by John Moore
‘A fair enough comment,’ said Mr Chorlton when he read the report in the local paper. ‘It would serve as a not-unkindly epitaph: They were so simple!’
There were no house-parties after that. Shortly the Rector was offered another living, perhaps in some parish where the villagers were less mistrustful of strange and new things. He readily accepted, and his successor turned out to be a kindly old man whose hobby was numismatics and whose only ambition was the enjoyment of peace and quiet so that he might finish before he died his book of seven hundred pages on the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas.
Part Six
The Syndicate
‘To the Workhouse with Him’ — Ruin and Rabbits - … Musa vetat mori - The Postman - The Oppressors — The Last Crusade - The Vultures Descend - The Mad Lord Discovers Dreamland - Many a True Word - The Right of Way - The New Unhappy Lords - The Secret People - This Desirable Property —‘… of Interest to Speculators and Others’
‘To the Workhouse with Him’
The Huge and horrid Syndicate, meanwhile, consolidated its position upon the slopes and the summit of Brensham Hill; and Lord Orris continued to keep himself out of the Bankruptcy Court by selling, to the Syndicate, a covert, a few fields or a small parcel of land every time they threatened to foreclose on the mortgage. Thus his estate suffered a gradual attrition, and now only his Park, the Manor, the Home Orchard and a few adjoining smallholdings and cottages remained to him and were like an island amid the encroaching flood. Lately he had been compelled to sacrifice the Folly, which his great-greatgrandfather had built in 1755. It stood in a rough field overgrown with brambles and thorn-bushes, which the Syndicate had long coveted because their pheasants, bred in the larch plantation, were apt to stray there. They had no use for the Folly itself, and they certainly had none for the Hermit who inevitably went with it. They lost no time in applying for an ejectment order against him, and their lawyer took pains to emphasize that in doing so they displayed remarkable tolerance and clemency. ‘My clients,’ he said, ‘cannot recognize him as any sort of a tenant, not even a tenant-at-will; indeed it is possible that in the eyes of the law he is simply a tresspasser. I am instructed that he more or less “lives off the land” and if this is so he could also be prosecuted for tresspassing in pursuit of coneys. But in view of the fact that he appears to have committed this trespass with Lord Orris’ consent or acquiescence for a great number of years I have advised my clients to take the very moderate course of applying for this order.’
I am sure that Lord Orris, when he made over the field on which the Folly stood, had no idea that he was throwing the Hermit to the wolves; it simply had not occurred to him that anybody would want to turn the poor old man out. General Bouverie and the rest of the magistrates apparently felt the same; it was obvious that they were unhappy about the case, for the General asked:
‘Do your clients offer him any alternative accommodation?’
‘Emphatically no, your Worship. They do not regard him as a suitable tenant for any of their cottages, even if one were vacant.’
The magistrates consulted together. At last General Bouverie said:
‘The man is very old: and although he is certainly a little eccentric the Bench feels that it would be somewhat harsh to turn him out, at his age, with nowhere to go except the workhouse, of which he would probably be a rather difficult inmate.’
‘I must repeat,’ said the long-nosed lawyer, ‘that for various sanitary reasons which I need not go into, my clients regard him as a most undesirable tenant: if indeed he can be called a tenant. They are being very lenient, but I am afraid they feel strongly on the subject; for the Tower, in its present condition, is nothing short of a menace to public health.’
The General said drily:
‘Really? On the top of Brensham Hill?’
‘Certainly,’ snapped the lawyer. ‘The water supply of several villages is dependent upon springs which are found within a few hundred yards of the Tower.’
He sat down. The magistrates consulted again, and then General Bouverie announced brusquely: ‘Application granted. The order will be made.’ He had no choice, for the case was clear-cut and simple, and he knew that even if he adjourned it the Syndicate would marshal against the wretched Hermit all the formidable bureaucratic apparatus of Sanitary Inspectors, Medical Officers of Health and perhaps the Lunacy Laws.
