by John Moore
Beyond the church, at the bottom of the Rectory lawn, runs the river, Shakespeare’s Avon winding its way down to the Severn between flat meadows and osier-beds: margined with loosestrife, lily-padded, perch-haunted, meandering. This is the ultimate objective of most of our summer visitors. Many of them are anglers, who line the banks on Saturdays and Sundays patiently watching their painted floats and whooping with joy whenever they pull out a tiddler. Their needs are catered for by Jaky Jones the odd-job-man whose cottage at the end of Ferry Lane bears on its garden gate in summer the horrifying invitation:
Lobworms, Fat Maggots, Warsp-Grubs in Season, Teas.
Other visitors hire motor-launches from Elmbury, four miles downstream, and infuriate the fishermen by chugging up and down the narrow river, with their ladies browning themselves on the half-deck and looking as languid as Cleopatra in her barge, while the boat’s wash frightens the fishes and drowns the floats, and its bilge-water covers the surface of the river with a rainbow film of oil. The humbler brethren of these superior mariners take out rowing-boats and canoes which they cannot manage, upset themselves, and are profitably rescued by our villagers; while the dry-bobs, as it were, picnic in the meadows by the ferry, spoil the mowing-grass with their love-games, and amaze the aged ferryman with their exiguous sunsuits. Sooner or later they all find their way to one or other of the village pubs where they promptly catch the antic spirit of the place and drink pint-mugs of our rough local cider, which sends them away singing and acts later as a potent purge.
Meanwhile the more decorous sort sketch the quaint church or take rubbings of its Memorial Brasses; study the flora of the riverside or hunt for bee-orchids on Brensham Hill; photograph the Oldest Inhabitant and ask him questions about our Folk-lore, which he obligingly invents for their benefit; or go foraging down the leafy lanes where at almost every gateway chubby-faced and cheeky children offer bundles of’sparrow grass’, chips of strawberries, and baskets of yellow and purple plums each in their season. By the end of September there is not a fruit-grower in the district who does not believe himself to be rich, forgetting that the bundles of pound-notes are his squirrel’s hoard which must last him through the long winter.
As the days shorten, the stream of buses and cars dwindles and dries up. At weekends in October there are still a few devoted anglers to be found beside the river; but these become fewer, until one Sunday afternoon when the floods are rising the last of them turns up his coat collar and trudges reluctantly away, glancing over his shoulder as if he were defeated Canute, while the eddying water seeps over the withered sedges.
Then the oakwoods on Brensham Hill fall into a brown study, and stripped of their leaves the orchards in the vale become as drab as a monk’s habit. Brown too is the flood-water lying on the meadows, and dark sepia like the old thatch on the cottages is the ubiquitous mud. Only here and there do you see a scrap or splash of colour left over from September like the tattered relics of a carnival: a few late Laxtons and Worcester Pearmains cling to the apple boughs and are brighter than robins’ breasts in a winter hedge, a patch of tawny asparagus-tops smoulders like a squitch-fire and an isolated half-acre of red cabbage shows an iridescent gleam of purplish-bronze rather like the gleam on flakes of iodine when they catch the light. But soon even these colours fade, and we are left with a landscape of residual brown-and-green, like an Old Master upon which the varnish has become opaque; and against this landscape the figures of our hobbledehoys move to and fro among the sprout plants, as slow and plodding as cart-horses and, you might think, as stolid.
My People
And indeed they have a deceptive air of stolidity. Dwelling as they do in a countryside of sharp contrasts, of backbreaking mud and heartbreaking beauty, sprouts in December and apple blossom in May, they know that all things are transient, both the good and the bad. Because their little livelihoods are bound up with the changes and chances of English weather, at the mercy of hooligan winds, inexorable floods and unsparing frosts, they have acquired, I think, a philosophic acceptance of fate. They know alike the treason of false springs and the blessed benison of summer. They know that bountiful seasons are often followed by frugal ones, and that the worst drought is sometimes succeeded by the worst flood. They know that the apple blossom is as brief as young love, and that the longest winter melts at last into the sweetest spring. They do not, therefore, tend to lose their heads when good luck comes their way nor their hope when the world goes ill for them. They have learned to take things in their stride, be they May frosts or falling aeroplanes or, for that matter, world wars.
