by John Moore
Halliday, I think, saw much the same things as I saw in the little statue. He was a person, as Mr Chorlton said, who had suffered all his days from a serious lack of fun. All the more boisterous manifestations of life had passed him by. The furrows on his forehead grew deeper, his hair became tinged with grey, his eyes had wrinkles round the corners from reading late into the night; and when he had spoken of London he had said with a queer wistfulness: ‘There’s no wind there.’ Well, here was a high fierce wind of mirth and mischief, fun and frenzy, man’s divinity and man’s devilry! Strangely stirred by it, he continued to stare at the manikin which William Hart, bellowing with joy, had carved one uproarious midnight when he was full of wine.
‘Fertility rites,’ said Vicky, and added rather impatiently: ‘Do put it away.’ Halliday picked it up and stood it again in the dark shadows where it belonged. As he did so the wind got up, grew loud for a moment in the chimney, and rattled the windows with a new flurry of rain. One could almost fancy one heard in it the ancient laughter and the huge halloo.
Soon Alfie Perks and Sammy Hunt and the rest of the cricketers came into the bar, and we all sat together along the benches by the window and drank pints of beer. I don’t know how it happened that the talk got round to the subject of William Hart; I think Mr Chorlton must have engineered it. At any rate, we found ourselves talking about his young days, and his skill in carpentry, and Jaky Jones who’d been his pupil told us how he used to make the yellow wagons and about his favourite motto which no carpenter, said Jaky, should ever forget: Measure Twice and Gut Once.
‘Aye, he allus took pains,’ said Joe, ‘whether he was making a wagon or a coffin or a toy for the kids or something like this’ – and he indicated the Long Man standing in the shadows among the snuff-tins.
Halliday became interested at once.
‘Why, is William Hart the man who carved that figure? We noticed it when we first came into the bar.’
Joe nodded.
‘You spotted it, did you?’ he laughed. ‘As a matter of fact I usually hides it behind the snuff. It might fright the wenches else. I hope the lady warn’t frit?’
Vicky said nothing, but looked rather insulted at the suggestion that she might have been frightened by anything so silly, and Joe went on:
‘’Tis supposed to be a sort of charm; though I don’t believe in heathen idols myself. Gets you children, they say; but I keeps it because it makes me laugh.’
‘You seem to have plenty of grandchildren,’ said Halliday, who had no doubt seen and heard a good deal of Mimi’s and Meg’s numerous babies when he spent the night at the Horse and Harrow.
‘Eight,’ boasted Joe. ‘That’s to say, three at the police-station – my eldest girl married the bobby – and five in this house; and two more coming. It’s always neck and neck between Mimi and Meg. Mimi had a good start when she took up with the Count, but then Meg married a local lad, Alfie Perks’ boy, and first go off she had twins. But in the long run I’d back the Pole.’
‘Old William,’ said Jaky Jones, ‘he didn’t need no charms. He’d scarce so much as look at a maid and it was how’s your father.’
‘He had a lot of children?’ smiled Halliday.
‘Bless you, yes,’ said Joe, ‘and most of’em out of wedlock. And mark you, most of those are proud of it. That’s a funny thing,’ he added reflectively,’ they’re most of’em proud and open about it, aren’t they, Jaky?’
‘William’s a proud man himself,’ Jaky nodded.
‘Very proud and boastful of his ancestry he is,’ agreed Joe.
We explained to the Hallidays about old William’s absurd belief that he was descended from Shakespeare: a belief that went strangely with his own inability to read or write. ‘Well, he’s got the right name, anyhow,’ laughed Halliday. He seemed very interested in William, and Mr Chorlton winked at me. ‘What’s he like,’ Halliday asked, ‘this strange old fellow who’s brightened up the view from my windows with his field of flax?’
‘Well . . .’ Joe looked puzzled. ‘It’s difficult to put into words, but the thing I always think about him is that he’s full of life. Not in any ordinary sense of the words, either. He’s like a new barrel of beer which you can’t draw off in half-pints because it froths so; and you feel he’d bust if you corked him. I’ve never known anybody so full of life in all my time, have you, Jaky? ‘Course, I’m talking about his younger days now; we haven’t seen him down in the village since he got so lame.’
