Brensham Village

by John Moore

  ‘I’ll ring him up,’ said Joe, and went out. We heard him in the back-room calling to Mimi to fetch the iodine.

  Rexy lay still and whimpered. There was a short silence and then Alfie, who had gone very white, said:

  ‘It was awfully kind of you, Miss Jane.’

  ‘I took him to your house,’ she said, ‘but they told me you were here.’

  ‘How did you find him?’ asked Mr Chorlton.

  ‘I was up on the hill. I love walking in the rain. I got to the larch plantation - you know, your old bug-hunting place, they got it off Father years ago because he owed them some money - and then I remembered that somebody had told me they’d killed off the fallow-deer. I thought I’d go and see. So I went in and then I heard Rexy yelping. I suppose he’d been yelping for hours, and these devils must have heard him because they’d been shooting all day in the coverts just below where he was. But of course they wouldn’t care about a dog.’

  ‘Did you have a job to get him out of the trap?’ said Banks.

  ‘Well, I did as a matter of fact. He bit me,’ said Jane factually. Then we noticed for the first time that she’d a handkerchief tied round her hand.

  ‘Better let me fix it,’ said Banks. ‘I can do first-aid.’

  ‘It’s nothing. We’ll put some iodine on it when Joe comes back. But listen: aren’t they horrible, unspeakable, beastly?’ Jane turned to address us all. She was splendidly and beautifully angry. I knew what Mr Chorlton had meant when he said she wanted a Crusade. ‘What can we do about them? They’re rich and they’re powerful and they’ve got everything they want in the world; and yet they always want more. They’ve got thousands of pheasants; but they set those cruel traps to catch the vermin in case they should lose half a dozen. And they killed the fallow-deer because they were afraid they might do a few pounds’ worth of damage. They were gentle and delicate and graceful; so the Syndicate killed them. They kill everything that’s lovely. One day they’ll gobble up this village as they’re gobbling up my father’s land now. They’ll squeeze you out one by one, they’ll offer you a tempting price for your cottage or your bit of land and if you don’t take it they’ll break you. Can’t we do something, now, before it’s too late?’

  She was so splendid and passionate, I wanted to cheer. Sammy said:

  ‘They’ll never get Brensham. We’ll see to that.’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure,’ said Jane. ‘My father once said they’d never have the larch plantation.’

  ‘They’ve got the big guns,’ said Alfie. They’re helluva powerful.’

  ‘Wait till we get into power,’ said Briggs. ‘We’ll clip their wings.’

  ‘When you get into power,’ said Jane, swiftly, ‘they’ll clip your wings. They’ve done it twice already.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Miss Jane; we never had a clear majority anyhow.’ Briggs worshipped Jane but he could never quite forgive her for being Redder than he was. ‘Suppose I ask you what you’d do about it if your lot got into power?’

  ‘There wouldn’t be any need for us to do anything. If ever we got in we’d go in on a great tide of anger which would sweep the Syndicate and all such things away.’

  ‘Like the French Revolution?’ said Mr Chorlton.

  ‘Yes!’ said Jane.

  ‘I’m all for it,’ said Mr Chorlton with a little smile, ‘if you’ll cut off the right heads. But people get excited and, well, indiscriminate.’

  Jane said:

  ‘Well, I’m going to do something, anyhow. While I’m still angry I’m going to drive along to their shooting-box or whatever they call it and tell them what I think of steel traps. I’ll go now. Alfie, with all my heart I hope Rexy gets better. Goodbye, everybody.’ She turned to Mr Chorlton. ‘Goodbye. You’re terribly wise, and perhaps a tiny bit cynical and you’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’

  Mr Chorlton shook his head.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I promise you I’m not. I was thinking - shall I tell you what I was thinking?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jane, at the door, ‘I shan’t mind.’

  ‘These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows that I am with them, in some ways.’

  She laughed, and went out. We heard her furiously bang the car door. I thought I wouldn’t like to be the members of the Syndicate, whoever they were. Mr Chorlton said to me: ‘I hope they don’t offer her a cocktail. It’d be such an anticlimax.’ But I felt sure they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t dare to. You couldn’t offer a gin-and-bitters to an avenging angel.

  The Purge for Poetry

  Meanwhile Billy Butcher had been sitting alone in the corner and drinking whiskies almost as fast as Mrs Trentfield could serve them. He was long past the clowning stage — I dare say the Elmbury pubs had seen something of that, during the afternoon - and he looked terribly ill. I went across to him and asked him if he felt all right. He blinked and grinned.

