The Blue Field Page 10

  The old men who tell this tale say that he strode into the Horse and Harrow one September dusk and that he was ‘rascally drunk’, having already spent two or three hours at the Adam and Eve and the Trumpet. At the Horse and Harrow he drank no less than six pints of beer; but instead of making him more drunk this fabulous draught seemed to sober him, and he became all at once very quiet and thoughtful, and refused to play darts or to join in the usual Saturday evening singing. At last he handed his gold turnip-watch to the landlord, asking him to look after it until the morning; and without another word he walked out into the dark night.

  He reached the Gormley’s camp in Orris Park at about half past eleven, when the last of their fires were flickering out and the majority of the inhabitants of the tents and caravans were settling down to sleep. The camp contained about thirty men and boys, to say nothing of the women, who are famous viragos. Note that it was a Saturday night, when most of the men had probably been drinking in the various local pubs; and the Gormleys after a bout are as quick to strike as a nest of adders suddenly wakened from their slumber in the sun. Furthermore it was pitch-dark, and William did not know his way among the tent-pegs and caravans; and he was alone.

  You can imagine the howling set up by the score of mongrel dogs as he strode into the camp; the whinnying of the horses; the grunts and growls and oaths and snores of the awakening Gormleys. They may have thought that the midnight visitor was a policeman come to make unwelcome inquiries about a lost dog or somebody’s hens which had unaccountably vanished; at any rate they were in no hurry to show themselves, and were content at first to challenge the intruder with sleepy shouts of’ Who’s there?’ And then William smote them like a gale.

  He had provided himself with a sheath-knife, long and lovingly sharpened on the whetstone. First he slashed the headropes of all the horses and with a great holler drove them full-gallop through the encampment. Their hoofs sent the sparks flying from the still-smouldering fires, and by that little light, and the flicker of a few twigs rekindled, William went among the tents cutting the guy-ropes. The Gormleys are notoriously slovenly in their camping arrangements -they lost their woodcraft long ago when they ceased to be nomads – and I dare say most of the guy-ropes were rotten and many of the tent-poles depended on a couple of ropes instead of half a dozen. William had laid half the tents flat before the Gormleys realized what was happening, and he had also in his fine fury pushed over a ramshackle caravan, which by chance had a paraffin stove inside it, so that it immediately caught fire. The blaze, which added to the Gormley’s confusion, helped William to see his enemies as they gathered about him. He threw away the knife, for it had done its business, and he did not fight with knives; and with his bare fists he went into the fray.

  The Gormleys, you must remember, had been taken entirely by surprise. William’s sudden onslaught had caught them when they were sleepy and fuddled, and at least half of them were trapped beneath the fallen tents, where they writhed and struggled helplessly. The galloping, neighing horses, the yelping dogs, and the flame and smoke from the burning caravan completed their bewilderment. There were probably not more than a dozen men on their feet when the real fight started; there was only one on his feet when it ended.

  William fought, as the old men put it, ‘like the wind’. Now he was a tornado, a typhoon, a hurricane blowing through their camp, knocking over the tents like ninepins and toppling the men as a woodcutter fells trees. It must have seemed to the Gormleys that there was not one but a hundred Williams, shouting upon the name of Shakespeare and challenging them in a voice of thunder: ‘You carsn’t touch I! You carsn’t touch II’

  So he smote them, as Joshua smote the Seven Kings by the Waters of Merom: ‘he houghed their horses and burnt their chariots with fire . . . and smote all the souls that were therein.’ And then, so the tale goes, in the midst of the confusion he seized a small boy who fled before him, and holding him by the scruff of the neck whispered with what blood-curdling threats I know not: ‘The yellow caravan, show me the yellow caravan, quick’ That much at least he knew, for Pheemy had told him; her parents lived in a yellow caravan with scarlet shafts and wheels. The boy, terrified for his life, showed William the way while the bewildered Gormleys shrieked and howled and wriggled beneath the canvas and started fighting each other because they did not know who had laid the tents about them.

  William smashed down the door of the yellow caravan and found Pheemy confined there, cowering in a corner. He picked her up and slung her over his right shoulder, to leave his left hand free in case he had to fight his way out. But his bruised and bloody fist was needed no more that night. The Gormleys, still uncertain who or what had assaulted them, were crawling out of their tents, trying to catch their frightened horses, and pouring buckets of water on the burning caravan; a few continued to fight among themselves. Nobody challenged William as he made his way out of the firelight into the black night beyond. He carried Pheemy home, and knocked up his astonished parents, and declared to them as he stood bloody and triumphant in the doorway: This is my bride.

