by John Moore
Hearing he was ill, I walked up to his farm one Saturday afternoon to pay him a visit. On the way I met Dai Roberts coming down the hill on his rattling bicycle; long before he came into sight round the corner I knew it was Dai, because he was singing, and although our village lads are as vociferous as larks and thrushes, their favourite airs are merry and bucolic and generally sung out of tune. There is only one man in Brensham who sings beautifully and sadly and who chooses to sing hymns when he is not in church; and sure enough the rat-tat-tat of a loose mudguard accompanied the singing, and Dai appeared round the corner with his postbag flying over his shoulders and a fine fat hare tied across the handlebars of his bicycle.
This spare, wiry, sallow little man came to us long ago out of the dark valleys across the border, settled down in the village, and married a Brensham girl. He had previously, I think, been crossed in love, which was probably why he left home; for I was telling him once how I had hooked and lost a salmon (twenty pounds if it was an ounce and I played it for twenty minutes on a little trout-rod), and Dai nodded his head in respectful sympathy. At last he said, with perfect understanding:
‘I once loved a girl and she married another. But it is not so bad as losing a fish.’
A fisherman – whether he fished legitimately with a rod or illegitimately with dynamite, carbide, salmon roe, gaff or pitchfork – was to Dai as a brother. But he and I had something else in common. He had once won a prize for a poem at an Eisteddfod, he had worn the bays upon his brow, and because I wrote books he regarded me as brother-craftsman though of an inferior degree: his subjects were Sacred, whereas mine were Profane. Now he skidded to a stop and told me proudly that he had completed the composition of a long poem during the course of his round. I didn’t gather exactly what it was about, except that William Hart and the WAEC came into it, and also the Syndicate, whom Dai had fiercely hated because they had him prosecuted and fined ten shillings for poaching on their land.
‘Biblical it iss and yet modern too,’ said Dai, ‘for in it the Syndicate iss the sons of Belial, do you see, bearing false witness against their neighbour.’
I asked him how William was, and Dai shook his head.
‘Very strange and quiet and suddenly old he iss become. Broken his heart they have and maybe he iss not long for this world. He does not laugh nor sing, and his foot drags after him as he walks. It iss a great shame they have put upon his grey hairs.’
Then Dai remounted his bicycle and prepared to launch himself down the steep hill. Perhaps I had raised my eyebrows at the hare strapped to his handlebars, for he generally hides such things in his postbag, which is why our letters and parcels are so often smeared with blood. He shouted an explanation over his shoulder as he rattled away:
‘Constable Banks has boils upon his bottom. Afflicted like Job the poor man iss.’
I walked on up the hill and turned into William’s drive. On my left the linseed field, scarcely faded since its first blossoming, lay like a thick pile carpet of rarest blue.
‘Both man and bird and beast’
I found old William in the garden, and because he was sitting down I did not at first notice the change in him. As usual, he was surrounded by children and animals. Pru’s eldest, Jerry, now seven years old, was shooting at a tin-can with his catapult. The two babies were sleeping in their pram under the big mulberry tree on the lawn, and I noticed that Pru, most provident of mothers, had covered the pram with a piece of strawberry-netting lest the birds should peck them. As always the garden was full of birds and the mulberry tree was alive with the cheerful chirruping of flocks of blackbirds and thrushes glutting themselves with the wine-coloured berries. Two young goats playfully butted each other on the lawn, there were three or four cats stretched out in the sun, and William was petting a tame magpie, while Pru sat beside him dutifully darning socks.
The garden looked out on to William’s Home Ground, where the men were harvesting what must have been the heaviest yield of barley Brensham Hill had ever seen. I suppose I had half-expected to find an atmosphere of high tragedy lying over William’s farm, so it was a relief to hear the laughter of the men and girls in the barley field and to see the yellow wagon trundling past the garden gate with George Daniels driving it and Susan, with a pitchfork in her hands, perched up beside him on the yellow sheaves. George was shirtless, and burned deep mahogany by the sun; Susan’s arms and neck exactly matched the red-gold of the barley. The pair waved cheerfully as they went by, and I thought I had seldom seen a pleasanter sight than those two young lovers among the corn. The whole scene reminded me sharply of a passage from the Georgics which I had learned at school and only half-remembered now – something about ‘In the sheaf of Ceres’ stalk the season richly abounds, and loads the furrows with increase, and overflows the barns . . . the cows hang down their udders fraught with milk, and fat kids on the smiling lawn with levelled horns against each other strive.’
