Brensham Village (19 page)

Still Alfie couldn't believe that the destruction was complete and absolute. He ran about his land in panic, he told us afterwards with his familiar grin, trying to find some sheltered or shady place which the groping fingers of the frost had failed to reach. But there was none; and last of all he went to his strawberry bed, which he had covered the night before, and took off the straw, and began to pull open the tight-green flower-buds. Almost every one was brown and shrivelled. There was nothing left anywhere, nothing at all.

At noon Alfie went down to the Horse Narrow. It was unusually full, for nobody felt much like working and in any case the Horse Narrow was a sort of village club in which men tended to gather at times of crisis. Several of the fruitgrowers had brought with them grisly exhibits; twigs of plum, apple and cherry upon which, as upon Alfie's, every little embryo was spoiled. Some of these twigs bore a greater number of berries than anybody could remember having seen before; Sammy Hunt counted seventy-three on a branch only fifteen inches long. (That would be something to remember, something to tell a tale about in after years!) Even as the branch lay upon Joe Trentfield's counter every berry withered and went brown. Somebody pointed out a small green caterpillar crawling sluggishly among the leaves. ‘Still alive! The frost killed the plums, but it didn't kill ‘ee!' Alfie grinned. ‘I reckon he's welcome to what he
can get, now; there's nowt left that matters to us, on any of the trees.'

Joe had an exhibit of his own. ‘Come and look at my garden,' he said. Mrs Trentfield served teas in the garden to summer visitors, and Joe had planted a large number of geraniums, stocks, and tulips ‘to make the place look cheerful'. Now Joe, as we have seen, was remarkably casual, haphazard, and happy-go-lucky in his conduct of the business and in his dealings with his customers. His gloriously untidy bar was Liberty Hall. But in his gardening, and only in his gardening, the Regimental Sergeant-Major appeared. His flowerbeds were laid out like a barrack square; and Joe couldn't abide the slightest irregularity in the rows nor any sign of indiscipline among their occupants. If any plant showed a tendency towards individuality or waywardness he ruthlessly cut it back. Intruders upon the parade ground he fell upon as if they had been defaulters. The flowers in his garden must always be dressed by the right, numbered, sized, proved and properly covered off. ‘No talking in the rear rank!' you could imagine Joe telling them.

This morning, in consequence, Joe's garden presented an astonishing sight. The black frost's sabre had mown down all the rows with neatness and symmetry. A regiment of tulips had kept their dressing even as they fell; two companies of stocks, having formed square had fallen in that same formation, displaying the discipline of Guards; a platoon of geraniums still held their ground and gallantly remained standing though the blackened head of each one drooped as if the scimitar had passed with deadly precision along their unwavering line.

‘All that work for nothing!' said Joe. ‘The work of weeks destroyed in a night!'

‘Ah well,' said Alfie with a grin. ‘They died with their boots clean, Joe.'

Back in the bar Joe bought a round of drinks; and Sammy Hunt began to tell a story which no one had heard before, concerning a frost of remarkable severity he had endured in Alaska. This was unfamiliar territory to Sammy's listeners; and some wondered, though none dared to ask, what brought his tramp-steamer trading there. However, Sammy told his tale with great verisimilitude and as usual in minute detail.

‘To cut a long story very, very short, we were getting hungry because the pemmican was frozen so solid that you could scarcely break it with a lumberman's axe; so we tried to cut a hole in the ice of the lake, to see if we could get some fish. Well, believe it or not, every time we dropped our lines in it froze up pronto, so that we couldn't pull the lines out and lost our precious hooks—'

