perfume; and off they went.

I rode home to Elmbury. My horse was tired, and it was a bitter cold night, with sleet in the north wind; but I was warmed by laughter and cheered by a comfortable sense of the fitness of things. When I had stabled my horse I went to the Swan, and found the Colonel sitting in his usual chair. He'd just been duck-shooting and was very wet. Steam rose from his shoulders as he dried himself before the fire: a little miasma of his own creating. There was a pleasant smell of Harris tweed. He swallowed a large whisky and as he grinned contentedly his scarlet face fell into multitudinous creases: ‘Wet, me boy, wet. Whisky inside and water out.'

Then he looked at me curiously. He began to laugh. Miss Benedict, the middle-aged, tight-lipped, prim little barmaid, looked at me too, but without laughter. ‘What have you been up to?' said the Colonel.

‘Hunting. We had a good run from Brensham Hill. We killed—'

‘Hunting!' roared the Colonel, and his glorious laughter shook him as gusts of wind an old tree. ‘Hunting! Well, I've heard it called a lot of things—'

Then I saw my face in the glass over the mantelpiece. On my right check in post-office red was the print of Meg's kiss; and on my left, in a completely different colour, a sort of orange-tawny which was fashionable at the time, was the impression of Mimi's.

When the pantomime ended the girls returned to Brensham. The experience hadn't ‘turned their heads' as Mr
Trentfield had feared it would; but it had given them what their mother darkly described as Ambition, and Mimi was determined to go into Musical Comedy, while Meg already saw herself on the films. At village concerts they indefatigably sang and danced, performing what they called a Double Act: the Trentfield Sisters. It was a step, they imagined, towards stardom. Meanwhile they continued to help with the cricket-teas. They dressed themselves up in light flowery frocks and painted their faces so that Dai Roberts Postman, utterly scarified, whispered comments about the whore Jezebel. But there wasn't a scrap of harm in either of them; and you can imagine what a devastating effect they had upon the younger members of the visiting teams, and upon our own hobbledehoys, who when they sat down to tea found themselves suddenly confronted with the pantomime smile of Mimi and the Hollywood make-up of Meg, and enfiladed by the sidelong glances of Sally Doan.

There has always, I suppose, been a goggle-eyed spectatorial multitude who have watched with enjoyment, in the fashion of the age they lived in, the throwing of Christians to lions, the baiting of bears and bulls, the burning of martyrs, the hanging of malefactors, and the bloody pummelling between heavy-weights with naked fists. There has also, I am sure, since the first primitive hunter grew stiff in his joints, been a company of old men, past-masters of their various sports and games, who have delighted to watch the young upstarts throwing the javelin, shooting the arrow, wrestling, boxing, footballing, cricketing, and to recollect how much better they did these things in
their
young days. But the emergence of a huge class of able-bodied people who actually prefer to
watch other people playing the games which they could, if they liked, play themselves is a recent phenomenon. The young men who ‘follow' football-teams surely represent something new and something contemptible. Luckily it is a phenomenon of the cities rather than of the countryside. At Brensham the people who didn't play cricket had something better to do than to watch it. They fished in the river, caulked their boats, poached rabbits, weeded their gardens, mowed their lawns, rode their bicycles or motor-bicycles, took their wives to the pictures or their girls into the mowing-grass. Therefore our matches never attracted any considerable number of spectators. I can only remember three fairly regular ones: Goaty Pegleg, the Colonel, and the Mad Lord.

Goaty Pegleg, you will remember, lived in the first cottage on the way up the hill, at the end of the steep stony lane which we always used when we were children, it was two miles from thence to the cricket-field, a bone-shaking road downhill and a back-aching road uphill for a man with a wooden leg. But Goaty Pegleg had been a cricketer in his youth, before he slipped under the wagon wheel at haymaking, and every Saturday and Sunday afternoon in summer he stumped down to watch our games. There was a single bench beneath a shady willow tree beside the pavilion; and here Goaty Pegleg took his ease and watched every ball as keenly as if we had been playing a test match. His attention never flagged; but there was a curious time-lag in his consciousness, he seemed only to become aware of the event some sixty seconds after it had occured. A catch would be taken; and long afterwards, when the batsman, walking out, had nearly reached the pavilion, we would hear Goaty Pegleg's enthusiastic cry: ‘He's caught it!' A straight ball would spread eagle the stumps; and suddenly when the new batsman was taking his guard we would be startled by a
loud clapping, and a throaty cheer from Goaty Pegleg: ‘Well bowled, sir!'

