Brensham Village (26 page)

Sammy puffed slowly at his pipe and said at last:

‘Would such a transaction be legal?'

‘Perfectly legal, sir.'

‘Would it be regarded - in a business sense - as honest?' Sammy smiled.

‘Perfectly. We should describe it as - er - normal business practice.'

Old Sammy got up and his smile faded.

‘I am getting on in age,' he said, ‘and if my neighbours
have any esteem for me as you suggest they have it is because I have tried during a fairly long life to act straight. In other words I haven't indulged in what you call normal business practice. Take that answer to your masters; and tell them we are honest men in Brensham.'

‘- Of Interest to Speculators and Others'

The lawyer duly turned up in the saleroom at the Swan Hotel in Elmbury, and after some brisk bidding the farm was knocked down to him for four thousand pounds. In spite of the imminence of war, agricultural land was still fairly cheap in the district; and the farm was a good bargain at the price.

‘For a client …' said the lawyer when the auctioneer asked for the purchaser's name. Sammy, whose code of honour was a very strict one, had not yet told his tale; and he still kept his own counsel, for the lawyer might have many clients. But a month later we saw an advertisement in the local paper offering the farm for re-sale by private treaty. The advertisement was headed: ‘Ripe for Development.' We knew then for sure what we had already guessed: that the Syndicate had come down off the hill and gained a footing in Brensham.

Close of Play - Brensham by Post - Brief Homecoming - Good Correspondents - The Fire - Hearts-ease in the Horse Narrow

And Now I must write of Brensham mainly from hearsay, for on the second of September we played our last cricket-match and early next day I went off to the war.

It may have been our last match of all upon the square smooth Brensham ground; for the field had been part of the Colonel's farm - he had let us have it rent free - and the astute Syndicate had made a quick re-sale. An aircraft factory, recently built near Elmbury, was growing almost as fast as the mushrooms were in the muggy autumn weather; a site was needed for its ‘satellite' which would manufacture small components. The Syndicate took a profit of two thousand pounds which perhaps they patriotically invested in aircraft shares. While we played our last game, lorries full of drainpipes were already trundling past the cricket-field along a new cinder road.

It was a curious, uncomfortable match, and I had a sharp sense of unreality even when I was batting: for once it
didn't seem to matter if one hit the ball or missed it. We played four short and without our captain; for Sammy Hunt, at the age of sixty-one, had gone back to sea. Billy Butcher during the morning had got very drunk in the Horse Narrow; and at closing-time, dismally reciting Housman, he had gone off to Elmbury to ‘list for a soldier. Banks was busy and important in his police-station, where the telephone rang all day. And for the first time in anybody's memory Alfie had drawn the pubs in vain for ‘the boys'.

So we lost handsomely and without much minding. We packed away our bats and pads as carelessly as if they had been the impedimenta of a past life which we were now for ever leaving, hurried to the Horse Narrow for a last drink with Joe and Mrs Trentfield and the girls, and then I drove back to Elmbury to do my packing.

Thenceforth for many months I heard only scraps of news of Brensham in frequent letters from Mr Chorlton and occasional ones from Alfie, Joe and Mimi.

The unlucky Trumpet had another new tenant. She was an old woman with a considerable beard who greatly resembled the Witch of Endor, and she had quarrelled with most of her customers including Jeremy Briggs, who had sworn he would never enter the Trumpet again while she was alive. Jim Hartley had been recalled to the Guards and had been unable to make his old uniform come together across his great belly. The Adam and Eve was being rethatched, but the thatcher had been called up and Bardolph had taken on the job. He was no sooner up on the roof than he grew thirsty and descended to the bar; he'd been at the
task four months already and had drunk three hogsheads of beer.

Mimi in a round childish hand wrote: ‘His lordship I'm afraid is growing very old and feeble. Ginger Rogers has had a calf.' She told me that; Jane had joined the ATA and was flying aeroplanes from the factories to the RAF. The Fitchers and Gormleys had picked upon the Horse Narrow for their usual Christmas melée and had broken a lot of glasses which were difficult to replace in wartime …

A few weeks later I had a letter from Alfie addressed in that awkward painstaking copper-plate style which gave me a nostalgic reminder of his familiar cricket postcards: ‘You have been selected to play against Woody Bourton at Brensham on Saturday next the fourteenth at 2.30 sharp.'
You have been selected
- as if we ever had the luxury of making a choice, as if we shouldn't have to bribe and browbeat ‘the boys' on Saturday morning to fill the last three places in the team! But this year there would be no cricket.