However, it proved less simple to get rid of the Hermit than it was to issue the order; for he sat down upon his dirty pile of straw and flatly refused to budge. When a second attempt was made he shut himself inside the Folly and locked the door; and Banks, with the assistance of a locksmith and a police sergeant from Elmbury, eventually had to break his way in and carry him off by force. He struggled fiercely. His straw hat with the I. Zingari band came off and was trampled underfoot, his tangled mane of long white hair fell down upon his shoulders like the Clarkson wig of King Lear during the storm scene on the Heath. And who knows that he did not believe himself, like that mad King, to be dispossessed of a kingdom - the blurred and yellow tinted kingdom of orchard and meadow which he had contemplated so proudly every day for thirty years from the roof of the Folly, through the broken telescope?
Ruin and Rabbits
Lord Orris had given me permission to shoot rabbits in his park; and I sometimes went up there with a ·22 rifle in the evenings and stalked them as they sat out at the edge of the little coppices. It was more fun than blazing away with a 12 bore.
Weeds and rabbits, as acquisitive as the Syndicate, held joint dominion over the last remnants of the Mad Lord’s estate. Nettles and thistles and teasels stood high against the hedges, there was poisonous hemlock at the ditchsides, dock in the waste-ground, ragwort in the Park. Deadly nightshade like lurking adder hid beneath the crumbling stone walls, in the wet meadows there were more fegs and rushes than wholesome grasses, and when the corn began to ripen on the few patches of cultivated land the wanton poppies’ scarlet always smothered the gold. And as the anarchic wild weeds multiplied, so did the rabbits; and whatever wholesome thing the weeds failed to choke the rabbits were sure to devour. Priapus was the Park’s genius loci. ‘The Scriptures tell us,’ Lord Orris would say, ‘that the coneys are a feeble folk. But I ask you: just look! Indeed the fierce fertility of the coneys in Orris Park gave the lie to Holy Writ. They teemed on the face of the earth like mites on a cheese; and before such appalling profusion even the poachers stood abashed, lost heart, and poached no more. ‘Pharoah,’ said the Mad Lord, ‘had his frogs, lice, and locusts, his boils and his blains, but my plague is rabbits. Our crest, rightly, should be a rabbit rampant on a field of weeds!’
‘You never shoot them?’ I asked him once.
He shook his head. ‘I’m no good with a gun, for I can never bring myself to let it off. How often have I set out, burning with indignation, determined to blow the head off every rabbit I could find! I have even gone so far as to aim at a rabbit; but then I always think of a dozen reasons why I should not shoot. For instance, how should the death of one rabbit benefit me? Here are millions and millions. Again, what if the little beast does achieve five or ten shillingsworth of damage in the course of a year? What is that compared with my debts? Alas, it is a single raindrop to all great Neptune’s ocean. I owe my bank five thousand times as much as the hungriest rabbit could steal; I pay those gentlemen over the hill who hold my mortgages five hundred times as much in a year’s interest alone. But I don’t go and shoot my banker, or blow the members of the Syndicate to bits. And the rabbit has a much more pleasing expression than any of them.’
He smiled and went on:
‘By the time I have thought of all these considerations the rabbit has generally run away; but if it has the temerity to stay within range, at the last resort there is always an accidental factor which saves its life. The gun is not loaded; I simply cannot remember to put the cartridges in before I set out.’
… Musa vetat mori
Jane, that passionate and exquisite creature
, was away from Brensham most of the winter, for she was studying at a School of Aeronautics for her Ground Engineer’s Licence. The young men whom she now brought down at weekends were very different from the undergraduate Communists; they had grimy hands with broken nails, and oil-spots on their grey flannel trousers; and their conversation was all about internal combustion engines. On the whole we liked them better than the Communists, for they played darts earnestly, enjoyed their beer, and had the quiet and confident manner of men who do a job of work and are proud of it.