I sat down and talked to William about the weather and village affairs, while the magpie hopped about on his head. Pru sat primly over her darning with downcast eyes like those of a virtuous young lady in a Victorian magazine, a picture of innocence and modesty, speaking only when she was spoken to and favouring me for a second or two with that singular misty look which had caused such havoc among the armed forces of the Crown.
When I got up to go William insisted on hobbling with me as far as the gate; and it was then that I realized for the first time that he had become suddenly old. As Dai had said, he dragged his left foot after him as he walked, and his arm hung awkwardly too, as if he had little use in it. I thought that he had probably had a partial stroke. He leaned heavily on the gate, and said slowly:
‘They be going to turn I out, so they say.’
‘I’ve heard about it,’ I told him.
‘Look,’ he said, and made a queer comprehensive gesture with his stiff arm, an awkward and painful gesture which somehow included the Home Ground with its sheaves of barley, the weathered old farmhouse, the garden bright with hollyhocks and flaming peonies, the children, the cats and the goats on the lawn, the merry flocks in the mulberry tree, and away to the right Little Twittocks shining like a blue lagoon. ‘Look,’ said William. ‘They’ll turn I out of all this, they say. Can they do such a thing to a man, nowadays?’
‘They have big powers,’ I said; and it suddenly seemed to me fantastic and unbelievable that we should do such things in England. I thought, ‘Perhaps they’ll change their minds at the last moment; after all they’re good and decent men, Mr Harcombe, Mr Surman, Mr Whitehead, Mr Nixon . . .’ But I hadn’t much hope really, because I knew what happened even to good and decent men when they became caught up in the huge impersonal machine.
William said suddenly: ‘But I wun’t go willing,’ and for a moment I saw a lightning-flash of his old self, fierce and free. ‘I wun’t go. They’ll have to fetch I,’ he said.
Then the fierce flash faded, he shook his grand old head slowly two or three times and fell silent. The magpie hopped about on his shoulder and he put up his hand to scratch its head. ‘Hey, Cheeky,’ he said, ‘what do you want, eh? There, there, Cheeky’ - and I realized that he had already forgotten the threat which hung over him, the grief and anger had faded out of his mind, where all thoughts, hopes and fears were now as fleeting as pictures in the fire which old men see as they slump over the hearth with half-closed eyes. And yet, shorn as he was of all his boisterous vigour, I saw more clearly than ever before his essential gentleness. Often his noisy mischief had obscured it; but now that the laughter was silent and the singing done, the turbulent wildness purged out of him, I understood why the children had always loved him and the finches had flocked about him and the wild things had been without fear of his shadow. He reminded me suddenly of the Ancient Mariner – perhaps it was his long white beard! – ‘He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small.’ I left him playing with the pied bird on his shoulder, tickling the side of its head and talking to it, playing wit
h it like a child.
The Last Hope
I was tormented by the thought that William would soon be turned out of his happy and fruitful little farm, and that perhaps he’d end up in the workhouse because he had nowhere else to go. The only hope seemed to be that the Committee might hold its hand if we represented that William was ill and obviously hadn’t much longer to live, or if we pointed out that despite his unorthodox ways he had probably grown as much useful food per acre as anybody else in Brensham. I discussed this with Mr Chorlton one evening when I found him drinking port with Sir Gerald, and he proposed that we should take the first opportunity of putting William’s case before Halliday. Mr Chorlton claimed that he knew a good deal about bureaucracy, because he had been a temporary civil servant during the first war. ‘Even the most savage dog fears its own master,’ he said. ‘Even the most hide-bound bureaucrat is scared stiff of his own Minister; and all Ministers live in mortal terror of Question Time. We must therefore persuade our tame MP to ask a Question. There shouldn’t be much difficulty about that. The job will be to get hold of him. He’s always buzzing about like a chimera bominating in a vacuum.’
