by John Moore
One of the fat men stammered:
‘B-but do you mean to say that there will be no way of telling f-friend from f-foe?’
‘The Huns,’ said Joe grimly, ‘are likely to be the more peremptory.’ He then took his leave.
On the following Saturday night the Home Guard paraded at eight-thirty and marched up the hill for the purpose of carrying out an anti-invasion exercise. There were two sections, commanded respectively by Sergeant Jeremy Briggs and Sergeant Alfie Perks. The latter were instructed to conceal themselves in a quarry until nightfall, where they whiled away the time by burning corks and blacking their faces. When Joe inspected them at dusk they were practically unrecognizable as men of Brensham. ‘It don’t matter much about not being able to speak the lingo,’ said Joe, ‘but it wouldn’t do any harm if you was to say jar vole and Hare Gott now and then and click your heels when you get an order. And remember that though you’re Huns there must be no damage to persons or property.’ The section then moved off into Orris Park, where they sent up some Very lights (meaning ‘parachutists just landed’) and proceeded to play soldiers with great verisimilitude according to the agreed plan, which was as follows.
Sergeant Briggs’ section, less Corporal Dai Roberts who was engaged in setting rabbit snares, were to surround the Park as soon as they saw the signal and attempt to contain the parachutists within the pale. When the German parachutists broke out, which was inevitable, they were to occupy the outbuildings of the Manor itself and defend themselves against a further assault by the British. This tactical exercise, which had been invented by Joe himself, was perfectly legitimate and plausible; for it represented what would probably have happened if the Germans had really landed.
In the event certain things happened which had not been planned or anticipated; but it is by no means certain that they too would not have taken place if the ‘invasion’ had been genuine. The black-avis’d Alfie Perks, having led his section out of the Park and established it in the gardens and outbuildings of the Manor, was assembling a Lewis gun at the edge of the shrubbery when he was suddenly confronted by two furry women and two fat men who seemed to be half-demented with terror and who demanded tremulously: ‘Are you German?’
And Alfie, who had entered into the spirit of the game but who never imagined (or so he says) that he would be taken seriously, answered: ‘Jar vole.’
The effect of this utterance was unexpected and shocking. The two men and the two women began, said Alfie afterwards, to quiver and quake and shiver and shake like frog-spawn. ‘The silver-foxes’ heads was jigging and dancing about on them women’s shoulders so’s I could almost fancy they was snapping at me.’ Meanwhile the owners of the foxes gibbered at Alfie, and then the men joined in, and soon all four were speaking together in a sort of catch or chorus, like a quartet singing madrigals.
They wanted Alfie to know that they had no personal feelings against the Germans.
Politics didn’t interest them, anyhow.
We’d always been friends, hadn’t we?
They were peaceful civilians. It wasn’t their war.
If there was anything the soldiers wanted—
They bore no animosity against Herr Hitler or anybody else.
Alfie listened to this extraordinary performance with mounting horror, but he said nothing except occasionally Jar vole. Before long, according to his own story (but Alfie is given to exaggeration), they’d offered him ‘the whole works, including the best bed’. At this point, however, Sergeant Briggs delivered his assault upon the Manor. There was a rattle of rifle-fire, a thunderflash landed at Alfie’s feet, and the shrieking women fled into the house. (’The men got there before ’em,’ said Alfie grimly. ‘They was helluva swift-footed.’) A few moments later some pyromaniac in Briggs’ section set alight the shrubbery with a Molotov cocktail, and the Home Guard spent the rest of the night trying to put out the fire. Nothing more was seen of the inhabitants of the Manor until the morning, when Joe called upon them, ostensibly to make his explanations and apologies.
Needless to say, they were extremely angry. They said that they were law-abiding citizens robbed of their sleep and terrified out of their wits by a lot of thugs playing at soldiers. They declared that the fire in the shrubbery had destroyed some valuable rhododendrons recently imported from Kashmir. They claimed compensation for the damage, and they threatened to write letters to The Times, their Member of Parliament, the Area Commander, and the Minister for War, who was, they said, a distant relation of their aunt. Joe listened to all this in silence, and when they had finished he answered briefly and to the point. He answered in two syllables: Jar vole.
As a matter of fact, they did write their complaint to the Area Commander; and it is said that this busy officer, who already had before him a somewhat mis-spelt but forcibly worded report from his obedient servant Alfie Perks, Sergeant, Home Guard, submitted for immediate attention through the proper Service channels, took exactly sixty seconds to consider the complaint. He then turned to one of his staff officers and said: ‘If you had a large half-empty mansion, occupied by some people who we want to keep our eyes on, what would you do about it?’
