Brensham Village (24 page)

These actions were incomprehensible to the people of Brensham. The taking of fruit, in a district where in good seasons fruit rotted by the ton beneath the trees, had never been regarded as theft; as Joe Trentfield said, you might as well call it a theft when a kid pulls up out of your hedge some wild weeds for his guinea-pigs. The fish which swam in our river were mostly chub, roach, dace and eels: valueless to the gentry, who generally travelled to Scotland to catch salmon or to Hampshire to throw their gossamer lines over the chalk-stream trout. But the chub and roach gave sport to the village boys with their bamboo-rods, and the eels made a stewing for many a poor man when they were in good condition, at the time of the first frosts. Everybody in Brensham had grown up in the certainty that they had a right to wander foot-free along the banks of their own river
with a rod. Now they were not so much angered as shocked by the fact that rich men thought it worthwhile to collect sixpences from boys whose pocket-money was perhaps a penny a week and labourers who lived on one pound ten.

As for the matter of the rabbits, David Groves had always believed that it was part of his duty to keep them down; for their buries spread into the hedges alongside the railway and if they were not checked they colonized the cuttings and the embankments, and might even cause a subsidence on the line. He earned a few pounds each year by selling them; and this he regarded as a right, one of the few ‘perks' he had in his hard life. He was utterly bewildered when the keeper abused him; and he was terrified of the threat of prosecution, for like most men who have always been poor he was mistrustful of the law, and saw it as his enemy. He didn't argue or complain; he knew it was no good. ‘They turned I off,' was all he would say. ‘They chivvied I off as if Td been a good-for-nothing varmint.' He shrugged his shoulders. He couldn't understand it; for now the keepers were trapping and snaring the rabbits, and sending them off to Birmingham market in hampers to sell them at ninepence a couple. David Groves had never imagined that the gentry were interested in rabbits or in fourpence-halfpennies. In the hard rough world as he saw it such trifles were ‘poor men's perks'.

Alfie tried to explain it to him one night in the Adam and Eve.

‘'Tis like this, David. 'Tisn't that they're mean because they're rich, but ‘tother way round: they're rich because they're mean. If you've got a good many thousands and you still think pennies are important, you can be as rich as you like in no time. But luckily for us poor men, most people when they get a few thousands stop bothering about
pennies. If they didn't we'd lose the shirts off our backs before we knew what was happening.'

When we heard that Jane was going to fly to London to wait for favourable weather for her adventure, almost the whole of the village went up to the Manor to see her off. There must have been nearly fifty people in the flat field below the house. There were even two or three strangers, and we learned that these were reporters who had come down from London to interview her father. The Mad Lord's vaguely apologetic greeting had greatly puzzled them: ‘My dear fellow, you can see for yourself that I have no money! If I possessed anything worth taking you should have it and welcome.' It was some time before they realized that he was under the impression that they were bum-baillies or duns.

While Jane said goodbye to each of her friends, kissed Mimi and Meg and Mrs Trentfield, thanked Dai again for his poem, and tried to explain to the reporters that if they stayed the night at the Manor they would probably get nothing to eat, Lord Orris rode round the field on his old mare and tried ineffectually to clear a gaggle of Gormleys out of the path of Jane's take-off. The old man looked very sad. ‘I shall be lonely when she has gone away,' he said. ‘And aeroplanes are horrible things.' With a slight sorrowful smile he added: ‘I am led to understand that Australia positively teems with rabbits. It will be a sort of home from home.'

At the last moment Jane ran back into the house and fetched a small brown paper parcel which she packed into the cockpit. ‘I suddenly thought I'd take Robert with me,' she said. ‘His heart might be a sort of talisman.' Then she
climbed into her little aeroplane and started its engines which crackled so loudly that Rosinante shied - surely for the first time in a dozen years - and Lord Orris was nearly unseated. She waved goodbye, Joe Trentfield and I pulled away the chocks, the wind from the slipstream flattened a long swathe of grass, and the aeroplane began to move forward over the bumpy ground. Everybody cheered as it gathered speed, the last Gormley child scampered out of its way, the tail lifted, the engine thundered and the sun glinted on the bright blue paint as the burnished dragonfly sped along. ‘She's off!' cried Dai Roberts; but suddenly the whole machine lurched sideways, one of the wheels bounced high off the ground and the opposite wing began to plough a long brown furrow through the grass. I heard Mimi scream, and saw a wheel bowling away from the aeroplane like a cricket-ball, one of the wings broke off it, there was a long splintering crash and then silence.