And indeed, although in theory he lived at the Manor, we saw very little of our MP. During Parliamentary sessions he was in London from Monday till Friday night. He sometimes appeared in the village on Saturdays and Sundays, but he was always in a hurry, always rushing off to address meetings in his own constituency or somebody else’s. Even during the recess there seemed to be no respite for him. He spoke for other candidates at by-elections; he sat on numerous committees; and when he was at home he was generally busy answering the bundles of letters which Dai Roberts reluctantly carried up the steep hill to the Manor: ‘Forty-seven letters by the morning post! And all for one man! It iss not reasonable. And who knows but a telegram there will be waiting when I get back to Mrs Doan’s Post Office!’ Dai sadly looked back upon the good old days when the Mad Lord had lived at the Manor and his sole correspondence consisted of bills in halfpenny envelopes which Dai delivered only once a week ‘for the sake of his lordship’s peace of mind’.
‘Bombinans in vacuo’ Mr Chorlton went on, ‘and unless we can soon persuade him to sit down and think now and then over a pint of beer he’ll end up as they all end up, with hardened arteries and shrunken souls like shrivelled nuts rattling about inside the shell. Empty husks through which the wind of what they call Public Opinion blows with a thin sad piping. I’ve seen some old politicians in my day!’
Mr Chorlton sipped his port.
‘We’ve got ten weeks,’ he said, ‘before William is actually dispossessed. We must get to work on Halliday before the House assembles again, and he must then ask a question which will make the hide-bound bureaucrats sit up. Isn’t it odd, by the way, that we’ve almost got into the Greek habit of attaching particular epithets to particular nouns? The Press writes of hide-bound bureaucrats just as Homer wrote of the rosy-fingered dawn and the wine-dark sea! Have another glass of Government Port?’ He made his ancient and familiar joke. ‘It’s any port in a storm.’
‘You’d think it ambrosia,’ said Sir Gerald, ‘if you’d tasted my mango-spirit in Burma.’
‘Nihil altum, nihil magnificum’ boomed Mr Chorlton, ‘ac divinum suscipere possunt. . .’ launching himself into a quotation from Cicero to the effect that those who devote their thoughts to low and abject things cannot attempt anything exalted, noble or divine.
The Umpire
As it happened the opportunity of talking to Halliday about William Hart came unexpectedly a fortnight later. To everybody’s astonishment he consented to umpire in our annual cricket-match against Woody Bourton.
The team was short of an umpire because Joe Trentfield, who had done the thankless job for years, suddenly declared that he was sick to death of being Vilified by friend and foe alike, and nothing we could say would persuade him to change his mind. ‘They Vilifies me,’ he repeated, as he shook his head; and he reminded us of the painful dispute after the last match with Woody Bourton, when our opponents asserted that he had lost them the match while our own side maintained that they had only won in spite of him. ‘I was absolutely Vilified,’ said Joe, and we could see that he was adamant; so the committee began to look round for a successor.