Alfie had laboriously scratched out with a spluttering pen what must have seemed to him a very long letter. He told me that the blossom was coming on well and everybody was crossing their fingers and praying there wouldn't be a frost. Rexy had killed three rats under the poultry-house. Alfie's two boys had gone into the Tank Corps and he would have a job to manage without them.

Then I heard from Joe. The new woman at the Trumpet had suddenly died, and Jeremy Briggs on the following morning had marched into the bar as bold as brass and ordered a quart of beer. Now the place had yet another new landlord; his wife was florid, flirtatious and red-haired and was already known, said Joe, as the Strumpet. As for the Horse Narrow, the bar on most nights was full of Landgirls. They sang songs, and Meg played the piano, and sometimes a few soldiers came in and then there were great goings on.
It was nice, in wartime, to see people having a bit of Fun.

Then, after Dunkirk, I heard how the war's lengthening shadows began to reach out towards Brensham at last. A training aeroplane had crashed in the Summer Leasow and Banks had to guard it all night. Jim Hartley had come back from France looking as if he had been on a ceremonial parade, his buttons all polished and not a speck of dirt on his boots. He had lost three stone; but Mrs Hartley was feasting him on such a gargantuan scale that he looked like getting them back before his leave ended. The Local Defence Volunteers prowled the hill at night armed with pikes and shotguns. Soon they were rechristened the Home Guard, and Joe Trentfield became their captain. ‘He makes us run about like schoolboys,' wrote Mr Chorlton. ‘To think how I used to watch with Olympian amusement the sweaty antics on field days of the school OTC!'

His next letter told me:

‘Billy Butcher was killed during the Retreat. Perhaps he found at last the means of escape from himself which neither whisky nor the Groupers nor Sally Doan could give him. Sally has just had a baby. She will be happy, I think; for the memory of a dead hero is a more comfortable companion than ever poor Billy could have been.'

In the late autumn I came home on embarkation leave and spent one day of it walking on the hill with Mr Chorlton. It was a wet and blowy day, the last of October, and there was doubt and insecurity in the air. As we came down the slope of Orris Park I looked about me and saw the season guttering down into black winter. In the Manor drive my feet
scuffled through the dead-leaf-drifts and the air was full of spinning and whirling leaves. The gale snuffed the yellow elms like candles; a little warmth seemed to go out of the landscape as the colours faded from each tree.

The usual desolate fields of sprouts filled the gaps between the sepia orchards. The scene was Brensham's familiar autumn scene, a mixture of dull-green and dirty-brown, but two isolated splashes of bright colour curiously relieved it. Close to the village there was a tawny acre of feathery asparagus-tops which looked like a field afire; and upon Alfie's holding there was a patch of purple cabbage which caught the pale rays of the sinking sun and glowed reddish-bronze. So, I thought, in this winter of our discontent the light and the fire glows stubbornly in our hearts amid the darkness and the desolation!

Mr Chorlton was telling me about the Home Guard and the knives and the pikes they expected to use against the Germans, who would come, we all believed, as soon as the Channel lay still. But the village below us looked, as it always did, snug and secure against wind and weather and whatever else might befall. Mr Chorlton broke off his discourse on the correct methods of noiseless assassination and said: ‘I do love our houses, John; they look as if somebody had poured a thick brown sauce all over them' - and, of course, he quoted:

‘“If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grew to be old—”'

and then, falling suddenly grave, he said: ‘But thatch is no good against bombs and bullets. My God, how the place would burn!'

I felt unhappy and a bit frightened, because I was going off next week to a faraway battle, I didn't know where. I
said: ‘I wonder if it'll still be here, when I come back,' and Mr Chorlton shrugged his shoulders: ‘God knows.'

