Brensham Village

by John Moore

  ‘Now the point is, they knew who the industrialist was, who the farmer was, who the landlord was. Those people had names and faces, and it was common knowledge where they lived. Even the greatest tyrants the world has ever seen - Nero, Tiberius, Napoleon - were known and recognized, and if you liked to risk it you could have a shot at assassinating them. But this new tyranny is quite different. You don’t know where the head of a combine lives, even if you happen to know his name. As for the Civil Service, it’s all arms, body and legs, but you can’t find the head: if you have a quarrel with, say, the Inspector of Weights and Measures, you can’t tackle him about it in the street, because you don’t know him from Adam. And it’s the same with the Syndicate, “the new unhappy lords”. Tyrants ought to have names so that they can be held personally responsible for their tyranny. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But what do you propose to do about it?’

  ‘There’s precious little we can do. But I have been having a talk with Briggs and we’ve got an idea. In fact I’m not sure that the latest member of the County Bench hasn’t instigated a bit of “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace”.’

  ‘What’s the plot?’ I said.

  ‘Come along to Briggs’ forge at two-thirty on Sunday afternoon and you’ll see.’

  The Secret People

  I duly went there; and I was astonished to find the biggest crowd I have ever seen in Brensham gathered together outside the blacksmith’s shop. Sammy Hunt was there, and Mr and Mrs Hartley, Sir Gerald and his family, Joe Trentfield, Mimi and Meg in their absurdly fashionable Sunday hats, Mrs Trentfield huge and blowsy and in full sail like a square-rigged ship going into action, David Groves, Alfie, and a dozen more, with a large number of children of all ages and a score or so of Gormleys and Fitchers, fortunately segregated from each other, standing about and muttering in little groups. Jeremy Briggs, who seemed to be acting as a kind of Master of Ceremonies, was wearing a bowler hat and his black Sunday suit, with the gold watch chain across his waistcoat, which he always wore at political meetings and on General Election days. But this was not a political meeting. ‘There will be no speeches and there must be no rowdyism,’ he said severely. ‘All you have to do is to walk.’

  Mr Chorlton, who was chuckling with delight, marshalled the crowd into a sort of crocodile. Briggs marched at its head, and led us up the lane to Orris Park, where he solemnly opened the gate at the end of the footpath. ‘There must be no Wilful Damage,’ he shouted. ‘All you does is to walk, backwards and forwards, up and down.’

  And that is what we did. Our ridiculous crocodile wound its way slowly across the Park to the gate at the farther end, turned round and came back, turned once more, and crawled back at funeral pace to the end of the path again. Nobody interfered with us, though a couple of keepers appeared in the distance, gaped at us, conferred together, and unhappily shuffled away. Backwards and forwards, up and down, to and fro we marched for an hour, until we had worn a noticeable track through the thin grass which previously had known the footsteps of no more than one or two wayfarers in a month. When we had finished we carefully shut the gates; and as we walked home Mr Chorlton in high spirits came up to me and took my arm. ‘How’s that for the Secret People?’ he said with a grin; and once more he quoted:

  ‘“Smile at us, pass us, pay us; but do not quite forget, For we are the people of England, that has not spoken yet.’“

  This Desirable Property

  The Colonel had not taken part in the demonstration, because he had been suddenly taken ill. Three days later he died.

  ‘They’ll have to carry me there,’ he had said, vowing that he would never willingly go to church again. And now, sooner than he or any of us had expected, he was carried there and laid to rest. For many months a sharp angina had troubled him, but he had made light of the pain, and had disobeyed his doctor’s advice to take things quietly. If he could no longer walk over the hill, wade in the water, lie in wait at evening for the wild ducks that came flighting down from the north with the first flurry of snow, he didn’t want to go on living. So he went spinning for pike as usual in September, and walked after the partridges through the yellow stubble-fields; and when the end came it came quickly - he was drinking whisky in the Horse Narrow a week before he died. For months afterwards we found it difficult to believe that we should see him no more. He had been almost a part of the landscape for so long that we missed him as we should miss a great oak beneath which we had played in childhood, and which we had known all our lives as a kindly shade in summer or a thing of rugged splendour when the leaves fell.