‘Like weeds he was,’ said Jaky, rather obscurely; but Joe understood. ‘That’s it!’ he said eagerly. ‘Like weeds. I’ve got a rough and unruly piece of ground which I ploughs and hoes and disc-harrows and cultivates but it’s so full of life that the weeds always come up in it fierce and free. It’s got a sort of demon in it. Last spring I thought I’d lay down a patch of concrete to make a stand for the horse and dray; because in wet weather it’s so mucky that they’re like to get stuck. But would you believe it, a little dock, no bigger’n my finger or an asparagus-top, poked up and forced its way through the concrete and cracked it, and then more docks and thistles and nettles, till all the concrete was busted and now it looks like crazy pavement with weeds growing in all the cracks! In the same way, if you can understand me, life was fierce and forceful in William Hart in the days of his youth. There was a demon in him; and yet you couldn’t say he was wicked any more than weeds are wicked. They has to sprout and riot; and so did he.’
‘But how, exactly, did he sprout and riot?’ asked Halliday.
Everyone laughed.
‘Wenches and drinking and singing and fun,’ said Joe. ‘And yet there wasn’t an ounce of harm in him, was there, Jaky? The maids he wronged always forgave him; and even when he was drunk he was as gentle as a lamb.’
Jaky nodded; and Alfie Perks put in:
‘A child could handle him. And yet you wouldn’t have thought it, to hear him bellowing about the village after the pubs shut. You’d have thought Beelzebub was inside him; and yet ‘twas simply that he was full to overflowing with Life.’
‘Funny you saying that,’ said Jaky, ‘because somehow I just can’t fancy William ever being dead. Most people,’ he went on, with a sardonic grin, ‘when I sees ’em in the street or in the pub I knows they’ll come to it in the end.’ (To this favour they must come! I thought.) ‘But William, somehow, I can never see myself burying him, I can’t picture him in the churchyard. Though, Lord knows, he’s been familiar enough with the churchyard in his time; and I often used to tell him that he’d know the way there.’
Joe hastened to explain:
‘At one time he was courting the cook at the Rectory. He’d slip in through the lych-gate after dark, and cook’d slip out through the Rector’s back door, and they’d be up to their games among the owls and the yew trees. Then one day they fell down a hole that Jaky here had dug, and the cook sprained her ankle. There was a fine old to-do about it, and the Rector had it stopped; but by then, of course, ‘twas too late.’
‘How’s your father again,’ said Jaky succinctly.
‘That’d be, what, twenty-five years ago,’ Joe reflected, ‘when William was over fifty?’
‘Twenty-five years it must be,’ agreed Sammy Hunt. ‘Young Pru is twenty-four.’
I smiled at Halliday and he whispered: ‘I’m enjoying this. I’m beginning to get a picture of your wild old man.’ It was a confused and fantastic and rather one-sided picture, but I could see that it delighted Halliday in the same way as the carved figure had delighted him, and probably the Long Man had somehow got mixed up with William in his mind. Now Jaky Jones told him the story of William’s first marriage to the gypsy girl and Sammy Hunt described William’s wondrous store of home-made wine, and Joe brought out from the back of the bar a faded photograph of William at the flower show, standing beside his biggest vegetable marrow (rather like the pictures we used to see in the war of airmen standing beside their two-thousand-pound bombs!) Yes; considering they used very few words I think Joe a
nd Jaky and Sammy and Alfie painted a pretty accurate and vivid portrait of William in the space of about half an hour. Full of life, like a new barrel of beer, and fierce and forceful as the weeds: irrepressible life working in him like the ferment in his own plum wine, bursting out like the trees in spring or the dock cracking the concrete; something demoniac about him, yet withal he was as gentle as a lamb; bellowing about the place like the Bull of Bashan; singing and shouting (the long slanting mouth half-open like that little idol’s, the ancient laughter and the huge halloo!); and then, at the age of fifty, sprouting and rioting among the tombstones with the Rector’s cook – and the offspring of that union was called Prudence!
My people don’t use many words, I thought, but they know how to tell a tale.
‘What a man he must have been!’ whispered Halliday; and at some story of Sammy Hunt’s, about how the parsnip wine had affected the Rector when he called to admonish William and drank two glases of it under the impression that it was a teetotal drink, Halliday suddenly threw back his head and laughed. He filled his lungs with laughter as a man who has been too long in cities breathes deep the unaccustomed country air. We looked at him in surprise, for we had never seen him laugh like that before; and Vicky, who had probably formed her own, and very different, picture of William Hart (a case of arrested development with a low Intelligence Quotient!) stared at him with a sort of bewildered disapproval. But at least she had drunk two pints of beer in a public bar, which I was pretty certain she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing six months ago. We were taming her!
