The Blue Field (26 page)

‘It can't be helped,' said Halliday cheerfully. ‘There's no way of getting to Elmbury so that's that. You cannot legislate against the wind.' And as if this rather curious phrase pleased him, he repeated it slowly, and I realized that he was more than a little drunk. It occurred to me that it was probably years since he had been drunk if indeed he had ever been drunk before in his life and that he was obviously enjoying the unfamiliar sensation. Once again he repeated that stray wisp of a sentence which seemed to be related to nothing in particular ~ ‘You cannot legislate against the wind. By God,' he said, ‘I like that. It's the sort of thing a Frenchman might have said, Danton himself might have said, when the mobs were marching to the
Marseillaise
!'

Meanwhile Vicky in her precise way was explaining to Joe about the fallen trees. ‘So, you see,' she ended, ‘we can't go on to Elmbury and we can't go back home.'

‘Well, you be proper buggered!' said Joe, roaring with laughter because nobody's minor misfortune ever failed to delight him. ‘You'll have to stay the night here.'

Just then the door opened and there entered, in procession, Pistol, Bardolph, Nym, ‘Enery and Pierre, followed by George Daniels and Susan. Through the open door we
could see ‘Enery's old lorry piled high with mistletoe. While Pru, who remained perfectly calm and self-possessed, speaking only when she was spoken to in her small prim voice, poured them out glasses of wine, Pistol told us a long story about how with George's help they had collected nearly half a ton of mistletoe, and how a man they knew in Birmingham had offered to buy it for seventeen pounds a hundredweight. ‘So “Let's ‘andle,” says I, and we done the deal.'

Then Wistaria climbed on to the counter and announced dramatically that George and Susan were going to run away together and get married. George, it seemed, had made enough money out of his share of the mistletoe-deal to furnish a cottage, and they were going to buy a tractor and set up in a little business. (‘Ploughing by Contract,' said Susan proudly.) So we all drank their health and wished them luck, and when they drove off with ‘Enery in the lorry to Birmingham, where Susan said she had a married sister living (though nobody really believed this) the Frolick Virgins all rushed out and cheered them away as if they had indeed been setting out on their honeymoon.

‘St Thomas's grey, St Thomas's grey,' cried Alfie Perks in valediction, ‘the
longest night
and the shortest day!'

Pru, whose pram I nearly fell over when I went out to see George and Susan drive away, took advantage of a moment when her sisters weren't looking to slip out through the door. Light-hating, dark-loving, ‘negatively phototropic' as Mr Chorlton put it, she wheeled away her babies into the windy darkness; and shortly afterwards Pierre crept out after her. Perhaps it was Pru's last chance, for we were told that she was going to live with her step-sister Betty, who had declared a firm resolve to ‘keep her out of mischief in future'. ‘This,' quoted Mr Chorlton, ‘will be the decay of lust and late-walking throughout the realm!'

Meanwhile Betty and Joan and Mimi and Meg still went about through the crowded room like almsgivers dispensing old William's particular brand of happiness to anybody who happened to have an empty glass. In retrospect the wine seems to have had a peculiar lightning property of illuminating certain incidents with vivid unforgettable flashes, while others have disappeared for ever into the darkness of oblivion. Of these disconnected flashes my memory of the evening is made up.

I remember, for instance, watching Halliday sitting in a corner with Pistol, Bardolph and Nym while they vied with each other in telling him stories about the campaigns they'd fought against Germans and Italians and Arabs and Afghans and fuzzy-wuzzies of various kinds. On Halliday's face, as he listened to these fantastic tales, there was – I swear – a look of real envy. This was the kind of things which he would have liked to have done himself! And when Bardolph held up his hand to demonstrate that he'd lost two fingers at Mons, and Pistol pulled up his trouser-leg to show the long scar which he said was due to the thrust of an assegai, what matter if I was aware that Bardolph had once put his hand under a circular-saw and that Pistol had spiked himself when he climbed over a fence to escape from an angry keeper? For the moment at any rate they were veterans of Agincourt:

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars And say,
these wounds I had on Crispin's Day,

and as I watched them I had the same sense of the proximity of Shakespeare and of the continuity and immortality of his
people as I had had before when I talked to Jaky Jones and saw suddenly, peering out from under his bowler hat, the grim clown who dug Ophelia's grave.

