The Blue Field Read online

  When the time came for judging, Vicky announced that there must be no suspicion of favouritism and everything must be done in a Democratic way. She would therefore have the babies brought to her, one by one, by the district nurse; then she wouldn’t know whom they belonged to. She examined them all with the greatest care, and indeed she did possess some qualifications as a judge for she had originally trained as a nurse and had worked in a hospital during the war. She took a long time to make her decision, and at last she announced that the result was a tie. There were two babies, two little girls, which were obviously healthier, better nourished, and better cared for than all the others; and that was saying a good deal. She suggested that the mothers of these two girls should divide the prize.

  There was rather a long pause before Pru, who was the mother of both, padded up to the platform with her soft cat’s tread, pushed from behind by the other mothers because she was so shy, and with a demure little curtsy and a look of misty-eyed wonder received her prize from Lord Orris. She was no doubt terrified of Vicky, because of that terrible threat about a ‘Home’; but she needn’t have worried any more. It would have been very difficult to maintain that the best mother in Brensham was in need of care and protection herself.

  Altogether it was a bad afternoon for Vicky. After the judging, the smaller babies were confined in a play-pen while their mothers had tea. Before long the most horrible noises, shrieks and gurglings, gasps and what sounded like death-rattles, began to rise from this pen, in which the unruly children of the Fitchers and Gormleys reproduced in miniature (like a battle demonstrated on a sand-table) their parents’ larger strife. At first Vicky watched this dismaying spectacle with the too-deliberate unconcern of the conscientiously broad-minded; having no children of her own she probably believed that if one prevented them from doing what they desired they suffered from inhibitions in later life. However, when a Fitcher boy began to savage the ear of a Gormley girl, and it seemed that the latter might be permanently disfigured, she could stand it no longer and gallantly entered the arena in order to part them. In doing so she got herself bitten on the hand, and since it was to be supposed that the bite of a Fitcher or Gormley would be peculiarly poisonous there was a hurried search for the. iodine-bottle, which could not be found. Poor Vicky, whose terror of germs was well known, thereupon lost her self-possession altogether and began to look as if she were going to cry. She was comforted in a very chivalrous and old-fashioned way by Lord Orris, who courteously gave her his arm and took her outside for ‘a breath of fresh air’. He was probably the only person who wasn’t surprised by Vicky’s unexpected behaviour; for he had had nothing whatever to do with women since early Edwardian times, when they were apt to cry or swoon at the least provocation. He was therefore completely master of the situation and dealt with it beautifully.

  Since it was generally supposed that he was starving, the committee of the Women’s Institute had arranged to present him with a cake; and they had taken great pains, and sacrificed some of their rations, to make a very large and rich plum cake for him, which was said to be his favourite sort. He was delighted; and when the Baby Show was over he carried away a big cardboard hat-box containing this precious gift. Alas, he did not keep it for long. On his slow way up the lane he was overtaken by Pru, wheeling her two babies in the pram. He immediately became convinced that they had more need of the cake than he had; and he was seen by two members of the Women’s Institute to bestow it upon them with a little stiff and gracious bow, familiar no doubt in Edwardian drawing-rooms but very rarely seen on Brensham Hill.

  ‘We’ll Tame Her’

  For quite a long time the village always spoke of the Hallidays as ‘them foreigners’. It did not mean to imply, of course, that they were un-English, but merely that they were not natives or old inhabitants of Brensham. People who lived in Elmbury, only four miles away, were ‘foreigners’; and newcomers to the neighbourhood, even if they were householders, remained ‘foreigners’ until Brensham got used to them.

  However, after the incident at the Baby Show, the village people began to take a kindlier view of Vicky, because they had seen her shaken out of her self-possession, which had previously frightened them. ‘She nearly cried,’ they said. ‘she’s human after all.’ Even when Vicky began to reorganize the Amateur Dramatic Society on a more democratic basis (which meant that the leading parts were no longer given to people whose feelings might be hurt otherwise), and to revive the Youth Club and to form a Folk-lore Society and a Debating Circle, these innovations were patiently endured, for it was well known that Ladies of the Manor were addicted to troublesome Good Works and that humble folk must tolerate them in the same way that they put up with the interminable Welfare Work of clergymen’s wives. ‘We’ll tame her,’ they grinned, meaning that they’d break her in to Brensham ways just as they broke in each successive village policeman, parson and parson’s wife. In this way this was a compliment to Vicky, because there had never been any question of attempting to tame the Syndicate. ‘We’ll give ’em the sack,’ Brensham had said.

  We noticed too, as the weeks went by, an interesting change in Mr Chorlton’s attitude to the Hallidays. He had professed the greatest alarm when they had come to live at the Manor. ‘God help us, they’ll tidy us up!’ But now he gradually began to accept them, as we all did, as part of the Brensham scene; and though he still spoke of Vicky as ‘that female Cobbett’ with pretended dismay, it was significant that he also called her a female Cobbett to her face, teasing her and pulling her leg in just the same way as he had pulled the legs of generations of schoolboys in the past. On one occasion he took her to a Meet of General Bouverie’s hounds, when they met outside the Horse and Harrow, and with the utmost gravity put forward his suggestion that the Communist Party should adopt pink coats and top-hats as their official uniform.