‘I’d billet a company of Poles there,’ said the resourceful staff officer.
‘Exactly what I was thinking.’ Next week the Poles arrived at Orris Manor, and among them was one Count Wladislaus Pniack, who took only ten days to fall in love with Mimi Trentfield, three months to marry her, and the minimum period thereafter to father her twins.
‘Oi?’
That was an uncomfortable winter for the Syndicate. They did not get on with the Poles, whose Commanding Officer, a polished gentleman in most respects, possessed an idio-xsyncracy about candles which has also been recorded of the great Dr Johnson: when they failed to burn well he held them upside down and shook them over the best carpet. It was during this winter, too, that our local garage-man took to introducing sugar into the petrol whenever he filled up one of the Syndicate’s big cars; he also was a member of the Home Guard, and he made the excuse that he wanted to test the effect of sugar in petrol in case the Germans came. Generally speaking, however, the village refrained from actual sabotage. It was thought better, on the whole, to cause a multitude of small niggling inconveniences than a few large and obvious ones. So Mrs Doan, at the Village Shop and Post Office, took a hand by making innumerable mistakes over the rations, muddling up the weekly bills, and giving wrong telephone numbers, all of which things she did by the light of nature, and Dai Roberts contrived to deliver the Syndicate’s most important-looking letters to the wrong addresses or even to drop them down a rabbit-hole when he was setting his snares.
But perhaps the deadliest weapon of all, and certainly the one which Brensham most enjoyed using, was the assumption of sheer, block-headed, gawkish stupidity. The village which had mucked the church spire to make it grow lived up to its reputation and put on its zany’s expression for the Syndicate’s benefit. And this, after all, is the traditional weapon of our countryfolk against all forms of tyranny; poachers, rick-firers, sheep-stealers often saved their necks by it two hundred years ago. It is so simple an armament that the veriest fool can use it; indeed it is most effective when employed by a fool. It consists of saying ‘Oi’ when asked a question and then reiterating ‘Oi?’ with a faint note of interrogation every time the question is repeated. Many of the present inhabitants of Brensham owe their very existence to the fact that their astute ancestors, threatened with deportation to Australia, stood for hours in the dock doltishly saying ‘Oi?’ to the clever counsel in their august wigs and even to His Majesty’s Judges of Assize.
Crack-brained Brensham has a reputation for this kind of thing. Indeed in many of the stories which are told about our oafish simplicity there is also a suggestion of sly mischief; it generally turns out in the end that we are not such fools as we seem. Once upon a time, they say – telling what is surely the oldest story of them all – a gentleman from the City lost his way and found himself in Brensha
m on a dark and dirty night. He stopped his carriage and leaned out and asked a stupid-looking puddin’-faced chap the way to Gloucester. The chap said he didn’t know, so the gentleman asked the way to Elmbury, being aware that it was only a few miles off. Once more the chap shook his head, and the gentleman neighed angrily in his whinnying London voice: ‘Don’t you know anything, you stupid fellow?’ There was a short silence, and then the Brensham man said quietly: ‘Mebbe I’m stoopid; but I knows where I be, which is more than thee does, mister.’
The gypsies’ tactics against the Syndicate were more direct and less lawful than those employed by the villagers. We didn’t altogether approve of them, and we were in any case distrustful of the rough and riotous tribes. Little love was lost between Brensham and the gypsies; but our temporary alliance with them was less extraordinary than the armistice between the gypsies themselves, who belonged to two hostile families called respectively the Fitchers and the Gormleys. These families, like Montagues and Capulets, bore each other an ancient grudge. Fifty years ago one of the Fitchers had murdered a Gormley, cleaving his head with a hatchet during a quarrel over a woman and subsequently casting his body into the river, whence by ill-chance it was carried down to the Severn by a sudden flood and found its way into a salmon-net operated by some relations of the Gormleys above Elmbury Weir. In due course the murderous Fitcher was hanged and ever since then the families had lived in perpetual enmity, for although the cause of the original trouble was half forgotten the implication of insult remained like an ineradicable taint in certain words and phrases – ‘hatchet’, ‘rope’, ‘gallows-bird’ and ‘What’s in the salmon-nets today?’ – which the factions abusively hurled at each other whenever they wanted a fight. Their hatred of the Syndicate, however, proved stronger than their internecine enmity; and they made common cause to take their revenge.