Plus ça change
Yes, said Mr Chorlton later in the evening, when we’d said goodnight to the Hallidays and were walking home together up the crooked village street: Brensham was taming them both. The very thing was happening to them which Vicky had far-sightedly foreseen, on that morning when we took her into the Horse and Harrow after the Meet: they were fitting into the jigsaw-puzzle of our little community, they were becoming part of the structure and pattern, they belonged.
‘And yet,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s not so strange or unexpected after all. I don’t wholly agree with their politics, probably because I’m too old or because having read too much of Pericles and the politics of Athens, I tend to see the whole of politics as a historical merry-go-round, repeating itself in an endless and rather boring cycle. And yet I believe that those two are just as valid an expression of the English Spirit as William Hart; and the English Spirit doesn’t greatly change. Halliday’s dream is not very different from the young dream of Disraeli, in Sybil, when he imagined the aristocracy setting the people free from their middle-class masters; it’s only the conception of aristocracy which has altered. And as for Vicky, as I said before, she’s pure Cobbett, the English Radical who never changes except in name, and who is truly Radical in the sense of having deep roots. Perhaps Vicky hasn’t got very obvious roots yet; but you wait. She’s growing them!’
Microcosmos
There followed a long lull in the affairs of William Hart. The field of flax faded at last, became a smudge of faint indigo on the side of the hill, and in due course an unsuccessful attempt to harvest it was made by George and Susan. The WAEC, contrary to everybody’s expectations, took no steps to plough it in. Michaelmas brought its mists and its mushrooms, Susan driving her red tractor turned up the brown earth in Little Twittocks once more, the Frolick Virgins started sprout-picking again and demonstrated the truth of the saying ‘Cold hands, warm hearts’, by all falling passionately in love afresh with each other’s young men. Soon after Parliament reassembled Mr Chorlton had a note from Halliday, saying, that he’d tackled the Minister, who promised to inquire into William’s case; so we ceased to trouble our heads about it, feeling confident that all would be well.
At the end of September the usual horde of Birmingham fishermen descended upon Brensham in twelve charabancs for their annual Fishing Competition, which was won with a catch of five small eels about as thick as bootlaces; but the fishermen drank our three pubs dry and Joe chalked a sad sardonic little notice upon his front door, which he still kept hospitably ajar:
NO BEER, NO CIDER, NO SPIRITS, NO GIGS, BUT PLENTY OF STRONG POP.
About the same time a curious misfortune happened to Sammy Hunt, whose tiny estate by the river consisted of a cottage, a paddock, a landing-stage where he hired out boats, and a small osier-bed. All this messuage, as the lawyers say, was situated within the bend of the river, where it wound round the base of the hill; in summer, with its yellow flags, water-lilies, purple loosestrife, pink flowering-rushes and overhanging willows, it was one of the pleasantest places where a man might fish or laze or paddle a boat and dream. But some tidy-minded official of the Catchment Board decided that the river would be much nicer if it ran straight; for then the winter floods would drain away more quickly. The Conservancy therefore sent two mechanical dredgers to chop off Sammy’s osier-bed and straighten the bend. They had offered him, of course, the usual compensation: much more, probably, than the osier-bed was worth. But Sammy protested in vain that the money was useless to him, he wanted to keep the place as it was ‘because it was his’ and because in any case he liked crooked rivers. The tidy-minded official saw no point in this argument, and day by day like caterpillars chewing at the edge of a leaf the dredgers whittled away at the osier-bed, nibbled chunks off the bank, and dragged up the very entrails of the river to make a black and slimy mud-bank at the bottom of Sammy’s land. ‘It’s vandalous, vandalous,’ cried Sammy in despair, ‘and what’s more they’re beginning to undermine my garden.’ And now sure enough, as the first flood-water came down the river, the bank collapsed and half of Sammy’s garden, including his carefully tended three-year-old asparagus-bed, slithered gently into the muddy stream. Moreover a deep crevasse appeared within a few yards of his back door; and the officials who now descended upon him in swarms with offers of still more compensation shook their heads gravely and wondered whether the foundations of the cottage itself might be damaged. ‘It just shows,’ said poor Sammy, ‘what comes of interfering with Nature. What are you going to do about it, anyhow?’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said the officials kindly. ‘You’ll get compensation on a very generous scale indeed. You’ll be able to buy another place if you like.’