Alfie interrupted the story to buy another round; then Briggs bought one, then Billy Butcher; for there was nothing to be done about the blasted orchards, and a catastrophe so profound deserved some sort of celebration. They drank grimly at first, as a beaten army drinks to its defeat; but soon they began to recollect as they stood around the bar the good seasons and the bad, the fat years that had made them rich, the lean ones that had nearly ruined them. They could laugh, now, about some of the disasters that had attended them in the past; and they knew, being market-gardeners and therefore philosophers, that some time hence they would be able to laugh at this one. ‘Ten years ago,' mused Alfie, ‘I built great bonfires all round my orchards; twenty quid it cost me, and I thought, now let the blessed frost come and I shall be the only man in the district with a crop worth picking. But there wasn't no frost that year, and there was so many plurns that it wasn't worth sending them to market. I let my bonfires stand; and next year, as you'll recollect, there came a nasty frost one night at the end of
April. I sensed it coming. The wind was in the east; so I lit the bonfires on the east side of my orchards and went to bed. About midnight, when I was fast asleep, the wind changed; and it froze like billy-o from the north-west. I lost all my plums; and the only good my bonfires did was to save a tuppeny-hapenny patch of gooseberries in a garden on the other side of the road owned by an old bitch called Mrs Parsons who I hated. Very grateful was Mother Parsons' - Alfie grinned - ‘next Christmas she sent me a very small bottle of green gooseberry wine.'

Each had his tale of great frosts in years long past. The Colonel told how in 1895 the severe weather lasted from January to the end of March: ‘You could still feel the bone in the ground,' he said, ‘when you came to get the soil ready for planting your peas and beans.' Briggs remembered a season when April snow had come simultaneously with April blossom, so that from the hilltop you could scarcely tell which was which. Sammy had a story of the song-thrush frozen to her nest in a ‘silver thaw' at the end of March. Joe Trentfield called to mind old Jacob Grindley, ‘the meanest, miserablest old miser as ever lived at Brensham', who was the first, man in the district to own a wireless crystal-set and who therefore was able to get a later weather forecast than anybody else. He couldn't abide to think of his neighbours sharing this information free-gratis-and-for-nothing and if you met him in the evening and asked him: ‘Is it going to freeze, Mr Grindley?' he'd tell you:' I dunno. The wireless wouldn't work. I couldn't get anything out of it but squeaks and groans' - but ten minutes later you'd see him hurrying towards his strawberry-bed's with a boltin of straw.

‘I minds him doing that,' said Alfie. ‘He saved his strawberries and I lost all my plums. Come to think of it, I'd just had my ladders mended that year too! Seems it's
unlucky to mend your ladders till you sees the fruit on the trees!'

‘Ah well, Alfie,' said the Colonel wisely, ‘if there's anything Jack Frost teaches us it's this: ‘tis no use looking up into the trees for your rent. Where you've got to get it from is down
here
' - he pointed with his stick at the ground— ‘and what you get up top is just perks.'

‘That's the way it is,' said Alfie with a shrug. It was nearly closing-time, and he made his way home, had his midday bait, and spent an hour or two tidying up the Missus' garden. Then he took his two sons out on to the land and went to work with a will in the hot sunshine which mocked the blasted trees; he set one of them to hoeing between the bean-rows, the other to skimming off a frosted crop of peas, and he himself began to plant out another batch of lettuces.

‘For that's where your profits come from,' he told his boys. ‘Out of the ground.'

But not every man who owned an orchard or a few plumtrees was also a market-gardener. As Mr Chorlton drily put it, the trouble with most of the people of Brensham was that they had all their egg-plums in one basket. One season's dead loss might not indeed ruin them; but it meant hard times for all, especially as it came at a time of agricultural unemployment and trade depression.

As if to emphasize the mutability of human fortunes and the fond frailty of human hopes, the sun shone throughout the rest of May and the warm nights brought with them the merest zephyrs from the soft south. These infinitesimal winds, which faintly stirred the branches of apple and plum, were sufficient nevertheless to dislodge a steady
shower of small brown withered berries. Obedient to Newton's Third Law, they fell with a gentle patter, as of summer rain, to the ground.

‘Allegorical it iss,' said Dai Roberts Postman, ‘for what are man's dreams but shrivelled husks when God in His wisdom iss moved to nip them in the bud?' And for many days he relieved the monotony of his round by composing an allegorical poem entitled ‘The Chastisement of Nature Upon the Wanton Prodigality of her Children'.