It was Alfie Perks who suggested that Halliday should be invited. The reasons he gave were sound but unusual: in the first place, he said, nobody who was familiar with the bitterness engendered by this particular match would take on the job, and in the second, not even the loathly captain of Woody Bourton would dare to dispute the decision of a Member of Parliament. So on Sunday a deputation was sent to the Manor, where they were hospitably entertained with glasses of sherry, a drink to which they were unaccustomed. When they came to the point Halliday confessed to them that he would have been delighted to accept the invitation if only he had known the rules; but he had never played cricket in his life. Alfie, who had drunk three glasses of sherry, assured him airily that his lack of cricketing experience would make no difference at all; the Laws of Cricket, he said, were set forth in Wisden, and were much less complicated than the Laws of England, which Mr Halliday doubtless carried about in his head. ‘Mug ’em up, sir!’ said Alfie, full of sherry and enthusiasm. ‘A chap like you could mug ’em up easy in a few hours! And when you’ve mugged ’em up, all you’ve got to do is to remember you’re the boss and not be frit of nobody. That was the trouble with Pegleg, who used to be our umpire years ago: he was always frit. One day Lord Orris’ father brought W. G. Grace to play in a match on our ground, and the very first ball the old man steps in front of his wicket and the ball hits him fair and square on the pads. “How’s that?” yells the bowler. “How’s that?” hollers the wicket-keeper. And everybody else shouts “How’s that?” as loud as they can. Up goes Pegleg’s finger, though it was shaking like a leaf, and “Out” says he. But Mr Grace’s beard bristles, and he gives Pegleg a terrible look, and then in a voice of thunder which you could have heard on top of Brensham Hill he just says: “What?” That “What?” was too much for Pegleg. “Beg pardon, sir, not out,” says he, trembling like an aspen. And W. G. stayed there to make a hundred. But for a chap like you, sir,’ finished Alfie, ‘if you ain’t frit of Mr Churchill in the House of Commons, you won’t be frit of nobody I’m sure.’
Next day Alfie provided himself with a copy of Wisden and took it to the Manor. ‘I think I can ‘tice him,’ he said with a grin, explaining that in his belief laws and rules and regulations would always prove irresistible to political chaps if dangled before them like carrots in front of a donkey. This is what he proceeded to do. He opened Wisden at Rule 22 and, remarking casually, ‘There’s a fair puzzle here,’ began to read:
‘Note (f): The striker is out if the ball is hugged to the body of the catcher even though he has not touched it with his hands. Should the ball lodge in the fieldsman’s clothing, or in the top of the wicket-keeper’s pads, this will amount to its being hugged to the body of the catcher.
‘Funny thing, that,’ said Alfie with an expression of wide-eyed innocence, ‘for if a ball sticks in a wicket-keeper’s pads, how can you say he’s hugging it?’
‘I think,’ said Halliday, ‘that it is one of those cases where a common phrase is given a wide interpretation to cover a large number of possible eventualities. But it’s an interesting clause, certainly.’
Alfie continued to dangle his carrot.
‘Rule 44 Note c,’ he said. ‘It always makes me laugh. The umpire is not a boundary. Just that.’
‘What?’ said Halliday. ‘Let me have a look at the book.’
‘Would you like to borrow it for a few days?’ said Alfie.
‘That’s very kind of you. Let me see. The umpire is not a boundary. Very odd. But I suppose if you scored four runs every time you hit me – I mean the umpire - it would be a very strong temptation, wouldn’t it?’
Alfie, who had not failed to notice that ‘me’, returned in triumph to the Horse and Harrow. ‘I ‘tic
ed him,’ he said. ‘Now the next thing is to get him trained.’ A few days later we took Halliday down to the nets to give him, as Alfie put it, a bit of a try-out. He came through this test with flying colours. Indeed he seemed to know the lbw rule better than we did ourselves. It was a good deal simpler than Company Law, he said, and the man who had drafted it knew how to express himself in plain English.
‘It just shows,’ remarked Alfie on the way home, ‘how easily these MP fellows can mug things up when they set their minds to it.’
The match was fixed for the following Saturday, and we had the umpire’s white coat specially washed and ironed for the occasion. Halliday, who evidently took his duties very seriously, brought the copy of Wisden with him, and read the Laws of Cricket in the pavilion to refresh his memory. This somewhat dismayed us, for it seemed to suggest that he did not, after all, know them by heart; but he told us that even the Solicitor-General would sometimes refer to his authorities during a Parliamentary debate. We suggested, however, that he should not display the book more often than he could help before our opponents. Woody Bourton (Bloody Bourton, as we called them) were a suspicious lot, we explained; and Halliday with a most unaccustomed twinkle in his eye tucked Wisden away in his pocket.