In the early spring Jane brought a new aeroplane back to Brensham. It was painted bright azure so that it looked more than ever like one of those burnished dragon-flies. Once more Jane alarmed the village by performing aerobatics over the church, but her loops were neater and tighter and she had learned to do slow-rolls; she told us lightly that she proposed to fly to Australia. She would have preferred Pekin; but the newspaper which put up the money had demurred: ‘No good at all; China’s not in the Empire.’ If she knocked a day or two off the solo record she expected to get ten thousand pounds. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘we’ll pay off the mortgage and patch up the old house. If anything it looks more dilapidated than Father.’
The whole village was apprehensive about Jane’s crazy project, and Dai Roberts Postman was even moved to write her a poem; for he believed that aeroplanes were inventions of the Devil and was quite certain that she would be killed. The only true immortality, he knew, was that which lay in the gift of poets; so he hastened to pay her the ancient tribute which the Muse has always paid to those who are beautiful and who die young. When it was finished he presented it to her without humility or embarrassment; for although the Honourable Jane was a great lady, he was a Bard, and the men of his craft had held their heads high even before kings. ‘It iss in the Welsh tongue,’ he said, ‘because that iss the best language for the writing of poetry. You will not be able to understand it, but it iss a very noble poem in honour of yourself, and there are twenty-seven verses in the manner of Sion Tudor containing altogether one hundred and eight lines. You will carry it with you in your aeroplane to the ends of the earth?’
‘Of course I will, Dai!’
‘Not even the glorious songs of Taliesin,’ said Dai proudly, ‘have travelled as far as that!’
The Postman
Dai Roberts, about this time, was having his own troubles with the Syndicate. Recently one of its members had taken up permanent residence at the Shooting Lodge. Now in order to reach the Lodge from Brensham, one had to take the steep rough lane which led past Orris Manor and skirted the Park until at last, becoming rougher and steeper, it cut over the shoulder of the hill to the other side. I met Dai one afternoon pushing his bicycle up this lane and I asked him where he was going; for I was under the impression that the outlying parts of our district had a morning delivery only. He said that he was going to the Shooting Lodge to take some letters to a gentleman whose throat he would like to cut. I laughed and said:
‘You don’t like the Syndicate, Dai?’
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘they are bloody rats.’
‘What have they done to you?’ I asked.
‘It iss like this,’ said Dai, who was obviously glad to meet somebody who would listen to the story of his grievance. ‘Lord Orris iss not, if you follow me, a letter-writing man. Indeed it iss little but bills and the like that I ever bring up to the Manor. Now a bill iss not a pleasant thing; and it wass better for his lordship, and better for me, that he should not receive his bills too often. So we came to an arrangement: I would put his bills in my pocket, do you see, and bring them up perhaps once a week, saving my old bones, the tyres of my bicycle, and his lordship’s peace of mind. It wass a very fair understanding.’
‘Very fair,’ I said.
‘Ess. Well now indeed, along comes this gentleman to the Shooting Lodge and of course I do not keep his letters as long as I keep his lordship’s bills, but sometimes, if there is only one, I do not make the journey in the afternoon. That would be a foolish waste of breath, would it not?’
I agreed.
‘Ess. But the day before yesterday the gentleman made a complaint. He went to Mrs Doan Postmistress and he complained, sir, that I had kept back one of his letters for two days. It had come on Saturday afternoon; and I had delivered it punctually at nine o’clock on Monday morning. So I cannot see that he had much to complain of. But Mrs Doan said to me that perhaps I had gone poaching instead of delivering the letter and I must go up to the Shooting Lodge and make an apology.’
‘And did you?’
‘That, sir, is the point. I did so. I stood on the doorstep with my hat in my hands before a man with a cold voice who said: “You are the postman?” and I said, “Yes, I am Dai Roberts Postman; but I am also a poet,” and he said: “I understand you do not like bicycling uphill?” and I said: “Only a fool would like bicycling uphill,” and then he said, very cold and bitter, “Very well, Mr Dai Roberts; in order to make sure that my letters are delivered regularly in future, I have taken the precaution of ordering, from London, two newspapers - a morning and an evening one - to be posted to me each day. The one will arrive in time for the morning delivery, the other in time for the afternoon. You will therefore have the pleasure of climbing the hill twice every day whether there are any other letters for me or not.” That iss what he said to me, sir, and that iss what he has done. And that iss why I say, Bloody Rats! And by God if I could I would like to cut the throats of them all!’
