by John Moore
Upon one famous occasion Alfie Perks drove this train. It was during the General Strike; and Alfie and several other market-gardeners had volunteered to act as porters and load their own produce into the trucks. Thus it came about that Alfie found himself, on the third morning, temporarily in charge of the station; for the station-master had joined the strikers. The six-thirty duly arrived, but its driver who happened to live at Elmbury, jumped down off his engine and declared that he was sick of being a blackleg and was now going home.
‘Hey,’ said Alfie, ‘you can’t do that. What about my lettuces?’
But the driver, bearing the little black box which engine-drivers carry, was already on his way out of the station.
‘My mates call me a blackleg,’ he declared. ‘Can’t let my mates down.’
‘What about letting down us chaps? My lettuces are helluva perishable,’ Alfie shouted after him; but it was no good, he was over the bridge and walking rapidly towards Elmbury. Alfie rang up the Junction, ten miles up the line, and asked them what he should do. They told him that they could find an amateur driver to take the train up north, but they possessed no means of transporting the driver to Brensham. ‘If the train could only get to us,’ they told him, ‘we could probably send it on.’
‘How the hell do you expect it to get to you?’ asked Alfie, ‘call it, and perhaps it will come.’ He was angry; he had forty crates of lettuce in his dray and they would be worthless in twenty-four hours. He went back to the engine and talked to the fireman.
‘Can you drive this thing?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said the fireman. ‘It’s easy.’
‘Well, unless you’re going on strike too,’ said Alfie, ‘you’d better bloody drive it.’
‘Can’t do that,’ said the fireman. ‘It’s against company’s regulations and the Union. More than my job’s worth.’
‘Can you show me how to drive it?’
‘Sure, I can do that.’
So Alfie loaded up his lettuces and off he went. He’d never even driven a lorry before; in fact, he’d never driven anything but his old horse which looked rather like a rocking-horse and was appropriately named Dobbin. But the fireman condescended to take off the brakes for him, and put them on when the train reached the Junction, and the rest, said Alfie, was helluva easy. There was a shortage of produce in the Manchester markets next day, and his lettuces made the best price he’d ever had. ’Twas a pity, he said, the Strike looked like ending; or he’d have bought his own railway engine and delivered his stuff personally.
Trains and Charabancs
So, you see, the railway brought both tragedy and comedy to Brensham. Our lives were bound up with it as they were bound up with the river and the hill. I have seen the effect of the charabancs and the motors on a main road village near Elmbury; I have watched them slowly suck its blood so that in a few years the village had no real life at all except a kind of spurious weekend life which was that of its parasites. When they went away on Monday there was nothing but a sham village, a mere husk, consisting of petrol-stations, two deserted tea-shops, a pub full of chromium-plating and ill-kept beer, a tea-garden with yellow-striped umbrellas over the tables, and Ye Olde Blacksmythe’s Shoppe where an indifferent craftsman made curios. It was a dead village which on Saturdays and Sundays and Bank Holidays was grotesquely galvanized into activity in the fashion of a Zombie. The parasites had sucked it dry.
But the railway wasn’t parasitic on Brensham; instead of sapping its vitality, it actually made the pulse of the village beat faster. And it robbed us of nothing, except a few moments of our quietude now and then. Nor was that a perceptible theft; for the people who lived along the line didn’t wake up when the midnight express hammered past; they only woke up if it failed to pass, and listened to the silence, and looked at their watches, and wondered what had happened to make it so late.
The Trumpet
The second pub, as you walked down the village from the Adam and Eve, stood close to Mrs Doan’s Post Office, and almost opposite the entrance to Magpie Lane. It was bigger than either of the others, and it had a sizable back room where Cricket Club and Farmers’ Union meetings and the annual dinners of organizations such as the British Legion were held. It was more modern than the Horse Narrow and the Adam and Eve: it had a garage at the back, and advertised ‘Bed and Breakfast, h and c’.
