Brensham Village (14 page)

In fact, as Joe said with his deep guffaw: ‘Judging by the sort of character and references they want before they'll let you keep a pub, you has to be an angel; but as soon as you've got your licence they looks on you as the biggest bloody rogue alive.'

At the time I am writing of, early in the nineteen-thirties, a remarkable change was occurring in the social habits of the villagers. Like most English revolutions it happened gradually and without fuss. It produced the usual grumbles and the usual rhetorical questions about ‘What's the world coming to?' and a few Diehards expressed the opinion that it would ‘lead to immorality' which in social revolutions is always the Diehards' last ditch. I refer to a change in the domestic custom which had started very much earlier in the cities and towns: the women of Brensham began to use the pubs.

Of course, it was no new thing for Joe Trentfield or Jim Hartley to serve women with drinks. There were always a few old crones who were ‘regulars' at one or other of the pubs; these generally drank stout, or, when
the weather was cold, spiced warm beer which set their tongues wagging fourteen to the dozen. The Fitchers and Gormleys, upon their unwelcome seasonal visits, always brought their womenfolk, who added to the horrors of the subsequent free-for-all by their employment of fingernails and hairpins. And there was a great gypsyish woman from Adam's Norton called Shooks who descended upon Brensham most Saturday nights and passed from pub to pub like Billy Butcher, a blowsy unpleasing creature resembling a figure out of Hogarth's gin-palace drawings, whose appearance in the Horse Narrow quenched even Joe Trentfield's earthy sense of fun.

But these women were not typical of Brensham; they formed a class of their own. They were disapproved of, laughed at, or accepted with a shrug of the shoulders as part of the Brensham scene; but they certainly did not set a fashion. They were rather a deterrent to other women. ‘Go boozing in the Horse Narrow and get like old Shooks? Not I!' The village men would not have dreamed of taking their wives, their girls or their daughters to any of the pubs until about 1930. Then a number of factors began to operate which slowly effected the change.

Mimi and Meg may have had something to do with it. They got up a concert-party of young men and girls, and held their rehearsals at the Horse Narrow in the long room next to the bar. Sometimes these rehearsals went on too long, so that the bar was open before the young people had left. The customers would say ‘Give us a song, girls!' and then would buy them a shandy. Gradually it became accepted that Mimi's Girls, as they were called, might be found in the bar at any hour. Their mothers made no great fuss about it; for Mimi and Meg were extremely popular even among those who described them as little hussies, and Mrs Trentfield in spite of her appreciation of a dirty joke
was known to be a motherly person who would see to it that the girls came to no harm.

Certainly the homeliness and the family-party atmosphere of the Horse Narrow did a lot towards breaking down the ancient prejudice against taking wives and sweethearts into bars. Another factor was the example set by the ‘gentry', who had no such prejudice: Mr Chorlton's niece, who stayed with him in the holidays, always came along with the team after cricket-matches and played darts as competently as most of the men; Sir Gerald's wife and his middle-aged sister often accompanied him to the Trumpet; and even the parson's two daughters, only just back from a finishing-school in Switzerland, thought nothing of taking their numerous young men to the Horse Narrow and publicly drinking pints of beer.

Then there was the Mad Lord's daughter. She came down to spend a few weeks with him, one summer holiday, and on the very first morning she went into the Adam and Eve, all alone, leaned on the bar, and asked for a Guinness! We hardly recognized her at first; for since her mother died, ten years previously, she'd been brought up by her aunt. We still remembered her as a pale shy child with long hair rather like Tenniell's pictures of Alice. Now she was up at Oxford - her aunt was paying, we supposed - and she was a tall and beautiful girl with nothing of the Alice-look about her, unless it were in her big and inquisitive grey eyes.

Well, thought the villagers, if the pubs are good enough for the Honourable Jane, they ought to be good enough for our wives; if Parson Mountjoy sees no harm in his daughters drinking pints, maybe we shouldn't object to ours taking a half-pint of shandy. So the social revolution was gradually achieved. What was at first a liberty taken by the gentry, because they stood outside the reach of the usual sanctions, became in the end a liberty indeed. It was no longer the
function of women to sit at home and wait for the men to come back from the pub - wondering apprehensively whether they'd be drunk or sober, good-tempered or bad. The man's world of pubs and darts and evening talk was immeasurably widened, because women also had their place in it.