The Oppressors
For a number of reasons, the village had less cause than ever to love the strange oppressive Syndicate. Two small boys, nephews of Jeremy Briggs, had been prosecuted for stealing some green collywobbly apples out of their orchards. In the meadows beyond the Summer Leasow, once Lord Orris’, where Brensham boys and Brensham men had been accustomed to go fishing ever since anybody could remember, appeared a notice which said: PRIVATE ANGLING, TICKETS 6d PER DAY, and a self-important oaf from the town was employed to patrol the tow-path and sell tickets on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. And then David Groves, who had been in the habit of ferreting for rabbits in the fields adjoining the railway (for this had long been a privilege of the platelayers and gangers) was caught by an angry keeper and threatened with a prosecution if he were ever found there again.
These actions were incomprehensible to the people of Brensham. The taking of fruit, in a district where in good seasons fruit rotted by the ton beneath the trees, had never been regarded as theft; as Joe Trentfield said, you might as well call it a theft when a kid pulls up out of your hedge some wild weeds for his guinea-pigs. The fish which swam in our river were mostly chub, roach, dace and eels: valueless to the gentry, who generally travelled to Scotland to catch salmon or to Hampshire to throw their gossamer lines over the chalk-stream trout. But the chub and roach gave sport to the village boys with their bamboo-rods, and the eels made a stewing for many a poor man when they were in good condition, at the time of the first frosts. Everybody in Brensham had grown up in the certainty that they had a right to wander foot-free along the banks of their own river with a rod. Now they were not so much angered as shocked by the fact that rich men thought it worthwhile to collect sixpences from boys whose pocket-money was perhaps a penny a week and labourers who lived on one pound ten.
As for the matter of the rabbits, David Groves had always believed that it was part of his duty to keep them down; for their buries spread into the hedges alongside the railway and if they were not checked they colonized the cuttings and the embankments, and might even cause a subsidence on the line. He earned a few pounds each year by selling them; and this he regarded as a right, one of the few ‘perks’ he had in his hard life. He was utterly bewildered when the keeper abused him; and he was terrified of the threat of prosecution, for like most men who have always been poor he was mistrustful of the law, and saw it as his enemy. He didn’t argue or complain; he knew it was no good. ‘They turned I off,’ was all he would say. ‘They chivvied I off
as if Td been a good-for-nothing varmint.’ He shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t understand it; for now the keepers were trapping and snaring the rabbits, and sending them off to Birmingham market in hampers to sell them at ninepence a couple. David Groves had never imagined that the gentry were interested in rabbits or in fourpence-halfpennies. In the hard rough world as he saw it such trifles were ‘poor men’s perks’.
Alfie tried to explain it to him one night in the Adam and Eve.
‘’Tis like this, David. ’Tisn’t that they’re mean because they’re rich, but ‘tother way round: they’re rich because they’re mean. If you’ve got a good many thousands and you still think pennies are important, you can be as rich as you like in no time. But luckily for us poor men, most people when they get a few thousands stop bothering about pennies. If they didn’t we’d lose the shirts off our backs before we knew what was happening.’
The Last Crusade
When we heard that Jane was going to fly to London to wait for favourable weather for her adventure, almost the whole of the village went up to the Manor to see her off. There must have been nearly fifty people in the flat field below the house. There were even two or three strangers, and we learned that these were reporters who had come down from London to interview her father. The Mad Lord’s vaguely apologetic greeting had greatly puzzled them: ‘My dear fellow, you can see for yourself that I have no money! If I possessed anything worth taking you should have it and welcome.’ It was some time before they realized that he was under the impression that they were bum-baillies or duns.