Portrait of Elmbury (21 page)

Jerry was one of their company; but Dorrie's gentle hands held him on a pair of reins, and I thought that with luck he'd weather the bad times, while Demon's sure-footed jumping would save him from breaking his neck. He would often lend me a horse, and it was generally a good one, but if hounds ran fast I would never see much of Jerry. He rode always a little way from the huntsman; and if the huntsman took a toss you would hear Jerry's clear voice calling the hounds on to the line.

I enjoyed my hunting, and it is something I am glad to remember and glad I had the chance of doing, though I don't think I shall ever want to do it again. It seems to me now somewhat too elaborate a way of doing to death a rather pleasing little animal. But it has many merits, not the least of which is that it teaches a lot of people to know the countryside far better and far more intimately than they would otherwise do. Of course there is a lot of nonsense talked in its defence. We are told that it is necessary for the purpose of “keeping down foxes” whereas, of course, what it does is to preserve foxes while to a certain extent
controlling them; that it “creates employment,” which indeed it does by using up a lot of man-hours quite unproductively and smashing a lot of fences which the farmer's men have to mend; and that it is very “democratic,” whatever that may mean.

This is a very curious claim to make for a sport or ceremony —it is a bit of both—which automatically divides its followers into two classes: those who can afford to ride and those who can't. Yet I suppose fox-hunting is “democratic” in one respect, for it cuts clean across all the customs and traditions relating to private property. Its defenders never attempt to make this point; perhaps they dare not; but it is a fact that there is an aspect of fox-hunting which is not so much democratic as anarchic. Boundaries, fences, gates, all the great and little walls which man erects against man, mean nothing whatever to the fox-hunter. It doesn't matter whether he rides on a five-hundred-guinea horse, pedals a bicycle, or goes on foot: if he is following the hounds he will ignore your “Trespassers will be prosecuted” board, enter your orchard, wander at will about your fields, go crashing through your plantations, and even invade your back garden. He is the despair of keepers; for the most notorious poacher, if the hounds are near, will claim the right to loaf about at the covertside. The veriest ragamuffin, discovered in a lord's most sacred preserves, will have a good answer to the question, “What right have you got here?” if he can say, “Following the hounds, sir.” For it is a poor man's right as well as a rich man's; and it is indeed a right, and a very ancient one, for there is no offence in trespass unless damage is done, and trespassers cannot be prosecuted under English law. Fox-hunting reminds us of our old rights and confirms them; it also provides us with a useful remedy against such as lock their gates and deny access to their land. For if a landlord in a hunting country fails to welcome the hounds, with all their rag-tag-and-bobtail followers, then woe betide him. There are social sanctions more powerful far than economic or legal ones.

So I suggest that the sport is essentially anarchic, though it is practised by those who most fear anarchy. On the flimsy excuse that a small red animal has run through your garden a crowd of
scarlet-coated men, fierce women, and half the loafers of the nearest town will appear upon your lawn, and if by chance the terrified creature has taken refuge in your chimney they will establish themselves in a circle round your domain whence you will not easily dislodge them. Indeed unless you take the firmest stand against them they will attack your house with crowbars and pull it down brick by brick until they have achieved their strange desire, which is to tear the little creature limb from limb. Having done so, and the demoniac frenzy having left them, they will assume once more their normal and respectable characters, Lord X, Lady Y, Sir Lionel Z, Mr. A the chartered accountant, his daughter Polly, and Mr. B who keeps the sweet shop in the village. They will apologise most politely for any trouble they have caused you, smile charmingly, and take off their hats to you as they ride away down the road.

It was out hunting that I encountered again that roguish, gnomish, remarkable man whom I first saw through the Tudor House window when I was a child: “the Colonel,” whom I had since discovered lived at Brensham, where he had a small farm. “Encountered” is the right word; for Jerry had put me on a horse which was too fresh for me, and it was running away with me down a steep lane on Brensham Hill when I met the Colonel coming up on foot. I did the best I could to avoid him, but the horse was going too fast; the sharp toe of my hunting-boot caught him right in the midriff and he collapsed with a loud grunt on the ground.