  ‘Hunting-pink,’ he said, ‘is not pink in the sense of being pale or wishy-washy; it is scarlet, a good revolutionary colour, the colour of blood. Now it may be true that the only sort of hunting practised by the Communists is heresy-hunting, but I do suggest that instead of deploring this uniform as the insignia of the Idle Rich the Party should buy a lot of pink coats and wear them as the battledress of revolution.’

  ‘But I’m not a Communist,’ protested Vicky.

  ‘I know, my dear, but I want you to pass on my suggestion to your friends; for I assure you there is a great deal to be said for it. In the first place pink coats look gay and gallant, and the colour is that of the Red Flag and therefore stained with no ideological impurities. In the second, since taxation has practically ruined the Idle Rich, there are plenty of pink coats going cheap and coupon-free. Thirdly, I understand that the Party is not entirely heedless of the trends of fashion which originate in Moscow, and it must be aware that Russian Communists often appear in public in bright and dazzling uniforms bemedalled even more wonderfully than the late Marshal Goering’s; in short they have discovered what kings and archbishops discovered long ago: that it’s fun to dress up.

  ‘In England there’s a temporary reaction against military uniforms; we’ve grown tired of them. But the quaint and cheerful habit of these hunting-men has no military significance. It’s a wholly bucolic uniform which English people regard with humorous affection. If the Communists really want to win their way into our hearts they can scarcely do better than appear next May Day in top-hats, scarlet coats, buckskin breeches, and polished top-boots with spurs.’

  General Bouverie tittuped past, tootling some truants from his pack which were whimpering after a cat in the churchyard. Mr Chorlton went on:

  ‘And here’s another point. The wearing of this uniform in public would finish whatever is left of the Squirearchy more quickly than a bloody revolution. Imagine the scene at the emergency meeting of the MFH Association. Picture the chaos in the Counties and the confusion in the Shires. Contemplate the situation in Leicestershire, with the committees of the Pytchley and Quorn in continuous session trying to devise a new uniform
and to buy in the black market enough coupons to obtain the material! Finally, just think of General Bouverie’s anxiety lest he should be mistaken for a Communist. Surely he’ll hasten to fit himself out in a suit as threadbare, shabby and unobtrusive as the one in which Karl Marx once walked the streets of Bloomsbury; and then, Comrade, your revolution is achieved!’

  When the Hunt moved off I took my car and we followed them a little way up the hill; but the fox which they started almost at once ran into a quarry, where it found refuge in a sort of foxes’ catacombs among the rock. The General insisted on trying to dig it out, and sent for mattocks and crowbars. ‘My old father always used to say,’ he declared, ‘my old father who’s been in his grave these twenty years, “My boy,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what you chase so long as you kill it; whatever else you do, see to it that your hounds taste blood”’ None of us wanted to wait for this unpleasant climax, so we took Vicky (who was obviously boiling up for a Question about Blood Sports) back to the Horse and Harrow for a drink. The bar was very full, for it is the custom of Brensham men, at the stroke of noon, to plant their spades and forks firmly in the dark earth, to tie up their horses to the nearest tree or to park their tractors at the end of the furrow, and to make their way to the nearest pub for a pint of beer or cider. There was Alfie Perks, who’d been spraying his fruit trees and whose face was brick-red from the acrid rain of the spraying-mixture; old Sammy Hunt with his bald head like a wrinkled walnut and the smell of tar about him, for he’d been caulking one of his rowing-boats; George Daniels still wearing his old camouflaged jacket with the blue parachute on his sleeve; Briggs the blacksmith in his leather apron; the porter from the railway station and the gangers and platelayers from the line. Vicky became more and more bewildered as we introduced her to each of these people in turn; she was still a stranger to the sort of village microcosmos in which everybody is known by their Christian names. Then Jaky Jones the odd-job-man arrived, and ‘Enery and Pierre drew up in their lorry upon some dark business or other (the lorry was loaded with a crate of hens, a hogshead barrel, a roll of wire-netting, and something very mysterious in a bloody sack), Mimi and Meg came bouncing in from the back-room, and Mimi’s Pole clicking his heels whenever he could find an excuse, and Mrs Trentfield, who’d left her kitchen, she said, for the purpose of seeing a bit of life. Joe and the girls were kept busy fetching and carrying drinks, and the company fell to darts playing, talking, stamping mud-caked boots on the stone floor, or eating the midday ‘bait’, which consisted of inch-deep slabs of bread with cold fat bacon, upon which a raw onion was precariously balanced. Vicky, better informed about calories and carbohydrates than about the needs of hungry men, watched the rapid disappearance of these morsels wonderingly through the corner of her eye.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ said Mr Chorlton.

  ‘I was thinking about Happy Families,’ she said.

  ‘Happy Families?’

  ‘A horrible game we used to play with cards. Do you remember the terrifying self-sufficiency of those families when you gathered a whole set together in your hand? I was thinking that Brensham is rather like that. Everybody belongs, everybody has a function and forms part of a pattern. Every single person who has come into this bar this morning immediately fell into place like a piece of a jigsaw-puzzle. “This is Mr Perks who grows fruit and is the father of Meg’s husband and Meg is Joe’s daughter, the sister of the one who had twins.”’