I remember, in another vivid flash, a strange speech by Betty (orwas it Joan?) when she declared that she could never forgive herself for telling her father, on some occasion long ago, that his home-made wine was like the Devil inside him, making him bawl and holler. Too late, said Betty, she realized that she had been wrong; for she herself felt now as if she were filled, not with devils but with a whole choir of chanting angels; and to everybody's astonishment, in a rather quavering voice, she began to sing.

That set everybody singing. Mimi strummed on the piano, and we sang such a medley and mixture of songs as not even Brensham, surely, had ever sung before: a mixture half-Christian and half-Pagan like ourselves, for there were carols and folk-songs and soldiers' songs in the mixture, we sang impartially of Good King Wenceslas and Tom Pearce's Grey Mare, and the rats of exceptional size in the quartermaster's stores and of some unspecified person who would be wearing silk pyjamas when she came; of shepherds watching their flocks and of the wonderful Wizard of Oz; of Billy Boy and his charming Nancy Grey (
‘She lies as close to me As the bark is to the tree!
'), of Mademoiselle from Armentiéres and John Peel. Alfie sang about the red poppies and Joe sang his imitation of the grunting pig, and the Frolick Virgins sang a song of their own invention, a very mournful song, about picking sprouts. And Sammy, of course, bellowed in his deep sailor's voice about the girl who had a dark and a rolling eye,

‘
And her hair hung down in ringalets,
She was a nice girl and a decent girl,
But one of the rakish kind!
'

And then suddenly, without being conscious that we were doing so, we found ourselves singing one by one all the songs which old William used to sing when he sat in the corner-seat by the fireplace and beat time with the poker. It was as if, said Alfie Perks, he stood close to us and prompted us; for there was no need for anybody to suggest a song, as soon as we'd finished one we were on with the next, as if the same thoughts ran through all our minds at the same moment.

We were still singing
Roll Me Over
when the company in twos and threes began to go home; and for hours afterwards, it seemed, people were singing in the streets, little snatches of song were blowing about Brensham on the wind. William's home-made wine was a carminative drink indeed!

At last there were only about half a dozen of us left sitting round the sweet-smelling cherry-log fire which Joe always built up with architectural skill so that it made a bright pyramid of flame. Then Sammy put on his duffel-coat, slung the hood over his bald head, and remarked that it was time he went home to see if his house was still there or whether it had sunk under the river. Jaky Jones pushed his bowler hat still farther on to the back of his head, gave a sardonic shrug, and said, ‘The Missus'll be lying in wait for me, else. And then it's Matey, look out!' They went home together, and Sammy called back to us through the door: ‘The wind's going uphill, you can feel the sharp edge of it.' ‘Feels like snow,' Jaky added. ‘‘Ow's your father!' The five of us, Mr Chorlton and Sir Gerald, the Hallidays and I, still sat in front of the fire while Joe washed up the glasses. We had lost all sense of time.

Mr Chorlton glanced from Halliday to Vicky, and said:

‘Well, you've seen us at our most disorderly now. Crack-brained Brensham at its best or worst. We're one of the last untidy corners in your tidy England. Do you still want to tidy us up?'

Vicky shook her head slowly.

‘No, Diogenes . . .' That was her pet name for him now, Diogenes in his tub. ‘No, I don't, but in some way or other I want to fit you in.'

‘
Can you?'
Mr Chorlton leaned forward. ‘Can you so arrange this planned and orderly world which you dream of so that there is still a place in it for the rebellious, the eccentric, the unruly – for people like William Hart? In such a world will we not all have to be good and bad in the same ways, all possessing the same moral stature, or being at any rate neatly graded – “From the left, in two ranks, size!” Can you fit in, let us say, people like Sammy Hunt who likes rivers to be crooked, or the odd-job-man (or do you call him a self-employed person now?) like Jaky Jones? Or even such an amorous individualist as Pru?'

