by John Moore
While Jane said goodbye to each of her friends, kissed Mimi and Meg and Mrs Trentfield, thanked Dai again for his poem, and tried to explain to the reporters that if they stayed the night at the Manor they would probably get nothing to eat, Lord Orris rode round the field on his old mare and tried ineffectually to clear a gaggle of Gormleys out of the path of Jane’s take-off. The old man looked very sad. ‘I shall be lonely when she has gone away,’ he said. ‘And aeroplanes are horrible things.’ With a slight sorrowful smile he added: ‘I am led to understand that Australia positively teems with rabbits. It will be a sort of home from home.’
At the last moment Jane ran back into the house and fetched a small brown paper parcel which she packed into the cockpit. ‘I suddenly thought I’d take Robert with me,’ she said. ‘His heart might be a sort of talisman.’ Then she climbed into her little aeroplane and started its engines which crackled so loudly that Rosinante shied - surely for the first time in a dozen years - and Lord Orris was nearly unseated. She waved goodbye, Joe Trentfield and I pulled away the chocks, the wind from the slipstream flattened a long swathe of grass, and the aeroplane began to move forward over the bumpy ground. Everybody cheered as it gathered speed, the last Gormley child scampered out of its way, the tail lifted, the engine thundered and the sun glinted on the bright blue paint as the burnished dragonfly sped along. ‘She’s off!’ cried Dai Roberts; but suddenly the whole machine lurched sideways, one of the wheels bounced high off the ground and the opposite wing began to plough a long brown furrow through the grass. I heard Mimi scream, and saw a wheel bowling away from the aeroplane like a cricket-ball, one of the wings broke off it, there was a long splintering crash and then silence.
Jane was climbing out of the wreckage when we got there. She was not hurt, except for some scratches on her forehead and nose. But the bright little aeroplane, that a few seconds before had seemed as gay and lively as a bird, now sprawled upon the ground like a dead pheasant crumpled by the sportsman’s gun. Its propeller was broken and twisted, its nose was buried in the earth, its wings and its tail lay in tangled heaps about it. Small pieces of torn fuselage were strewn behind it for twenty yards like the aftermath of a paper-chase. It was painfully obvious that it would never fly again.
‘What happened?’ we asked; and Jane said in a queer flat voice:
‘It was a rabbit-hole. The starboard wheel caught in a rabbit-hole and she swung out of wind and turned over.’
She began listlessly to pull her suitcase and maps out of the cockpit, and throw them down on the ground. Last of all she brought out the brown paper parcel. She stared at it, pulled away a corner of the paper, and suddenly smiled.
‘He’s broken too,’ she said. ‘Oh Lord, I’ve broken Robert!’ She handed me the parcel and I could see through the tear in the corner some fragments of smashed porcelain and a piece of grey rubbery substance which had a faintly aromatic smell.
‘Poor Robert,’ said Jane. ‘He wasn’t meant to fly.’
Suddenly we heard Dai Roberts shouting loudly:
‘Stop him! Stop him! My bicycle it iss that the man iss riding!’
We looked across the field in the direction of Dai’s frantic gesticulations; and saw a man on a bicycle pedalling away furiously along the drive. It was one of the reporters, on his way down to the village to telephone to his newspaper.
But Jane got no headlines next day. There is no news value alas, in ‘record flights’ which fail even before they are properly begun.
The Vultures Descend
Even if Jane’s fantastic venture had succeeded and she had got to Australia, won ten thousand pounds, and come back to restore the family fortunes like a fairy godmother in the last act of one of Mimi’s pantomimes - even so it would have been too late. The year was 1938; and if there was already talk of war in the Adam and Eve and the Horse Narrow there was certainty of war in the banks and in the City. Lord Orris’ remaining stocks and shares, which in prosperous times were scarcely enough to secure his overdraft, suffered a sudden depreciation in common with all others. Simultaneously, to people who were in ‘the know’, landed property, and particularly agricultural land, began to appear a most desirable acquisition; for whatever happened estates would not shrink to nothing in consequence of a crisis nor England’s green acres melt away in a night. Therefore Lord Orris found himself assailed on both sides suddenly; the bank with reluctance and the Syndicate with eagerness called in their loans and foreclosed on their mortgages. There was nowhere else he could go for money; and so, in May, Orris Manor passed into the hands of the Syndicate at last. With it went the weedy garden, the ruined chapel, the muddy moat, and the Muscovy duck; six smallholdings and five cottages; and fifty acres of rabbit-infested parkland with the numerous families of Fitchers and Gormleys, who were encamped upon it in their caravans, and whom the Syndicate evicted within a week.