  ‘And don’t you approve of it being like that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She glanced about her, at Sammy Hunt and Mimi and Meg and the blacksmith and the railway porter, the odd-job-man and the rest, the Happy Families all complete, and she turned back to Mr Chorlton with a little frown.’ I think it rather scares me. If we were here for a year or two, I believe, you’d absorb us.’

  ‘We always eat our missionaries,’ smiled Mr Chorlton.

  ‘Without meaning to, without even troubling your heads about us, you’d fit us somehow into the jigsaw-puzzle, you’d make us part of your little world. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re a very intelligent young woman,’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘That is exactly what Brensham is likely to do.’

  Part Three

  The Case of William Hart

  The Scarlet Spider’s Web – Poacher, Poet, Postman – ‘Both man and bird and beast’ – The Last Hope – The Umpire – The Long Man – Plus ça change – Microcosmos – The Siege – The Stirrup-cup.

  The Scarlet Spider’s Web

  THE Hallidays had been at the Manor for nearly a year when William Hart’s field of linseed appeared like a banner of rebellion hung out on Brensham Hill.

  Meanwhile that bulging docket – ‘The Case of W. Hart’ – had continued upon its inexorable way. A kind of spider’s web of red tape had spun itself round William’s affairs. And now suddenly the threads drew tighter.

  In weighing up the rights and wrongs of this matter it is important to remember that the War Agricultural Executive Committee was at no time tyrannical in its dealings with William. It was a quorum of respectable and successful farmers, and after all one of the ancient principles of English justice is the principle that a man should be judged by his peers. Being human, the successful farmers may have been a trifle puffed up by their own importance; but according to their lights they treated William fairly, and even in the matter of the sunflowers, as we have seen, they refrained from exercising to the full their rather terrifying authority. They had the wasted crop ploughed in, and then the Chairman, as he put it, ‘gave the old fool a wigging’ and that would have been the end of the whole affair if William had not next year planted the field with linseed. His offence in disobeying the cultivation order was made greater by the fact that the crop was unfortunately full of weeds. Even so, I think the Committee would have hesitated to exact the extreme penalty of the law but for three unfortunate complications. In the first place, General Bouverie happened to be Vice-Chairman of the Committee. In the second, some permanent official of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, having read The Case of W. Hart with amazement, had taken it into his head to call for a report on William’s state of mind. And in the third, the letter of complaint written by the Syndicate’s solicitors some twelve months ago had made its tortoise progress, slow but sure, through what are called the usual channels to this same official’s desk. (The evil that men do lives after them!) The official wanted to know what steps the WAEC had taken to deal with the complaint.

  The General sat on the Committee by virtue of the fact that he farmed a thousand acres to his own considerable profit although perhaps he was more concerned with the pheasants in his coverts than the stock in his fields. He was neither an unjust nor a vindictiye man, but he honestly believed that anybody who was not enthusiastically in favour of fox-hunting couldn’t be quite right in the head; moreover it was indisputable that William had threatened him with a gun – and he didn’t know that the gun had been empty. To make matters worse he had had a subsequent encounter with William who, being drunk at the time, boasted truculently of his descent from Shakespeare. It was therefore as clear as daylight to General Bouverie that the old man was suffering from delusions, and he put this point of view very forcibly to the Committee. The Committee incorporated his statement in its report; and some say that a clerk, copying this document, accidentally left out part of a sentence, so that it read: ‘He thinks he is Shakespeare.’ This was particularly damaging; because an Englishman can understand the foible of a man who believes himself to be Nelson or Napoleon or the King, but immediately assumes that the lunacy is dangerous in the case of a man who thinks himself a poet.

  By the time the fat beribboned bundle of documents about W. Hart had returned from the Ministry to the WAEC it was high summer, and as a token of William’s continued disobedience the linseed blazed blue on the side of the hill. The Committee lost no time in taking up this final challenge (as it must have seemed) to their august authority. They delegated three of their members to inspect Wil
liam’s farm; these three men reported that the linseed crop was not worth harvesting; and a week later Dai Roberts Postman delivered another registered letter at William’s door. It contained no complicated forms this time, and no empty threats. The Committee proposed to take over the farm on Michaelmas Day. It was regretted that it would be necessary to requisition the farmhouse as well. Any appeal against this decision must be lodged in writing within twenty-eight days.

  Poacher, Poet, Postman

  William’s notice of appeal was duly written out for him by Pru. She was, he said, a wonderful scholard, by which he meant that she could at any rate read and write. But about the middle of August, when the appeal was due to be heard, the old man was suddenly taken ill. The Committee, knowing nothing of this, waited for him all the morning and finally rejected the appeal in his absence. All the same they were not ungenerous to William; being property-owners themselves, they hated the whole principle of dispossession, and were anxious to put off the repugnant act until the last possible moment. They decided to suspend the take-over of the farm for ten weeks after Michaelmas, in order to give William time to find somewhere to live.