Brensham Village

by John Moore

  Sir Gerald is a very sick man, and his arthritis keeps him to the house in the winter weather. He has rigged up his bird-table at last, with an automatic camera which is supposed to take a picture every time a bird alights on the top of the table; but of course it doesn’t work.

  Sammy Hunt arrived unexpectedly in the village wearing a borrowed khaki battledress. ‘The sods had the cheek to sink me,’ he said. He roared with laughter. ‘The so-and-sos gave me a cold swim.’

  Mrs Doan, who is mentally incapable of filling in forms, says she is going to give up the Post Office and the Grocery. ‘I had a good schooling,’ she snivels, ‘honest I did, sir, but them dratted papers makes my head go swimey every time I looks at them, so’s I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels!’

  Mimi’s going to have a baby. Brensham hasn’t had a bomb yet nearer than five miles, though the Heinkels go over every night on their way to the Midlands.

  They’ve cut down the tall elm trees in the Summer Leasow where the Colonel’s herons built their nests. Funny how often we find ourselves thinking and talking of the Colonel. He was one of those rare spirits which live on in the memories of everyone who knew them. Mimi and Meg regularly tend his grave in the churchyard. Charming of them, and unexpected; but the Nymphs, of course, always worshipped Proteus, didn’t they?

  Hitler was over again last night. No bombs here, but it was helluva noisy.

  Haunted and hounded by Forms, which have turned her hair grey and frayed her nerves and finally driven her into a state near to persecution mania, Mrs Doan is convinced that every stranger in the village is an Inspector from the Ministry of Food.

  Now that the Japs have come in Sir Gerald has gone off to Burma. He received a telegram and left hurriedly next day. He looked a very sick man, hardly up to the journey. He wouldn’t tell us what he was going to do; but he said to one of the village children, who asked him if he’d be back for the bird-nesting: ‘The King’s got a job for me. It may take a longish time.’

  Pistol, Bardolph and Nym have all been prosecuted for taking mushrooms from a field which belongs to the Syndicate. Their defence was ingenious. ‘They were only bluelegs, your Worship.’ General Bouverie: ‘Do the police confirm that?’ The policeman did: they had five pounds of bluelegs in their basket. General Bouverie: ‘I understand that blueleg is an edible fungus called Tricholoma personatum. It is never cultivated and I doubt if it can properly be called a mushroom. Case dismissed.’

  The Pershore plums has been helluva good; but I’ve got nurn on my Vies.*

  There’s a rumour that Sir Gerald was sent to Burma to advise about the blowing up of some dams which he’d built himself in 1920. Nothing very definite or certain about him, but a story that he stayed behind pottering with the fuses and refused to leave when the engineers did, but stood and watched the unharnessed waters roaring into freedom from the prison where he had confined them years ago.

  Meg is engaged to Alfie’s younger son. He’s just been home on leave from Italy. The Army has improved him ever so.

  The Strumpet has run off with an airman; and now there’s another new landlord at the middle pub.

  It’s D-Day and still Brensham hasn’t had a bomb.

  The Fire

  And then, when at last I came home to Elmbury and asked in the Swan for the latest news of Brensham, somebody said: ‘You’ll find it very knocked about, I’m afraid.’ ‘Knocked about? Surely,’ I said, ‘it hasn’t had a bomb all the war.’

  It wasn’t a bomb exactly, they told me. One of our Lancasters was struggling home hard-hit after a raid on Dresden or somewhere: the last, or nearly the last, big raid of the German war. Its tail had caught fire, and it seemed to be trying to get rid of its bombs, for one went down in the open country two miles from Elmbury. That brought the townspeople out into the streets; and they craned their necks to watch the bright comet streaming across the sky. As they watched, orange fragments broke off from it, a Leonid shower of meteorites from the comet’s tail. There was a terrible white flash which lit the whole town, followed by a sudden darkness and a slow red glow on the northern horizon.

  It had fallen in two parts. The tail like a Roman candle gushed fiery particles all the way along the main road between Elmbury and Brensham; the rest of the aeroplane, with some bombs still on board, came down in the middle of the village, close to the Horse Narrow and the church. Then it blew up, hurling a hundred flaming brands upon the dry thatch of the cottages, and Brensham began to burn. Joe Trentfield and his Home Guard, the old men, the women and even the children fought the fires with buckets and stirrup-pumps until the engines got there and saved what could be saved. The firemen said there would have been nothing left of Brensham but for the work of Joe and his men. They had even climbed on to the roofs and scrabbled and scratched at the smouldering thatch with their bare hands.

  But I should find Brensham very changed, they told me in the Swan. There was a hole nearly fifty yards across in the middle of it.