This, however, was little comfort to Brensham. During the weeks following the frost the village like a broken army after battle learned of its casualties one by one. Alfie, it seemed, would be five hundred pounds down on his year's trading; for he had sprayed and he had ploughed, spent a lot of money on artificial manure, bought extra equipment and a new horse. Now he would have to borrow money from the bank and struggle hard to keep his head above water until next season. All the other market-gardeners were heavy losers, and the Colonel, whose farm included forty acres of orchard, was reputed in spite of his private means to be in a bad way. Lord Orris would almost certainly be unable to pay his mortgage interest when it became due; and even the cottages such as David Groves were hard hit, for many of them counted on their plums or apples for the money they needed to buy and feed the pig which they hoped to kill at Christmas.

It was the first summer in any man's memory during which not a single pot of plums left Brensham station; generally, at the peak of the season, the railway company ran a special train every night. Whereas a score of ‘little men' would normally sell their fruit for, say, twenty-five or fifty pounds, and two-score owners of bigger orchards might get seventy or a hundred, this year nobody received a penny. The total loss ran into thousands; and that meant
that Mrs Doan sold less groceries, the pubs sold less beer, and almost everybody in the village - and in Elmbury as well - was directly or indirectly affected. One of the first casualties was the poor little landlord of the Trumpet. He was sold up in August, and another optimist reigned in his stead.

To make matters worse there was a bad slump in onions, a crop which was another of Brensham's staples. Early in the season the market-gardeners had been offered as much as seventy pounds an acre. They refused the offer because they had plenty of labour to fork them up and bundle them and send them to market; they thought they'd make more that way, and they needed all they could make. But the day before the first batch was ready the foreign onions began to arrive and ‘the bottom fell out of the market' suddenly. The price was 2½
d
a dozen bundles. When he heard the news Alfie went home and did a long complicated sum - he wasn't very good at sums, he frequently licked his blunt pencil and added up the figures several times but he was always right in the end - and when he had finished he discovered that it was
costing
him 2½
d
a dozen bundles to get the onions out of the ground.

So he grinned and shrugged his shoulders and ploughed in the crop which, a few weeks before, had been worth two hundred pounds.

‘In times of scarcity,' he said, ‘you're broke because you ain't got nowt to sell; in times of plenty you're broke because you can't sell what you've got. It's helluva puzzling!'

I was away for most of the summer; and when I came back in September, and played in the last cricket-match of the
season, I found the village still talking about the Great Frost. The shadow of the disaster remained upon Brensham. Lord Orris, I was told, stood nearer than ever before to bankruptcy; nevertheless he had refused to accept his Michaelmas rent from any man who relied wholly or partly on fruit for his living. All the tenants, well knowing his straits, had saved, stinted and even borrowed to pay him in full on the day of the Audit; but the Mad Lord, who employed no agent and who received his rent in person over a glass of cider in his chilly morning-room which the duns had ransacked until it was practically bare, had waved them away with a courteous gesture of refusal.

‘My dear fellow, you will only embarrass me if you insist. The cruel frost robbed us all; but if I exacted from you a rental for which you have received nothing in return, I should be a robber too. I shall manage somehow, I assure you; my needs are very small. Next year, perhaps, you will all make a fortune: and I, who have done nothing to deserve it, will share in your good luck.'

They told me this story in the Horse Narrow, after cricket, where Sammy Hunt was still comparing Brensham's frost with that of Alaska.

‘I'm not leg-pulling,' I heard him say, ‘though you may find it difficult to believe me when I tell you that it was downright dangerous - on account of the risk of frost-bite - to attempt to obey the ordinary, trivial calls of nature—'

Alfie was in the pub, and Mr Chorlton, Briggs and Banks and David Groves; but there were very few of the labouring men, and those whom I saw were more inclined to drink half-pints of cider than pints of beer. Mr Chorlton told me that he had started what he called ‘a small semi-private fund' to aid any cottager who might be unable to afford his usual Christmas pig. ‘A sort of unofficial pig club,' he said. ‘We provide feeding-stuffs on credit, and things like that.'

I asked who were the officers of this philanthropic body.

‘Oh, myself, and the Colonel, and Sammy and Lord Orris and Sir Gerald and Joe and Briggs and one or two more—'