Jane was climbing out of the wreckage when we got there. She was not hurt, except for some scratches on her forehead and nose. But the bright little aeroplane, that a few seconds before had seemed as gay and lively as a bird, now sprawled upon the ground like a dead pheasant crumpled by the sportsman's gun. Its propeller was broken and twisted, its nose was buried in the earth, its wings and its tail lay in tangled heaps about it. Small pieces of torn fuselage were strewn behind it for twenty yards like the aftermath of a paper-chase. It was painfully obvious that it would never fly again.

‘What happened?' we asked; and Jane said in a queer flat voice:

‘It was a rabbit-hole. The starboard wheel caught in a rabbit-hole and she swung out of wind and turned over.'

She began listlessly to pull her suitcase and maps out of the cockpit, and throw them down on the ground. Last of
all she brought out the brown paper parcel. She stared at it, pulled away a corner of the paper, and suddenly smiled.

‘He's broken too,' she said. ‘Oh Lord, I've broken Robert!' She handed me the parcel and I could see through the tear in the corner some fragments of smashed porcelain and a piece of grey rubbery substance which had a faintly aromatic smell.

‘Poor Robert,' said Jane. ‘He wasn't meant to fly.'

Suddenly we heard Dai Roberts shouting loudly:

‘Stop him! Stop him! My bicycle it iss that the man iss riding!'

We looked across the field in the direction of Dai's frantic gesticulations; and saw a man on a bicycle pedalling away furiously along the drive. It was one of the reporters, on his way down to the village to telephone to his newspaper.

But Jane got no headlines next day. There is no news value alas, in ‘record flights' which fail even before they are properly begun.

Even if Jane's fantastic venture had succeeded and she had got to Australia, won ten thousand pounds, and come back to restore the family fortunes like a fairy godmother in the last act of one of Mimi's pantomimes - even so it would have been too late. The year was 1938; and if there was already talk of war in the Adam and Eve and the Horse Narrow there was certainty of war in the banks and in the City. Lord Orris' remaining stocks and shares, which in prosperous times were scarcely enough to secure his overdraft, suffered a sudden depreciation in common with all others. Simultaneously, to people who were in ‘the know', landed property, and particularly agricultural land, began to
appear a most desirable acquisition; for whatever happened estates would not shrink to nothing in consequence of a crisis nor England's green acres melt away in a night. Therefore Lord Orris found himself assailed on both sides suddenly; the bank with reluctance and the Syndicate with eagerness called in their loans and foreclosed on their mortgages. There was nowhere else he could go for money; and so, in May, Orris Manor passed into the hands of the Syndicate at last. With it went the weedy garden, the ruined chapel, the muddy moat, and the Muscovy duck; six smallholdings and five cottages; and fifty acres of rabbit-infested parkland with the numerous families of Fitchers and Gormleys, who were encamped upon it in their caravans, and whom the Syndicate evicted within a week.

But like most tyrants, who grow tired from time to time of the taste of too much power and seek to spice the tedious plateful with a dash of magnanimity, they decided at the last moment to tickle their palates with a titbit of clemency. The Mad Lord might keep the Lodge at the end of the drive, which was occupied by his cowman. A room was prepared for him by the cowman's wife, who had been his parlourmaid in prosperous days; and there, in June, he found his last refuge. The cowman went to work for the Syndicate; but he still found time to milk and tend the Mad Lord's five cows and two calves which grazed in the Home Orchard. These, with the orchard itself and his spavined mare, represented the sum total of Lord Orris' worldly possessions. Nor was he likely to keep them very long; for a heifer belonging to one of his late tenants died in calving and as soon as he heard of it he insisted on sending along his roan calf as ‘a small gift to compensate him for his loss'. The Mad Lord was madder than ever, people said when they heard of it. Yet his madness, if it was indeed that, was of the gentlest kind; his wits had gradually fallen away from him as the
leaves fall from the trees in soft Septembers. His folly was not of grandeur but of poverty; he never imagined himself to be God or Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte or the King or indeed anybody but the debt-ridden penniless Lord Orris whose fortunes had tumbled down about his ears. He spent his declining days riding about the land which had once been his upon his ancient and Rosinantine mare; a beggar on horseback, he nevertheless seemed perfectly contented and continued, out of his dwindling store, to give things away.