  In the spring his farming-stock was sold, the piebald horses, the deep-sided dappled Ayrshires, the Gloster Spot pigs, the monstrous Spanish sheep for which not even the dealers were eager to bid. I went to the sale and bought the Colonel’s gun and fishing-rod for old times’ sake. Afterwards I walked down to the Summer Leasow to have a look at the Heronry; but although last year’s nests were still there, black rafters at the tops of the greening elms, this season the birds had not come back. Nor did they ever come to Brensham again, to gladden us with their lovely flight as they winged their way over the river across the sunset sky towards their precarious haphazard homes in the windy tree-tops.

  A few weeks later the Colonel’s farm itself was offered at auction. Now his next-door neighbour, on the river side, had been Sammy Hunt, who owned the osier-beds and a couple of meadows next to Summer Leasow; and a week before the sale to Sammy’s great surprise he received a visit from the same ‘long-nosed snooping lawyer’ who had first appeared in Brensham after the great frost. This man proceeded to put up to Sammy a rather curious proposition. He began by saying that he represented what he called an ‘interest’ which was anxious to acquire the Colonel’s farm. Next he asked if Sammy was in the market for it, and Sammy answered ‘No’. ‘Excellent,’ said the lawyer, ‘then we shall find it easy to agree,’ Sammy thought privately that he would find it easier to agree with a tarantula, but he held his peace. The lawyer went on:

  ‘You are well known in the district, and are held, if I may presume to say so, in great respect and esteem. Now my clients - I need make no secret of it to you, they already own the greater part of the farmland round Brensham - are less well known personally and have encountered from time to time a certain unreasonable local prejudice against themselves. Our proposition, to be very frank, is that you should bid for the farm; since unfriendly people who might deliberately “run up” my clients would certainly not do so if you were the bidder. If it is knocked down to you, at a price which we will discuss, my clients will repurchase it from you at a hundred pounds more than you gave for it. They will also pay all legal costs. In a nutshell - you get a hundred pounds for an afternoon’s trouble. What about it?’

  Sammy puffed slowly at his pipe and said at last:

  ‘Would such a transaction be legal?’

  ‘Perfectly legal, sir.’

  ‘Would it be regarded - in a business sense - as honest?’ Sammy smiled.

  ‘Perfectly. We should describe it as - er - normal business practice.’

  Old Sammy got up and his smile faded.

  ‘I am getting on in age,’ he said, ‘and if my neighbours have any esteem for me as you suggest they have it is because I have tried during a fairly long life to act straight. In other words I haven’t indulged in what you call normal business practice. Take that answer to your masters; and tell them we are honest men in Brensham.’

  ‘- Of Interest to Speculators and Others’

  The lawyer duly turned up in the saleroom at the Swan Hotel in Elmbury, and after some brisk bidding the farm was knocked down to him for four thousand pounds. In spite of the imminence of war, agricultural land was still fairly cheap in the district; and the farm was a good bargain at the price.

  ‘For a client …’ said the lawyer when the auctioneer asked for the purchaser’s name. Sammy, whose code of honour was a very strict one, had not yet told his tale;
and he still kept his own counsel, for the lawyer might have many clients. But a month later we saw an advertisement in the local paper offering the farm for re-sale by private treaty. The advertisement was headed: ‘Ripe for Development.’ We knew then for sure what we had already guessed: that the Syndicate had come down off the hill and gained a footing in Brensham.

  Part Seven

  The Bomb

  Close of Play - Brensham by Post - Brief Homecoming - Good Correspondents - The Fire - Hearts-ease in the Horse Narrow

  Close of Play

  And Now I must write of Brensham mainly from hearsay, for on the second of September we played our last cricket-match and early next day I went off to the war.

  It may have been our last match of all upon the square smooth Brensham ground; for the field had been part of the Colonel’s farm - he had let us have it rent free - and the astute Syndicate had made a quick re-sale. An aircraft factory, recently built near Elmbury, was growing almost as fast as the mushrooms were in the muggy autumn weather; a site was needed for its ‘satellite’ which would manufacture small components. The Syndicate took a profit of two thousand pounds which perhaps they patriotically invested in aircraft shares. While we played our last game, lorries full of drainpipes were already trundling past the cricket-field along a new cinder road.