  No: there had been no serious casualties, though Joe Trentfield was scratched by splinters and Mr Chorlton burned his hands. He was doubly unlucky; for while he was helping to fight the fire in the village, his own cottage, ignited by one of the fragments from the tail, was burning itself out, halfway between Brensham and Elmbury.

  Hearts-ease in the Horse Narrow

  I had almost forgotten the lovely course and procession of the English seasons; I hadn’t realized that it was already blossom-time. When I drove to Brensham next day I was astonished, as I have been afresh every spring since my boyhood, by the greenness and the whiteness and the silver spray of the plum-petal breakers splashing against the lower slopes of the hill.

  But in the village itself the trees stood gaunt and bare, with that now-familiar leprosy mottling their trunks and branches with livid patches and streaks. By a freak of the blast two plum trees in the churchyard, and the big apple tree which stood beside the Horse Narrow, had partially escaped; and upon these, even though the branches were broken, there was a defiant outburst of leaf and blossom, and in the apple tree a thrush was singing. ‘The apple tree, the singing, and the gold!’

  The gilded weathercock on the top of the church spire was knocked awry, there were holes in the church roof and the three poplars were down in the Rectory garden. There was a big crater outside the churchyard, and when I looked up the village street I could count a score of gutted cottages. In contrast to the blackened shells their gardens were bright with tulips and daffodils; and the light winds carried the remembered scent of gillyflowers. The front of the Horse Narrow was partly blown in, and green ricksheets patched the blackened thatch of its roof. I had been told that Mr Chorlton was living there with Joe, and I found him in the bar playing a game of darts with Alfle.

  I had expected that I should find a bitter and a broken man; but he hadn’t changed at all - in fact, I thought he looked younger and sprightlier. He bought me a drink and I asked him if it was true that he had lost all his books. He nodded.

  ‘And the butterfly collection?’ I said.

  ‘The whole bag of tricks.’

  I didn’t know what to say. He smiled.

  ‘You know, it sounds worse than it is,’ he said. ‘If I had had foreknowledge that it was going to happen to me I am sure I should have killed myself; I should have thought there was nothing worth living for. But now it’s happened and I’ve got over the first shock I feel curiously free. It’s rather an odd sensation, when you’re over seventy and suddenly you don’t have to worship the Lares and Penates any more. Those two thousand books which I used to catalogue afresh every year - wondering to whom I’d lent the ones which were missing! Those rows and rows of Magpie Moths and Blues and Fritillaries - how alarmed I was lest the mites or the damp should get into the cabinet drawers, or an eager schoolboy with his pointing finger chip a piece off a butterfly’s wing! Well … I can think of them now without regret. Too many possessions clutter up a man’s life perhaps; and it may be that I haven’t got much mo
re of mine left to live. For the last few years at any rate I shall be very free!’

  Joe Trentfield had gone into the back-room to fetch his wife; and now she came bustling out, heaving and swelling like a pouter pigeon, and shouting over her shoulder to Mimi: ‘Come along, Countess! Here’s an old friend of ours back from the war!’ Out from the parlour the two girls came scampering, and I was introduced to Mimi’s Pole and Mimi’s grubby-faced baby. ‘Pniack,’ said the Pole, coming smartly to attention. ‘P silent.’ Joe guffawed. ‘Wladi slaw’s his Christian name,’ said Mimi, spelling it for me. Joe said with possessive pride: ‘He’s a Count, you know,’ adding modestly: ‘Of course they have a lot of Counts in Poland.’

  It was one o’clock, the villagers began to come in for their midday beer or cider and I was kept busy shaking hands. Jeremy Briggs seized me with a grip that nearly broke my wrist. Then Sammy Hunt came in, with his bald head the colour of a walnut, for he’d spent the last year of the war in the Mediterranean. We had drinks all round, and Alfie in the same breath told me that his elder son was just back from a prison camp in Germany, the younger was going to marry Meg next month, Rexy had caught another rat under the poultry-house, and there was a cricket-meeting fixed for Monday to discuss the question of making a new pitch in one of Sammy’s meadows.

  Now I began to perceive that the changes that had occurred in Brensham were only physical changes: burnt-out cottages, blasted trees, holes in the wall of the Horse Narrow bar. Joe behind his splintered counter was roaring with laughter because somebody had brought him a parsnip with a long twisted root which had grown into the middle of a curiously-shaped potato. He held the conjoined vegetables up for us to see, and roared: ‘Have you ever come across anything so comical in your life? Have you ever seen such a sight in all your days?’ - and Mrs Trentfield’s balloon spinnakers filled with a good steady soldier’s-wind of laughter, and Mimi giggled and nudged her Pole.