But like most tyrants, who grow tired from time to time of the taste of too much power and seek to spice the tedious plateful with a dash of magnanimity, they decided at the last moment to tickle their palates with a titbit of clemency. The Mad Lord might keep the Lodge at the end of the drive, which was occupied by his cowman. A room was prepared for him by the cowman’s wife, who had been his parlourmaid in prosperous days; and there, in June, he found his last refuge. The cowman went to work for the Syndicate; but he still found time to milk and tend the Mad Lord’s five cows and two calves which grazed in the Home Orchard. These, with the orchard itself and his spavined mare, represented the sum total of Lord Orris’ worldly possessions. Nor was he likely to keep them very long; for a heifer belonging to one of his late tenants died in calving and as soon as he heard of it he insisted on sending along his roan calf as ‘a small gift to compensate him for his loss’. The Mad Lord was madder than ever, people said when they heard of it. Yet his madness, if it was indeed that, was of the gentlest kind; his wits had gradually fallen away from him as the leaves fall from the trees in soft Septembers. His folly was not of grandeur but of poverty; he never imagined himself to be God or Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte or the King or indeed anybody but the debt-ridden penniless Lord Orris whose fortunes had tumbled down about his ears. He spent his declining days riding about the land which had once been his upon his ancient and Rosinantine mare; a beggar on horseback, he nevertheless seemed perfectly contented and continued, out of his dwindling store, to give things away.
The Mad Lord Discovers Dreamland
‘Contented’ is perhaps not strong enough a word; for Lord Orris had found in the evening of his life a new pastime which gave him hours of the most perfect and unclouded happiness. It was a simple, cheap and almost childish pastime; and he found it by accident. Meg Trentfield had achieved her ambition at last and ‘gone into the films’: that is to say she stood in a long queue every day at Elstree or Pinewood to await the decision of some minor tycoon whether or not she was required as an extra, and if the decision was favourable she stood about in the studio all day to await a greater tycoon’s verdict whether the brief crowd-scene would be ‘shot’. Her sister Mimi, who was a great favourite of Lord Orris’, met him one day and described to him in glowing terms this strange and romantic life which her sister was leading; and he said that it was extremely interesting but, for his part, he knew nothing about that kind of thing for he had never been to the pictures. This admission astonished and indeed quite upset Mimi, who went to the pictures at least four times a week; she was as surprised as if someone had told her he had never ridden in a railway train, as moved as if she had suddenly learned that pit-ponies never see the daylight. She immediately prevailed upon her father to lend her his car, and that very evening took Lord Orris to the cinema at Elmbury. When they got there she was disappointed to find that the film concerned gangsters. ‘I am afraid,’ she said to her guest, ‘that it won’t be exactly your cup of tea.’ Nevertheless, it soon appeared that the film was very much to his taste. He sat up straight and tense in his seat and gripped the sides of it tightly. Several times Mimi
heard him gasp with excitement and when the heroine was abducted by the gangsters he sighed with deep despair. When the hero rescued his lady in the nick of time Lord Orris clapped; and when Mimi placed a restraining hand upon his arm at the moment when the shooting started, he clapped louder than ever, and she realized that he was oblivious of her presence and of the audience and indeed of everything except the walking shadows upon the screen. When the show was over and they came out into the daylight he looked exhausted but supremely happy. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘it was wonderful. That splendid detective! But I never thought he would be in time. When those brutes were torturing the girl, I thought it was all up, honestly! And those policemen on motor-bikes, actually shooting at sixty miles an hour. So clever of them. And the brave man who jumped on to the moving train … wonderful, wonderful.’ Thus he chattered happily all the way home.