  It was a curious, uncomfortable match, and I had a sharp sense of unreality even when I was batting: for once it didn’t seem to matter if one hit the ball or missed it. We played four short and without our captain; for Sammy Hunt, at the age of sixty-one, had gone back to sea. Billy Butcher during the morning had got very drunk in the Horse Narrow; and at closing-time, dismally reciting Housman, he had gone off to Elmbury to ‘list for a soldier. Banks was busy and important in his police-station, where the telephone rang all day. And for the first time in anybody’s memory Alfie had drawn the pubs in vain for ‘the boys’.

  So we lost handsomely and without much minding. We packed away our bats and pads as carelessly as if they had been the impedimenta of a past life which we were now for ever leaving, hurried to the Horse Narrow for a last drink with Joe and Mrs Trentfield and the girls, and then I drove back to Elmbury to do my packing.

  Brensham by Post

  Thenceforth for many months I heard only scraps of news of Brensham in frequent letters from Mr Chorlton and occasional ones from Alfie, Joe and Mimi.

  The unlucky Trumpet had another new tenant. She was an old woman with a considerable beard who greatly resembled the Witch of Endor, and she had quarrelled with most of her customers including Jeremy Briggs, who had sworn he would never enter the Trumpet again while she was alive. Jim Hartley had been recalled to the Guards and had been unable to make his old uniform come together across his great belly. The Adam and Eve was being rethatched, but the thatcher had been called up and Bardolph had taken on the job. He was no sooner up on the roof than he grew thirsty and descended to the bar; he’d been at the task four months already and had drunk three hogsheads of beer.

  Mimi in a round childish hand wrote: ‘His lordship I’m afraid is growing very old and feeble. Ginger Rogers has had a calf.’ She told me that; Jane had joined the ATA and was flying aeroplanes from the factories to the RAF. The Fitchers and Gormleys had picked upon the Horse Narrow for their usual Christmas melée and had broken a lot of glasses which were difficult to replace in wartime …

  A few weeks later I had a letter from Alfie addressed in that awkward painstaking copper-plate style which gave me a nostalgic reminder of his familiar cricket postcards: ‘You have been selected to play against Woody Bourton at Brensham on Saturday next the fourteenth at 2.30 sharp.’ You have been selected - as if we ever had the luxury of making a choice, as if we shouldn’t have to bribe and browbeat ‘the boys’ on Saturday morning to fill the last three places in the team! But this year there would be no cricket.

  Alfie had laboriously scratched out with a spluttering pen what must have seemed to him a very long letter. He told me that the blossom was coming on well and everybody was crossing their fingers and praying there wouldn’t be a frost. Rexy had killed three rats under the poultry-house. Alfie’s two boys had gone into the Tank Corps and he would have a job to manage without them.

  Then I heard from Joe. The new woman at the Trumpet had suddenly died, and Jeremy Briggs on the following morning had marched into the bar as bold as brass and ordered a quart of beer. Now the place had yet another new landlord; his wife was florid, flirtatious and red-haired and was already known, said Joe, as the Strumpet. As for the Horse Narrow, the bar on most nights was full of Landgirls. They sang songs, and Meg played the piano, and sometimes a few soldiers came in and then there were great goings on. It was nice, in wartime, to see people having a bit of Fun.

  Then, after Dunkirk, I heard how the war’s lengthening shadows began to reach out towards Brensham at last. A training aeroplane had crashed in the Summer Leasow and Banks had to guard it all night. Jim Hartley had come back from France looking as if he had been on a ceremonial parade, his buttons all polished and not a speck of dirt on his boots. He had lost three stone; but Mrs Hartley was feasting him on such a gargantuan scale that he looked like getting them back before his leave ended. The Local Defence Volunteers prowled the hill at night armed with pikes and shotguns. Soon they were rechristened the Home Guard, and Joe Trentfield became their captain. ‘He makes us run about like schoolboys,’ wrote Mr Chorlton. ‘To think how I used to watch with Olympian amusement the sweaty antics on field days of the school OTC!’

