The Blue Field Page 13

  A Purgatory for Planners

  The Hallidays came to live at Brensham a fortnight later, and while their furniture was being moved to the Manor they spent a night at the Horse and Harrow. For Mrs Halliday at any rate this was a most unhappy introduction to Brensham ways. She was obviously a girl who above all things abominated disorder. She had an almost physical abhorrence of the haphazard, the unorganized, and the unplanned. But in order to enjoy a night at the Horse and Harrow one has to be appreciative, or at any rate tolerant, of the most uncompromising individualism. The plumbing, indeed, has so much individuality that it might be described as anarchic.

  Even the journey up to her bedroom must have seemed a nightmare to Vicky Halliday. I have taken a good many visitors to stay at the Horse and Harrow, and have carried their suitcases upstairs for them, so I am familiar with the experience. You are led first into the kitchen, which is small and generally full of children belonging to Mimi and Meg. Mrs Trentfield mountainously rises up from an armchair and Mimi and Meg, often with babies at their breasts, appear like foothills beside her. ‘I’ll have to lead the way,’ says Mrs Trentfield, ‘because the staircase is a bit awkward.’ It is indeed. It goes up in a corkscrew spiral, in pitch darkness even by day, and the suitcase jams against the banisters. At every bend a low beam juts out, upon which you bump your head. At the sound of the bump Mrs Trentfield chuckles, and when she does so the whole staircase creaks. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘but visitors always bump their heads and I always has to laugh.’ At the top of the staircase there is a narrow crooked corrider with an uneven floor; here you invariably trip up; and at the end of it you climb another convolute staircase, and reach the Guests’ Bedroom. ‘Here we are at last!’ says Mrs Trentfield, as triumphantly as if she were a pilot who has brought his vessel safely to anchor through the treacherous shoals. The room, which is a fairly large one, is almost completely filled by the largest bed you have ever seen. ‘Take care you don’t get lost in it,’ says Mrs Trentfield cheerfully.’ It’s feathers. Now I must explain about the bathroom. I hope you won’t mind; but the fact is the bathroom was built on separately, by a local jobbing builder, and to get to it you have to go down the way we came up, and through the living-rooms, and through the bar, and up the other side. It’s a nuisance, but it can’t be helped, and of course if you like you can always arrange to have your bath during closing-time . . .’ As like as not, while she stands beaming there, a most extraordinary noise, which seems to come from the ceiling, startles you out of your wits. It is a sort of deep gurgling chuckle, interspersed with choking gasps, and ending with what sounds like a loud belch. ‘That’s just the plumbing,’ explains Mrs Trentfield, kindly, ‘and it only means that somebody’s pulled the lavatory plug downstairs. The water tank makes that noise when it’s filling up again. Joe – my husband – he calls it Minnehaha Laughing Water. Lord, he’s a merry man!’ she adds. ‘Twenty years we’ve bin here and twenty times a day he’s heard it, but I should begin to wonder what was up with him if it didn’t make him laugh!’

  Poor Vicky Halliday! I called at the Horse and Harrow in the evening, and took her into the bar for a drink. (Her husband, in his usual tearing hurry, had driven off to a meeting at the other end of his constituency.) In protest, I think, against the untidiness of her surroundings she had over-tidied her hair and reduced it to that state of symmetry and order in which she would like to see the disorderly world and especially the disorderly village of Brensham. She looked rather like a model for Hitler’s ideal of Aryan womanhood. There was, however, a large and angry-looking bump on her forehead.

  While I ordered the drinks she stared with disapproval at the remarkable assortment of curios, curiosities and unseemly odds-and-ends which decorated the walls of the bar. Her cool and unamused glance wandered from the old top-hat which surmounted the moth-eaten stag’s head to the stuffed parrot and to the fox’s mask upon which in the late hours of VE-Day Joe had ceremonially hung up his Home Guard cap. She had no sense of the comic or the absurd, and she found nothing funny in Joe’s extraordinary collection of malformed and contortionist vegetables which occupied the mantelpiece – potatoes with legs and arms, a parsnip like a mermaid, a pear like a wizened old man, a marrow with a caricature of Winston Churchill engraved upon it, a hobgoblin tomato putting out its tongue. When she had taken a long look at all these she turned to me and made her considered comment.

  ‘A bit prep-school, isn’t it?’ she said.

