Brensham Village

by John Moore

  Like most blacksmiths, Briggs possessed notable biceps, forearms and hands. When he was a young man he could tear a pack of cards in two. His palms were criss-crossed with old calloused scars, which were the consequence of his youthful foolishness in bending six-inch nails for the entertainment of the company at the Adam and Eve. In later years, becoming less reckless, he wrapped handkerchiefs round his hand before starting his demonstration.

  At one time he was the terror of travelling showmen at the local fairs; for whether it v/as a matter of bending pokers or lifting weights, Briggs could always do it better than they could. When the Strongest Man in the World with painful effort and streams of perspiration had managed to give a slight twist to an iron bar, Briggs, pleading with affected innocence ‘Let me try that, mister! Let me have a go!’ would mount the rostrum and without apparent exertion bend the bar almost double. All the Strongest Men in the World hated and feared him.

  At Elmbury Mop he elected one night to try his strength upon one of those machines which you smite with a mallet. He had had a great deal of beer, and what happened would have served as a good advertisement for the brewery. With his first shot, being as he freely admitted a bit unsteady on his pins, he missed altogether. The showman laughed; and this annoyed him. He took a lot of trouble over his next shot, his great hands which had clamped in their awful grip the kicking hoof of an angry stallion clasped the handle of the mallet, the muscles of his forearms stood out like the roots of an old tree, and Briggs smote. He hit the machine fair and square with such force that it fell apart; the head of the mallet flew off into the crowd. Satisfied, he shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

  Yet at cricket he hardly ever hit sixes, but batted with a huge stolidity which would have done credit to a Lancashire stone-waller; his favourite stroke was what he imagined to be a neat and professional cut through the slips, off which he was generally caught in the gulley. And at darts he had a most curious style which seemed to be a flat contradiction of his great size and strength: he threw rather like a girl. He possessed a set of darts of his own, very tiny and, as one might say, sissy darts, which he picked up deliberately between his enormous fingers (which weren’t half as clumsy as they looked) and propelled very neatly and primly into the particular double or treble he wanted.

  The Potterer

  At the time when I began to play cricket for Brensham, the elderly, sick-looking, sallow-faced man called Hope-Kingley was a newcomer there; and the village didn’t quite know what to make of him. He was shy and extremely reserved; and he never talked about himself. He had a quiet, pleasant, middle-aged wife and one small son. We knew he had lived abroad for most of his life, but that was all. Jeremy Briggs said he was a very good example of the Idle Rich who had nothing better to do than potter about; and although there was no evidence that he was rich we all agreed that he was a Potterer. He started pottering as soon as he was settled in his house. He began to build himself a rock-garden, and left it half-done to make a lily-pond. He went in for Aquaria. He bred Sealyhams. He planted expensive Alpines in the unfinished rock-garden, and the slugs devoured them. He tried without much success to grow asparagus and prize sweetpeas.

  He seemed to do nothing very well. You would meet him wandering about with a gun under his arm and he would tell you that he was Pottering after Pigeons; but it was very rarely that he shot anything and when he did so he was generally more embarrassed than pleased. I once saw him haloed as it were with a cloud of pale grey feathers, blood spattered all over his face, and a pigeon’s head in one hand, its body in the other. ‘I wounded it,’ he confessed miserably, ‘and I didn’t know how to kill it. I wanted to put the poor thing out of its misery, so I tried to screw its neck; and then as you see I panicked.’

  Encouraged by Mr Chorlton, he even took to butterfly-collecting; but he wasn’t very good at that either. I have stood and watched him chasing Clouded Yellows, which are as fleet as Atalanta, among the tall thistles at the edge of a field of lucerne, and he has reminded me,” as he pranced about, of a rather battered and elderly faun. I confess I laughed; and of course he didn’t catch any Clouded Yellows. In the end he had to employ Johnnie Perks, Alfie’s son, who got him half a dozen in ten minutes.