  His next letter told me:

  ‘Billy Butcher was killed during the Retreat. Perhaps he found at last the means of escape from himself which neither whisky nor the Groupers nor Sally Doan could give him. Sally has just had a baby. She will be happy, I think; for the memory of a dead hero is a more comfortable companion than ever poor Billy could have been.’

  Brief Homecoming

  In the late autumn I came home on embarkation leave and spent one day of it walking on the hill with Mr Chorlton. It was a wet and blowy day, the last of October, and there was doubt and insecurity in the air. As we came down the slope of Orris Park I looked about me and saw the season guttering down into black winter. In the Manor drive my feet scuffled through the dead-leaf-drifts and the air was full of spinning and whirling leaves. The gale snuffed the yellow elms like candles; a little warmth seemed to go out of the landscape as the colours faded from each tree.

  The usual desolate fields of sprouts filled the gaps between the sepia orchards. The scene was Brensham’s familiar autumn scene, a mixture of dull-green and dirty-brown, but two isolated splashes of bright colour curiously relieved it. Close to the village there was a tawny acre of feathery asparagus-tops which looked like a field afire; and upon Alfie’s holding there was a patch of purple cabbage which caught the pale rays of the sinking sun and glowed reddish-bronze. So, I thought, in this winter of our discontent the light and the fire glows stubbornly in our hearts amid the darkness and the desolation!

  Mr Chorlton was telling me about the Home Guard and the knives and the pikes they expected to use against the Germans, who would come, we all believed, as soon as the Channel lay still. But the village below us looked, as it always did, snug and secure against wind and weather and whatever else might befall. Mr Chorlton broke off his discourse on the correct methods of noiseless assassination and said: ‘I do love our houses, John; they look as if somebody had poured a thick brown sauce all over them’ - and, of course, he quoted:

  ‘“If I ever become a rich man,

  Or if ever I grew to be old—”’

  and then, falling suddenly grave, he said: ‘But thatch is no good against bombs and bullets. My God, how the place would burn!’

  I felt unhappy and a bit frightened, because I was going off next week to a faraway battle, I didn’t know where. I said: ‘I wonder if it’ll still be here, when I come back,’ and Mr Chorlton shrugged his shoulders: ‘God knows.’

  Good Correspondents

&nbs
p; More letters: single ones reaching me at long and irregular intervals and out of chronological order, batches piled up to await me at the base, peripatetic letters which arrived a year late after travelling halfway round the world, stained and dirty and sweaty letters which had been stuffed into a pocket and forgotten because they came in the middle of a battle …

  Mimi has married a Pole. Alfie’s eldest boy is missing in Libya. David Groves is getting to look very old and ill, he ought to have retired long ago but the railway is short of men, almost every hour the troop-trains and the munition-trains go thundering through Brensham station. The Home Guard had a report of suspicious noises in the night and surrounded the larch plantation; but all they found was a badger in one of the Syndicate’s steel traps.

  The Trumpet is full of Canadian soldiers flirting with the landlord’s wife. It turns out that Mimi’s Pole is a Count; so she is a Countess. He cannot speak much English. His name is Pniack, and if you pronounce it wrong he corrects you: ‘P silent’. This always sends Joe into fits of laughter. Meg is in Ensa and does a song-and-dance act of her own ever so nice.

  Alfie has taken on three landgirls. They’re helluva good-looking but they quickly gets the backache dibbling in the beans. The plums were very bad last year: just when there would have been a good sale for them at a decent price. But that’s the way it is.

  Mr Chorlton is a Corporal in the Home Guard, but Jeremy Briggs is a Sergeant. Wouldn’t care to be a Hun if Jeremy got those great awful hands and steely fingers round the back of my neck! How he reminds me of Hopkins’ Felix Randal: ‘at the random grim forge, powerful amid peers, Didst fettle for the great grey dray horse his bright and battering sandal!’