  He married Pheemy three weeks later, and the village policeman, reinforced by a sergeant from Elmbury, kept guard outside the church in case the Gormleys should come down from the hill to take their revenge; but they kept sullenly to their camp, and did not show their faces in the village for more than a month. When at last they did so the Fitchers, their deadliest enemies, mocked them in the streets with new catchwords and catcalls: ‘Biters bit! Biters bit! What about the wife-stealers no-ow!’ So a new fight began, and raged up and down the crooked street of Brensham, and an old harridan of the Fitchers was so badly mauled with a hatpin that she had to go to the doctor and have three stitches put in her nose.

  The Reconciliation

  Of Pheemy after her marriage the tellers of tales have little to say. She rarely came down to the village, and did not often venture farther than the garden gate, being frightened, perhaps, lest she should encounter any of her own clan. William’s parents were kind, and William cherished her – he even gave up for a time his Saturday night visits to the pub, and people smiled knowingly: ‘The young rascal’s settling down at last.’

  Nevertheless there was a vague feeling in the village that all was not well with the match, and the old men still shake their heads about it in a puzzled way. ‘’Tain’t natural to marry a gypsy, any more than it is to cage a wild bird. They don’t thrive within bricks and mortar, they pine under a roof.’ Whether Pheemy was happy we shall never know. The few people who remember her speak of her as ‘over-quiet’ and ‘timid-like’ and say that she’d start and turn her head at the least sound – ‘like a small brown squirrel she were, always darting her looks this way and that’. Perhaps in time she would have got used to the gorgio walls and the gorgio ways, but she had little time, poor child, to get used to anything. Three years after her wedding, when she was scarcely twenty-one, she died in childbirth. She had already borne William two daughters, but she took the third baby with her upon that last journey. William, they say, ‘was crumpled up sudden-like as if he’d took a mortal sickness’: for a season the young giant seemed to shrivel and shrink. Then one day he threw back his shoulders again and broke out ‘wilder than ever before’. He was back upon the familiar merry-go-round of fights and football and pubs and wenches; but love sets its mark upon a man, and if he has known it he is never quite the same afterwards. The mark which was left on William’s character took the form of a most unexpected tenderness towards all wild and timid things. It was as if he saw Pheemy in every wounded bird or hunted fox or frightened hare; or in the children for whom he invented stories and made toys. Among men and women he laughed and sang and hollered and went his wild noisy ways; but in the company of a child or an animal he became at once both gentle and grave.

  Meanwhile something very queer and inexplicable had occurred which ended for ever the bitter quarrel between William and the Gormleys. On the evening of the day when Pheemy died William went for the second tim
e alone to the camp in Orris Park. Since the Gormleys had solemnly sworn to murder him if he showed his face near the camp this action was either fantastically foolhardy or fantastically brave; but I doubt if he thought of the danger at all, for he had a last duty to perform for his dead Pheemy and an angel with a flaming sword could not have stopped him. In broad daylight he walked into the camp and he held his hands behind him, for there must be no fighting on this day: he would not hit back even if they struck him. The dogs set up their customary howling, but neither man nor woman nor child spoke or stirred. The tent-flaps were drawn, and the doors of the caravan were shut; but half a hundred faces peered out at William through the tent-flaps and the caravan windows. In the terrible silence William walked through the camp, and all the eyes followed him. At last he stood before the door of the yellow caravan and knocked upon it. There was no answer, and he stood there with bowed head, listening to the silence; then he knocked again, and still there was no answer, and so for the third time he clenched his fist and thundered upon the door so loudly that all the dogs howled together at the imperious sound. As that dreadful chorus died away, the door was opened to William. He went inside, and delivered Pheemy’s message, whatever it was; then with a hundred eyes upon him still, he walked slowly back through the camp and down the hill towards Brensham.

  Nobody knows what passes in the Gormleys’ minds; nobody can say for sure whether their respect for William, which grew later into something much more than respect, was due to the thrashing he gave them when he stole Pheemy away or to his action in going back to their camp with Pheemy’s last message to her parents. However it was, he alone of all the people in Brensham had somehow found the way into their hearts; and very slowly as the years went by there sprang up a relationship between William and the gypsies which is difficult to explain or define except by saying that they looked up to him as children to a beloved father, or as tribesmen to a trusted prophet, or as a nation to some elder statesman who has reached the calm waters which lie beyond the storms and hurly-burly of politics. All this, of course, happened very gradually, for there is no short cut into the confidence of the gypsies, who do not even trust each other. At first it was noticed that the women carrying their baskets of clothes-pegs would curtsy when they met William in the street; yet they never went to his door begging and whining as they did at all the other back doors in Brensham. Then, one sunny season, all the fruit ripened at once and there was a sudden shortage of plum-pickers. It was soon after William went into his farm; he was said to be in bad straits financially, but he had a splendid crop of Victorias and the price of plums was high. It would fall, however, as the market became glutted and possibly in a week or two the plums wouldn’t be worth picking. Do not ask me how the Gormleys knew all this, for they were away picking in the Evesham Vale on the other side of the hill; but suddenly without warning they left the orchards where they were at work (they did not even wait for their wages, which was unheard of) and tramped twenty miles back to Brensham, where they presented themselves bright and early on the following morning at William’s farm. They picked his plums in three days, and earned him two hundred pounds, which may have saved him from bankruptcy; then without waiting for thanks they tramped off on the road towards Evesham.

