The Blue Field Page 19

  ‘They’re flying south, my dear. We shall get some rough weather.’

  William Hart is Dead

  Joe asked me into the bar for a half-pint of beer; and because of the strong wind he closed the front door. A moment later Mimi’s pink knickers and the morning letters came tumbling together into the wire letter-box. Dai’s sing-song voice came after them. He is something more than a postman, for he bears every day from house to house the latest tidings, scandal or gossip.

  ‘Mr Trentfield’, he said, ‘I haf some sad news for you. Old William Hart is dead.’

  When he said that I had a queer feeling that Brensham would never be quite the same again; it was as if the whole landscape was altered, as if Brensham Hill itself had suddenly disappeared during the night.

  Dai spoke through the letter-flap, for he had a strong prejudice against public houses and it was his stern boast that he had never set foot in one. He went on:

  ‘Died in his chair he did early this morning with a glass they do say in his hand.’

  ‘Old William,’ said Joe. ‘Well, well.’

  ‘And as soon as it was light the police came to his farm, and surrounded the house, because they believed he was desperate and armed, do you see; and all the time he was lying there dead to shame them.’

  ‘Well, well!’ said Joe again.

  ‘And the boy Jerry shot at them with a catapult,’ Dai went on. ‘Truncheons they had brought to deal with a maniac who carried a shotgun; and a little boy with a catapult they did find.’ He paused to take breath and continued: ‘Natural causes the doctor says it was. No inquest will there be. Better part of a jugful of wine he had drunk before he died. Empty to the last drop they do say the glass was in his hand!’

  ‘It would be,’ said Joe, nodding his head in grave approval of this demonstration of the fitness of things. ‘Aye, it would be empty.’ Dai withdrew his mouth from the letter-slit and the flap went back with a loud click. As he took Mimi’s crumpled knickers and the letters out of the box Joe shook his head and sighed.

  ‘That’s a queer ending,’ he said, ‘to the case of William Hart.’

  ‘Perhaps in a way the best ending,’ I said. I was thinking of Mr Chorlton’s dreadful prophecy: ‘I suppose that in the end they’ll have him certified.’

  ‘Aye. He had a good innings,’ went on Joe. ‘He must ‘a’ bin nearly eighty. ‘Tis ten years at least since we saw him in this bar.’ I followed his glance as he looked towards the chimney-corner by the fireplace which had been William’s favourite seat, and as if it were yesterday I could remember the wild old man sitting there. I saw him with a red-hot poker in his hand warming up a pot of the spiced ale which always set him singing. The ale fizzed into brown froth round the poker till it had a great mushroom head in it overhanging the rim of the pot. William raised it to his lips and drank deep, and the foam flecked his white moustache and beard. Then while he beat time with the blackening poker he began to sing. Surely nobody had ever possessed such powerful lungs as he! When he sang it was like a tornado blowing through the bar. You had an impulse to pick up your glass off the counter lest it should be swept away by that torrent of sound.

  ‘What a man!’ said Joe reflectively. It was curious how often people said ‘What a man!’ when they spoke of William. He shrugged his shoulders. I suppose if you keep a pub your bar becomes increasingly populated by ghosts as the years go by, although there are always new customers, young and vigorous, elbowing them out of the way. The memory of William Hart, I thought, would surely be one of those late-lingering and obstinate ones which wouldn’t readily give way to the youngsters and which would never again take any notice (William when alive had never taken much notice) of ’Time, Gentlemen, Please!’ It was difficult, even now, to imagine him lying dead. Life in him had been like a yeast, ever fermenting and renewing itself and furiously working again.

  Joe picked up his broom and began energetically to sweep out the bar, as if he would sweep the ghost of William out of the way. For a moment or two he swept in silence, then as the rising wind howled in the crooked chimney he paused on the broom and glanced out of the window at the dark threatening sky where the clouds surged like waves in a rough sea.

  ‘’Tis William Hart’s own weather,’ he said oddly. ‘You could almost think him to be up there in the wind.’