‘Contented' is perhaps not strong enough a word; for Lord Orris had found in the evening of his life a new pastime which gave him hours of the most perfect and unclouded happiness. It was a simple, cheap and almost childish pastime; and he found it by accident. Meg Trentfield had achieved her ambition at last and ‘gone into the films': that is to say she stood in a long queue every day at Elstree or Pinewood to await the decision of some minor tycoon whether or not she was required as an extra, and if the decision was favourable she stood about in the studio all day to await a greater tycoon's verdict whether the brief crowd-scene would be ‘shot'. Her sister Mimi, who was a great favourite of Lord Orris', met him one day and described to him in glowing terms this strange and romantic life which her sister was leading; and he said that it was extremely interesting but, for his part, he knew nothing about that kind of thing for he had never been to the pictures. This admission astonished and indeed quite upset Mimi, who went to the pictures at least four times a week; she was as surprised as if someone had told her he had
never ridden in a railway train, as moved as if she had suddenly learned that pit-ponies never see the daylight. She immediately prevailed upon her father to lend her his car, and that very evening took Lord Orris to the cinema at Elmbury. When they got there she was disappointed to find that the film concerned gangsters. ‘I am afraid,' she said to her guest, ‘that it won't be exactly your cup of tea.' Nevertheless, it soon appeared that the film was very much to his taste. He sat up straight and tense in his seat and gripped the sides of it tightly. Several times Mimi heard him gasp with excitement and when the heroine was abducted by the gangsters he sighed with deep despair. When the hero rescued his lady in the nick of time Lord Orris clapped; and when Mimi placed a restraining hand upon his arm at the moment when the shooting started, he clapped louder than ever, and she realized that he was oblivious of her presence and of the audience and indeed of everything except the walking shadows upon the screen. When the show was over and they came out into the daylight he looked exhausted but supremely happy. ‘My dear,' he said, ‘it was wonderful. That splendid detective! But I never thought he would be in time. When those brutes were torturing the girl, I thought it was all up, honestly! And those policemen on motor-bikes, actually
shooting
at sixty miles an hour. So clever of them. And the brave man who jumped on to the moving train … wonderful, wonderful.' Thus he chattered happily all the way home.

Mimi had a very kind heart; and to give so much pleasure, as she said, was a pleasure in itself. She took Lord Orris to the pictures almost every week; so that Joe teased her and called him her new boyfriend. He did not seem to mind what kind of picture he saw. His appreciation was catholic and unselective. Galloping cowboys would make him cheer, star-cross'd lovers sometimes even moved him to
weep, he roared with laughter at the comics and whistled the catchy tunes out of the musicals. The only films which he did not thoroughly enjoy were the Walt Disneys, which he thought were too much like real life. This amazed Mimi, who took great pains to explain to him that they were phantasies; but soon she discovered that in this matter they spoke a different language. The nightclubs, gilded restaurants, cocktail bars and Fifth Avenue apartments which she believed to be Real Life, or at least a desirable extension of the Real Life she knew at present, represented for Lord Orris the palaces of fairyland. The lives, the behaviour, and the motives of the characters on the screen were so completely unrelated to anything within his experience that he was able - indeed he was compelled - to regard them as figures in a fairytale, whereas the deliberate parables of Walt Disney were comprehensible and sometimes even painful in their reality.

But of the fairytale, the gorgeous and enthralling fairytale of gangsters and detectives and Nightclub Queens and Dance Band Leaders and Poor Little Rich Girls, Lord Orris never tired. Sometimes, when Mimi was unable to take him, he even went to the pictures alone, riding into Elmbury upon his old grey mare which he stabled at the Swan and standing in the queue with the schoolboys (who were not more excited than he was) to pay his ninepence for a cheap seat. Before long he could recite as accurately as Mimi and Meg the names and the hierarchies and even the matrimonial complexities of most of the inhabitants of the Hollywood fairyland; and in their honour he rechristened his four cows Ginger Rogers, Bette Davies, Mae West and Myrna Loy.