  After that, at pea-picking and plum-picking, you would always see the gypsies working in William’s fields and orchards. The bright dresses of the women, and the red and yellow neckerchiefs of the men, made even the drab fields of peas blossom like a garden. On William’s farm (and nowhere else) the Fitchers and the Gormleys worked side by side in amity; they worked harder for him than for anybody; and they paid him the ultimate and rather touching tribute of respect – they did not steal!

  Gypsies love a patriarch, and as William’s splendid beard became grizzled and then slowly went white his authority over them grew greater. The Fitchers as well as the Gormleys began to come to his house with their troubles, and even to lay their disputes before him as it were for Solomon’s judgement. I have seen the women with their baskets and their babies (slung from their shoulders in a shawl in the ancient, primitive, comfortable way!) going down the path to his farmhouse to ask his advice or settle a quarrel; and I have seen them actually step inside the back door into the kitchen, which was a wonderful thing, for except when perforce they go shopping the gypsies never have a roof over their heads from year’s end to year’s end. William, in his middle age, took to visiting their camp from time to time and knew them all by their Christian names, even differentiating between their grubby babies. Sometimes he would sup with them, taking an honoured place beside the camp-fire and sharing the meal which came out of the big bubbling pot like a witch’s cauldron. Two or three times I went with him and took part in that feast; for it happens that I too possess some small privilege among the gypsies, not through any merit of my own, but because my grandfather used to doctor them long ago. Now doctors are very important to the gypsies, for though in almost all other respects they are self-supporting within their own community, providing their own tradesmen and having no need of parsons or lawyers, they are still dependent upon the outside world when the surgeon’s knife or the physician’s diagnosis becomes imperative. They possess, it is true, their wisewomen who treat the ordinary ills and infirmities with herbs, salves, purges and charms; but when the long wasting sickness comes, or the pain gripes deep in chest or belly, or the baby comes feet first – then mortal terror seizes the gypsies and a sense of their own helplessness drives them post-haste into the town to knock timidly upon the doctor’s door. My grandfather was not only a good doctor, but a good man; and knowing their poverty he always treated them for nothing. He was also in some respects a rather eccentric man; he once took on a prize-fighter with his bare fists and downed him within five rounds, a feat which was bound to appeal to the Fitchers and Gormleys. Moreover he took more pleasure in the company of gypsies, tramps, poachers and various kinds of scallywags than he did in that of his respectable patients; and when he was sick of the drawing-room conversation and the bedside manner and the spoilt pampered brats and the rich women with their maladies imaginaires he often sought relief in the gypsies’ camp, where he would tether his horse and sit down to a hearty supper. The gypsies have long memories, and, although my grandfather died more than fifty years ago, because I bear his name they make me welcome.

  The Wind on the Heath, Brother

  It is a curious experience to sit with the gypsies round their pot in the twilight and to take your chance with them regarding what comes out of the pot on the end of your fork. For the cauldron is literally a lucky dip, and makes no allowance for finicky choosings. You plunge in your fork and whatever may happen to be speared upon it falls to your portion; you can make no guess beforehand what it is likely to be, for the brown bubbling stew gives away no secrets. But when you have impaled your piece and dragged it forth on to your plate (if the Gormleys are so formal as to provide you with one) then experience plus an elementary knowledge of anatomy will generally solve the riddle. A rabbit’s shoulder-blade, a pheasant’s leg (especially if there are a few feathers still attached to the drumstick), or a chicken’s wishbone provide simple clues, and I once fished up a whole partridge on the end of my fork and felt as if I had drawn out Leviathan with an hook. Sometimes, however, the diagnosis is less easy, for the stew may contain such assorted ingredients as hedgehogs, hares, moorhens, grey squirrels, lapwings, fieldfares (which are excellent) and many small birds, with all kinds of herbs and vegetables, mushrooms, truffles, and the late autumn fungi which we call blue legs. The gypsies are not averse to curing the hams of a badger when they can lay hold of one, and it is difficult to distinguish the meat from good lean bacon; and every year in the winter they take their toll of the cygnets on the river, catching them for preference just before the brown plumage becomes flecked with white. So you see there is plenty of variety in the gypsies’ diet, and when you sup with them it is best on the whole to put aside all uncomfortable speculations – in fact to ‘ope
n your mouth and shut your eyes and eat what the good Lord sends you’. Otherwise you are apt to remember your Macbeth and the Weird Sisters’ recipe, and to read into the morphology of even the most delicious morsel a suggestion of fenny snake or newt’s eye, lizard’s leg and birth-strangled babe’s finger. That way nausea lies.