Brensham Village

by John Moore

  He seemed to suppose that the more pubs there were, the more we should drink, as if a man should say that the more petrol pumps there are by the roadside the more often will a motorist fill up his tank. It was sheer nonsense, of course; but we were very angry indeed at his suggestion that because we had the Adam and Eve, the Horse Narrow and the Trumpet were, in his horrible phrase, ‘redundant’. All three pubs were different and each had a different atmosphere; you might prefer the Adam and Eve to the Horse Narrow or the Trumpet to both, according to your taste, or you might decide on any given evening that the Horse Narrow matched your mood whereas the Adam and Eve didn’t. Each had its ‘regulars’, old faithfuls who would never dream of going elsewhere, but most of us liked a change now and then. You might feel it was an Adam and Eve night, or a Horse Narrow night, or that the company at the Trumpet would be pleasantest; but it was very rarely that you wanted to visit all three. Only Billy Butcher did that, staggering from one to another, and then back to the first, upon his hopeless and terrible pilgrimage.

  The Adam and Eve

  I suppose I should say, if I tried to differentiate, that the Adam and Eve was the darts players’ pub, the Trumpet was the place for a quiet pint and serious conversation, and the Horse Narrow was the rendezvous for those who wanted what we called a bit of jollity: a tune on the piano, a song by Mimi, a pint and a merry tale after closing time with Joe Trentfield. It happened that our cricket-team generally went to the Adam and Eve after matches, because we liked to play darts and because of the wonderful variety of the pickles which Mrs Hartley provided with her bread and cheese.

  The landlord, at forty-five, was already a little Falstaff, with a belly which he could only just squeeze through the narrow door in his counter. This was no wonder to us because Mrs Hartley had curious notions about the constitution of men; she was convinced they would faint from starvation unless they devoured at least four enormous meals a day. She also had her own definition of a snack; she thought it consisted of a brown cottage loaf, all crusty and new, with half a pound of fresh butter, yellow as buttercups, a great hunk of double gloucester cheese, piccalilli, pickled walnuts, cucumbers, and red cabbage, with spring onions, lettuce, and radishes if they were in season. After the cricket-matches, when she thought a snack would be insufficient, she generally added a meat-pie or two and a couple of thick slices of ham.

  This was all very well for us, who only experienced her providence once or twice a week. Whether it was good for her husband was open to doubt; for she continually plied him between gargantuan meals, not only with her larger ‘snacks’, but with such occasional titbits as chitterlings, faggots, cold tongue, or brains on toast, which the poor man was quite unable to resist. He became, in consequence, a trifle sluggish. Jim Hartley, you would say, was a very decent fellow but neither his brain nor his legs worked as quickly as they used to. This sluggishness was very much in evidence when it came to a question of turning out the Voluntary Fire Brigade, of which he was the captain. Luckily we had very few fires: a hot rick or two, a burning thatch on bonfire night, a smouldering beam in one of the old houses, made up as a rule the year’s tally. On these occasions Mr Hartley would look very imposing in his shining helmet but by the time the old horse had been coaxed into its bridle and harnessed to the fire engine, and the engine taken to the fire and the water supply discovered and the pump set going, the Conflagration, as the Intelligencer invariably called it, was ‘well under control’. The neighbours had seen to that. However, there was a story that once, when the Colonel’s old barn took fire, the Intelligencer’s reporter and photographer, driving four miles from Elmbury, contrived to arrive upon the scene before Mr Hartley’s fire engine which was housed only four hundred yards away. The barn was blazing merrily and the Colonel in rage and frustration was dancing about in front of it like some ancient fire-worshipper. The photographer, whose news-sense was less developed than his tact, deemed it an inopportune moment to take his picture; he tactfully walked away up the road in search of the fire brigade. Shortly it appeared at the trot, with Mr Hartley in his shining helmet looking like Thor himself. The photographer politely asked if he might take a photograph. ‘By all means,’ said Mr Hartley, whoa-ing the old mare. ‘Pose, men; and when he’s ready don’t forget to smile.’

