Brensham Village Read online

  This was the unexplored jungle, the unclimbed mountain, the unmapped hinterland! (We didn’t know what a hinterland was but thought it must be some particularly impenetrable sort of forest.) Off we scampered, with our butterfly-nets, our rabbit snares given us by Pistol, to maraud, to slaughter, and to explore.

  How often the reality disappoints even proper explorers of virgin lands! I suppose that El Dorado wasn’t golden when old tired Raleigh came to the bitter end of the dream. But Brensham did not let us down; the hill which we had peopled, as we sat in the nursery window, with fabulous beasts and fabulous men did not fail us when at last we set foot upon it.

  There were no hoopoes nor golden orioles, it is true; but there was a pair of merlin falcons, and before our amazed eyes a brown jackdaw flew away among the black ones which with loud clacking and chatter rose from the old quarries. We saw no fire-crested wrens, but plenty of goldcrests in the larch plantation. And there also, while we watched and waited for we knew not what, we heard a patter as light as falling leaves, and held our breath while three dappled shadows cantered by, paused among the bracken, became for a moment substantial in the sunlight as they twitched velvet ears and noses, and then suddenly in a panic and flurry of delicate legs rejoined the trees’ lacy shadows and so vanished. The Mad Lord’s fallow-deer still roamed Brensham Hill.

  So did the Mad Lord. We saw him, I think, once during the summer holiday. He didn’t look mad; but he certainly didn’t look like a lord. He was dressed in an old jacket and breeches which would have been moderately becoming upon a scarecrow, and he rode upon a moth-eaten grey, an ancient and decrepit bag of bones which the meanest of his tenants would surely have sent to the kennels long ago. We held open for him the wicket-gate into the larch plantation; he felt in his pocket for pennies, found none, and gave us instead a slow, gentle smile. We raised our caps, and to our astonishment he swept off his hat, if it could be called a hat, for like his jacket it would have served to frighten the rooks. He rode slowly away and we stood amazed at his courtesy: a lord had taken off his hat to us and smiled! He tittuped down the ride, on his terrible mare which was rather like Famine’s mount in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and it was four or five years before I saw him again. By then I had read a book and I recognized a likeness; I knew that I had seen Don Quixote riding on Rosinante.

  The Bottled Crusader

  The Mad Lord, whose wife had died, had a daughter of about our own age, a pale-faced, wide-eyed, flaxen-haired child called Jane whom we encountered from time to time during our walks on the hill. She soon became friendly and at ease with us, and one day she informed us, to our great astonishment, ‘I have an ancestor who lives in a sort of jamjar. I only show him to my special friends. You can come and see him if you like.’ We followed her down by a rough scrambling path to the Mad Lord’s house on the side of the hill, where she obtained from her easygoing nurse a large and important-looking key and led us down the garden to a very peculiar building which she told us was the private chapel. (It had been designed, we learned later, by the second Lord Orris who had made a Grand Tour and had been greatly impressed by Venice.) She unlocked the door and took a candle and a box of matches off the shelf.’We‘re going down to the family vault,’ she said. ‘Hardly anybody goes there except relations.’ She held the candle above her head to light our way down some wet slippery steps into a place of cavernous darkness which was full of cobwebs and the rustle of bats and which had a queer damp smell. At the far end of it was an oaken door with a heavy padlock; she nodded towards it and said: ‘I’ve never been through there; but I know what’s in it. Can you guess?’

  We said we couldn’t.

  ‘Coffins,’ said our young hostess. ‘But I expect they’re not worth seeing. They are all the dull ancestors. Robert, the exciting one, is here.’

  She lifted the candle to show us a small recess in the stone wall, where there stood, not a jamjar, but a beautiful urn, greeny-bronze in colour and very delicately fashioned. Hanging on the wall beneath it was a framed inscription in neat old-fashioned handwriting:

  ‘This Urn contains the Heart and Viscera of Robert La Bruère who fell at the Siege of Acre in 1191.’

  Craning our necks we read above it another and later inscription:

  ‘There is a tradition that Robert La Bruère distinguished himself in the Third Crusade, and was at one time a sort of aide-de-camp to Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and eventually met his death in combat with Saladin himself. His embalmed heart and viscera were brought home in 1194 after the failure of the Crusade. Having suffered various vicissitudes they were interred here in 1790.’