  And all around me I could hear the familiar talk of the blossom, of crops and cultivations, of horses, of guns, of dogs, of cricket. Meg was sitting at the piano and strumming out her tinny little Ensa tune. David Groves in the corner was silently and thoughtfully chewing his bait - two hunks of bread with a lump of cheese and a raw onion which he peeled with his pocket-knife. There was a game of darts going on, and I listened with a joyful sense of homecoming to the old absurd backchat:

  ‘Middle for diddle.’

  ‘Mugs off.’

  ‘Glicketty-click.’

  ‘Hard to bear.’

  ‘Up in Annie’s room!’

  And there was Sammy standing in his usual corner and telling the Pole a long story about Brensham’s Great Frost.

  ’… Believe it or not - you may get it pretty cold in Poland - but here we were in the first week of May; I’m not quite sure whether it was the fourth or the fifth, or was it the sixth, and the thermometer outside my front door - I’m not leg-pulling - was showing thirteen degrees Fahrenheit…’

  Meanwhile Mr Chorlton was telling me the news. The aircraft factory on the Colonel’s farm had ceased production, and there was talk of its being dismantled. The Syndicate? It had been lying doggo during the war, or perhaps it had bigger fish than Brensham to fry; but recently the long-nosed lawyer had been seen in the village again, snooping round some of the ruined cottages. If he tried to buy them he’d be up against some opposition; for Jane had also been down to the village, and she was going to be married to a rich young man who talked of coming to live at Brensham and putting up a loan free of interest so that the cottagers could buy their own houses when they had been repaired.

  ‘Dear, splendid Jane!’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘She’s still searching for a crusade. But perhaps at last she’s found one.’

  I overheard Sammy say:

  ’… Well, to cut a long story bloody short, there I was, up to my neck in the water, and this huge black shape bearing down on me…’

  I said:

  ‘Oh, Sammy, I heard you’d been sunk and had to swim for it. How did it happen?’

  He looked rather annoyed by the interruption.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about that,’ he said with dignity. ‘I was merely telling the Count here our little tale about the Great Flood. I was explaining to him how I was nearly gored in the water by the Colonel’s Ayrshire bull.’

  I glanced at Mr Chorlton and he winked; and suddenly it struck me that Sammy had practically forgotten about his cold swim in the North Sea and that Brensham had very nearly forgotten about its bomb. I realized for the first time in six years that war was a passing thing. It had passed; and the searing flames of its passage were for Brensham but another memory with all the other great and little disasters that had come and gone, with the dangerous flood and the withering frost, with the brief uncomfortable midsummer madness of the Group and the stealthy invisible menace of the Syndicate looming over the hill. These came and went and left their scars; but they left also laughter and labour and courage, Joe guffawing behind his bar because he loved to see people having a bit of fun, Jeremy Briggs fighting for liberty in the clumsy heavy-handed way which was the only way he knew, David Groves with bent back still ‘walking his length’ every day, Alfie in his orchards saying with a grin and a shrug, ‘You can’t spray against Jack Frost,’ but doing the tedious job each year nevertheless because he felt he owed it to his neighbours and his trees, Mr Ghorlton starting life again at seventy and telling me: ‘I saw a Cabbage White butterfly today and it occurred to me, “How exciting! I haven’t even got that in my collection!’”

  No, Brensham hadn’t changed, I thought, for all that mattered of it was unchangeable: the brief beautiful blossoming, a whiff of gillyflower on the wind, and laughter and labour and courage, the imponderable, indestructible things.

  * I looked it up and of course he is quite right. Namque omne quotannis Terque quaterque solum scidendum glœbaque versis Aeternum fragenda bidentibus, omne levandum Fronde nemus.

  *Ie, ne’er’un on my Victorias.

  Author’s Note

  In Portrait of Elmbury I told the story of a market town in England’s ‘Middle West’ during the period between the wars. Inevitably some of the neighbouring villages which were Elmbury’s offspring and satellites came into the tale; and one of them was called Brensham.

  Like Elmbury, Brensham is real in the sense that I have built upon a ground-plan and framework of truth: but I have purposely played fast and loose with chronology and topography and have not hesitated to make what Byron called a short armistice with truth in cases where it would have been embarrassing (to say the least of it) to write about living people. For example, I have transplanted a Lord, borrowed a Parson, and imported a Syndicate; and to that extent Brensham is a synthesis of the villages which lie about Elmbury and its biography is a synthesis too.

  A few of the Elmbury characters reappear here: notably ‘the Colonel’, Mr Chorlton, and Pistol, Bardolph and Nym.

  JOHN MOORE

  April 1946

  For Lucile

  This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © John Moore

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  ISBN: 9781448204199

  eISBN: 9781448203604

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