As soon as I had stopped the obstreperous horse I rode back to apologise. The Colonel had picked himself up, and if you can imagine an infuriated gnome you will understand how truly formidable he looked. I approached him timidly and penitently, hat in hand. He was making a loud spluttering noise which was not recognisable as speech. His long walrus moustaches bristled; his little blue eyes were popping out of his head; his face was
purple, bright purple as a Victoria plum, and yet it had also a sort of pallor of rage which was rather like the bloom on a plum.

“I'm most awfully sorry-” I began; but that was as far as I got. If I was timid, my horse was thoroughly scared. It took one look at the Colonel, flexed its ears, and shied; then, seizing the bit between its teeth, it spun round in the lane and galloped back madly down the hill.

A few days afterwards I met the Colonel again in the Swan bar.

It was just before noon. The bar was empty and I settled myself in a chair in the corner with a pint of beer and
The Times
which happened to be lying on one of the tables. A moment later the Colonel entered. He took off his battered deerstalker, hung it up on a peg behind the door, and advanced towards the bar. He caught sight of me, his bright blue eyes stared angrily, he took three purposeful steps in my direction.

“Sir,”
he said. “
Are you aware that you are sitting in my seat?”

I hastily apologised—he was really a very terrifying old gentleman—and moved to a neighbouring chair. He grunted, ordered a whisky, and sat down. I thought I would placate him, and show deference to his grizzled hairs. I folded up
The Times
.

“Would you care to read the paper, Sir?” I said.

He glared at me. His moustache twitched. He looked as if he were about to spring, as if he would leap over table, chairs, whisky and all to assault me.

“It is for that purpose, Sir,”
he said in a dreadful voice, “
that I order it to be delivered here every morning.”

I was utterly abashed. I passed him the paper with mumbled apologies and tried to hide myself behind my beer. He was indeed a terrible and a wonderful old man; and I couldn't help admiring his gesture in having the paper delivered to the pub, where after all he spent half his time. (The other half was spent in the pursuit
of various animals, birds, and fishes, during which
The Times
would have been an encumbrance.)

I became aware that he was staring at me over the top of his paper. I felt very frightened indeed; but as he slowly lowered the paper I perceived that his extraordinary face was undergoing a metamorphosis. A thousand wrinkles appeared all over it, as if a catspaw of wind blew across the sea. His blue eyes disappeared between folds of red weather-beaten skin. His turkey-cock neck shook and quivered. I suddenly realised that he was laughing. Out of his open mouth came suddenly such clear and merry laughter as I had never heard before, such laughter as the Greeks called Ionian laughter which matched the mirth of the Ionian springs. It was rare and beautiful and unexpected laughter and I was entranced as I had been entranced by his mischievous grin, some fifteen years before through the nursery window.

“God damn it, my boy,” said the Colonel, “what a bloody old fool I am. Let's have a drink!”

I shall have much more to say about this remarkable Colonel, but first I must describe his habitat, which was the Swan Bar.

Every country town has a bar like the Swan, but you will not find such a place in any city or suburb or village. It belongs absolutely to the small market town. It isn't a “local,” in the sense that villages and city streets have their “local”; it has a different atmosphere altogether. It isn't “commercial” and travellers avoid it like the plague. It isn't a stopping-place for motorists. And it certainly isn't a smart cocktail-bar.

You could call it a kind of Town Club; but people belong to it who would never be elected to any respectable club, and many good clubmen are made so unwelcome that they stay away. It is not class-conscious in any ordinary sense; and yet one has the feeling that the people who regularly go there do represent a class. I cannot put a label to the class; I can only tell you who were the regulars in the Swan about 1930.