  ‘In the bag,’ he said. ‘It’s in the bag.’

  ‘You’re in the bag.’

  ‘Yes. Three bags full. Black sheep, black sheep, that’s me. One for the somebody and one for the something and one for the little boy who lives in the lane. Mrs Trentfield! Please! One for the little boy who lives in the lane.’

  ‘You’ve had enough, Master Billy,’ she said.

  ‘One for the little boy who lives in the lane.’

  She poured him out a small one; but he was watching, and he shook his head. ‘Double! Double, double, toil and trouble. How right those witches were!’

  ‘Billy,’ I said, ‘you are a BF.’

  ‘Many do call me a fool,’ said Billy, almost startling me because I had so often thought of him as clowning like Andrew Aguecheek.

  ‘That foolish knight,’ said Billy, ‘had a vacuum inside him.’ He got up unsteadily and staggered to the bar, where Briggs, Sir Gerald, and Mr Chorlton were listening to another of Sammy’s stories which I recognized immediately as the one about the geisha girl. Alfie and Joe had taken Rexy into the back room, where they waited for the vet.

  Billy leaned against the bar and waved his glass in the air. He looked terrible. His eyes were red, his hair was falling over his forehead, and his features were becoming curiously blurred. In spite of his years of drinking Billy had a fine face; it was a face which even had a sort of nobility, but tonight the whisky had begun to rub out the nobility as moss and erosion and weathering Time will blur the crumbling features of a piece of sculpture. He was approaching the last stages of his bout; he’d blow up soon; and whether the eruption would be one of poetry or of window-breaking was simply a matter of chance.

  ‘The foolish knight,’ he repeated ‘- I am not referring to you, Sir Gerald - had a vacuum inside him. But I am different. I am full. Full of whisky, and also of devils. Did you know that, Chorlton? I am possessed by devils.’

  ‘I think we are all aware of it,’ said Mr Chorlton.

  ‘But they are no ordinary devils,’ Billy went on with terrible seriousness. (It would be poetry and not windows, I thought with relief.) ‘Their names are Ideas, Philosophies, unattainable Dreams, tormenting Thoughts, unwritten Epics, Sonnets, Songs, Ballads and Balderdash. If they were cast out into a herd of Gadarene swine the poor pigs would certainly run mad.’

  ’… These geisha girls,’ said Sammy indomitably, ‘they dance, you know, and they make you cups of tea. Don’t you think, Billy, it’s time you went home?’

  Billy laughed.

  ‘And a Voice valedictory, Who is for Victory? Who is for Liberty? Who goes home? There I go, you see: the devils are stirring. But I deal with them as if I were a lion-tamer, though they are much more dangerous than lions. I command them: Down, sir, down, Ponto, down - Give me another drink, Mrs Trentfield - with a host of furious fancies whereof I am commander: that’s me. Well, down the hatch boys. Down, Ponto, down.’

  ‘Do shut up, Billy,’ said Sammy Hunt. ‘As I was saying, to cut a long story very short, these girls—’

  ‘My trouble,’ announced Billy in a loud vo
ice, as if he were bearing witness to a sudden revelation, ‘is that I am a sort of bottle.’

  We all laughed at that.

  ‘There’s many a true word spoke in jest,’ said Briggs.

  Billy fixed us with a fierce and reproving look.

  ‘You may laugh,’ he said earnestly. ‘I am a bottle, but not in the vulgar sense you mean. When I was a boy I was in the habit of swallowing poetry. In West Africa, where I was all alone in the jungle with a dusky lady and half a dozen books I swallowed a lot more. A terrible lot: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Keats, Swinburne. Then one day I put the cork in it; because it was bad for me, see, it was making me think. I put the cork in and took to whisky. No more poetry, I said; and except for the racing tips I haven’t read a word since. But like parsnip wine when you bottle it too soon, it goes on working. This Skimble-Skamble stuff - who said that? I’ve forgotten - it fizzes inside me, and it’s trying to blow out the bloody cork.’

  Billy swayed and held on to the counter.

  ‘Give me a whisky,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Trentfield had decided to be firm at last. ‘You’re not well, Master Billy. It would do you no good.’