  Like Wind I Go

  For three days after William Hart’s death the boisterous wind barged about Brensham with the aimless mischief of a cart-horse colt. It thundered through the orchards and gave the plum trees a rough and ready pruning. It plucked the thatch from cottages and the hats from people’s heads. It tugged at sleeves and fluttered skirts, and somehow when it did so it seemed to tug at the spirit and flutter the heart as well. It was a rollicking, uproarious, antic wind, which reminded us all, as it had reminded Joe Trentfield, of the free spirit of William Hart.

  And indeed one felt, somehow, as one went about Brensham during those three days, a strange sort of restlessness, wildness, excitement, what you will. If there was grief and anger blowing about in the wind, there was laughter and song as well, and something else which I cannot explain, something which I can only describe as a turbulence of the spirit as well as of the air. Dai Roberts felt it, when he went about his rounds singing Land of My Fathers at the top of his voice and composing, he told me, a poem of forty stanzas about the Pentecost in the manner of the great bard Taliesin. Mr Chorlton felt it when his hat went spinning down the village street and, forgetting his gout, he pursued and fielded it as smartly as he’d fielded many a ball when he played cricket for Somerset forty years ago. Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith felt it, when he stood at the door of his smithy and remarked to me that his bellows, compared with the wind, were as puny as the Labour Government, and discoursed of a revolution after his own simple heart which should be as fierce and brave and cleansing as the gale.

  Odd things happened which matched our turbulent mood. The wind toppled over one of the dredger-cranes which was engaged in destroying Sammy Hunt’s osier-bed, and as it fell into the river Sammy performed a war-dance of delight upon the bank. Then in accordance with the tradition of his sea service, which will not let even an enemy drown, he took out his boat and rescued the crane’s operator who had fallen in with it.

  And late one afternoon, as I was walking, I was startled to hear the sound of singing, coming, it seemed, out of the very sky. I looked up, and nearly at the top of a sixty-foot aspen tree I saw George Daniels, hanging on for dear life and hacking away with his knife at a misletoe bough to which he had already attached a rope. The tall tree creaked and groaned, and the swaying motion, accompanied by the rush of air, must have reminded George of the time when he parachuted down to fight the Germans at Bruneval.

  ‘Singing yi-yi-yippy-yippy-yi!’

  yelled George.

  ‘They’ll be wearing their red berets when they come!

  They’ll be wearing their red berets,

  They’ll be wearing their red berets,

  They’ll be wearing their red berets when they come!’

  But just as he cut through the mistletoe bough an extra strong gust interrupted the song, and for a moment he was compelled to cling to the rough stem of the aspen with both his hands and both his knees. The tree leaned so far with the wind that its branches grated against those of another tree; then as it slowly righted itself George lowered the mistletoe to the ground, steering it neatly between the branches, to where Pierre and ’Enery stood ready to receive it. (Their lorry, I now saw, was parked by the side of the lane.) ‘I’ve had enough of this hushabye-baby stuff!’ shouted George; and quickly followed the mistletoe bough, digging his climbing-irons into the bark and hugging the rough aspentrunk as tightly, I’m sure, as he’d ever hugged the slim waist of Susan.

  Then Jaky Jones, who was busy making William’s coffin, brought back a strange report from the farmhouse where he had been to do his necessary business. He told me this story as he planed a piece of wood in his workshop and grumbled
at its twisted grain and the rough knots in it. (‘Lord knows what old William would say!’) I must tell it here in my own way, for I cannot attempt to sustain for long the individual manner of Jaky, every paragraph peppered with ‘Matey’ and ‘How’s your father’. Jaky, it seems, when he came downstairs from William’s room, found the three daughters, Betty, Joan and Pru, ‘looking a bit queer’ and when he saw the bottle on the table he realized that they’d been at William’s home-made wine. This bottle was labelled ‘Sloe gin’; no doubt they had thought it a ladylike, respectable and almost teetotal drink, and being unaccustomed to drinking had taken too much. Without speaking, they beckoned to him and led him along a passage towards the still-room. At the end of the passage Joan opened the door, stood back, and said simply: ‘Look.’

  It was an astonishing sight. The small still-room was filled, from floor to ceiling, with casks and bottles. The casks occupied the whole of the floor-space and were stacked three deep; Jaky said they made him think of Gunpowder Plot. The bottles took up four long shelves, and he reckoned there must be twenty dozen at least. All were carefully labelled, and there were almost as many sorts as there were bottles. Elderberry, Elderflower, Dandelion, Mead, Mangel-Wurzel, Nettle, Parsnip, Carrot, Potato, Raspberry, Gooseberry, Rhubarb, Raisin, Blackcurrant Extra Strong. . .