  Luckily the brigade from Elmbury, which possessed a motor fire engine, reached Brensham in time to save the Colonel’s barn; and Mr Rendcombe, the Editor of the Intelligencer, displayed as much tact as his photographer and forebore to publish the photograph of Jim Hartley’s smile.

  Yes, a sluggish man: and yet in one respect he was an artist, excelling all others. Mr Hartley was the best darts player I have ever seen; and even at Brensham, where we prided ourselves upon our darts, he stood out like a Don Bradman in a village cricket-team, or a great lord among commoners. He was the only man I have known who would put three successive darts into the treble-twenty not as a rare accident, to be celebrated by drinks all round, but as a commonplace occurrence, not worth celebrating. He played darts not only with consummate skill and extraordinary accuracy but with the grace, the assurance, the artistry of a master. When he squeezed his pot-belly through the counter-door, and waddled towards the darts board, he was just a foolish fat oaf of a landlord whose wits had been dulled by too much roast beef and Yorkshire puddings; but as soon as he threw the first dart he was transfigured. He was lordly, he was matchless, he dominated all.

  It was not at all surprising, therefore, that the Adam and Eve should be famous throughout the district for its darts. Jim Hartley attracted the darts players to him like a magnet. In his long tap-room we played all our matches, and from there we set off, on winter evenings, to visit pubs elsewhere whose teams had challenged us, the Shakespeare or the Barrel or the Coventry Arms at Elmbury, or the Salutation Inn at Adam’s Norton where the darts-match always ended in a sing-song, because the men of Adam’s Norton were born to singing as thrushes or nightingales, and the music in their hearts would out, willy-nilly, whenever they had a few pints of beer.

  The Language of Darts

  If you knew nothing about the game, you would have had a job to understand the talk of the darts players in the spotless bar out of which Mrs Hartley with her duster chased every mote and speck twice a day. For darts has its own esoteric terminology, some of which is common to the whole country and some of which is probably local. It is a language of association, with a bit of rhyming slang mixed up in it. Thus if you score a hundred and eleven - one-one-one - you say ‘Nelson’: one eye, one arm, and one (let us say) ambition. But if your score is sixty-six it is ‘clickety-click’, which is simply rhyme. Ninety-nine is ‘the doctor’: obviously. Twenty-six is ‘bed and breakfast’ because two and six, in happier days, was the cost of bed and breakfast at a country inn. The left-hand side of the board is known, rather obscurely, as the married side: sixteen and upwards. Thirty-three is ‘fevvers’ and the reason for that is very obscure indeed; it must have originated in a joke about somebody who couldn’t pronounce the sound ‘th’, for if you ask why thirty-three is associated with ‘fewers’ you get the strange reply: ‘Firty-free fevvers on a frush’s froat.’ But why a thrush’s throat should be supposed to possess thirty-three feathers, or who took the trouble to count them, I haven’t the faintest idea.

  A hundred is a ‘ton’, of course, all over England. Two twos is Jews and two fours is two whores and two tens is two hens and so on. And all over England, surely, if at the end of the game you leave yourself the ‘double one’ at the top of the board, you are said to be ‘Up in Annie’s room’. Who was Annie? I wonder; and over what bar did she dwell, and hear the darts thudding on the wall beneath, and what happened up in Annie’s room which made the young men and the old men chuckle when their darts flew high?

  The Railway

  Pubs have characters like people; and there was a factor other than the fame of its darts players which gave individuality to the Adam and Eve and made it different from the other pubs in the village. The main li
ne of the railway ran past it, and Brensham’s little station was only a hundred yards away; so the Adam and Eve was not only a village pub but also a railwaymen’s pub. The station-master had his morning and evening pint there, pulling out his great turnip-watch every time a train went by; our only porter spent a good deal of time there, as he could afford to do, since the even tenor of his life was interrupted by only four stopping trains a day; and at noon the gangers came in and ordered pints of cider, sat down in the corner and had their bait.