  ‘Presumptuous woman,’ said Billy severely, ‘how do you know? Are you a physician of the mind? Can you prescribe for my cerebellum? Whisky stops me thinking. Poetry makes me think. Thinking is disastrous. Ergo, whisky good, poetry bad. But nobody classifies Shakespeare as a Dangerous Drug. You don’t have to get a licence to sell Swinburne. Suppose I ask you. Mrs Trentfield, for a half-pint of Housman? Ha ha! But it hurts, it torments, it keeps you awake, it gives you bad dreams; your whisky is harmless by comparison. Poetry is a curse, alcohol is a blessing. With a trifle of help from Mr Coleridge I made up a rhyme about alcohol the other day. Would you care to hear it? It goes like this:

  ‘In Xanadu did Kuhla Khan

  A sacred pleasure-drome decree

  Where Ale the sacred river ran

  Through taverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless—

  ‘Mrs Trentfield, I shall offend you if I go on. Give me another whisky. Give me one more.’

  ‘Well, one small one and that’s the last.’ Mrs Trentfield poured it out reluctantly.

  ‘“Come, cordial, and not poison, go with me,”’ said Billy, and drank it. He was very near the edge now, I thought; this last one would topple him over. He suddenly fell silent; and Sammy, seizing his opportunity, began again:

  ‘These girls are specially trained, you see, for the purpose of entertaining gentlemen—’

  Billy cried angrily:

  ‘“This is no world to play with mammets and to tilt with lips.” Christ Almighty, what a world! “ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. ’Tis an unweeded garden, that’s gone to seed.” Like me. Gone to seed. Bloody well gone to seed at thirty-five. “Methinks I have out-lived myself and grown to be aweary of the sun. I have shaken hands with delight.” You don’t know who wrote that. None of you know. It came out of the bottle.’

  ‘A vintage,’ said Mr Chorlton, ‘called Sir Thomas Browne.’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve forgotten. But it came out of the bottle, the deadly dangerous bottle of stuff that makes you think.’ Billy put his head in his hands. ‘If man were drunk for ever,’ he muttered. ‘Half a pint of Housman. Christ, what a drink!’ He looked up and quoted savagely:

  ‘“But men at whiles are sober

  And think by fits and starts—”

  ‘There you see: just what I’ve been saying. Listen, you fools, listen:

  “And when they think, they fasten

  Their hands upon their hearts.”

  ‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it,’ he cried. We recognized the symptoms; and sure enough, already the tears were rolling down his cheeks and his broad shoulders were heaving. Mrs Trentfield had her arm round his shoulder and began to lead him through the bar.

  ‘It’s all right, Master Billy, all you want is a bit of a lie-down, see, a quiet lie-down in the spare bedroom till you feel better …’

  The Flood

  After that I played a game of darts with Banks, while Sammy’s familiar tale flowed majestically on towards its tantalizing climax (his ship’s siren was hooting for him, the Japanese girl had her arms round his neck, If you leave me, she said, I shall commit hara-kiri). Then I heard the telephone ringing, and a moment later Joe came out of his back-room and said: ‘That was the Colonel. He wants a bit of help. He says the flood’s come up over the Summer Lcasow and trapped his cattle and sheep. I told him we’d all be down there in a few minutes.’

  Mrs Trentfield came bustling out with Joe’s mackintosh.

  ‘We do see Life,’ she said.

  We all packed into my little car, and I drove down the muddy lane which led towards the Lock. The ditches on either side of the lane were brimful, and in places were already overflowing. The Summer Leasow was a forty-acre meadow which lay in the bend of the river just past Sammy’s cottage; it was a hay field in summer and in autumn the Colonel pastured his Ayr shires, and a few of his queer Spanish sheep, upon the rich lattermath.

  Before we got to Sammy’s cottage we were driving axle-deep through flood-water which flowed like a little river between the hedges. The rain had stopped, and a half-moon was showing through torn and ragged clouds. By its light we could see ahead of us a muddy lake which was the Summer Leasow. ‘Must be three feet of water there,’ said Sammy. His cottage, which stood upon a bank, was well out of flood’s way, but part of his garden was submerged and his boats, which he’d pulled up on the bank for tarring and winter repairs, were afloat already and tugging at their chains. ‘Lucky I pegged ‘em down,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they’d have been halfway to Elmbury. Maybe they’ll come in useful.’