The Colonel was a less attentive spectator than Goaty. He brought a flask with him; and this flask kept him so busy that he often failed to notice what went on in the cricket-field. ‘Hear you hit a six,' he would say, ‘I'm sorry I missed it; I was having a swig.' He himself was no cricketer; his unflagging pursuit of animals, birds and fishes had left him no time for chasing balls. Indeed he only came to watch our matches during those brief intermediate seasons when there was nothing to kill, and stayed only for so long as the pubs were closed; but I think he enjoyed himself, for he liked Mrs Hartley's hams and meat-pies and he delighted to flirt in a very courteous and old-fashioned way with Mimi, Meg and Sally Doan. They loved him, of course; everybody loved him. I often wondered why, though I loved him as much as anybody. At first sight he was just a peppery old man who drank too much whisky; a rather ugly old man, with a purple pimply nose and a tobacco-stained walrus moustache. But of course he was much more than that: a kind of greatness clothed him, though I was never able to define it nor to decide wherein his greatness lay. He had, beneath his peppery manner, a beautiful courtesy; but so did many other old gentlemen of his generation. He had a huge sense of fun, and a twinkle in his blue eyes, and his laughter bubbled like a spring, was such laughter as the Greeks called Ionian because it reminded them of the mirth and music of the mountain streams. But other men, after all, possessed merry blue eyes and laughed gaily. I think perhaps the Colonel's greatness had something to do with the fact that he belonged more completely than anybody else to the fields, woods, rivers which were his home. He knew the ways of each thing that ran, swam, crawled or flew not as a man who has learned them but as if by instinct. And by instinct
too he knew the country people, the carter with bent back leading the horses home after ploughing, the women working in the mangold-fields, the country craftsman laying a hedge, he knew them and was one with them as he knew and was one with the animals. He didn't need to patronize them nor sentimentalize them; he knew what went on in their minds and he had the enormous all-embracing compassion which comes only from complete understanding.

Compassion: perhaps that was the secret of his greatness. His compassion extended to all living things even - though this may sound absurd - to the creatures he hunted. I do not mean that he pitied the fox with the sort of anthropomorphic pity which sentimentalists feel who imagine it suffers the same terror as they would suffer if they were pursued by dogs. He
knew
the fox; he was at once the hunter and the hunted, just as he was farmer and labourer, landlord and peasant because of his compassionate understanding of all. He belonged, as I have said, body and soul to the countryside of Brensham; as if its streams and rivers had run in his veins, its meadows had clothed him, he had grown old with its trees.

At our cricket-teas he was, perhaps, outside his environment and the contrast between our white flannels and his old green tweeds was so striking that strangers would ask: ‘Who is that old man of the woodland?' seeing in him at once, as I in my boyhood had seen, a sort of elderly Robin Hood. He wore a hat which was the wonder and the admiration of everybody who gazed upon it, except Mrs Hartley, who was a tidy-minded person, waging ceaseless war against dust and cobwebs with a duster in one hand and a broom in the other: Mrs Hartley was heard to say that she'd like to burn it because it bred germs. It was a deerstalker hat of Victorian pattern, the kind which French cartoonists once supposed English milords to wear. It was at
least fifty years old, and its original colour was no longer evident but it had weathered unevenly, so that parts of it were lichenous-grey and parts of it were mossy-green. Here and there the moth or the mould had got into it, and here and there the Colonel's sister - he was unmarried - had ventured to make a tentative darn. But the holes didn't really matter, for they were covered up - thatched would be the better word - with a multitude of fishing-flies. The whole hat bristled with bits of gut, hooks and feathers. There were mayflies of ancient pattern, march browns, duns, sedges, olives, coch-y-bonddhus, alders, and there were salmon-flies as well to add their tinselled brightness, a Jock Scott, a Thunder and Lightning, a Blue Charm azure as the kingfisher. When the Colonel sat down to tea, keeping his hat on because of the sun, we would delightedly watch the effect upon the members of the visiting team, who could scarcely take their eyes off the preposterous thing, except when Mimi's stagey smile or Sally's brown eyes momentarily exercised a more powerful attraction.