Brensham, which had its own sense of values about which it was sure and confident, wasn't an easily shockable village. It wasn't at all shocked, for instance, though it was a trifle surprised, when Jane Orris first walked into the Adam and Eve. However, it was certainly put out when young Jane publicly declared that she was a Communist; and the village took a few weeks to see the matter in its proper perspective.

Probably nobody would have minded if only Jane had been concerned; for she belonged to Brensham, she was one of us even though she had learned unfamiliar ways at Oxford, and since the village believed in individualism and stoutly practised it, she could have declared herself a Seventh Day Adventist if she'd liked and nobody would have minded. From the Mad Lord's daughter we expected no less. What shocked us for a little while - nothing shocked us for long - was not Jane but Jane's young men. They came down every weekend and draped themselves upon the bar at the Adam and Eve or the Horse Narrow. They wore long hair and pink ties and very baggy trousers. They preached to us a doctrine which we found difficult to understand in a manner which insulted us. They were bogus and we knew they were bogus. They patronized, and that, in Brensham, was the unforgivable sin.

For instance, they addressed people like Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith and David Groves the permanent-way ganger by their Christian names. The Colonel could do that, and so could Billy Butcher, and both Jane and I could do it because the village had known us since we were children. But when Jane's foolish young men said ‘Have a drink, Jeremy' or ‘Tell us, David, are you really content to go on all the rest of your life working for two pounds a week?' it was a breach of good manners and there was an embarrassing silence before Jeremy excused himself and David made some short non-committal reply.

I don't suppose there was much harm in these drawing-room Bolshies, as the Colonel called them. Mr Chorlton, who was tolerant and wise and who knew a great deal about young men, told us that they reminded him of his own undergraduate days. ‘We called it Aestheticism then, and now they call it Communism; but it's simply growing pains really. Our Aesthetes, most of ‘em, were shooting lions or foxes or fighting in the Boer War a few years later. These Communists will probably be Diehard Tories, God help ‘em, before they reach the age of forty.
Plus ça change'

‘And what about Jane?' I asked him.

He shook his head.

‘She's different. There's something authentic there. It isn't part of the fancy-dress which she's put on with an undergraduate's gown. It isn't academic, at all. She's full of righteousness and burning pity and she wants to go on a Crusade. Isn't she splendid? She warms my old heart. Do you know, I was looking at her the other day and I thought: Suppose she'd been born just over a hundred years ago, and born a man, and she went striding down the High with a pistol in one hand and a poem in the other, whom would you see? The young Shelley.'

We caught a glimpse of that ‘burning pity' in the Horse Narrow one evening soon after Jane came home. It was also the night of the big autumn flood, when the Colonel was nearly drowned; and it was the night when Billy Butcher got more sublimely drunk than I have ever seen him. Mr Trentfield had frequent occasion to remark ‘We do see Life, don't we?' Townsmen who believe that nothing ever happens in the country should have been with us on that first of October.

The evening began quietly enough, with a Cricket Club meeting for the purpose of ‘winding up the accounts for the past season'. I came in late, on my way home from shooting what was probably Lord Orris' only cock pheasant; for he had invited me to walk round his land and get whatever I could of the poacher's leavings. He didn't shoot himself; he hated killing things. So I took him the cock pheasant in the hope that it would be a change from his usual diet of rabbit, though I felt pretty certain that he'd give it away. I was right. He said: ‘How nice of you. And it's the only one you got, in a whole day's walking through the rain? Dear, dear; I feel positively ashamed of inviting you. Those mischievous fellows from Elmbury poach them all, I'm afraid; but I can't find it in my heart to blame them, living in those awful alleys, and unemployed, and with their wives and children hungry, perhaps … And that reminds me. You won't mind, will you - I know you won't mind - if we don't actually eat this exquisite thing ourselves? You see, there's a fellow at the Lodge - he used to be my cowman as a matter of fact in our palmy days - whose daughter's just going to have a baby. It's what they call a mishap, as it happens; she's not married. And that
makes it all the worse for the poor girl, doesn't it? And she's a bit finicky about her food, I'm told; they get like that. So if you
really
wouldn't mind, I'd like to take it along there — as a present
from you
, of course - where it would really be a godsend to the unfortunate child …'

Bless his heart, I watched him stump off in the pouring rain down his weedy drive towards the Lodge, admiring the bird's bright plumage as he carried it, and looking as happy as if somebody had left him ten thousand pounds.