‘My mother said—’
If they knew of the Syndicate’s intervention in the Case of William Hart, the gypsies had another good reason for joining in the fight; and doubtless they did know, for they seemed to have some sort of bush-telegraph which informed them of everything that went on in the neighbourhood. William was the only man in Brensham for whom these feckless, fickle and secret families possessed any respect or affection; he was the only person, apart from their patriarchal chieftains, who had any authority over them, who could settle their quarrels and quell their fights and even send them packing from the village pubs when they were drunk. Indeed these Heathens, as Joe Trentfield said won-deringly, ‘worshipped the ground he trod on’, and to find the reason for this phenomenon we have to go back more than fifty years and listen to a strange old tale which has been told a hundred times on winter nights round the fire at the Horse and Harrow.
Imagine William, then, in his hot youth; ‘prenticed to his father who was a wainwright before him, but apt to play truant from the workshop whenever his father’s back was turned if there was any football or cricket to be had, or if the Fair with its itinerant boxing-booths happened to come to the district. By all accounts he was a young giant who lorded it over the rough football games, and swiped the bowling out of the cricket-ground and into Cuckoo Pen or beyond into the river itself. (They say that he once slammed three balls in succession as far as Sammy Hunt’s osier-bed, where they were lost for ever in the tangled undergrowth and the squelchy mud; and that was the end of cricket for the season, although it was only August, for the Club couldn’t raise enough money to buy any more.) He could swim as fast under water as most people can on top of it, and he used to terrify his companions by diving off the top of Elmbury Weir; he won prizes at the Regatta for rowing; and he could stick on the back of any half-broken wild farmer’s colt until it was tired of trying to unseat him. His favourite sport, however, was boxing. Whenever the Fair came to Elmbury or Brensham you would always find William hanging about round the improvised canvas ring where the showman strode up and down uttering his brazen challenge like the champion in an ancient battle: ‘Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see who’s got the courage to step into the ring with Terrible Twin the Tonypandy Tornado. Ten silver shillings for anybody who beats him on points and a golden sovereign for anybody who knocks him out. Now then, you sportsmen, here’s your chance to show the girls what you’re made of. Who’ll dare to climb over these ropes and face the Man-eating Tiger from Wales?’
Then William with great deliberation would take off in turn his coat, his waistcoat, his shirt and his singlet, fold them into a neat pile and set a friend to keep guard over them, and purposefully stride forward towards the ropes. And the showman, of course, would keep up his swift patter, knowing that words won as many fights as fists. ‘Well, well, well, here’s an upstanding young chap. They breeds ’em big in these parts. But I fear he’s over-young for the Tornado. He likes ’em young, does Terrible Twm. He’ll eat you up, young feller-me-lad, Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman . . . Still keen to have a try? You’re mammy oughtn’t to let you loose, that she oughtn’t. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you . . .’ Then, while William went quietly to his corner and put on the gloves, perhaps the showman would say:
‘On my right, ladies and gents, Terrible Twm the Tony-pandy Tornado, Champion of the Valleys, now on tour to challenge all comers. On my left – what might be your name, young feller-me-lad?’
‘Never you mind,’ said William, and grinned: ‘I be a descendant of the poet Shakespeare!’
Only the very old men, who were boys when he was a boy, remember seeing William fight and tell tales of it in the Horse and Harrow. Doubtless they exaggerate, as old men will, but they all agree in one thing: he fought, they say, ‘like the wind’. Whether there was much art or science in it they are not sure; but they say he rushed out of his corner like a gale and Terrible Twm or Basher Joe or whoever the broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared wretch happened to be went down before that fierce buffeting like a rotten elm tree before the March wind. A score of times, they swear, William blew down his opponents at Elmbury Mop, until at last the travelling showmen became wary of him, and would no longer offer their golden guineas as a reward, and their poor peripatetic pugs as a sacrifice, to the young man who uttered the word ‘Shakespeare’ as if it were a battlecry. No doubt, as I say, the old men embroider these stories with the fanciful embroidery of fifty years; but there must be a great deal of truth in them, because they help to explain William’s triumphant encounter with the Fitchers and Gormleys, which happened when he was twenty-five.
By then William had already begun to sow his crop of wild oats, which didn’t fade as most people’s do but went on sprouting green for thirty years. You may be sure that he was as practised with his lips as with his fists and that the brown slip of a gypsy girl who used to sneak secretly out of the camp in Lord Orris’ Park wasn’t by any means the first to discover how gentle as well as strong his big hands could be.
She was only seventeen, in that far-off spring when she and William began their secret courtship; but the gypsies are quick to mature, and the old men say that already she walked with the lovely arrogance of the gypsy women, which has the pride of Lucifer and the slyness of a fox mixed up together in it, and like them she would toss her head and like them give the furtive look over the shoulder – but what do the old men remember of such things? You can imagine her striding up the hill to her trysting-place with William among the bracken and the furze and the may-bushes which were smudges of white in the twilight, her brown eyes like a fawn’s peering this way and that, half-eager, half-timid, till she found him waiting by the accustomed stile; you can see her running back on swift sure feet in the darkness, pausing breathless at the Park pale because a twig had crackled under his tread, creeping through the gap in the broken fence, whispering hush! to the lurcher dog which stirred beneath the caravan, and the rough terrier which whimpered in its sleep beside the dying fire.
