by John Moore
The Blue Field
John Moore
Contents
Part One
LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES
Part Two
LORDS OF THE MANOR
Part Three
THE CASE OF WILLIAM HART
Part Four
THE WIND
Part One
Landscape With Figures
Poetry and Sprouts – Crack-brained Brensham – My People – The Top of the Hill – The Blue Field – The Two Potterers – The Ploughgirl – Frolick Virgins – Young Corydon – Letter from a Liberator – ‘The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe’ – The Wild Old Man – Carnivorous Cider – Mr Hart, Wainwright – Goodman Delver – The Poacher – The Trophy – ‘A Foolish Thing Was but a Toy’ – Old Adam – The Ruin of Orris – O Fortunatos Nimium – ‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood’ – Ups and Downs – Liberty ’All – Fermented Happiness – Pru – Our MP – Mrs Halliday – The Irreconcilable
Poetry and Sprouts
MY PEOPLE have poetry in their hearts and dreams in their heads – and, for much of the time, what feels like half the West Midlands on their boots. They are a quick, imaginative, even a passionate people, but they also grow excellent asparagus, fat Victoria plums, and the best brussels sprouts in England. For many months, therefore, they slop about through the rich dark mud of their little farms, holdings and market-gardens, ploughing, mucking, spraying, grafting, pruning, sprout-picking, and so on. At times they are circumscribed by large and lesser floods, and at others the hoar frost on the sprout-tops makes their hands so cold that I have seen the men, as well as the land girls, crying with the pain of it. Nevertheless they sing songs and dream dreams; though you might not have suspected them of it if you had leaned with me over the gate of William Hart’s Nine-acre Piece, as he called it, on a typical November day and watched the gumbooted bumpkins (for so they would have seemed to you) at work in the half-flooded fields.
At such a season the prospect which confronts you is gloomy in the extreme. Over the gate lies a black morass, in which yesterday’s rain has made a chain of little lakes and upon which as like as not today’s rain drips softly with a hissing sound rather like the noise made by an old and disillusioned ostler grooming a horse. The brussels sprouts, melancholy of aspect, rise up out of the mud and are reflected in the dirty water; their yellowing outer leaves, torn off by the winds or the sprout-pickers, sail idly upon the brown lagoons. Of all the crops cultivated by man, sprouts make the dreariest landscape; and I believe the English are the only nation which spends its labours upon growing and tending them, which cherishes and takes pride in them, and which eventually eats them with relish. It is an addiction which we share with the caterpillars of the large white butterfly, and with certain sorts of blight.
The sprout-pickers, one to each row, bend low over the plants, heads down, behinds in the air, in the traditional attitude of ostriches, and when they have finished one plant they straighten themselves painfully and hobble to the next. There are men, women, and even a few children as well, for whole families take a hand when the tight-folded buds, as hard as walnuts and almost the same size, are ripe for picking and worth ten shillings a pot. So you would have seen in old William’s field not only his regular workmen and his quota of land girls but also a few of his relations and neighbours, putting in a day’s work either because they needed the money or because William had lent them some labour when they were picking their plums or their peas.
At sprout-picking time we get into the way of recognizing people by their behinds: and from William’s gate I should have been able to point out to you the neat and rounded bottoms of Mimi and Meg, the landlord’s daughters from the Horse and Harrow Inn, the corduroy trousers of Briggs the blacksmith (for sprout-picking is sometimes more profitable than waiting for horses to shoe), the often-patched breeks of Jaky Jones the odd-job-man, the blue ones of Dai Roberts Postman (if he had finished delivering the letters), the camouflaged paratroops’ jacket of George Daniels who dropped into Normandy on D-Day and has never worn anything else since, and the enormous, elliptical and inexplicably sombre behind of Count Pniack, the Polish soldier who married Mimi during the war and fathered the twins whose light-blonde heads exactly match the yellow of the floating sprout leaves. Somewhere about we should probably have seen a pram, in which two illegitimate children belonging to William Hart’s youngest daughter, like Spartan brats exposed in the Apothetae, slept peacefully despite the cold rain; while their mother Pru, surely the naughtiest girl in Brensham, picked sprouts in proximity to the most personable young man she could find. In addition to all these there would have been about half a dozen land girls, with coloured handkerchiefs tied turban-fashion over their hair in the forlorn hope, I suppose, of preserving the wave in it until the village dance on Saturday night. Even though they were working a quarter of a mile away, and all bent industriously over their task, old William could have told you which was which without a moment’s hesitation. Susan, Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria (believe it or not!) and Ive: ‘I knows ’em by their little backsides, you see.’ And his leathery, apple-cheeked face, framed in the wild white beard, would have creased into the multitudinous grin which heralded his belly-rumbling laughter.