Notwithstanding, it was an unlucky pub. It had had a succession of landlords, some good and some bad, but none of them had managed to make a fair living out of it. This was partly due to its situation in the middle of the village; for the Horse Narrow and the Adam and Eve stood like sentries at either end, and offered a strong challenge to thirsty travellers approaching from either direction. Also, at the time I am writing of, it was suffering from the aftereffects of having had for three years the worst landlord in Brensham’s history, a villainous, get-rich-quick towny fellow whose notion of a country inn was a place where people from the City spent illicit weekends and were charged double prices for the privilege. In consequence, he spent a good deal of his time giving evidence at the Divorce Court (which he thoroughly enjoyed) instead of attending to his legitimate business in the bar.
Now nobody could say that Brensham was a puritanical village; indeed I think our illegitimate birth-rate was rather high and we certainly saw little harm in our young lovers’ midsummer mischief so long as they did not do too much damage to the crops. We disapproved of the dreary divorcees at the Trumpet not because of their morals, which were no concern of Brensham, but because of their manners, which grossly offended us. So the Trumpets few ‘regulars’ began to drift away to the other pubs, and although the landlord didn’t mind this in the summer he began to notice the effect of it in the long, dark winter evenings, when there were no weekenders and even if there had been the gloomy spectacle of Brensham’s flooded river, muddy lanes and fields of rotting sprout-stems would have promptly ended their romance.
The landlord now began to grow jealous of the other two pubs, whose bars were full of darts players even on the wettest and coldest nights. So one evening when he had closed his bar promptly at ten - there were no customers to turn out of it - he took a walk down to the Horse Narrow and was gratified to find that the lights were still on in the bar. He peered through the window and saw Joe serving drinks, Mimi playing the piano, and a dozen villagers enjoying a sing-song. The clock over the bar stood at ten-twenty. Joe, who enjoyed the singing, had forgotten the time; and he was never very particular about prompt closing anyway.
The landlord of the Trumpet hastened back to his pub and rang up the police-station. His towny voice was sly and ingratiating. He believed in keeping in with the police.
‘Mr Banks,’ he said, ‘I’m going to give you a tip.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Banks, surprised and on his guard. ‘What is it?’
‘Just take a walk down the street and you’ll see.’
It was a beastly night, cold and drizzly, and Banks had been sitting in his slippers before a good fire. He said rather sharply:
‘I can’t act on that. Tell me what’s the matter and I’ll go and deal with it,’
‘Well, it’s like this, Officer,’ said the wretched landlord. ‘I happened to be passing the Horse and Harrow a few minutes ago - ten-twenty to be exact - and I’m sorry to say that there’s Goings On there. I don’t like to let a fellow landlord down but what’s fair for one is fair for all. There were drinks being served, and music.’
Banks remained silent. As he told some of us afterwards, he was doing a bit of quick thinking. After all, Joe Trentfield was his father-in-law.
‘Music and singing,’ whined the landlord into the silent telephone. And then, losing his head a bit, perhaps, because he still got no answer, he made a most foolish and disastrous statement:
‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you might like the chance of making a good cop.’
A good cop! ‘Leaving out altogether,’ said Banks, when he told us about it, ‘the fact that I’d have
copped my own father-in-law, did the fool really believe that I’d think it a good cop to get any landlord in the village into trouble - or anybody else for that matter?’ Banks had been village policeman for eight years; Brensham had tamed him. So he said coldly:
‘Thank you for your information, but as it happens I know all about it. Mr Trentfield warned me that he was having a party tonight. It is perfectly in order.’
‘But he hasn’t got an extension!’ wailed the miserable wretch.
‘No,’ said Banks firmly. ‘It’s a private party. Nobody is paying for drinks.’ He rang off. Next, day he went to see Joe and put the fear of God into him; he also visited the Adam and Eve and warned Jim Hartley to be careful. He wasn’t very discreet; I think he felt that for once in a way discretion didn’t accord with justice. So he said frankly: ‘I’m warning you only because we’ve got a tell-tale among us.’ That was enough. Joe knew who it was, and Jim Hartley guessed. Everybody in the village knew by closing-time that night.