The Good Fight
I don’t know how long it was before the gypsies got to hear of the affair. Not many weeks, I suppose;
for though the girl knew how to be secret there was never anything clandestine about William. Sooner or later, surely, he would drink publicly a toast to his Pheemy in the Adam and Eve or the Horse and Harrow, or shout her name for all to hear in a song which he made up as he rolled home half-drunk with love and beer. Nor was Brensham hilltop, even at night, so secret a place as lovers were wont to imagine. There were other couples besides William and Pheemy, and farmers looking to their lambs, and mischievous boys benighted after bird-nesting, to say nothing of Peeping Tom and Paul Pry. There were poachers too (though it was long before Dai Roberts’ day) and these poachers no doubt kept their eyes and ears open for their enemies the keepers and so would not fail to notice the parted bracken which stirred and swayed even though there was no wind. The Fitchers and Gormleys themselves set snares on the hill for rabbits and hares and sought out the snuffling hedgehogs there which they loved to bake in clay upon their smouldering camp-fires. Foolish Pheemy, if she thought that waist-high bracken and sheltering may-bush and love-performing night could keep her secret for long! As for William he cared no more than Antony cared whether the whole world saw him at the side of his Cleopatra.
But, of course, as soon as the Fitchers and Gormleys knew there was bound to be trouble. Perhaps this is the only integrity which they have left – that they keep themselves to themselves and have no truck with the village people. Generations ago they renounced, for what reason I know not, the major portion of their gypsy heritage: they ceased to be wanderers on the face of the earth and made a colony on Brensham Hill, rooting themselves in the neighbourhood. By doing so they sacrificed the ancient freemasonry of road and common, and cut themselves off from the other gypsies and tinkers, who now seem to despise them and who give Brensham a wide berth when they pass it in the course of their seasonal migrations. No true travelling gypsy will camp near the Fitchers and Gormleys if he can help it. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the Fitchers and Gormleys cling all the more fiercely to the tradition of gypsy isolationism; because it is the last relic of their gypsydom. They drink in our pubs when they are thirsty, they beg at our back doors when they are hungry, they steal our chickens and dogs and hedge-stakes, they pick our peas or plums for hire, and their women come wheedling at our gates with baskets of clothes-pegs every spring; but these tenuous contacts are the only communication they have with us, they give us no friendship and get none from us, and now I come to think of it I have never once seen a handshake between our people and theirs. I have sometimes thought that we actually hate each other – they hate us because of our possessions and our security and we hate them because their need of neither makes a mockery of all we believe. Certainly our housewives fear them, for they cunningly mix with their cajoling a kind of intimidation which keeps just on the safe side of the law. Surely the women must have been briefed before they set out by some wickedly-wise old grandmother gypsy who has taken infinite pains to study the silly laws of the gorgios! For if a gypsy says ‘Buy my clothes-pegs, lady, or you’ll have bad luck,’ she is uttering threats and telling fortunes and goodness knows what else which may land her in a police court. But if she merely looks slyly at the housewife who happens to be wearing a green blouse and says ‘Green is a very unlucky colour, lady,’ she is simply voicing a common superstition and if the housewife finds it necessary to cross her palm with silver to counteract the bad luck, well, that’s not the gypsy’s fault! The back door, then – or the foot unobtrusively placed just inside the back door, to prevent it being shut in their faces – was as near as the gypsies got towards intruding into our lives. Their numerous encampments, scattered all round Brensham Hill, formed a microcosmos within our larger world; but there was no common citizenship, and it would have surprised the village less that one of our lads should have brought home a Zulu or an Eskimo as his wife than that he should marry a Gormley girl. To the gypsies, whose isolation from us was somehow bound up with the last vestiges of their self-respect, such a match must have been still more unthinkable. Therefore the whole Gormley clan, including the girl’s parents, looked upon her courtship with William as an act of treachery and proceeded to deal with her as a traitor. Rumours began to fly about the village, that she was being beaten and starved, or locked up in solitary confinement within one of the caravans; that they had cut off her hair as a mark of shame; or that they proposed to cast her out of their tribe penniless into the world. Whether there was any truth in these stories I cannot tell; but before long William got to hear of them – perhaps he had waited night after night at the. trysting-stile in vain - and at once he girded up his loins for battle.