  ‘What’s viscera?’ we asked.

  Jane gave us a superior look.

  ‘Insides,’ she said. ‘But his heart’s there as well. For all we know it might actually have a hole in it, where Saladin struck him with his scimitar.’

  It was our turn to be superior.

  ‘Scimitars don’t stick,’ we said. ‘They slice.’

  ‘Well, then, with a slice out of it,’ said Jane, tossing her head. ‘Like a melon. Naturally we haven’t looked. But I was allowed to hold the jar in my hands once. It was awfully light; but my father said: “Hearts weigh surprisingly light when courage and fear have left them.”’

  We began to think very highly of Jane. ‘Well, that’s that,’ she said, in a businesslike tone. ‘Goodbye, Robert.’ She seemed to be on excellent terms with her ancestor. Then she held up the candle again and a bat’s opening wings threw a huge and grotesque shadow on the roof, like that of a vampire; and Jane with scarcely a glance at it led us up the steps which were wet with green slime and showed us the way back through the garden gate. Another wonder was added to Brensham, which was surely the only village where you could find the heart of a crusader.

  Wild Wormës in Woodës

  We had peopled the quarries with adders; and sure enough among plenty of grass snakes and blindworms and a few swift darting lizards we found before long the exquisite poisonous creature with the yellow V behind his head. We never had any fear of snakes and I even tried the dangerous experiment of picking up an adder by his tail, and cracking him like a whip; thus, Pistol, Bardolph, or Nym had told us, you snapped his neck and he couldn’t possibly hurt you. But my adder’s neck was made of tougher stuff; he whipped back towards my hand like a piece of Mrs Doan’s cattie-lackey, and I dropped him only just in time. After that we cut ourselves forked sticks when we went adder-hunting and used them to pin our victims to the ground. It was easy then to catch them behind the back of the neck and hold them prisoner while the forked tongue flickered out and the tail lashed back like a steel spring. One day as we held a snake thus we were astonished to discover that its belly was porcelain blue instead of the usual yellowy-white. In other respects it looked like an adder; but we had never heard of a blue-bellied adder and we accepted it as another of the marvels of Brensham. We let it go, and afterwards searched through our nature books in vain for some account of it. Many years later, in an essay by W. H. Hudson, I read how the great naturalist had found just such a snake in the New Forest and how he too had let it go rather than slay it and coil it in a bottle for the learned consideration of the herpetologists whom he despised.

  The Sugaring Expedition

  Blue-bellied adders, brown jackdaws, merlins, fallow-deer - what more could we ask of Brensham? Certainly there were no Camberwell Beauties, but there was a Convolvulus Hawk Moth, which visits Britain rarely from North Africa and has a wingspan as wide as our largest native moth, the Death’s Head. It sat upon a larch-trunk, resting perhaps after its long journey and awaiting its predestined captors; and we caught it with the aid of our prep-school master, Mr Chorlton, who had a holiday cottage on the roadside between Elmbury and Brensham. This great man, who made us love Latin and Greek, had played cricket for Oxford and Somerset, had written a learned commentary on the plays of Aeschylus, now drank regularly a bottle of port each night after dinner and collected butterflies and moths with the enthusiasm o
f a schoolboy. Brensham was his favourite hunting-ground, and this in our eyes added to its glory. One hot, still night in late August he took us up to the larch plantation and taught us the game of ‘sugaring’ for moths. Half an hour before, in the kitchen of his small cottage, we had assisted at the ceremony of preparing the ‘sugar’. Mr Chorlton took off his coat and solemnly mixed the ingredients in a saucepan to the accompaniment of a running commentary which, like all his talk, was as full of quotations as a Christmas pudding of plums. ‘First, black treacle made by Mr Fowler. Not the same one who wrote English Usage, perhaps, but a great man all the same: he makes thundering good treacle. Sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes or Cytherea’s breath. Now we add some brown Barbados sugar, which I understand you brats call Niggers’ Toes. You know where Barbados is? It’s one of the smaller islands in the West Indies. When the news of the outbreak of war reached Barbados in 1914 its legislature immediately cabled to Whitehall: “Get to it, England; Barbados is with you.” A stout-hearted little island; no wonder it produces such excellent sugar. Now we stir the mixture. Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire, burn, and cauldron bubble. Smell it. Taste it if you like. Isn’t it good? Isn’t it a feast fit for an Oleander Hawk Moth or a Glifden Nonpareil? But just you wait. We pour it off into a tin; and now Monsieur Chorlton the great chef completes his pièce de résistance. One or two drops, see, of Old Jamaica rum. Nothing to beat it. Nor poppy nor mandragora nor all the drowsy syrups of the world. Now smell it! That’s the stuff that makes the sailors sing. That’s the stuff that won the Battle of Trafalgar. Yo, ho, and a bottle of rum!’