There was always a great deal of noise and laughter going on round William. Being crippled with arthritis, he could not work with the pickers, but stood by the spring-balance which was hung on an improvised tripod at the gate; and as he weighed the bags and kept the tally of them he maintained a ceaseless flow of banter and tomfoolery, teasing, chaffing, giving everybody nicknames – ‘Old P silent’, for instance, for Mimi’s husband, because that was how the Pole tried to explain the pronunciation of his difficult name. Somehow it always seemed warmer in the part of the field where William was, as if he were a kind of human brazier, giving out a benevolent glow. Indeed, now I come to think of it, he did remind one of a brazier because the weather, aided perhaps by the home-made wine which he drank in tumblerfuls, had burned his face a deep fire-red. It shone like a little sun through the white mist of his beard, among the lustreless lagoons, the skeleton sprouts and the wan yellow leaves; but outside the range of that radiance the chilly dampness lay all about, it came down with the fine rain and struck upwards from the dark brown mud in which the feet of the pickers went slosh, squelch, slosh, squelch as they carried the bulging white bags to the weighing-place by the gate.
No, indeed, if you looked at Brensham in wintertime you wouldn’t suspect us of poetry, you wouldn’t credit us with dreams.
Cracked-brained Brensham
In April, of course, the scene is very different. Then our countryside seems made for poets to live in, though its brief loveliness would surely break their hearts. On the first fine day, when the chiff-chaff announces his arrival and the Brimstone butterfly comes out of hibernation, the plum blossom draws a diaphanous lace curtain over the vale; and next weekend the trippers come tearing down from Birmingham and the Black Country to admire the orchards in full bloom. ‘Why, it’s a dreamland!’ I have heard them exclaim. Thereafter in turn the pear, the cherry and the apple burst out – and it is truly a bursting-out, as startling and violent as the explosion of a bomb, touched off by the south wind and the sunshine. It doesn’t last long; the petals are generally falling when the cuckoo comes; but by then the young leaves have begun to unfold, and somehow the orchards seem to expand and spread themselves as the foliage gets thicker. Soon this green tide covers up the unlovely market-gardens, hides the seedling sprout-plants, and flows over the spring onions, carrots, radishes and potatoes which grow between the tree rows; so that by June the orchards have made a little forest round about the long straggling village of Brensham, and the second wave of tourists finds us embos
ked in an unexpected Arden.
Our crooked village street acts as a sort of trap, a lobster pot for tourists; slowed down by the bottlenecks and the sharp corners, they pause to look about them; and most of them are struck at once by something slightly unusual in the appearance of Brensham village, something which I can only describe as an antic appearance. For one thing it has never properly sorted itself out from the orchards, green leaf and brown thatch are everywhere intermingled, the plum and pear and apple trees lean crookedly over the street and you can stretch up your hand to pick a juicy Victoria as you walk along the pavement. For another, the half-timbered cottages which seem to grow up among the trees are likewise gibbous and asymmetrical as if one saw them in a distorting mirror. Suburbanites who are used to box-shaped houses, with the walls all plumb and the corners all right-angles, have difficulty in adjusting their eyes to our misshapen dwellings which bulge and lean and overhang as if they were about to collapse, and look as if they were rough-hewn out of some black-and-white matrix rather than built with a proper regard to stresses and strains. In fact, they settled themselves comfortably into these curious shapes three or four hundred years ago, soon after they were put up, and have scarcely shifted since; and they will probably still be standing when an atom bomb has reduced the suburbs to brick-dust, for they are the sort of tumbledown houses which never tumble down.