  I forbore to ask her if she liked her room, because I felt quite sure that she had an antipathy to double beds, especally enormous ones, and that she regarded feather mattresses as an affront to good hygiene. So we talked uncomfortably about the weather and the Village Hall which she proposed to redecorate and the Women’s Institute which she proposed to wake up. Then Mimi’s husband, Count Pniack, came into the bar, and I introduced him to her. He sprang to attention and loudly clicked his heels. ‘The P is silent,’ he barked; and clicking his heels once more, and bowing stiffy from the hips, he went out to the kitchen.

  ‘He was here during the war,’ I explained, ‘and married the landlord’s daughter.’

  ‘Oh, I see. One of those reactionary Poles,’ said Mrs Halliday.

  A moment later Mrs Trentfield came through the kitchen door, a surge of flesh accompanied by the smell of frying fat and boiling pudding.

  ‘Supper’s ready, my dear! There’s chit’lings, and suet roll, and, if you’ve got a corner to fill, bread and cheese and pickled gherkins and home-made piccalilli!’

  There was something anarchic even about the hospitality at the Horse and Harrow.

  The Pig-killing

  Next weekend the Hallidays had another unfortunate experience. Mr Chorlton had offered to ‘show them round the village’, but it turned out to be a drizzly grey day, November had shut down, the countryside was brown and sodden, and most of the population of Brensham, looking their most oafish, were engaged in picking sprouts. The squealing of a pig, shrill and tremulous upon the still air, accompanied the sightseers wherever they went.

  Normally Mr Chorlton would not have noticed this bucolic sound; but whenever it became exceptionally loud Mrs Halliday gave him a look of inquiry and at last when the squeals reached a crescendo she observed to her husband:

  ‘Maurice, I believe they’re doing something awful to that wretched animal.’

  Now Mr Chorlton was aware that Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith was preparing to kill his pig (which was called Mr Molotov because of its exceptional obstinacy) for he had noticed the preparations in the smithy yard as he passed by: the well-scrubbed bench, the pile of straw, the earthenware jug of cider on the bench, and the neighbours hanging about because a pig-killing was always a bit of a ceremony in Brensham. Guessing that the Hallidays would disapprove of public butchering, he didn’t tell them this, but took them into the church to see the memorial brasses. Not even the thick walls of the church, however, were impervious to the pig’s squeals, which sounded even more blood-curdling as they echoed in the vaulted roof; so Mr Chorlton conducted the Hallidays down to the river, and walked them about half a mile along the footpath, despite some warning twinges of gout in his big toe. But wherever they went the intermittent squeals followed them.

  Dusk fell at last, and Mr Chorlton, already limping badly, turned for home; but the smithy lay between the river and his house, and unless he led his charges across the muddy sproutfields there was no way round it. He therefore took them back by way of the village street and by a most unhappy chance the squealing ceased abruptly and significantly just as they approached the smithy. There was a short grunt, such as an old gentleman might make as he settled down for an afternoon snooze at his club, then silence. And here let it be said that the execution, without doubt, was performed swiftly and mercifully by Dick Tovey the butcher, who takes as much pride as a bullfighter in making a clean kill. The squealing which had provided such a lengthy prologue to the drama had been, like most prologues, completely irrelevant; it was no more than the
pig’s protest against the invasion of his rest and quietude. The Hallidays, however, were not aware of this.

  Nor were they familiar with the traditional epilogue to a pig-killing, which involves among other things the burning-off of the bristles; so that when they arrived at the gate of the smithy and saw the flames leaping high from the pile of straw, out of which the animal’s blackened face peered grotesquely like that of a half-charred heretic, they got the impression that the pig having been only partially butchered was now being roasted alive. And indeed to their unaccustomed eyes the sight must have been a fearful and horrific one. There was blood upon the ground and upon the beefy hands of Dick Tovey, who looked like a murderer in the firelight as he busied himself with his deadly knives. The flames danced above the straw-pile and two of Jeremy Briggs’ grandchildren, excited as children always are by a bonfire, were dancing too. They joined hands and jigged round the pig’s funeral pyre, singing and laughing, like little savages.

  ‘Children!’ breathed Vicky Halliday. ‘Maurice, it’s disgraceful!’