Mimi had a very kind heart; and to give so much pleasure, as she said, was a pleasure in itself. She took Lord Orris to the pictures almost every week; so that Joe teased her and called him her new boyfriend. He did not seem to mind what kind of picture he saw. His appreciation was catholic and unselective. Galloping cowboys would make him cheer, star-cross’d lovers sometimes even moved him to weep, he roared with laughter at the comics and whistled the catchy tunes out of the musicals. The only films which he did not thoroughly enjoy were the Walt Disneys, which he thought were too much like real life. This amazed Mimi, who took great pains to explain to him that they were phantasies; but soon she discovered that in this matter they spoke a different language. The nightclubs, gilded restaurants, cocktail bars and Fifth Avenue apartments which she believed to be Real Life, or at least a desirable extension of the Real Life she knew at present, represented for Lord Orris the palaces of fairyland. The lives, the behaviour, and the motives of the characters on the screen were so completely unrelated to anything within his experience that he was able - indeed he was compelled - to regard them as figures in a fairytale, whereas the deliberate parables of Walt Disney were comprehensible and sometimes even painful in their reality.
But of the fairytale, the gorgeous and enthralling fairytale of gangsters and detectives and Nightclub Queens and Dance Band Leaders and Poor Little Rich Girls, Lord Orris never tired. Sometimes, when Mimi was unable to take him, he even went to the pictures alone, riding into Elmbury upon his old grey mare which he stabled at the Swan and standing in the queue with the schoolboys (who were not more excited than he was) to pay his ninepence for a cheap seat. Before long he could recite as accurately as Mimi and Meg the names and the hierarchies and even the matrimonial complexities of most of the inhabitants of the Hollywood fairyland; and in their honour he rechristened his four cows Ginger Rogers, Bette Davies, Mae West and Myrna Loy.
Many a True Word
Autumn came with its old disquiet in the winds that blew through the yellowing orchards; and with a new disquiet in the winds that blew about the world. ‘Let us consult the Oracle,’ said Mr Chorlton, when somebody pulled the lavatory plug at the Horse Narrow and set up the familiar gurgling, Minnehaha, Laughing Water, in the tank above the bar ceiling. ‘For I imagine that is almost exactly the right noise. Now shall we ask it the ancient question: Will there be war?’
‘Better ask it,’ said Joe Trentfield shrewdly, ‘whether it’ll be this year or next.’
But before I went to the Horse Narrow again the Munich Agreement had been signed. I asked Joe his opinion of it and he said briefly: ‘I never thought I’d live to see us shamed so.’ Nevertheless, he was in great good humour that evening because he had a new exhibit to show his customers and with which to decorate his bar. He had lent his old gun to one of Alfie’s boys who had marked down a flock of wild duck on the river, and the first shot had blown a hole six inches long in the side of the barrel. Luckily the boy was unhurt; and as Joe passed the gun round for us to see he roared with laughter and demanded: ‘Have you ever seen such a comical thing in your life? Might have blowed his finger off!’ No misfortune, short of an actual fatality, failed to tickle Joe’s catholic sense of fun. ‘Bet it gave him a fright!’ he chuckled; and Mrs Trentfield, laughing till she shook like a jelly, echoed him: ‘I bet it made him jump!’
‘Any road,’ said Alfie, whose son had nearly been slain by it, ‘’tis one of them guns that shoot round corners now.’
And then Jeremy Briggs said grimly:
‘Pity it’s bust. You might need it, Joe, before old Chamberlain makes another agreement!’
We laughed; and none of us dreamed that two years later Joe Trentfield would indeed be patrolling with a shotgun on Brensham Hill.
The Right of Way
For the second time in his life Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith was in trouble with the Syndicate. Long ago he had refused to shoe their horses and had assaulted their chauffeur; this time he had trespassed upon their land and assaulted their keeper.