  Listening to Jaky, I could well imagine that Guy Fawkes’ well-stocked cellar had contained nothing half so dangerous. What pranks and riots and fights and foolishness were confined like genii in those two hundred-odd bottles! What devilry lay dormant in those piled-up casks! What concentrated mischief grew daily more potent as it fermented privily in that little dark room! The place, said Jaky, was like an arsenal and the stupendous thought that troubled him was this: The old gentleman had really intended to drink the lot!

  Back in the kitchen, Joan poured Jaky out a glass of sloe gin; she also refilled her own and her sisters’ glasses. The effect of the drink was so palpably beneficial that nobody saw any harm in having another; and after that it became almost a sacred duty to have a third. By this time Betty’s eyes had a curious dreamy look, while Joan’s cheeks were the colour of a ripe Ribstone Pippin.

  ‘’Tis sad but certain,’ said Joan in a far-away voice, ‘that we couldn’t drink all that wine ourselves, not if we lived to be a hundred.’

  Betty nodded gravely.

  ‘Not if we lived to be as old as ‘Thuselah,’ she declared.

  ‘’Thuselah, ‘Thuselah,’ repeated Pru solemnly; and suddenly giggled.

  ‘The thing that’s worrying me,’ said Joan, ‘is what in the world shall we do with it all?’

  ‘Listen!’ said Betty. ‘Please do listen! I’ve got an idea.’ She paused and took a deep breath, for she was already, Jaky thought, beginning to find it difficult to put things into words. Then she made a momentous statement.

  ‘I think the village should have it,’ she said. ‘The whole village. After the funeral. You know he always liked people being happy.’

  ‘Oh, Betty,’ said Joan, ‘I think it’s a beautiful idea!’

  ‘Oh, Betty, how clever you are,’ agreed Pru.

  ‘We’ll have it taken down to the Horse and Harrow,’ Betty went on. ‘They’ll be glad of it, because they’re always short of beer. And everybody in the village can drink a health to poor old Dad! Think of it, the village all crowded elbow-to-elbow in the bar, and Joe says, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s to William Hart, God Bless Him, and—”’

  At this point Betty’s moving speech was suddenly interrupted by a loud crash. The indecorous wind had blown down a chimney-pot from the roof of the farmhouse, and as it crashed on to the gravel path in front of the window Pru remembered her two babies in the pram outside and with a squeak of alarm ran out to make sure that they had come to no harm. Betty and Joan ran out after her; and Jaky followed.

  The babies were sleeping peacefully (and indeed they were so used by now to moving accidents by flood and field that they would probably have taken no notice of an earthquake!); but as the three sisters stood arm in arm beside the pram the fresh air began to affect them, they swayed slightly, and suddenly a gust of wind seemed to blow them together. Each leaning inwards, they formed a pyramidal pattern, like a camera tripod, said Jaky, or the piled rifles of soldiers; and if one had let go they would all have fallen down. Thus they hung on to each other with their heads almost touching and their legs forming the base of the pyramid; and as a turbulent eddy surged about them, Joan gasped, half-crying, half-laughing:

  ‘Oh, Betty, listen, listen—’

  ‘The wind!’ cried Betty.

  ‘Boisterous he was’

  ‘He always loved a wind. Often he’d laugh and shout when it was blowing.’

  And suddenly, said Jaky (‘for to tell the truth, Matey, the sloe gin was beginning to work on me too!’) – suddenly it seemed as if the air was full of voices. It chuckled, sang, shouted, bellowed, hollered its joy like old William taking leave of the pub or for that matter like old William taking leave of the world.

  The Funeral

  On the twenty-first of December, the day of the funeral, when they carried William down to the churchyard in his own yellow wagon, the wind blew harder than ever. It had been William’s wish that he should make that last journey in the great wain; and George Daniels with Susan’s help had washed and scrubbed the flawless paint and groomed the old horse and polished the head-brasses till they glittered. The words ‘W. Hart, Wainwright’ on the side of the wagon looked as clear and fresh as on the day when William had stencilled them.