In the 1914 war Brensham parish sent about thirty-five men into the forces. In 1939 there were fewer young men available, because some of the potential fathers had been killed in the previous holocaust and others, during the agricultural slump, had drifted to jobs in the towns. Nevertheless the village managed to scrape together twenty-eight, which was about a fifth of the whole male population; and this time a score of young women joined up as well. They went off, these farmers’ sons and market-gardeners’ daughters, these clodhopping labourers, these poachers and odd-job-men, in no fervent nor even enthusiastic fashion but in exactly the mood of Francis Feeble whose Cotswold blood for all I know may run in their veins. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death; an’t be my destiny, so; an’t be not, so; no man’s too good to serve his Prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’
Thus unheroically the men of Brensham went to war. They who perhaps till then had caught but a glimpse of the flat sea on Bank Holiday at Weston-super-Mare now sailed across the stormy oceans; they whose previous notion of adventure was to go by cheap ticket to Birmingham to watch the Albion play football now bought Birmingham-made Buddhas in Eastern bazaars; they who had cursed the winter floods of Brensham thirsted in waterless deserts; and the poachers who had learned on our hillside the quick and silent way of killing a rabbit now learned quick and silent ways of killing men. Some of our farmers’ boys flew as tail-gunners through the fiery night above Berlin; others, like George Daniels, were dropped out of aeroplanes into strange countries with tommy-guns in their hands. They talked by signs to Greek peasants about crops and to French peasants about cows. They gave chocolates to Italian children and cigarettes to German girls. They sat in foreign catés and ate foreign dishes and sang the choruses of foreign songs with a broad rustic accent and got drunk on foreign wine. They discovered the profound truth which makes a mock of wars, that all girls say much the same thing when they are in a soldier’s arms and that the men of opposing nations all look much the same when they are lying dead. And when at last the extraordinary adventure was ended they came home – nineteen out of the twenty-eight came home – and bundled away the memory of the war in much the same way as their fathers and mothers bundled away the memory of Brensham’s Bomb, and slipped back as if they had never left it into the rhythm and routine of Brensham’s life, Saturday afternoon cricket, and darts in the pub in the evening, apple-spraying and plum-picking, the brief beauty of April, the leafy pleasaunce of summer, haysel and harvest, the long labours of winter, mud and sprouts and cold hands.
You might indeed be forgiven for thinking them stolid! Yet, I who know them and have grown up among them – I have seen Bottom, Quince, Snug, Flute, and Starveling walking in their shoes, I have seen them quickened by the same strange fancy which played about the heads of that weaver and his crew in the magic ‘Wood not far from Athens’. For they are still at heart the people who hurdled the cuckoo to keep it always spring, the crack-brained incalculable people in whose hearts the secret poetry burns as bright as their late scarlet apples clinging obstinately to the trees; the cap-over-the-windmill people, no strangers to love and laughter and moderate in neither; fierce in defence of their little liberties; much given to singing and drinking; and possessed of a certain unpredictable wildness of the spirit which rises in them from time to time like a sudden wind. On the rare occasions when this h
appens they become, for a space, the most intractable, disorderly, turbulent people in the world.
I am going to tell you the story of a man of Brensham who was so wild and intractable and turbulent that he failed, in the end, to come to terms with our orderly world (or perhaps one could say that our orderly world failed to come to terms with him). And I shall tell you too of a time at midwinter in the dull wet colourless season of sprouts, when suddenly the wild grey-gooseweather came blowing down from the north and with it came I know not whence this boisterous wind of the spirit gusting through the hearts of Brensham folk. But first, before I come to that part of my story, I must describe some of the events which preceded it; and it will be well if we take a closer look at the structure and pattern of the crack-brained village straggling among its orchards between the river and the hill. For that will serve both as an introduction to the characters and a prologue to the play; let us follow, then, the good advice of Bottom the weaver:
Quince: Is all our company here?
Bottom: You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.
The Top of the Hill
We’ll begin at the top of Brensham Hill because from there you will get a good idea of the kind of country in which our village is set. This is the land which has made and moulded us. Look north, south, east and west, and you shall see as it were the four corner-stones of our character: the ancient foundations of our way of thinking and living, our wisdom, folly, manners, customs, humours, what you will.
Look north, then, where the Avon snakes down from Stratford through the Evesham Vale. With the aid of glasses on a very clear day you can just make out the red-brick ordinary-looking small town which people in Patagonia and Pekin have heard of, though perhaps they couldn’t name anywhere else in England save London. Shakespeare seems very close when you walk on Brensham Hill. He had friends in this neighbourhood, but a day’s good tramp from his home, and just across the river lived one who witnessed his will. You will find yourself wondering, when you see a very old tree, whether he sat in the shade of it; or when you come to a pub, whether he drank there. Now and then on some old labourer’s lips a country word or a turn of phrase brings him closer still. For example, we have a word which schoolboys use for the crackly dry stems of the hemlock and the hedge-parsley: ‘kecksies’, a local word which is heard, I think, nowhere else in England; but Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of the Duke of Burgundy in Henry the Fifth:
‘Nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs …’
So, you see, he spoke our speech and thought our thoughts. These our woods and fields, our lanes and rivers, served him as a backcloth for Arden or Athens, Burgundy or Illyria.