  Meanwhile Mrs Briggs energetically scrubbed a wooden trough, somebody else filled a can with boiling water from the furnace, and Jeremy set up a spring-balance over the door of the smithy to weigh the pig; for all the neighbours, as usual, had taken tickets in a sweepstake about it. Vicky watched all these formalities with growing horror, understanding nothing, but thinking, no doubt, in terms of cannibal feasts and druidical sacrifices. To make matters worse Dick Tovey came to the gate to have a word with Mr Chorlton, and his appearance was enough to daunt any stranger, let alone one so fastidious as Vicky. He was a hefty, gap-toothed fellow with red hair, always smiling like le bourreau souriant, who wore a pigskin apron smeared with grease and blood. In his belt, scabbarded like a soldier’s bayonet, he carried a long knife; at his hip hung a larger scabbard or pouch which contained an assortment of more frightful cutlery still – bone-handled, murderous-looking blades which rattled together when he moved, terrible gouges, and a thing like a marline-spike. He must have seemed to Vicky the personification of all the livers and lights, kidneys and tripes, which throughout her life had gruesomely affronted her; and she shied away from him as if she were a timid horse that smelt blood.

  ‘Well, we’ve killed old Molotov,’ observed Dick cheerfully. ‘Seventeen score if he’s a pound.’

  ‘Molotov?’ said Halliday.

  ‘Jeremy Briggs,’ said Dick, ‘always gives his pigs names after chaps he don’t like. He grows too fond of ’em else. At one time it was Ramsey Mac; and then it was Old Chamberlain. In the war it was Hitler and Goebbels and Musso, of course; but generally it’s politicians.’

  When Dick went away Vicky said to Mr Chorlton, in as matter of fact a tone as she could manage (she always believed in Facing Facts): ‘Tell me, why do they kill it here? I thought animals were always taken to an abattoir nowadays.’

  ‘In Brensham,’ said Mr Chorlton, ‘the executioner goes to his victim.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, if you’d ever tried to shift a pig when it didn’t want to be shifted, you’d understand that Dick Tovey on his bicycle is much more mobile.’

  They went back to Mr Chorlton’s house to tea. Vicky, who couldn’t eat anything, remarked later:

  ‘Maurice, I’m still thinking about those children. The harm done by this sort of thing might last for the whole of their lives. It could produce a really serious pyschological trauma. You must take steps to get it stopped. You must put down a Question . . .’

  And sure enough a few weeks later, as Mr Chorlton happened to glance through the Parliamentary Report in The Times, his eyes lit on a very elaborate Question indeed, a Question which seemed to rise in many tiers like an old-fashioned wedding-cake:

  Mr Halliday (Elmbury, Lab): ‘What regulations govern the slaughter of pigs on private premises in rural districts; whether these regulations have regard to considerations both of hygiene and humanity; whether it is not highly undesirable that such slaughter should take place in circumstances which give it the character of a public spectacle; and whether the presence of children and adolescents at these unedifying events is not to be deplored?’

  Crusader by Proxy

  Mr Chorlton had an interesting theory that Halliday’s wife was the fons et origo of most of the Questions with which he pestered his disapproving Front Bench. He pointed out that she possessed a quality which was fortunately uncommon in women and which was very rare indeed in girls as good-looking as Vicky: she was filled, brimful and overflowing, with reforming zeal. She was obviously one of those people, he said, who could not bear to see the wicked flourishing like the green bay tree and who never knew when to let well alone. Her path through life was beset with injustice and inequality; folly and stupidity luxuriated about it like rank weeds; hidden scandals lurked like the poisonous nightshade; dragons and monsters of monopoly, power and privilege uttered their brazen challenge out of the dark capitalist jungle; and Hydra-headed Conservatives lay hidden everywhere in the undergrowth. Like the Knights of the Round Table (‘who were also a pretty tiresome lot,’ observed Mr Chorlton dryly) she saw a simplified world in black-and-white, a woodcut-world without half-tones, and it never occured to her that dragons might have kind hearts or that some maidens might actually relish the attentions of an ogre; and with boundless energy she strove perpetually to remedy the injustice, to tidy up the disorder, to cast down the wicked, and to expose the scandal to the light of day.