  Now we could see lights moving over the Summer Leasow and their stippled yellow reflections in the water. We left the car and waded towards the gate; the bitter cold water came up to our knees. When we reached the gate we saw five figures about fifty yards away. We shouted and they came slowly towards us. They carried torches and hurricane lanterns, which showed up the bright surge of the water round their legs as they pushed through it. As they approached I recognized the Colonel and his cowman. The Colonel was wearing his fishing-waders, which came up to his waist, and in the light of his hurricane lantern he looked more wonderfully grotesque than ever; he looked like a kelpie emerging from his native lake. He was swearing hard, and the sound came to us on the wind like a deep purring growl.

  ‘Here we are,’ we shouted. ‘What can we do to help?’

  In shallower water now, he splashed more quickly towards us. I noticed that he was carrying a shepherd’s crook. He said:

  ‘We got most of the cows out; but there are two stuck in the far hedge, and there’s my goddam bull splashing about somewhere and bellowing like hell. And there are six sheep standing on that little tump of hay by the bank of the river. Can’t reach the sods except by swimming.’

  ‘I’ll go and fetch ‘em in a punt,’ said Sammy.

  ‘How many are there of you?’ called the Colonel.

  I looked round, and was surprised to see that our number was increased by more than a dozen. Alfie and Dai Roberts had arrived carrying ropes, Jim Hartley from the Adam and Eve, David Groves the ganger, the Rector, two or three village boys, and even a few gipsyish figures, unmistakable as Fitchers and Gormleys who always seemed to appear magically in the village in moments of crisis. I noticed that the three men standing in the shallow water behind the Colonel were Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, and I remembered that they had been picking sprouts for him; but I should not have been at all surprised if they had bicycled out from Elmbury, anticipating the flood, for they too delighted in crises, which gave them wonderful opportunities for scrounging, thieving, or earning tips.

  ‘Well, Jim,’ said the Colonel to Mr Hartley, ‘I note that thee turns out a lot quicker to a flood than to a fire! Or hast’a brought thy old leaky pump to pump the river dry?’ He
fell easily and without affectation into our country speech; it came naturally to him; it wasn’t part of a pose as it is with some of our petty squires; he was genuinely bilingual.

  Sammy said:

  ‘We’ll take four boats round by the river. Two of ‘em can take off the sheep and the other two can help you to chivvy the cows and the bull.’

  A few minutes later I found myself pulling one of Sammy’s row-boats down the channel between his osier-beds. Sammy and Abraham the ferryman took the long black punts, and Joe Trentfield followed me in a fourteen-foot dingy. Sammy had provided each of us with ropes, neatly coiled, and we each had a passenger armed with a boathook. Mine was a murderous looking Fitcher or Gormley who seemed extremely unhappy, having, perhaps, some atavistic disquiet about boats and ropes and floods and midnight adventuring upon the river.

  As soon as we got out of the channel and into the main stream I felt the strength of the flood. The current gave a sharp tug at the stern and pulled the boat round so that I lost ten yards before I began to make headway. Ahead of me I could see Sammy and Abraham standing up in their punts as they paddled them; Joe passed me with a couple of strong pulls. What watermen the people of Brensham were! They could all swim like otters from childhood and they could handle any sort of boat with the skill and confidence of longshoremen. I thought: but they are hillmen too, they walk like hillmen, and they’re as happy on horse-back as they are on the river; and they plough and dig and grow better sprouts than anybody else in the district! And they hang together, I thought, as Pistol once said. I felt proud to be with them and to belong to them, and I pulled hard at the sculls and got some way on the boat at last, so that I came level with Joe and saw over my shoulder the rhythmic dip of Sammy’s paddle as he drove the long punt round the bend.

  The horned Spanish sheep were jumping about and playing king of the castle upon the isolated hay-tump; they looked rather like ibex. Sammy shouted to me: ‘They’re too big for your boats. Abraham and I will take ‘em off in the punts. You and Joe go hard a-starboard and help chivvy the old bull.’ I swung my boat round the hay-tump and watched Sammy with two huge strokes bring his punt beautifully alongside it; then standing on the seat and looking like a giant against the moon he seized a struggling sheep and lowered it into the stern. Abraham’s punt as black as Charon’s nosed in beside his. I gave two hard pulls and felt the grip of the current suddenly loosen; it plucked feebly at the stern and then suddenly the boat shot ahead into the yellowish-brown backwater of the Summer Leasow.