  Then Mr Chorlton gathered up his net, his lantern and his killing-bottle and we set off up the hill. It was dark when we got to the plantation; the rabbits which scampered away from our steps were disembodied white scuts, the first owls were calling, the bats squeaked as they chased flies. Mr Chorlton took a paintbrush out of his satchel and proceeded to smear the treacly mixture on the tree-trunks. You could smell the rum a dozen yards away. ‘That ought to fetch ‘em,’ he said. ‘One of the most endearing things about moths is that there are precious few damned teetotallers amongst ‘em!’

  When he’d finished painting the trees he lit a pipe and we waited beside the stile while the dusk deepened. It was tremendously exciting; for it was the first time we had ever been in the woods at night. We listened breathlessly to the scurryings and squeakings of small anonymous nocturnal things. Mice chirrupped; something - was it a blue-bellied adder? - rustled at our feet, something else went by in the air with a whisper of wings like a short gasp.

  Gradually the darkness crept in upon us; we could almost see it advancing yard by yard, narrowing the circle. Mr Chorlton said something about ‘the circumambient night’. He never talked down to us, never mitigated a phrase or a quotation to make it more comprehensible, but paid us the extraordinary compliment of supposing we should either understand or ask for an explanation. He always treated boys as if they were his equals; and this was not, I believe, a technique of his teaching but simply part of his all-embracing courtesy. Therefore we never thought of Latin and Greek as ‘lessons’ but as fun, like fishing and rabbiting and sugaring and learning the names of moths, which as it happened were composed of Latin and Greek words too. ‘Lessons’ were geography, taught by a parrot who repeated to us biweekly something he had learned by heart long ago about Isobars and Isotherms; or English, taught by a pedant who compelled us to ‘parse’ the quality of mercy is not strained; or History, taught by a fool who made us repeat Dates. But when Mr Chorlton discussed Virgil or Plato it was as much an adventure as being out in the woods at night; and we did not associate it with our desks and inkpots since he did it impartially both in and out of school. I still remember after thirty years the fragment from the Aeneid which he quoted to us that evening when our minds were set on moths and our young bodies were a-quiver with the novelty and the delight and the terror of the inward creeping dark. ’ Nox atra cava circumvolat umbra,’ he said.’ Light the lanthorn! We’ll see what visitors have come to our feast!’

  Brensham on that occasion provided no rarities; but all was rare to us, as we followed behind the white beam and peered over Mr Chorlton’s shoulder at the centipedes, woodlice, beetles, and huge horrific slugs which, as well as moths, were drawn to the strong-smelling sweetness. I think I remember an Elephant Hawk, its pink-and-olive wings beautifully incandescent in the rays of the lantern; and I am sure there were numbers of Red Underwings, great moths with forewings of delicately-shaded grey which they drape over hind wings of flaming scarlet; so that when the wings are raised for flight it is as if a dowdy old woman lifts her skirts to show the red flannel petticoat beneath.

  However, we certainly didn’t think of that simile at the time; for Mr Chorlton as always used the Latin name which was Linnaeus’ lovely one, nupta: so for us it was a wedding-dress which the grey moth wore. When he spoke of creatures and flowers by their proper scientific names Mr Chorlton made us feel like men, or indeed like professors; so we did not trouble our heads with the English names but talked like naturalists from the very beginning. Thus we were enabled, at the age of ten or twelve, to disconcert a learned and pompous entomologist who came to give a lecture at our school. ‘We call this,’ he said, exhibiting a Cabbage White Butterfly - ‘we call this Pieris brassicae.’ ‘So do we!’ chanted four impertinent little boys in unison.