They had closed a footpath through Orris Park which local men had been in the habit of using occasionally on their way to work; and Briggs had made it his business every evening after work to parade ostentatiously along it until at last he attracted the attention of a keeper, who warned him off. He refused to go; and he then proceeded under the keeper’s very eyes to remove and smash to pieces the notice ‘Strictly Private’ which had been affixed to the gate. The keeper threatened him with a stick; and Briggs, who had a fist like a sledge-hammer, smote him upon the nose.
That was the simple story as it was told in court, and of course there could be no doubt about the verdict. The footpath might or might not be a right of way; that must be settled, said General Bouverie, in another court. Briggs had grievously assaulted the keeper, and he must pay the penalty.
‘There is no doubt whatever,’ said the General, ‘that you are guilty of a most serious offence. Have you anything you want to say?’
‘Yes, your Worship,’ said Briggs. ‘I’d like to say that I bore the keeper no ill-will; he was only doing his duty. I lost my temper, and hit the wrong bloke, that’s all.’
‘And who might be the right bloke?’
‘Them,’ said Briggs emphatically.
‘Them?’
‘The keeper’s bosses. Them as shut the footpath. Them as prosecuted the brats for pinching green apples. Them as has us turned off the river bank. Them—’
‘That’s enough,’ said the General sharply. ‘You’re not exactly helping your case, and I’m not at all sure whether you are treating this court with proper respect. In fact you seem, in a vague sort of way, to be uttering threats. We are going to fine you ten pounds or a month; if you give any further trouble it will be prison without the option.’
But when the case was over and the court rose he grinned at Mr Chorlton, who had recently been appointed a JP. ‘Stout-hearted chaps you breed in Brensham,’ he said. ‘We could do with some more of them.’
Briggs paid his ten pounds and went thoughtfully home. The matter of the footpath was in itself only a small grievance, but Jeremy had brooded upon it until it seemed to him a microcosm of all the oppressions under the sun, and although the right to pass through Orris Park was only a small and trivial right its importance was magnified in his mind until it became the sign and the symbol of a great Freedom and a larger Liberty. He swore that he would not let the matter rest; and one day when I was driving past his forge I found him in earnest and whispered conversation with Mr Chorlton and I guessed that there was a plot afoot.
Mr Chorlton waved to me and signalled for a lift; I was going back to Elmbury and could drop him at his cottage on the way. As he got into the car I heard him say, ‘Sunday, then?’ and Briggs with a broad grin said: ‘Sunday at half past two.’
The New Unhappy Lords
On the way we passed Lord Orris, who was riding back from the blacksmith’s upon his deplorable bag of bones. Briggs nowadays shod the Mad Lord’s mare for nothing, because he had come to look upon him as one of the Oppressed rather than the Privileged Classes - a victim of the capitalists, a martyr even to the
Big Businessmen. Mr Chorlton, who could never resist making a quotation when one sprang to his mind in Latin or Greek or even in what he called the Vulgar Tongue, turned to watch him ambling down the road and declaimed:
‘“We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land; and still it is not we.”
He whistled. ‘By Jove, it’s more apt than I thought! Chesterton’s ‘Secret People’. Listen:
‘“They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies,
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs.
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.”
How perfectly it describes the Syndicate!’ Mr Chorlton went on. ‘And in a way it expresses what poor Jeremy was trying to tell us in court. Them, he said. He wanted to hit Them; but he didn’t know who They were, and that was really what he resented. Now I believe he was right; for I think one of the most horrible and dangerous modern tendencies is this growth of what I’ll call anonymous tyrannies. You get it in industry - huge combines, trusts and so on; you get it in bureaucracy - a Civil Service that seems to become more impersonal every day as it gets bigger; and now we’ve got an example of it in the countryside. The Syndicate! You can’t hit a syndicate with your heavy fist; and that is Briggs’ complaint. I’m with him. In the old days, if a factory owner sweated his workpeople, sooner or later, if things got bad enough, they stoned his carriage or booed him in the street. If a farmer was a wicked employer they burned his ricks. And if a landlord was cruel enough and oppressive enough, they could break his windows or at any rate march up to his house in a body and caterwaul outside his front door.