  Since Brensham lay in a backwater, well away from the main road which passed through Elmbury, the railway was its principal means of contact with the urban world. When the villagers travelled far afield they went by train; and our summer visitors, mostly anglers from Birmingham who held their fishing contests in our river, generally arrived by train instead of by charabanc. Now whereas the impact of charabancs upon a village is a defiling thing, for they are devouring monsters which destroy the rural atmosphere without putting anything in its place, the impact of the railway has a very different result. The railway is not sterile like the charabancs; it does not, like them, destroy and then vanish, mosstrooper-fashion, but it remains to become part of the village, bringing indeed new life to the village, in the shape of the community which serves it. Thus Brensham wasn’t urbanized by the railway; instead the railway at Brensham was made rural. The station master married a Brensham girl and cultivated a typical Brensham garden, all hollyhocks, peonies, and rambler roses, with gillyflowers on the wall. The porter had been born in Brensham, and so had many of the platelayers and gangers; others, who walked each day down the line, tapping the rails, inspecting the sleepers, trimming the hedges along the top of the cutting, were men from neighbouring villages who spoke our speech and thought our thoughts and often played darts with us in the Adam and Eve. Thus the railway had become an integral part of the pattern of Brensham life, with the orchards, the market-gardens, the river, the cricket-field, and the pubs.

  The section of permanent way which ran north and south from Brensham was said to be one of the longest straight stretches in the country. The expresses gloriously thundered along it at seventy-six miles an hour, and more than a score of times in each twenty-four hours the glasses rattled in Jim Hartley’s bar, and the old pub shook with the tremor of their passing. The gangers who looked after this very fast and important sector were justly proud of the permanent way or, as they called it, the road. They would lean on their picks and watch the express go by, hammer hammer along the lines they’d laid, seventy-six point five miles an hour for five and three-quarter miles with never a curve or a gradient, they would listen for the slight change in the rhythm as the train passed over the bridge, the huge and splendid snort! as it roared through the station; and they would think ‘She couldn’t do that if it weren’t for us. She couldn’t touch seventy-six if the road wasn’t: perfect.’ I knew two of these men fairly well: George Hard-castle and David Groves. Both were oldish men; both had worked on the Brensham road since their boyhood. At fifty-five they walked, on the average, ten miles a day down the line; and the length of their stride even when they were walking along the village street was the exact unvarying distance between the sleepers so that you could tell they were gangers by the curious rhythm of their pace. Both were men of enormous integrity; their job was a labouring job but they did it with a craftsman’s pride. The line which to the rest of us was no more than two sets of rails running through a cutting and along an embankment was to them as diverse as a landscape; they knew it yard by yard and from yard to yard it was variable, here was a sandy patch, here was a bit of gravel, here was clay, here was a wet stretch adjoining a culvert which must be examined every day for the faintest sign of a crack or a subsidence. Nor were they concerned with the road alone; their territory extended to the fence on either side of it, they must scythe the grass in the cuttings, lay the hedges, and make sure that the fences were secure against cattle. It was within their province, even, to trap or ferret the rabbits which made their buries on railway property. Both were great rabbiters, and since by custom they were allowed to set their traps and snares in the fields adjoining the line, they were able to earn a little beer-money in seasons when rabbits were in demand.

  They needed it; for gangers are not very well paid. The engine-drivers, who were the little lords of the railway line, to whom Brensham was but a signal and a station and who thundered splendidly past in their fiery chariots, earned more than twice as much as David and George; and who knows whether they carried a heavier responsibility or exercised a greater skill? One day George’s sharp eyes spotted a tiny trickle of fresh soil in the embankment near to the culvert. There was a very slight crack above it: only a foot long, scarcely an inch wide, but George suspected trouble and he ran to the signal-box and got on the telephone. When the four-twenty-eight down express came along she found the signals against her; she was flagged over the culvert at five miles an hour. But when George and his inspector examined the crack afterwards they found it was both longer and wider, and a new crack had appeared above it. By day and by night, turn and turn-about, George and David watched beside that little crack; and finally the Company sent a special train with two hundred tons of rubble to shore up the embankment. One winter morning, when the job was nearly done, David relieved George at six o’clock. It was dark and cold, and perhaps George was tired and sleepy from sitting over the brazier. He set off down the six-foot way to go home. He knew to the minute, of course, the times of all the passenger trains which passed along his sector and he certainly knew that the parcels express was due at six-eleven; but a high wind was blowing, which roared almost as loud as a train through the tall elms in the coppice above the embankment. It happened that there was a light engine coming along the up-line; George saw it in good time and stepped out of its way - into the path of the down express.