  Children loved him. They didn’t seem to notice his tiresome ineffectiveness. Although he wore thick glasses and had rather bleary eyes it seemed that he was able to find birds’-nests which even schoolboys failed to find; and during the nesting season you hardly ever saw him without three or four of the village brats at his heels. One day we heard that he had actually shinned up a tree, in search of a magpie’s nest, and had become stuck there. Magpies generally build in the thickest and thorniest of trees and poor old Hope-Kingley hung there like Absalom. The attendant children rescued him, of course, and the incident merely strengthened their conviction that he was some kind of hero. For our part we remarked that the old boy must be getting into his second childhood; and Jeremy Briggs said it would have served him right if he’d broken his neck.

  At cricket, as at everything else, he simply pottered. He bowled a bit and batted a bit (though he was extremely liable to run out himself or his fellow batsman) and he fielded with sublime ineptitude for though he was incapable of catching or picking up the ball himself he frequently contrived to collide with anybody else who was about to do so. If he did get hold of the ball he threw it in with great force several yards wide of the wicket-keeper, so that it went to the boundary.

  However, he apologized so nicely for all his mistakes, and seemed to enjoy the game so much, that Sammy hadn’t the heart to drop him from the team. In any case we were generally two players short by noon on Saturday and would have gladly fielded a blind man if he’d offered to turn out for us.

  One summer - it must have been Hope-Kingley’s second at Brensham - the old potterer tired of his rock-garden, his lily-pond, his Sealyhams, his goldfish and his butterflies and determined to dam the stream which ran through his orchard and to make a big pool which he could stock with rainbow trout. He undertook this task himself, and would accept no advice or assistance from anybody. He carried it out, so it seemed to us, in a very slipshod and amateurish way, and we warned him that his dam wouldn’t hold, the water would run out of it. ‘Dear, dear!’ he said. ‘Perhaps it will. How foolish I am!’ And sure enough, he let the water in that night, and the new pond was dry again by breakfast-time. Briggs, who had prophesied this, spent most of his dinner-hour leaning on the orchard gate and grinning at the muddy morass. Other villagers, more polite, told Mr Hope-Kingley:

  ‘We’re very sorry to hear about your trout-pond!’

  The old man smiled a queer and quizzical smile.

  ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘I shall have to try again.’

  Once more he let in the water; and once more the pond was dry within twelve hours. And again, when people sympathized, Mr Hope-Kinglev gave them that queer little smile.

  The next day, as it happened, was the King’s birthday, and the honours came out in the paper. Somebody, glancing through the list of ‘Knights’, read with astonishment:

  ‘To be Knight Commander of the Indian Empire: Gerald Devereux Hope-Kingley: For distinguished services in hydraulic engineering in India, Burma and Malay.’

  Mr Chorlton and I were not altogether surprised, when we passed the trout-pond that evening on our way to fish in the river, to find that it was full; and this time the water was not running out. Hope-Kingley was pottering in his garden.

  ‘Sir Gerald,’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘You’ve been pulling our legs.’

  ‘Dear me,’ he said mildly. ‘You must forgive me. You must let an old man have his little joke.’

  He asked us in to have a glass of sherry. He showed us the rock-garden and the slug-bitten Alpines, and his draggled collection of butterflies and the tropical fishes in his aquarium which were dying off from some mysterious disease.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘none of these things go right, do they? And I suppose that’s because I’m such an awfu
l potterer. For forty years I promised myself, almost every day, that when I retired I would give myself the pleasure of deciding over my early-morning tea what particular form of pottering I should practise after breakfast!’

  I thought of the long uncomfortable years that had given him the right to potter: the steamy jungles of Burma and Malay, the high peaks of the North-west Frontier, the great watersheds above Nepal; the malaria and the insects and the damp heat which blurred the eyepiece of the theodolite; the great rains and the melting snow and the rivers thundering down and the agony of waiting to see whether the dam would hold.

  Sir Gerald butted in upon my thoughts.

  ‘Next autumn,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make a bird-table outside my study window. And then I shall rig up some sort of camera contrivance so that I can photograph the birds. One might invent an automatic one, don’t you think, which would take a picture whenever a bird alighted on the table? It would amuse me when I’m kept to the house, which is pretty often; for I had too long in the tropics to stick an English winter well. I always promised myself that when I couldn’t even potter I’d amuse myself with a bird-table and rig up a camera to photograph the birds.’

  The ‘Boys’

  The last five or six places in our cricket-team were filled, generally at the last moment, by various unreliable and often unwilling youths whom Alfie impressed out of the pubs: labouring boys, farmers’ sons, and so on. The former, who toiled all the week in the fields and market-gardens, found no enjoyment whatever in chasing a cricket-ball in the hot sun upon their afternoon off; the latter, whose interest lay chiefly in fiery horses and powerful motor-bikes, had little enthusiasm for a game which offered no prospect of a broken neck. However, Alfie by his press-gang methods usually captured a few of them; and some, especially the farmers’ sons, often slogged happily and heartily or took a few wickets with their murderous fast bowling.

  We included in the category of ‘the boys’, because they were equally unreliable, Billy Butcher the village ne’er-do-weel and Banks, the village policeman. We could not count on either: the former because he was almost always drunk and the latter because he was often on duty. On one occasion we lost both players through the same cause: Billy Butcher chose a Saturday afternoon to go roaring round the village merrily breaking windows, and Banks was called out to arrest him.

  That must have been the only arrest Banks made in his first five years at Brensham. He arrived, as all our village policemen do, as a young, efficient and rather officious constable, eager for promotion, willing to go out of his way to look for trouble, and inclined to hang about in the neighbourhood of the pubs at closing-time. He had succeeded an elderly, easy-going fellow who knew our ways; and at first we regarded Banks with suspicion and dismay. But Joe Trentfield, the landlord of the Horse Narrow, who’d seen village policemen come and go for twenty years, laughed at our fears and said philosophically: ‘’Tis alius the same with new brooms. Wait a bit, and you’ll see we’ll tame him. Be they real tigers, Brensham alius tames ‘em in the end.’

  And sure enough, we tamed Banks. We married him off, for one thing, to Joe Trentfield’s daughter. We persuaded him to play for us at cricket and darts. Sam Hunt built him a boat and taught him to fish for chub. Soon he learned that the business of a village constable was concerned, not with criminals and crooks, but with foot and mouth disease and swine fever, straying animals and lost dogs: and that the nearest he was likely to get to dealing with a murder was his annual duty of quelling a row between the Fitchers and the Gormleys about a murder which had happened fifty years ago. He discovered (Joe Trentfield’s daughter may have had something to do with the discovery) that the best way of making sure that the pub closed at ten was to drop in for a quiet drink with the landlord at ten-thirty. He found out that prosecuting people for having no dog licence or riding a bicycle without lights was not, after all, a short cut to promotion; and before very long the dream of quick promotion faded, and a different dream took its place: he began to save up towards buying a cottage with perhaps a little orchard and a couple of pigstyes, so that he could still live in the shadow of Brensham Hill when he retired.

  The Drunkard

  Billy Butcher, at the age of thirty-five, was still the village’s Problem Child. He was incorrigible and anti-social and I suppose that in the sort of society advocated by Mr Bernard Shaw he would have been told ‘We bear you no ill will, my dear fellow, but society must be protected’ and popped into a humane and hygienic lethal chamber in no time. We, on the other hand, having a vague and unformulated belief that one of the fundamental Rights of Man was his right to go to the devil in his own fashion, bought him drinks, lent him money, put up with his occasional bouts of window-smashing, and in fact allowed him to drink himself slowly towards a far more uncomfortable death than Mr Shaw would have devised for him.

  Was society worse off in consequence, or better? I don’t know. We should have been richer by more than a few pounds; for Billy was an expensive companion. But what are a few pounds compared with a lot of laughter, a lot of low comedy, a fragment of high comedy, an hour or two every week of wild and gorgeous talk? Billy gave us all that; for he was two other things as well as a drunkard, things which do not often go together: he was a clown and he was a poet. His clowning was spontaneous, irrepressible, and sometimes sublime. He didn’t have to try to be funny, and his fooling was of the same nature as Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s, it ‘came natural’. The truth of the matter was, I think, that for certain brief periods in the process of his drunkenness he saw the whole of life as an absurd and enormous comedy, and all he did then was to play his own part in it. If he made us laugh, it was simply because we, to him, appeared almost unbearably funny. Finding the whole world peopled with figures of fun, he did no more than adapt himself to his environment.

  As for his poetry, that was a very different matter. It was not at all obvious, it was something which had its source deep within him, it dwelt in the secret places of Billy’s heart where no doubt it teased and tortured and tormented him as such Daemons will. To quell it he drank whisky: more and more whisky, have another boys, well I don’t mind if I do, down the hatch - and perhaps if he drank long enough the Daemon lay still. But sometimes the opposite thing happened. There was a Tom Tiddler’s Ground, a no-man’s-land between semi-drunkenness and complete drunkenness, in which shadowy territory Billy sometimes found himself. Then for an hour, or half an hour, the poetry would bubble up. He became possessed. He talked sublime and airy nonsense. He quoted. His subconscious heaved - and brought up great undigested slabs of Shakespeare, gobbets of Swinburne, ill-assorted scraps and fragments from Chaucer, Skelton, Sir Thomas Browne. He was not showing off; it was sheer agony: the stuff gushed out of him. But the fit didn’t last long. Let’s have another, he cried almost desperately, another and another, as if the whisky were a sort of purge for poetry: and soon he was empty. Then we would see the sweat standing out on his forehead and the tears welling up in his eyes. ‘I can’t bear it,’ Billy would say.

  ‘Bear what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  And then, leaning against the bar, with his head in his hands, he would cry his heart out, until some kindly person led him away.

  If Billy had been a newcomer, I suppose we should have been less tolerant of him; but he was a native of Brensham, born in the pleasant house called Gables which Hope-Kingley now owned. He was the son of Colonel Butcher, a stiff moustachio’d warrior-scholar who had spent his last ten years in our village writing a grammar of the Urdu language. His wife had died in India, and the boy ran wild as a Brensham hare. While the old gentleman worked in his study, young Billy at the age of seventeen was discovering the queer dirty little pubs in the back streets of Elmbury and flirting with alley-wenches at Elmbury Mop. There was some trouble, when Billy was eighteen, over a girl in the village; and Colonel Butcher briefly interrupted his study of Urdu to deal with the situation, which he did by packing Billy off to a crammer for the Army. Six months later the b
oy was back; no princely fee, said the crammer, would compensate him for the disgrace and ill-fame which Billy’s presence brought upon his establishment. So the Urdu grammar suffered another set-back while its author made arrangements to dispatch his son to West Africa. ‘At least,’ he said bitterly, ‘you will find no blonde housemaids there.’ This was doubtless true; but Billy found something much more dangerous. When his father, having completed the grammar, died of boredom and old age, Billy came back to Brensham and we knew at once that the whisky held him in its power as no woman could ever do. We could see him hurrying down to the Trumpet or the Adam and Eve at a quarter to ten in the morning, in order to be there exactly at opening-time; we would watch how his hand shook as he lifted the first glass, how it became curiously steady after the third; we would notice the bulge in his pocket as he tottered home after closing-time. A few well-meaning people tried to help him: but most of us knew that it was already too late and we accepted Billy for what he was: a hopeless, incurable, incorrigible drunkard. His father had left him a good deal of money, and he spent it in a few years. Then he sold the house, and the library, and the furniture, and took a room above Mrs Doan’s shop. Then he sold his car and bought a motor-bike; sold the motor-bike; borrowed from moneylenders; and in his last extremity borrowed from his friends. At this juncture, when everybody was saying that he had come to the end of his tether, he received a lucky windfall: an uncle died and left him some money but, knowing Billy, appointed two trustees to prevent him from squandering it. These hard-hearted men (as Billy described them to us) doled him out the sum of three pounds a week and by dint of borrowing, sponging, and forgetting to pay Mrs Doan (who adored him) he contrived to keep himself headed for a toper’s grave, though of necessity his pace towards it became slower. In the fruit season he hired himself out, for he had no silly pride, to the farmers for plum-picking and cherry-picking. On one hot July day, being extremely drunk, he fell off a twenty-rung ladder on to his head. A sober man would have broken his neck; but the only effect it had on Billy was to make him slightly more lachrymose after his outbursts of poetry and slightly less controllable when the whim took him to break people’s windows.