Now Brensham was a remarkable village in this fashion: although it possessed, I think, as diverse a collection of inhabitants as you’d find anywhere in England, it was nevertheless more of an entity than any other community I have known. Its strange assortment of individualists had a way of getting together about any major issue and acting as one man. ‘They hangs together,’ Pistol had said to me; and he was right. Brensham hung together now. The question wasn’t debated in public; there was no common discussion or common agreement about it; but every individual in Brensham made his individual decision to boycott the Trumpet for as long as the treacherous landlord remained there. Even Billy Butcher, in his most drunken moments, staggered past it with his head in the air. The landlord never again sold so much as a half-pint to any of our villagers. He couldn’t live on weekenders and we broke him in six months. When he left he had a sale, but no one belonging to Brensham attended it. The only bidders were two or three dealers from Elmbury who formed a ring between them and bought up his few sticks of furniture for a song.
The Trumpet’s next landlord was as decent a fellow as you could find; but the pub remained an unlucky one. Its ‘regulars’ had left it, and become ‘regulars’ at the other pubs; being creatures of habit they were unwilling to make another change. It was more difficult to get the trade back than it had been to lose it; and when the new landlord’s wife died, and he could no longer provide bed-and-break-fast for the occasional motorists, he was hard put to it to make a living.
We sometimes called at his pub after cricket-matches, out of friendship and because we were sorry for him; but although he looked after his beer well and kept his bar clean we were never entirely at ease there. It had neither the homeliness of the Adam and Eve nor the boisterous gaiety of the Horse Narrow. It was just a place for drinking in; and although that may be the teetotallers’ idea of a pub, it was very far from being ours.
The Horse Narrow
Nor was it Joe Trentfield’s. It had been his ambition all his life to be an inn-keeper; and the reason, as he truthfully said, was because he liked to see people enjoying themselves. He had saved up during nearly twenty years of soldiering in order that he might gratify this simple ambition when he retired. Now he had his reward; for none but a churl or a misanthrope could fail to enjoy himself at the Horse Narrow. The atmosphere in the bar was rather like that of a large family party; and what was particularly enchanting about it was that the family obviously enjoyed it as much as the guests. Joe’s round red face positively shone with happiness; Mrs Trentfield’s bosom heaved with laughter like a balloon spinnaker filled with wind; Mimi giggled and sang, Meg giggled and strummed. No Happy Family could have been happier.
‘I likes to see people having fun,’ said Joe. ‘I likes to see a bit of life,’ said Mrs Trentfield. They weren’t very finicky about what constituted Fun and Life, so long as it warmed the cockles of their hearts. Mrs Trentfield enjoyed a bawdy joke or a naughty song as much as anybody; and, when she listened to either, the balloon spinnaker filled and shook and swelled and billowed as if it would burst. As for Joe, he was in the habit of declaring: ‘The Horse Narrow is Liberty ‘All.’ Even when Billy Butcher, being in the destructive stage, took him at his word and started pitching glasses at the darts board, Joe merely laughed, and Mrs Trentfield’s only comment as she swept up the pieces was: ‘Well, we do see Life.’
The very structure of the Horse Narrow matched its landlord’s free-and-easy character. There was a great apple tree outside it, which dripped pink petals on the doorstep in spring and tapped with its twigs upon the top-storey windows whenever there was a wind. The half-timbered, deep-thatched building had been added to from time to time by various local builders, so that it had a crooked, lopsided and rather comical appearance. The eaves jutting out over the small bedroom windows looked like beetling eyebrows; and Joe had beetling eyebrows too. The crazy inn sign, with its horse and arrow, completed the impression which the place gave of belonging to phantasy.