Halliday was silent, wrinkling his forehead and staring into the fire as if he saw two conflicting dreams there and was trying to sort them out. Mr Chorlton went on:

‘In the story of your England, will the huge shadow of Falstaff ever fall across the page? And the smaller, sneaking, troublesome shadows of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym? Or will you quietly eliminate them as Spivs and Drones? Will the people in that tale possess humours in the Elizabethan sense? Will ginger still taste hot i' the mouth to them? Will your standard of living, as you call it, have regard to fun, without which living is hardly worthwhile? Or will fun itself be something which has to be organized or controlled under a Minister of Popular Recreation with twenty psychologists and half a hundred censors on his staff?' He paused. ‘Let
William Hart, for a moment, be the yardstick by which we judge your world. Have you room in it for these strange flowers that blossom in unexpected places, and give colour to the scene, like poppies in corn or wild weeds in a well-kept garden? Those people who, however headstrong and wrong-headed, nevertheless reaffirm in their lives the ancient freedom and dignity of man? Because if not, I warn you, though your great machines serve you like slaves, though your citizens have only to press a button to obtain all the ease and comfort and all the pleasure and knowledge they desire, then it will all be meaningless, it will taste like dust and ashes upon the tongue. So I ask you again: Can you fit in the William Harts?'

‘I don't know,' said Halliday gravely. ‘I don't know.' He looked up suddenly from the fire. ‘But by God we'll try!'

Mr Chorlton smiled. ‘Well, good luck to you! It's time I hobbled home.' He got up painfully; his joints were old and stiff. ‘But one last word before I go. I'm going to say something now which is far more subversive than anything you've said or even thought of—' He smiled at Vicky. ‘A more dangerous proposition than ever my female Cobbett has dared to put forward. It's simply this:
The ideal citizen is not the ideal man.
Norman Douglas, I think, was the person who said it. The ideal citizen is not the ideal man.'

We said goodnight to Vicky, Joe took her out into the kitchen to find a candle, while Sir Gerald opened the door and a few snowflakes came drifting in with the wind. My last memory of the evening is a rather odd one. Halliday as he put his glass down on the counter caught sight of the statue of the Long Man among the snuff-tins and suddenly leaned across and picked it up and set it on the counter in front of him. For a moment he stood smiling at it; and then he repeated once more that stray phrase which had pleased him earlier in the evening. ‘You cannot legislate against the
wind.' I don't know what he meant by it, nor whether he really knew himself. But I thought, as I looked at the little figure, that there was a great tearing wind of laughter and mischief blowing there, like the gale which had swept William Hart through life; and that was a wind which never blew in Westminster. You couldn't legislate against that!

Then Vicky came back with the candle, and Halliday put his arm round her, and they went through the kitchen and up the creaking stairs. Just as I followed Mr Chorlton out, Mrs Trentfield bustled into the bar for a final tidying-up, saw the Long Man on the counter, and observed cheerfully as she put him back behind the snuff-tins:

‘Well, we do See Life, don't we?'

Three or four weeks later I walked down to the churchyard with Mr Chorlton to see the memorial headstone which, we heard, had been put up on William Hart's grave. It was a still sad day in January, and the village after its brief Saturnalia had gone back to the humdrum routine of sprout-picking. On the way to the churchyard we passed Alfie Perks' smallholding and recognized as we went by the patched breeks of Jaky Jones, the sombre backside of Count Pniack, and the behinds of the five Frolick Virgins-bent over the sprout plants. Alfie in his gumboots went
plop, squelch, plop, squelch
through the mud. No, you certainly wouldn't suspect my people of their turbulence and their wildness and their dreams!

As we approached the lych-gate we met Pru coming out. As usual she was pushing her pram, in which the two tough little babies were happily sucking the paint off a couple of wooden toys which William Hart had carved long ago. The
one baby licked the bowler hat of Jaky Jones, the other was chewing the feet of Joe Trentfield. Pru gave us a modestly downcast glance and a small, grave smile.

We walked across the cut grass to the grave. Betty, Joan and Pru, we understood, had together composed the wording on their father's headstone after days of cogitation and argument. The task could not have been an easy one; for the virtues and vices of William Hart were large ones, which might be chronicled in a whole book but could not baldly be set forth on a stone tablet. But in the end they hadn't made a bad job of it: and with a strict regard for truth and an admirable ecomony of words they had paid their modest tribute to William. ‘Well ... I wonder,' said Mr Chorlton, and we stood before the tombstone and read the lettering on the new stone. It said, briefly and simply: