Brensham Village
Page 5
And now the captains have tossed and Sammy Hunt leads us out to field. Sammy has a completely bald head, which at the beginning of the season appears startlingly white; but he scorns to wear a hat, and as the season progresses his pate becomes rubicund, and then gradually goes brown, until by mid-August it is the colour of an overwintered russet apple. Mr Chorlton, of course, wears his harlequin cap, the gayest cap in cricket, but it’s old and faded and it’s the very same cap, he tells us, in which he ran about the field for hours, in 1895, chasing the ball which Archie Maclaren hit so mercilessly when he scored 424 against Somerset. Mr Mountjoy, who wears his I. Zingari cap, must have been a useful cricketer too in his young days; but he can’t run very fast or bend very quickly, and his old eyes - so sharp at spotting the chiff-chaff in the willow tree - are too slow to follow the ball which comes quick off the pitch and breaks away. Therefore his innings generally end with a loud snick and a yell of ‘How’s that?’ from the delighted wicket-keeper; and as the umpire’s finger goes up Mr Mountjoy mutters sadly: ‘Oh Lord, that awful noise again!’
Sammy begins to arrange his field, doing so with humanity and a sense of the fitness of things. Thus Mr Mountjoy, since he can’t run far, goes to mid-off and to save him walking between overs takes point when the bowling is from the other end. Mr Chorlton, who can’t or won’t run at all, keeps wicket; and another elderly member of the team, a retired engineer called Hope-Kingley, alternates between mid-on and square-leg. But Briggs the blacksmith, who has huge horny hands with which he sometimes bends a six-inch nail for fun, must stand at forward short-leg or in the deep, and take what’s coming to him; the village policeman goes in the slips, because, says Sammy, that’s a suitable place for a bobby - ‘they catch you out when you’re not looking.’ Billy Butcher, who is the village ne’er-do-weel and drunkard, is sent to long-leg in the hope that a bit of running about will do him good; and the ‘boys’, a collective term for any youths whom the Secretary has roped in at the last moment to make up the team, are distributed round the boundary where with luck some high hits will harden up their palms. As for Sammy himself, he will be anywhere and everywhere, wherever the catches come low and hard, wherever the new red ball races towards the boundary there will by Sammy’s bald head bobbing after it; for he is like a good general who turns up unexpectedly wherever the fight is hottest.
Our Secretary, a small, wiry market-gardener called Alfie, takes the ball for the first over. Joe Trentfield, our umpire and the landlord of the Horse Narrow, counts his six pennies and drops them one by one into the pocket of his smock. Dai Roberts the postman opens his score book at the pavilion window and licks the point of his pencil.
‘Play!’ says Joe: and the season begins.
The Captain
Sailors hardly ever take to cricket; they don’t get the chance to practise, for one thing, and for another, I think cricket is a game for people who have roots, it is a territorial game, in which men really do bowl and bat with greater satisfaction when they do so for the place they belong to. It is an expression of parochialism; and even the County sides, which play for the money, would scorn to buy and sell their players as footballers do, dealing in men as stockbrokers deal in shares. Thus if you should meet, say, the Lancashire side and the Gloucestershire side together in a pub you could easily differentiate them by their accents; and when Somerset and Yorkshire go on tour they take the speech of Somerset and Yorkshire with them. This territorial aspect of the game is even more evident in village cricket; and people were sometimes quite shocked that I should be allowed to play for Brensham, although I lived only four miles away. Peripatetic cricketers, who hawk their batsmanship or their fast bowling round all the teams in the district and change sides as often as Warwick the King-Maker are rare and generally disapproved of: certainly Brensham would have nothing to do with them. For cricket, as I have said, is somehow mixed up with our vigorous parochialism; and when Brensham goes out to field on Saturday afternoon, it is Brensham going to war.
Therefore it was curious that Sammy Hunt should be our captain; for he was one of the rootless, hearthless ones, a sailor, and hadn’t had the opportunity, during his wandering life, to learn that absurd loyalty to a piece of well-kept turf. It was curious of course, that he should have settled down at Brensham at all, to ‘muck about with little boats’, as he put it, ‘on a piddling little river’. I suppose all sailors carry with them about the world, in addition to that small green kit-bag of their personal possessions, a dream of green fields; and for most of them the dream fades or the salt water tarnishes it; but somehow or other Sammy managed to keep his fresh and bright so that when the time came for him to retire he knew exactly what kind of a cottage he wanted, knew all about the green-sprouting osiers and the slow winding river, bent like a bow as it runs round the hill, and the water-meadows where in June the wind-waves trouble the mowing-grass as if it were the sea.
However, Sammy never forgot that he was a sailor; and he often enlivened the cricket-matches with great sea-oaths or astonished the opposing team by shouting to his bowler: ‘Pitch the beggar one on the starboard side!’ or commanding a fieldman to ‘move round a couple of points to port’. In the pub afterwards he would sooner or later launch himself into one of his long salty tales, about how he ran out of coal during a storm in the Bay of Biscay, or how he dealt with a mutiny at Tiensin, or how he nearly married a geisha girl in Japan; but although we knew these tales so well, and loved to hear Sammy telling them, we never learned what happened in the end: closing-time always came too soon, leaving Sammy’s tramp-steamer drifting helplessly towards Vigo, Sammy driving the mutineers into the fo’c’sle with his bare fists, or Sammy and his geisha girl locked in a timeless embrace on the seafront of Yokohama.
The Secretary
On the cricket-field Sammy’s word was law; but between matches it was Alfie Perks, the Secretary, who held the team together, who saw to the buying of the bats, balls, pads, gloves, stumps and score-books we needed, and who organized the dreadful rummage sale which was supposed to wipe out the usual autumnal deficit and the whist drive and dance which actually did so when the rummage sale had failed. It was he who wrote, painfully, slowly, and rather illiterately, those long complicated letters to other Secretaries, and made sense of their complicated and illiterate replies, so that by mid-February, when the pitch generally lay two feet under water and cricket seemed further off than the Millennium, he was able to send to the printer our list of fixtures for the next season. When the season came round, it was Alfie who had the job of notifying the players - eleven postcards scratched out in agonized copper-plate! - of arranging the transport - Who had a car? Who had a motor-bike? Who had room for a fat man with a cricket bag? - and of drawing the pub at midday on Saturday for those very uncertain quantities, ‘the boys’, who were always likely to let us down because they were haymaking or harvesting, or wanted to go fishing or to dig in their gardens or to fiddle with their motor-bikes or to take their wenches to the pictures.
All this would have been extremely burdensome if Alfie had allowed it to worry him; but being a market-gardener and fruit-grower, owning twelve acres of plum orchard and five of apple, his fortune hanging yearly on the chancy weather between April and June, he had long ago given up worrying about anything. He knew that a soft spring might make him prosperous, a late frost might ruin him. There was nothing he could do about it, except grin and bear it; so Alfie grinned. His grin was characteristic, typical, and familiar. With it he greeted impartially the sight of overladen boughs in good seasons or blackened buds after frost. Fruit-growing, he said, was like horse-racing; but there were more certainties on the racecourse. If he lost all his fruit, or if Mr Chorlton dropped three catches running off his bowling, Alfie grinned and shrugged his shoulders; and his comment on the large disaster was the same as his summary of the little one: That’s the way it is.
Alfie bowled leg-breaks: three paces to the wicket, longish fair hair falling over his forehead, a hop, skip and a jump, an
d an innocent-looking good-length, ball delivered with a sort of tousled grin. He was one of those small persistent men who inevitably remind one of terriers; and as it happened he owned a small tousled terrier, which also grinned. It was called Rexy and it followed Alfie everywhere and somehow resembled him; for both had bushy eyebrows, an air of perky truculence, and a hamorous acceptance of fate. For a week or two in late winter the resemblance was even closer. Alfie’s face, at that reason, went brick-ted and peeled as if he’d been in the sun, although there had been no strong sun for months. His eyebrows and eyelashes became curiously sandy, like those of desert soldiers. Rexy’s eyebrows, nose and whiskers went sandy too, and when we saw him running about the village like that we knew that Alfie had been spraying.
For the spray dripped off the trees into the grass and stained Rexy’s paws as he followed his master. Whenever there was a wind the liquid blew back like fine rain into Alfie’s face and burned it, peeled his nose and bleached his eyebrows, and made his eyes as red as a ferret’s. Both master and dog looked as if they had just come back from crossing the Sahara.
This tedious uncomfortable business of spraying was probably the biggest single operation in Alfie’s busy year. It took a long time, and it was also very expensive; so that less conscientious growers were apt to ‘give it a miss’ in seasons when their bank balances were in red or when they wanted to buy a new motor-car. There was a great temptation to do so; for if a sharp frost should come when the fruit was just forming, all the money and labour of spraying would have been spent in vain. The frost could slay more plums in a night than the little green caterpillars could devour in a season; and as the fruit-growers said when they looked for an excuse: ‘You can’t spray against Jack Frost.’
But Alfie, who was painstaking and persistent and whose integrity showed itself in everything he did, never made that excuse. He felt, I think, a sort of obligation to his trees. He must do his best for them; and if thereafter the frost took all, if there was not a plum left on the boughs nor a penny of profit from all the twelve acres, he would still have the curious consolation that his orchards looked ‘clean’, the abhorred caterpillars did not thrive in them, his neighbours need have no fear lest the pest should spread from Alfie’s land. He had the true countryman’s dislike of a botched job, the craftsman’s determination to leave nothing to chance. So every year, in January or February, Rexy went blond as a film star and Alfie with his peeling face looked very unlike a film star indeed, and the village knew that Alfie was spraying. Once again he’d decided to put off buying a motor-car.
This, I think, is how I shall always remember him: with a grin on his red, raw face and his eyebrows and eyelashes ginger-blond, and ginger-blond too the lock of hair which always pokes out from under his cap: with ginger-pawed Rexy sardonically grinning at his heels; walking among the trees which bear proud names like Blenheim and Victoria, looking up into the dripping boughs and then glancing at the inscrutable sky and shrugging his shoulders as an old gambler does while he watches the desperate race, his fancy lying third, and still a hundred yards to go.
The Blacksmith
Jeremy Briggs, who helped Mr Chorlton to make our pitch one of the best in the West Country, was another craftsman. At his blacksmith’s forge, when he was not shoeing horses, he would contrive you almost anything from a cigarette-lighter to a set of fire-irons or a pair of wrought-iron gates. On the cricket-field he lumbered about rather like one of those great slow farm-horses whose enormous hairy hoofs he cared for. Between matches he often mowed the ground for us, or patiently dragged the heavy roller to and fro, to and fro between the creases while Mr Chorlton with a pocket-knife dug up the daisies, and filled in the holes. These two, as they worked together, carried on an argument which never ended; for Briggs was a Socialist and Mr Chorlton, whose wide classical reading had persuaded him that the political troubles of Athens and Rome were much the same as ours, believed that mankind was incapable of improvement and that no doctrine could save it from damnation. The argument continued from week to week and was abandoned in September only to be resumed in the following April. When Briggs’ rolling took him down the pitch away from the crease where Mr Chorlton knelt before a daisy, Briggs began to shout; and Mr Chorlton shouted back, so that you could hear them in Magpie Lane, the one quoting Marx, the other Pericles. Our nearly-perfect cricket-pitch was really a by-product of their differences; for if they hadn’t enjoyed arguing we should not have had two good groundsmen for nothing.
Briggs’ smithy was next door to the Adam and Eve. There was no spreading chestnut tree, only a heap of old iron in the yard, with some broken carts, rusty farm implements and dismantled motor-cars. A notice-board announced: ‘J. BRIGGS, SHOEING ETC. SMITH. CONTRACTS UNDERTOOK; ODD-JOBING.’ I once asked him what Contracts he Undertook; and it turned out that he had an arrangement with a market-gardener to shoe his pony all round twice a year in return for four bundles of asparagus and a pot of plums.
There was plenty of work for Briggs in Brensham. Most of the farmers’ sons had their hunters and Point-to-Pointers, the district abounded with children’s ponies, there was a riding-school at Elmbury, and the Hunt stables were only five miles away. Briggs, for whom the colour red had a very different connotation from that of pink coats, shod these Hunt horses somewhat reluctantly, pointing out to the Whips and Second Horsemen who brought them to his smithy that Hunt Servants were merely the misguided flunkeys of the idle rich. The Whips, secure in their certainty that jumping a stiff blackthorn or hollering a fox away as he crept down the winter covertside was a very different thing from flunkeydom, merely smiled and wondered how a man who could handle horses so confidently came to believe in Labour. There was a close association, in their minds, between horseflesh and Conservatism.
But when it came to a question of working for the Syndicate Briggs stuck his toes in. The Syndicate kept horses for hacking; they did not hunt. They liked, we thought, to have their photographs taken on horseback when they came down from town for the weekend. Briggs, who merely disapproved of the Hunt, really hated the Syndicate. The Hunt, after all, performed its wicked Capitalist actions openly, publicly and indeed ostentatiously, with shiny top-hats and red coats and polished top-boots. It galloped over your holding and broke down your fences with a hurrah and a holloa. If you got in the way, and General Bouverie cursed you, you could curse him back; you could scowl at the elegant gentlemen and the great ladies and the fat smug farmers and the feckless farmers’ sons and pleasantly contemplate stringing them up to the lamp-posts in the fullness of time. But the Syndicate worked in darkness and in disguise: it was the kind of Capitalism which pulled the invisible wires and made poor men dance to its tune. It was part of the monstrous mysterious Thing which sent up the rent of cottages and sent down the miner’s wage; which contrived a glut of coffee in Brazil or a rice famine in Bengal by fiddling about in some unexplained way with Foreign Exchange. In some unspecified fashion, Briggs was sure of it, the Syndicate was associated with the terrible, powerful, nameless people whom he thought of as ‘They’. ‘They’ had their offices in London and New York and Amsterdam; ‘They’ were supernational; ‘They’ played with Governments as if Governments were pawns, stood above Prime Ministers and Kings, and laughed cynically at revolutions, being confident that ‘They’ could easily corrupt the revolutionaries with the gift of a little illusory power. ‘They’ was invisible, anonymous, unidentified; you couldn’t curse them, break their windows, imprison them or hang them. Briggs had serious doubts whether even the Russian Communists had effectively got rid of Them.
Seeing in the Syndicate’s workings a trivial, fragmentary manifestation of Their power, Briggs stoutly refused to shoe their horses and assaulted their Head Groom who apparently ‘called him names’. For this he was bound over by the Justices of the Peace for Elmbury. ‘What did he actually call you?’ asked General Bouverie, who was Chairman of the Bench.
‘A bloody Bolshie, your Worship,’ said Briggs.
‘Very p
rovocative. I should have hit him myself,’ said General Bouverie, who knew all about Briggs’ politics. ‘In the circumstances I shall refrain from imposing a fine.’
Of course, Briggs could easily afford to refuse the custom of the Syndicate; he was an extremely prosperous tradesman. There is a mistaken notion that the blacksmith’s is a dying trade; and those who are always moaning and mourning the departure of Ye Olde things, the William-Morrissy-arty-crafty people, will tell you that the village smith is disappearing, another craftsman-victim of ‘the thing we miscall Progress’. In fact I believe that Jeremy Briggs made a good deal more money than James Briggs his father, who owned the smithy before him. It is true that there were not so many farm-horses in 1930 as there were in late Victorian times (although there were more hunters); but the ‘odd-jobing’ which he so proudly advertised more than redressed the balance. If there were fewer horses, there was more farm-machinery; and when the binder or the hay-sweep went wrong it was generally the blacksmith’s job to put it right. Again, fewer horses meant more motor-cars; and these motor-cars from time to time ran into each other head-on. When the drivers had been taken to hospital, and the vehicles had been towed to the garage, and the doctors, the motor-manufacturers and the garagemen had all levied their dues upon the insurance company, there often remained a kind of residue in the shape of two bent front-axles which found their way to Briggs’ forge. Besides, being a skilled worker in most metals, Briggs made a good many profitable odds-and-ends in his spare time; the local builder alone gave him enough work to pay for the beer which he drank in enormous quantities. He certainly didn’t deserve the pity of the arty-crafty crowd who went in for folk-dancing and played upon pan-pipes and taught long-suffering villagers to make useless things out of raffia.