  Almost everybody in the village, and some people from far away, turned up at the funeral. The Fitchers and Gormleys were there in full strength, dressed in their best clothes, and wonderfully sober; but they would be drunk later, we knew, for their grief was deep and genuine and they would be constrained to drown it. Halliday arrived with Vicky at the last moment, having just driven down from London; he seemed very upset, and blamed himself, he said, for not acting quickly enough. But we all felt that nothing which Halliday or anybody else could have done would have altered the course of events; it was destined and somehow fitting that William should have died when he did.

  While the coffin was being lowered into the grave which Jaky Jones had dug for it the wind reached its crescendo. Mr Chorlton whispered to me: ‘He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music’, and just then a flock of geese with a wild cry went over towards the south.

  After the funeral Pru in her mouselike way padded to and fro among the people in the churchyard inviting them in a soft meek voice to go to the Horse and Harrow in the evening to drink William’s health in his own home-made wine. Her step-sisters, Betty and Joan, invited some more. As a matter of fact, because we live so close to the Welsh border, it is not at all unusual in our parts to hold a kind of wake after a funeral; and nobody except perhaps the Hallidays was unduly surprised.

  So in the afternoon the yellow wagon, driven by George Daniels, made its second journey down to the village, this time filled with bottles and casks. Joe Trentfield had gone up to the farm to help with the.loading; and he, with Susan, Betty, Joan and Pru, rode in the wagon sitting on top of the casks. It is said that some of the bottles exploded as they were loaded into the wagon, and that the party drove down the hill to the accompaniment of a violent cannonade; but nobody minded, because as Betty remarked it simply showed how powerful the stuff was – and what were a few bottles lost among so many?

  It is said, too, that as the party were loading up outside the farmhouse the cork blew out of a bottle of parsnip wine; and rather than waste it they invited various passers-by whom they encountered in the lane to have a drink with them. Among these were a group of Fitchers and Gormleys, and the Frolick Virgins, bicycling up the hill to their afternoon work, and Dai Roberts coming back from his round. Now Dai Roberts is a strict teetotaller, and it seems unlikely that he would have accepted any of the wine. Nevertheless I assure you that I saw him going down the village street in th
e late afternoon, pedalling as fast as he could with the wind behind him, and singing very loudly indeed a song so cheerful that he would normally have considered it Profane – the merry little song called Sospan Fach. Moreover, a party of Fitchers and Gormleys were certainly involved in a fight later in the day – the cause of the trouble, I understand, was an allegation that the recently-married Gormley youth had beaten his Fitcher wife – and for half an hour at least a rout of these gypsies ran up and down the village crying to each other their customary insults of ‘Hatchet!’ ‘Gallows-birds’, ‘Wife-stealers!’ – and ‘What’s in the salmon-nets today?’

  As for the Frolick Virgins, they certainly did no sprout-picking; for General Bouverie and his hounds suddenly appeared in the neighbourhood in pursuit of their usual phantom fox which nobody had actually seen and land girls tearing after the hounds on their bicycles while General Bouverie clattered down the village street shouting ‘Fishcakes and Haemorrhoids!’ and demanding of all and sundry: ‘Have you seen my fox, damn and blast you?’

  At about half past five I called for Mr Chorlton and we walked down to the Horse and Harrow to drink a toast to William Hart as we’d promised to do. Sir Gerald told us that he would come down later; he was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by hundreds of razor blades, giving the final touches, he said, to the Improved Model of his patent mowing-machine.

  There was a fitful moon, and by its light the antic aspect of Brensham was enhanced and exaggerated. The bare branches of the goblin trees, tossed by the gale, seemed to grope about the roofs of the queer-shaped huddled cottages and their twigs tapped at the windows beneath the shaggy thatch. The hanging sign of the Adam and Eve squeaked like a banshee as it swung to and fro. On the wind from time to time, now faint, now loud, came the harsh and terrible and nerve-tickling cry of the wild geese. Crack-brained Brensham! Any strange thing might happen here, I thought – in weather like this, what might not happen? I was aware of the adventurous wind blowing away at the very topgallants of my spirit, and as recklessly as any drunken pirate’s my heart cried: ‘Let it blow!’