There was the Colonel; and he was certainly the Chairman, for he was the only one who possessed, as it were by prescriptive right, his own chair. There were two of his especial cronies, a genial fat lawyer called Johnnie Johnson and a merry little “gentleman-farmer” called Badger Brown. There was Mr. Chorlton. There was Mr. Brunswick the haberdasher, Men's and Women's Sana in Corpore Sano. There was the Mayor. There was his most active political opponent, a cobbler called Anderson. There were two or three more Town Councillors; a tailor; a jobbing carpenter; a pensioned sergeant-major; a retired gardener. There was Mr. Tempest, the bank manager; Mr. Rendcombe, the editor of the
Elmbury Intelligencer and Weekly Record
; and Mr. Benjamin, a bookie, a Jew, and a good fellow who was generally in trouble with the police. And there was an idle little ruffian called Sparrow who ran illicit errands for Mr. Benjamin, poached, and was reputed to be a dog-stealer. He lived in a caravan surrounded by ramshackle kennels full of barking and whimpering mongrels, which he had the impertinence to call the Sparrow Dog Farm.

These fifteen or so constituted the usual company at the Swan in the evening. There were others who dwelt as it were on the fringe; and of course there were occasional visitors, though strangers were not as a rule very welcome.

Now I cannot for the life of me tell you what it was that these members of the inner circle had in common. It wasn't class in the usual meaning of the word; for there were gentry, tradesmen and working-men. It wasn't politics, for the Mayor was a Diehard and the cobbler was a Red. It wasn't money or the lack of it; for the lawyer and Mr. Benjamin were both rich men, whereas the cobbler, the sergeant-major and the gardener were comparatively poor. It wasn't respectability, for Mr. Benjamin notoriously kept two mistresses and Mr. Sparrow occasionally went to prison. And it wasn't disreputableness, for Mr. Chorlton was a Justice of the Peace and the Mayor was a Churchwarden.

Yet the company was homogeneous: so much so that if you entered the bar as a stranger you felt as if you had barged by mistake into a private room which had been hired for an annual
reunion of old schoolfellows. And the longer you remained there, the more of an alien you would feel. These men of Elmbury didn't
mean
to be unwelcoming; they were kindhearted and friendly people. But because they were knit into so close a fellowship—by what mysterious bond I have never really discovered— they simply could not help appearing to a stranger to be a kind of secret society into which he had intruded.

And yet there was nothing sinister about their strangely-assorted companionship. They didn't, as you might imagine, order the affairs of Elmbury from the Swan bar. No council confidences were shared there. No tradesmen's secret deals were done there. No scandal was spread. The conversation of the Swan regulars was singularly innocent and inoffensive; being concerned chiefly with the following subjects:

The weather; the backwardness or forwardness of the season; gardening; crops; the price of plums; sprouts, and other local products; the behaviour of familiar beasts and birds; the rise or fall of the river and the likelihood of flood or drought; fishing; guns, dogs, horses and hounds; local topography especially in relation to Short Cuts (a most fruitful source of argument); old times, and their superiority in all respects over to-day; and, once more, again and again and yet again, the weather, past, present and future, yesterday's hailstones, this morning's white frost, the probability of to-morrow's thaw.

I have said the talk was innocent; it had to be. Miss Benedict saw to that. She was exactly the opposite of everything a barmaid is supposed to be. She was middle-aged, tight-lipped, prim and proper. She always wore a high-necked tight-fitting black dress with innumerable jet buttons upon it. Her hair was scraped back in a bun. She had rimless glasses. She didn't smoke, she didn't drink, and she didn't permit the least familiarity from her customers. Whenever she poured you out a drink, she did it with the air of disapproving of your buying it. She was the very spit
of a Victorian nursery governess caricatured on the music-hall stage. And her Christian name was Prudence. We learned this when she went to court to give evidence about a waiter who had stolen a bottle of gin; we would never have known it otherwise. To all her customers she was Miss Benedict; though she had served them drinks for twenty years.

Twenty years! She must have known more about Elmbury than any man knows; far more than I know, who have the presumption to write a book about it. She must have learned, as she stood severe and disapproving behind her bar every day from ten to two and six to ten, the comic and the tragic, the drab and the spectacular truth about a very large proportion of its inhabitants. She must have carried the stuff of a hundred novels behind that forbidding brow. But whatever she knew, Miss Benedict kept to herself. She spoke when she was spoken to; she never gossiped. And if you asked her a question about one of her customers she would reprove you with a stern glance. “I'm afraid I don't inquire into the gentleman's business,” she would say.