The same sort of delightful disorder was apparent within. There were numerous low beams in awkward places, upon which strangers were apt to bang their heads. When they did so, Joe roared with laughter. His catholic notion of what constituted Fun included all minor misfortunes of that kind. Generations of happy-go-lucky builders had contrived the various additions and alterations in a spirit of rough humour which beautifully matched Joe’s. Some of the doors were too narrow, and opened the wrong way; when Mrs Trentfield’s bosom became jammed in them, Joe nearly split his sides. The only bathroom was placed on the opposite side of the house from the bedrooms; in order to get to it visitors and members of the family had to pass through the bar. The sight of Mimi scampering through in her dressing-gown, or Meg running the gauntlet of the young men with her hair in curlers, was an unfailing source of merriment for Joe. Another was associated with a freak of the plumbing. Every time the lavatory plug was pulled, it emptied a tank immediately over the bar, which refilled itself with a curious gurgling noise. Joe called it Minnie haha, Laughing Water; and it never failed to set him going so that the chuckle in the ceiling seemed like an echo of his great gusty laughter, it was as if the very building shared his mirth.
The walls of the bar were decorated with the strangest assortment of pictures and curios. There were coloured photographs of Mimi and Meg in their exiguous pantomime dresses, looking very pink and shiny and as unreal as an adolescent’s dream; yet if you glanced at Mimi and Meg you realized at once that the photographs were likenesses, the sisters were indeed an embodiment of the image in the mind of the awakening boy: a sort of synthesis of girls.
There was also a photograph of Joe as a Regimental Sergeant-Major, and one of Mrs Trentfield on her wedding-day which suggested that Mimi’s taste in hats might be hereditary. There was a pair of antlers, one of Joe’s trophies from Africa, which he had seen fit to decorate with an old top-hat. There was an improbable-looking stuffed pike in a glass case and a live parrot in a cage, and there were a number of innocently-vulgar postcards, chiefly showing fat women in bathing dresses, which the unerring instinct of Joe’s best friends had prompted them to send him from Weston-super-Mare. Upon the shelf behind the bar were some more of these postcards, the ones which Joe deemed unfitted for display upon the walls, and a piece of wood-carving representing the Long Man of Elmbury who was in some ways an even more impressive figure than the better-known Long Man of Cerne Abbas. On this shelf also there was generally a collection of malformed potatoes, parsnips, tomatoes, and vegetable marrows which local gardeners had brought to the Horse Narrow in the certainty that they would make Joe laugh. A potato shaped like a manikin, a parsnip resembling a mermaid, a Pompeian broad bean or cucumber - these curiosities would afford him endless delight and he would hold them up to show his customers, or demonstrate their peculiar qualities to his wife, with such a happy grin on his red face that even a prig or a Puritan would be bound to join in the laughter. Up from- his very boots would come Joe’s deep chuckle and Mrs Trentfield heaving in front lik
e a pouter pigeon would laugh till she cried, and the Echo in the ceiling perhaps would answer them, so that their laughter before it died away was reinforced and renewed. It was the laughter, surely, of Chaucer and Rabelais; for it was of the earth earthy, like the comic misshapen vegetable in Joe’s hand.
The Landlord
For all his happy-go-lucky manner, Joe took his job as landlord very seriously. He worked far longer hours than most of us; as he said: ‘A pub ties you worse nor a dairy herd, for a man can generally find somebody to milk his cows’ - whereas it took an expert to milk those casks in the cool dark room behind the bar. Besides, there is more to pub-keeping than that. Joe fulfilled a function in the village much larger than that of mere provider of beer. He was a sort of secular Father Confessor; for if a man wanted to share his troubles or ventilate his grievance or tell a funny story it was ten to one that he’d make his way to the Horse Narrow. There he was certain to find Joe standing behind his well-polished counter, always ready to listen patiently and nod his head understandingly and at the end to put in a wise or comforting word, or if it were appropriate to gladden the storyteller’s heart with his thunderous laughter.
And when the talk was general, and the pub became, as it often did, a sort of village parliament - when the discussion concerned perhaps some question of village politics such as a right-of-way or the water-supply or the drains, Joe found himself in much the same situation as the Speaker: he must keep the peace without taking sides. He never forgot that he was the host and his customers were guests, that all shades of opinion were represented among them, and that it was part of a host’s duty not to give offence. I have heard him when the debate became heated sum up both arguments as impartially as a judge.