  David Groves found him later and I don’t think he ever quite got over that experience; for a man’s body is demonstrated to be a pitifully frail thing when it encounters a great mass of steel hurtling along at seventy-six miles an hour. And George had been his companion and best friend for nearly forty years. He carried on with his job, of course, but we noticed that when he brought his bait into the Adam and Eve he ate alone and in silence; and when the expresses went by with a snort and a rattle he would sometimes start, as if he had suddenly remembered how they could hurl a man out of their terrible way as a man might flick a troublesome fly.

  And David began to look old now, at fifty-five. He’d had a hard life, hard from the beginning; for at the age of sixteen he’d been hired to a farmer for a whole year for the sum of eighty shillings. Although he was so patient and uncomplaining, and so slow of speech and unready with a quick answer, you could always rouse him to dispute with you if you spoke of the Good Old Days. ‘Maybe they were good for some, sir. I can tell ’ee they weren’t for us. Up at five to do the milking, dry bread and a slice of fat bacon for breakfast, then a ten-mile round with the milk, a bite of bread and cheese and a glass of cider, then more milking and another ten-mile round. A bit of a sit-down in the kitchen, a bite of supper, and then a hard bed: seven days a week. I dunno how much butter we helped to make every week, but I know we never tasted it; fat bacon was all the grease we got on our bread.’ When he was seventeen he went to work for the railway; and for many years after that his wages as a platelayer were sixteen shillings a week. His wife fell ill, and became in the end a permanent invalid; his son was a cripple who couldn’t earn anything towards his keep. It was always a hard struggle to make ends meet, and David never had a penny to spend on himself. ‘They talk about Charity in the Good Old Days,’ he would say, ‘but I never saw much of it myself. I had sixpence from the parson once or twice, and a bag of coal at Christmas. We didn’t often see any meat, and we still never tasted butter!’

  But as the years went by wages improved and the working day became shorter, so that he had a chance to dig his garden in the summer evenings; he’d never had time for that
before. At the age of fifty-five he was earning a little more than two pounds a week, and would have thought himself comfortably off but for the shadow of old age which lay ahead of him. He’d never been able to save anything; and the company which he had served so long and faithfully provided no pensions for their servants in the lower grades when they were worn out and old. So David couldn’t have retired even if he’d wanted to; and he patiently carried on as he’d done ever since he was promoted from platelayer to ganger, ‘walking his stretch’ every day and in all weathers, on Sundays as well as weekdays, for rather less than fifty shillings. His back became more bent and his legs more stiff from treading the sleepers; but his sharp eyes that could see a rabbit-track in the cutting forty yards away still kept faithful watch along the road for the rot in the timber or the fault in the steel, for the wet patch in the clay or the displaced brick in the culvert or the tell-tale seeping of sand from a crack in the embankment. And thanks to David Groves and others like him the great expresses still roared through Brensham station at seventy-six point five miles an hour.

  The Compleat Engine-driver

  Those expresses never stopped at Brensham. We set our watches by them, and that was all they meant to us, unless some labouring lad, watching the blurred lights tearing past on a winter’s evening, and catching a glimpse of the people in the carriages, who’d been in Scotland perhaps for breakfast and would be in Bristol before midnight - unless some such lad standing in a muddy gateway felt the spirit of adventure stirring within him, and upped and away next morning all because of the swift splendid train.

  But for most of the villagers the goods trains were much more important than the expresses; Brensham’s prosperity was bound up with them. They carried away in season, to the north and to the south, the strawberries, the cherries, the plums, the apples, the pears, the sprouts, the onions and the cabbages upon which nearly half the inhabitants depended for their livelihood. At plum-picking time there was even a special which picked up a load each day at six-thirty and delivered our Pershores and Victorias to the northern cities in time for market next morning.