  Just like William Cobbett, said Mr Chorlton: abhorring hornets, and having no hornets in her own garden, she goes off and stirs up the hornets’ nests of her neighbours. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting,’ he speculated, ‘that she pleads with her husband for Questions in the House in much the same way as other girls badger their men for new hats or fur coats. He’d probably much rather give her a hat; but more likely she wants a Parliamentary Question about the egrets’ feathers in somebody else’s. He’d gladly, I expect, buy her a fur coat; but no, she demands an inquiry into the fur coats with which band-leaders are alleged to bribe members of the BBC. And the poor fellow can’t refuse her. As other men might pacify their wives with lollipops, he poses these Questions to please her. And I’m sure he’d bring her the Prime Minister’s head upon a salver if she asked for it.’

  Curiously enough, although his activities had not made Mr Halliday popular, they had a by no means adverse effect upon his career. The political gossip-writers were already suggesting that he might be offered the next available Under-Secretaryship, to keep him quiet.

  The Boy David

  Mr Chorlton’s theory received fresh confirmation a few weeks later. We had heard that Pru’s eldest child, Jerry, following in the family’s anarchic tradition, had put a shot from his catapult through the Hallidays’ drawing-room window – having missed the mistle-thrush which he was stalking in the Manor grounds. Shortly afterwards we read in the Parliamentary report:

  Mr Halliday (Elmbury, Lab) asked the President of the Board of Trade how much rubber, in the form of elastic, was allocated for the purpose of the manufacture of catapults; and whether in view of the Wild Birds’ Protection Act this wasteful employment of valuable raw material could be justified.’

  This roused Mr Chorlton to such a pitch of indignation that he immediately sat down and wrote to The Times on behalf, he said, of ‘a section of the community which has no Society or Trades Union to defend their ancient liberties’. He stated his belief that a small boy without a catapult in his pocket (and a fluffy, half-sucked bull’s eye stuck to the elastic of the catapult) was an unnatural child who was unlikely to make a good citzien. And he ended:

  ‘At least I am thankful that I was a boy before the foolish paternalism of Government began to take cognisance of such trivia; and perhaps it is fortunate that there were no well-meaning MPs in the days when another small boy “chose him five smooth stones out of the brook . . . and his sling was in his hand; and he drew near to the Philistine”’.

  The Baby Show

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sp; It was not to be expected that Vicky would be able for long to resist the temptation of trying to reform poor Pru, especially as Pru’s favourite lane for love-making happened to be the one which led from the village to the Manor. Driving back from Elmbury on a foggy night in January, Vicky collided with a pram which was parked at the side of the lane; and the two small babies in the pram traced a neat parabola through the air and fetched up squalling on the grass verge. They were unhurt, though frightened; Pru, who came over the stile a moment later followed by a shadowy young man, was very frightened indeed; but probably the most frightened person of all was Vicky and her fright very naturally showed itself in righteous indignation. She threatened Pru with the police, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and even with a Home, at the very thought of which Pru burst into tears. She would probably have carried out these threats but for an incident which happened a few days later.

  The Village Hall had been redecorated and the Women’s Institute woken up; and to celebrate the decorations and demonstrate the awakening a Baby Show had been arranged at which Vicky had been asked to judge the exhibits and Lord Orris to give away the prizes. Therefore, on Thursday afternoon, about a score of babies (for Brensham was a very philoprogenitive village) sat about in the hall staring without comprehension at the frieze of formalized tractors which Vicky’s artist friend had painted round the wall, while their mothers, who understood what it meant even less than the babies, comforted each other with the assurance that the dust and the cigarette smoke would doubtless fade the daubs before long. In due course Vicky arrived, and also Lord Orris, who was wearing his only suit which did not hang about him like the rags on a scarecrow. This outfit, miraculously saved from the pawnshops and the moneylenders, consisted of light-grey trousers, almost as tight-fitting as the mess-trousers of a cavalryman, and a cutaway tail-coat, originally black but now bearing faint traces of green mould due to the pervasive damp of Orris Manor. Lord Orris also wore spats, patent leather boots, and a grey bowler hat; and he looked exactly like a ‘Spy’ cartoon. He was in good heart, however, and got on very well with the babies, who delighted to pull his long drooping grey moustache. Vicky was less at home in his company; for I think she had been brought up on the idea that the aristocracy were all Wicked and Rich, and was having difficulty in adjusting her sense of values to the discovery that a real Lord could be both gentle and poor. Moreover, it probably embarrassed her to find out that she had more or less bought the Lord with the Manor; for he still lived in the Lodge, and if you felt as Vicky did about the evils of privilege it must have been extremely uncomfortable to have a representative of the Privileged Classes living upon your charity.