More letters: single ones reaching me at long and irregular intervals and out of chronological order, batches piled up to await me at the base, peripatetic letters which arrived a year late after travelling halfway round the world, stained and dirty and sweaty letters which had been stuffed into a pocket and forgotten because they came in the middle of a battle …

Mimi has married a Pole. Alfie's eldest boy is missing in Libya. David Groves is getting to look very old and ill, he ought to have retired long ago but the railway is short of men, almost every hour the troop-trains and the munition-trains go thundering through Brensham station. The Home Guard had a report of suspicious noises in the night and surrounded the larch plantation; but all they found was a badger in one of the Syndicate's steel traps.

The Trumpet is full of Canadian soldiers flirting with the landlord's wife. It turns out that Mimi's Pole is a Count; so she is a Countess. He cannot speak much English. His name is Pniack, and if you pronounce it wrong he corrects you: ‘P silent'. This always sends Joe into fits of laughter. Meg is in Ensa and does a song-and-dance act of her own ever so nice.

Alfie has taken on three landgirls. They're helluva good-looking but they quickly gets the backache dibbling in the beans. The plums were very bad last year: just when there would have been a good sale for them at a decent price. But that's the way it is.

Mr Chorlton is a Corporal in the Home Guard, but
Jeremy Briggs is a Sergeant. Wouldn't care to be a Hun if Jeremy got those great awful hands and steely fingers round the back of my neck! How he reminds me of Hopkins' Felix Randal: ‘
at the random grim forge, powerful amid peers, Didst fettle for the great grey dray horse his bright and battering sandal!'

Sir Gerald is a very sick man, and his arthritis keeps him to the house in the winter weather. He has rigged up his bird-table at last, with an automatic camera which is supposed to take a picture every time a bird alights on the top of the table; but of course it doesn't work.

Sammy Hunt arrived unexpectedly in the village wearing a borrowed khaki battledress. ‘The sods had the cheek to sink me,' he said. He roared with laughter. ‘The so-and-sos gave me a cold swim.'

Mrs Doan, who is mentally incapable of filling in forms, says she is going to give up the Post Office and the Grocery. ‘I had a good schooling,' she snivels, ‘honest I did, sir, but them dratted papers makes my head go swimey every time I looks at them, so's I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels!'

Mimi's going to have a baby. Brensham hasn't had a bomb yet nearer than five miles, though the Heinkels go over every night on their way to the Midlands.

They've cut down the tall elm trees in the Summer Leasow where the Colonel's herons built their nests. Funny how often we find ourselves thinking and talking of the Colonel. He was one of those rare spirits which live on in the memories of everyone who knew them. Mimi and Meg regularly tend his grave in the churchyard. Charming of them, and unexpected; but the Nymphs, of course, always worshipped Proteus, didn't they?

Hitler was over again last night. No bombs here, but it was helluva noisy.

Haunted and hounded by Forms, which have turned her hair grey and frayed her nerves and finally driven her into a state near to persecution mania, Mrs Doan is convinced that every stranger in the village is an Inspector from the Ministry of Food.

Now that the Japs have come in Sir Gerald has gone off to Burma. He received a telegram and left hurriedly next day. He looked a very sick man, hardly up to the journey. He wouldn't tell us what he was going to do; but he said to one of the village children, who asked him if he'd be back for the bird-nesting: ‘The King's got a job for me. It may take a longish time.'

Pistol, Bardolph and Nym have all been prosecuted for taking mushrooms from a field which belongs to the Syndicate. Their defence was ingenious. ‘They were only bluelegs, your Worship.' General Bouverie: ‘Do the police confirm that?' The policeman did: they had five pounds of bluelegs in their basket. General Bouverie: ‘I understand that blueleg is an edible fungus called
Tricholoma personatum
. It is never cultivated and I doubt if it can properly be called a mushroom. Case dismissed.'

The Pershore plums has been helluva good; but I've got nurn on my Vies.
*

There's a rumour that Sir Gerald was sent to Burma to advise about the blowing up of some dams which he'd built himself in 1920. Nothing very definite or certain about him, but a story that he stayed behind pottering with the fuses and refused to leave when the engineers did, but stood and watched the unharnessed waters roaring into freedom from the prison where he had confined them years ago.