  The Hermit

  It was midnight when we finished the last round of the sugared trees. Brensham Hill at midnight! - with the harvest moon coming up through the black feathery branches of the larches, and Brensham Folly upon the summit looking like the Dark Tower in the poem! That was where the Hermit lived; we should have been frightened, perhaps, if Mr Chorlton had not been with us for the Hermit was a savage-looking man, with a dirty grey beard, who bedded himself down like an animal upon a heap of straw in the dark cobwebby chamber beneath the Folly. And it was true that he caught rabbits with his hands; he crept up to them where they couched in the tufts of long grass and pounced on them with a horrible pounce. (Thus murderers, thus assassins, thus the following footsteps which suddenly begin to run!) It was true too that he ate them raw, although we were somewhat disappointed to discover that he skinned them first. An eccentric old creature, as unhygienic as Black Sal and even crazier, for he had made his own slum at the top of Brensham.

  How did he come to live in the Folly? It was said that he had simply squatted there, constituting himself its unpaid caretaker, and that the lord who was himself mad hadn’t the heart to turn him out. Local authorities were more tolerant in those days than they are now, and Medical Officers of Health rarely climbed up Brensham Hill; nor would the workhouse have welcomed such a disquieting inmate, for who knows what he would stalk and pounce upon if rabbits were denied him? Certainly he was harmless enough, he troubled nobody in his eyrie on Brensham; and in summer, on Sundays and Bank Holidays when visitors were to be expected, he even dressed himself up in an ancient clerkish black suit, and a straw boater with a black-and-yellow ribbon, and conducted tourists up the steps to the top of the Folly, charging them a fee of threepence for the privilege.

  The tower had been erected by an ancestor of the Mad Lord. It was large enough to contain a narrow winding staircase of stone leading up to the roof. A long inscription in bad Latin, carved spirally upon the interior wall, followed the course of this staircase so that the climber read it word by word as he mounted step by step:

  UT TERRAM BEATAM

  VIDEAS, VIATOR,

  HOEG TURRIS DE LONGE SPECTABILIS

  SUMPTU BUS

  RICARDI ORRIS

  DOMINI MANORII

  AD MDCGLXV

  EXTRUCTA FUIT OBLEGTAMENTO

  NON SUI SOLUM

  SED VICINORUM

  ET OMNIUM

  We used to chant this as if it were a psalm as we climbed the stairs behind the Hermit, who for his part would always count the number of steps aloud, as if he wanted to make sure that there were always fifty-two.
When we reached the top, puffing triumphantly et omnium, we entered a small dark chamber with slits for windows in which perhaps the altruistic Richard Orris had been accustomed to delight his neighbours with views of the blessed earth even on wet days. But now only bats inhabited the little room and slept, caring nothing for panoramas. When the trap-door in the roof was opened, letting in the light, they stirred uneasily with a slight dry crackle, like a crumpling of parchment.

  The Hermit, observing with satisfaction: ‘Fifty-two: that’s as many stairs as there are weeks in the year,’ would now insinuate his head and shoulders into the oblong hole where the trap-door had been and with grunts and groans would heave himself through it. Dick, Donald, Ted and I followed like a pack of pirates emerging from a ship’s hold. Now we were on the roof. Upon the parapet another Latin inscription confronted us. From this elevated place, it said, when the sky is untroubled by cloud nor mists lurk in the low places thou canst see, O Traveller, twelve rich counties, four great cathedrals, and sixteen abbeys. There was a camera obscura which didn’t work and a telescope with a broken lens. This telescope had the remarkable property of imparting to all objects seen through it the colour of bright yellow. Nevertheless the Hermit would put it to his eye and sweep it round in a gesture as proud as if he had been Nelson counting his ships before Trafalgar. When he stood thus upon the Folly roof the Hermit seemed to gain both in stature and in confidence. His beard and his long grey locks streamed out in the wind; he had something of the witless grandeur of Lear. He leaned upon the parapet, telescope to eye, slowly turning his head and reckoning up the counties spread beneath him nor caring, apparently, that they were yellow ochre instead of green. He smiled slightly with satisfaction, as a farmer who numbers his sheep and says to himself: ‘Mine, all mine!’ And then he beckoned to us and handed us the broken telescope and waved his filthy hand with its long talon-like fingers in lordly fashion as if to say: ‘Mine, all mine; but you can look at them if you like.’