Because of this antic look, Brensham’s ancient nickname suits it rather well. It is a nickname of which we are secretly proud: people call us crack-brained Brensham; and if you ask them why, in the neighbouring villages and in the market town of Elmbury, they will shake their heads and say that we are like that, ’tis a crack-brained place with crack-brained folks in it, allus was and allus will be till Kingdom Come. They will even tell you that it was Shakespeare himself who gave us the name; but I’m afraid there’s no evidence for that. He is certainly supposed to have made up a rhyme about some other villages not far away: piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, haunted Hillbro’, drunken Bidford, and so on; and crack-brained Brensham would have fitted into the rhyme very nice by – but it isn’t there.
Anyhow, whoever invented it, the epithet is tagged on to Brensham for ever now; ours is the village where any extravagant thing may happen, and we are the unpredictable people of whom nobody knows what we’re likely to do next. We are the subject of all sorts of tales and legends and proverbs and sayings at which old men in pubs have chuckled for hundreds of years and some of which are supposed to exemplify our extreme innocence and stupidity: we are the village, for instance, which ‘mucked the church spire to make it grow’. But in others our alleged simplicity becomes mixed with a sort of wild and wayward fancy: we ‘hurdled the cuckoo to keep it always spring’. Who wouldn’t want to do that, in Brensham at blossom-time? A sublime folly indeed.
I don’t know anything about the origin of these legends, but at any rate it is true that we possess the tallest church spire in three counties, and there’s a little, square, willow-girt field next to our cricket-ground, to which the spring comes early with stitchwort and ladysmocks, and which is shown on the Ordnance Map as Cuckoo Pen.
Even the tall church spire, by the way, is slightly out of true; not startlingly so, but just enough to puzzle visitors, who cock their heads sideways to look at it and ask themselves: ‘Is that spire straight or am I seeing crooked?’ And there is another peculiarity about the church, which is dedicated, rather unconventionally, to Saint Mary Magdalene: the outside of its west wall bears traces of a coat of whitewash spattered all over with round marks each about the size of an orange. These marks are a source of great bewilderment to visiting archaeologists; but the explanation is really quite simple. Previous generations of crack-brained Brenshamites were in the habit of playing a game of their own invention – it somewhat resembled fives – against the west wall of the church, which they whitewashed annually for this purpose until some reforming clergyman decided that the practice was unseemly and had it stopped.
The village pubs, too, have unusual characteristics. The Adam and Eve bears two naked figures on its hanging sign, painted by an extremely uninhibited artist and displayed by a landlord who has no puritanical notions about fig leaves. The Trumpet, not to be outdone, shows the head of a bright-eyed, cherry-lipped, come-hither-looking minx on its sign, which strikes you as irrelevant until you learn that the name of the inn is locally corrupted to ‘The Strumpet’. Lastly there is the Horse and Harrow (which Brensham calls the Horse Narrow) with its leaded windows over which the shaggy thatch comes down like beetling eyebrows and with an elder-shrub growing absurdly out of its chimney and forming a tuft of twigs like a feather in its cap. Beside the Horse and Harrow stands a large Blenheim apple tree; and the building and the tree seem to lean together, ‘like a pair of drunks’, says Joe Trentfield the landlord, ‘when you can’t tell which one is propping up t’other.’
I must not forget to mention Mrs Doan’s Post Office and General Stores, which is remarkable chiefly because of the strange assortment of goods displayed in its window and upon its shelves. Most of these goods are extremely old-fashioned – there are curious Victorian hair-curlers stuck on cards decorated with engravings of curious Victorian hairstyles, there are boxes of lead soldiers belonging to armies and regiments long disbanded – ‘Montenegrin Infantry’ and ‘Serbian Hussars’, there are babies’ rattles painted in red, white and blue to celebrate the jubilee of Queen Victoria, and milk jugs bearing the legend ‘Mafeking’, and framed pictures of the Coronation of King Edward the Seventh. There is even a ‘line’ in frilly bloomers, discreetly stored away on a top shelf. And every year in early February Mrs Doan fetches down from an attic or store-room a boxful of nineteenth-century Valentines, printed about 1880, which she hopefully lays out upon her counter.*
Mrs Doan’s mother, who had the shop before her, must I think have been possessed by a sort of folie de grandeur before she died; instead of ordering goods by the dozen she suddenly took to ordering them by the gross. And Mrs Doan has never troubled to replace the unsaleable lines, professing the belief that ‘Folks would come back to them in the end.’ Now, at long last, her faith is justified. Fashion has come full-circle, and the hairstyle shown on the copper-plate card advertising curlers begins to look startlingly modern. Summer visitors buy the Mafeking jugs as quaint curiosities; and even the frilly bloomers, we are told, are coming into favour again. As for the Valentines, they were discovered last year by the land girls from the hostel down the road, and since there are about two dozen land girls, each of whom at any given time is sure to be in love with six young men, Mrs Doan must have sold a whole gross of them. With renewed confidence she declares ‘Folks will always come back to things, if only you’ve got the patience to wait long enough.’