‘But don’t you understand,’ Sammy protested desperately, ‘it’s mine; I bought it to retire to; I don’t want another place.’
The officials gravely shook their heads.’ If the house were to collapse,’ they said, ‘we could take no responsibility for any injury . . .’ But Sammy, who had twice in his life stood on his bridge while a ship went down beneath him, was not the sort of man to abandon a sinking house. ‘Here I am,’ he said, ‘and here I stays, and if so be as I wakes up one morning and finds myself swimming I’ll see you all in hell.’
About the same time Mrs Doan of the Village Shop was also having trouble with officialdom. Some sharp-nosed functionary of the Customs and Excise, who happened to be in the village on holiday, whiffed a strong smell of peppermint, and following the scent like a hound on the trail he came at last to Mrs Doan’s wash-house, where she was busy distilling her autumn store against the colds and coughs of November. So he demanded to see her licence, hinting darkly that for all he knew she might use the still for making whisky or gin. Mrs Doan, a lifelong teetotaller to whom the very word gin was anathema, protested her innocence in vain; and a few weeks later she had a letter threatening her with all sorts of persecutions, pains and penalties unless she ‘desisted forthwith’ from what was described as ‘an open contravention of the law’.
October came in with some still days, as translucent and pearly-grey as a pigeon’s feathers, the evenings shut in, and Pru heard again the ancient and irresistible call. Quiet as a mouse, soft-padding as a cat, kin to the fluffy-feathered owls and the downy moths of autumn, she crept out into the dusky lanes where the love-performing night drew its close curtain over her. Late wayfarers hearing a faint bleating from the h
edgeside would often happen upon her pram with the two prize-winning babies inside it, parked beside a convenient stile; but they noticed that Pru had now provided the pram with a red rear lamp. Once, when I had got up very early to go duck-flighting down by the river, I met her pushing her pram from the direction of Elmbury. She looked as fresh and dewy-eyed as the autumn morning itself; but when I took my hat off to her she modestly dropped her glance and gave me such a mere shadow of a vestal smile as Lucretia herself would not have been ashamed of. I was not at all surprised to meet her coming from Elmbury, because we were all aware by now of the identity of her new young man. No narrow nationalist was Pru. She was courting Pierre, the friend and partner of ‘Enery, Pierre the French-Canadian with the wonderful side-whiskers and the sleek oily black hair.
Autumn drifted imperceptibly towards winter. For a week or two the hill was as many-coloured as Joseph’s coat, then gradually as if they ran together on a palette the greens and reds and yellows blended into brown. Mr Chorlton, enjoying a respite from his gout, went pike-fishing in the river, caught nothing, lost all his tackle in a sunken chain belonging to the dredgers, and produced an apt quotation from Martial to fit the case: Ecce redit sporta piscator inani. Sir Gerald perfected (so he said) his razor-blade mowing-machine and proceeded to invent an improved model. He also added another society to the hundred or so to which he already belonged: he became a Baconian, to the vast annoyance of Mr Chorlton, who was often to be heard arguing with him very fiercely in the village street: ‘I think perhaps the most insane part of the whole extra-ordinary heresy is your monstrous assumption that Bacon could possibly have created Bottom . . .’
George and Susan went nutting in the hazel-brakes and people said ‘Ah’ in a significant way, because we have a queer superstition about what happens when young couples go nutting together. The devoted pair, who daily discovered new enchantments in each other’s company, now went to the Saturday night hops in the Village Hall for the sole purpose, it seemed, of slipping out together after the first dance; from that time onwards they were seen no more. Come snow, frost, rain or hail, it was all the same to them: ‘Sure you won’t get cold?’ said George solicitously. ‘It won’t be so cold as sprout-picking,’ Susan whispered back. There was also at this time a perpetual whispering among the Frolick Virgins, rather like the ceaseless and sibilant murmur of wind in aspen trees, and we got the impression that something highly dramatic was likely to happen soon in connexion with George and Susan: they were going, said the Frolick Virgins, to Elope.