It had been raining all day: the second day running of ceaseless driving rain. I was wet through; but it had given me some satisfaction to reflect that the Syndicate, whose guns were pop-popping all day on the other side of the hill, were probably as wet as I was and a good deal colder, since their pheasants were driven to them and they notoriously sped from stand to stand in their big motor-cars. I walked up the hill as far as the larch plantation and had half a mind to poach it; they were saving it, no doubt, for another shoot tomorrow. However, I was Orris' guest and it would have been ill-manners to my host if I had done so. As far as the Syndicate was concerned I had no compunction.

I got to the cricket-meeting at the usual moment of crisis when Sir Gerald, who was Treasurer at the time, was announcing solemnly:

‘I am sorry to say that I have to report a deficit on the season of twenty-one pounds five and twopence. This is in addition to the overdraft of thirty pounds which we incurred when we bought the motor-mower—'

Mr Chorlton, who could never resist a quotation, and hardly ever failed to add the source of it, said:

‘To owe is a heroic virtue: Rabelais.'

‘Our bank manager,' said Gerald drily, ‘apparently doesn't agree with Rabelais' corollary: that it is a godlike thing to lend.'

Sammy Hunt, getting down to earth, remarked as he did at this juncture every year:

‘We'll have to get up another rummage sale, that's the answer.'

‘And a whist drive and dance,' said Jeremy Briggs.

‘Aye.' Sammy nodded. ‘Alfie will do that, as usual. By the way where
is
our Secretary? I'm sick of keeping the minutes myself.'

Banks said:

‘Perhaps he's still looking for Rexy Perks.'

Brensham had a curious custom of referring to dogs by the surnames of their masters. Almost every villager had his dog and generally took great pride in its ability as a retriever, rabbiter, ratter, badger-baiter, house-guard and so on. So they talked of dogs almost as if they were people: ‘I hear Bengy Briggs has got distemper,' or ‘Rexy Perks has gone all ginger. Alfie must be spraying.'

‘He came along to the station this afternoon,' Banks went on, ‘to say that Rexy was lost. Very upset, Alfie was.'

Billy Butcher in a loud voice suddenly announced: ‘Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware of giving your heart to a dog to tear,' and then giggled. I noticed for the first time that he was very drunk. It had been market day in Elmbury, when the pubs are open all the afternoon.

‘Well,' said Sir Gerald briskly, ‘I think that's all. I'll write to the bank and put their minds at rest. I'll tell them I'll guarantee the excess, if necessary.'

Soon afterwards the meeting ended and we went into the bar. Alfie arrived, apologetic and disconsolate; he'd bicycled almost all the way to Elmbury, looking in vain for Rexy.

‘Nobody ain't seen him,' said Alfie. ‘And that's funny, because everybody knows Rexy.' He added: ‘It's raining helluva hard. The river's rising fast, and no wonder. It's over the meadows at Dykeham.'

‘'Twill be a big flood,' said Sammy Hunt, and launched himself immediately into a story about a flood in the Yellow River. Like all his tales, it had no ending. Broad and long as the great Yangtse itself it flowed majestically on, and while we listened bemused to what was surely the story's climax - for no less than a thousand drowning Chinamen were being borne down towards Sammy's ship - there was the briefest hiatus while Sammy remarked that floods reminded him of droughts and droughts of deserts, and lo, before we realized it we were enmeshed in another story which looked like being even longer. Its scene was set in Arabia, Sammy had gone ashore to shoot quail and he was armed only with a twelve-bore when a party of Bedouins attacked him.