Another old-fashioned thing which Mrs Doan deals in is peppermint – not the mildly-flavoured stuff which you buy in ordinary shops, but an aromatic concoction which will cure your cold (and very nearly blow your head off) if you pour a few drops of it into boiling water and sniff it before you go to bed. Mrs Doan distils this spirit, according to her mother’s recipe, in the wash-house at the back of her shop; and the whole village know when she is doing so, for the strong sweet smell tickles your nostrils though you are fifty yards away.
Mrs Doan, as her mother did before her, also looks after the Post Office and telephone exchange, so she knows everything that goes on in the village. In her mother’s day, it is said, the Post Office business was conducted entirely coram populo, so that the gossips would take a walk down to the Post Office ‘just to have a read at the telegrams, my dear’. Nowadays only the telephone calls are regarded as public property, and Mrs Doan’s daughter has more than once saved the landlords of the local pubs from getting into trouble by ringing them up to say ‘Somebody’s just phoned the policeman to tell him you’re keeping open after hours. Thought you’d better know. Ta-ta.’
The lower part of the village – between the Post Office and the church – still bears the scars of war; for
early in 1945 a homing Lancaster, winged over Germany, fiery-tailed like a comet, ploughed its way through the churchyard, knocked down the three poplars at the edge of the Rectory garden, and finally blew up, bombs and all, on the patch of green where our boys used to play football. The explosion splintered the doors and windows of a score of cottages, added another two or three degrees to the inclination of the church spire, and threw a shower of burning wreckage upon all the thatched roofs within range. The dry thatch quickly caught fire, and soon half Brensham was burning; and because the road from Elmbury was blocked by the blazing tail of the bomber the fire engines took forty minutes to get through. By the time they arrived the old men, the women and the children of Brensham had pulled the thatch off their cottages, pitchforked the crackling straw into their gardens, hacked away the smouldering timbers, and saved every building except one cottage and an old barn. For weeks afterwards there was hardly a man in the village who did not wear bandages on his hands.
Now, three years later, the marks of the explosion have almost disappeared. You can still see the jagged stumps of the poplar trees and the deep furrow across the churchyard; and the new thatch shows white against the brown where Jaky Jones the odd-job-man did the longest odd-job of his career – for he worked on the roofs for eighteen months and began to feel as much at home up there, he said, as an old tom-cat. But the crater, which was eight feet deep, has filled with water, so that we now have a pond on the village green, where five ducks go puddling and marsh-marigolds open golden chalices to the April rain.
As Brensham’s scars heal, so does the memory of that flaming midnight fade from its people’s minds. You might think that the affair would already have become a famous legend to be told and retold in the pubs to the summer visitors: The Night When Half Brensham Was Afire. But instead the unpredictable village has bundled away its Bomb into the limbo of its long history to be half-remembered for a while and then forgotten as the Wars of the Roses are forgotten, and Cromwell’s Roundheads riding to Worcester fight, and the goings and comings of soldiers hunting the beaten King, the beacons of Trafalgar and Waterloo and the burning ricks of 1830, and even, in time, the bonfires of V-Day. If you should ask the company in the Horse and Harrow why there is now a pond on the green where no pond was before they will answer briefly ‘An aerioplane done it,’ adding perhaps the additional information that ‘we calls it Bomb Pond’. In a hundred years’ time, I shouldn’t mind betting, they’ll still call it Bomb Pond; but if they are asked why they’ll say that nobody knows, rightly, but it has allus been called so.