Look south, downstream, to the old town of Elmbury standing at the junction of Avon and Severn. Just below the junction is the battlefield called the Bloody Meadow in which the Red Rose went down and the White Rose triumphed on a May day in 1471. By chance a deep-red flower called cranes-bill grows profusely in this meadow; at times it almost covers it; and if you look through strong glasses from the top of Brensham Hill at this patch of English earth on a summer day you will see the dreadful stain upon it, you will see it drenched in Lancastrian blood. After the battle the routed army streamed into Elmbury Abbey for sanctuary, and the young Prince Edward who fell that day is buried there. With him lie the great lords who helped to shape the fortunes of England for three centuries, the makers and unmakers of Kings whose mighty names thunder through the chronicles of Hall and Stow and Holinshed: the Despencers and the De Clares and the Warwicks and the Beauchamps, and that false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence who met his inglorious end in a butt of Malmsey wine. These old stones and bones give us, I think, a sense of the past: not a knowledge of history (for there are few men in Brensham who could tell you the date of Elmbury’s battle nor which side won it) but an acceptance of history, which is much the same thing as a sense of proportion. It accounts, perhaps, for our attitude to the Brensham Bomb and to a couple of wars in a lifetime; but it is not a conscious attitude, it is simply a piece of our background with which we have grown so familiar that we forget it is there – just as when we go to church at Elmbury we forget the Lords of Old Time who lie all round us and keep us silent company.
And now look east to the strong Cotswolds where rugged shepherds have watched their flocks since 1350. The winds blow cold there, and at night the stars in their courses wheel slowly across an immense sky. The men from being much alone grow taciturn, and their long stride takes a queer rhythm from the slopes of the whaleback hills. Brensham, seven hundred feet high, is itself an outlier of the Cotswolds; so thence, perhaps comes our hillmen’s lope, and thence the trick of being silent when we have nothing to say.
Lastly, look west to the Malverns and beyond them to the mountains of Wales. It’s not very far across the Severn and the Wye to the dark shut-in valleys and the cold slate villages and the savage Fforest Fawr; it’s certainly not too far for a man to go courting if he had a mind to – so if an anthropologist came to Brensham and started to measure our heads he’d discover a fine puzzling mixture of long ones and short ones and betwixts and betweens. And he’d find if he could look inside the heads a compound and amalgamation of Welsh wildness and English sedateness, Border magic and Cotswold common-sense. For though we live in a fat and fruitful vale, yet we have a sense of looking out on to the wide waste-lands and the mysterious mountains. That’s where our occasional turbulence comes from, and the fancy that tried to pen the cuckoo, and our love of singing.
The Blue Field
Now on a day in late July, if you had stood on Brensham Hill and looked down the furzy slope towards the village, you might have seen a remarkable spectacle. In the middle of William Hart’s farm, which occupied about a hundred and fifty acres along the skirt of the hill, a seven-acre field had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies. It happened almost in a night. One day there was a faint azure mist upon the field, like smoke from a squitch-fire. Next morning when the sun came up a cerulean carpet covered it; and we almost caught our breath at the sight of this miracle, for although our farmers with their seasonal rotations paint the land in many colours, blue is not one of them, blue stands as it were beyond the agricultural spectrum, and this particular shade of blue, so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies, was something that we had never seen in our countryside before.
Moreover it made an extraordinary contrast with the rest of the hillside; for there was no other bright colour to share the sunlight with it. In other years, as a rule, there is purple clover or pink sainfoin or luteous charlock; but the authorities had caused most of the hill to be ploughed up for corn. So the familiar pattern was one of ash-blond oats and rust-coloured barley rippling in the wind like the fur of a marmalade cat, with the foaming green of the orchards making a hem to the skirt of the hill. Now, between the orchards and the corn, appeared this astonishing lagoon of blue which caught and held the eye so that within an hour the whole neighbourhood was talking about it. ‘Have you seen old William’s field of linseed?’ people said. ‘It does your heart good to look at it; but Lord, I wouldn’t be in his shoes when the trouble starts!’
The Two Potterers
It was Mr Chorlton, the retired prep-school master, who first suggested to me there might be serious trouble. Being nearly seventy and very lame, he plays a smaller part than he used to in our village life; but from his garden gate the old philosopher observes and comments as shrewdly as he ever did, and acts as a sort of Greek chorus to our little comedies and tragedies.
‘I am wondering,’ he said, as he gazed up the hill at the marvellous flaxfield – for linseed is a form of flax – ‘whether perhaps it is the kind of trivial gesture which begins big rows: an absurd but memorable casus belli, like Jenkin’s ear.’
I had gone to have tea with Mr Chorlton and his old friend, Sir Gerald Hope-Kingley, in whose house he lived; for his own cottage, halfway between Bre
nsham and Elmbury, had been destroyed by the flaming tail of that Lancaster which fell out of the sky in 1945. All his worldly possessions had been burned with it: his precious library, his collection of eighteenth-century first editions, his cabinet of butterflies which represented a lifetime’s hobby, and his small cellar of wine. Yet the loss of so many cherished things did not break him as we all thought it would; he shrugged his shoulders and smiled and told us that he felt strangely free. ‘It is interesting to discover, when all is taken from one, how little one really needs,’ he said soon after it happened. ‘Out of those two thousand books, I have only bothered to replace three: Shakespeare, Plato, and the Old Testament. As for butterflies, I shall probably get more pleasure out of watching them at the flowers than looking at them in my cabinet. And as for the wine, I shall strive to acquire a new taste for Government Port. The only thing I want is a roof over my head; like Diogenes, I am looking for a tub!’