The Blue Field Read online

  Carminative Drinks

  When we got to the Horse and Harrow Joe was busy tapping the casks of wine, and Mrs Trentfield, Mimi and Meg were decorating the bar ready for Christmas with sprigs of holly and a great bunch of mistletoe which bore such a crop of berries that it made you think of a rich dowager overdressed with pearls. The Frolick Virgins were there already, with about half a dozen of their young men, and everybody kissed everybody else under the mistletoe a great many times. I asked where Susan and George had got to, and Wistaria said ‘Hush! It’s a great secret. You’ll know later,’ and all the Frolick Virgins giggled and began whispering together like a flock of agitated starlings.

  Soon Alfie Perks and Sammy Hunt arrived, and Briggs dressed up in his black Sunday suit with his thick gold watch chain and a red rosette in his buttonhole because he was going to take the chair later at Halliday’s meeting. Then Halliday himself turned up, with Vicky looking unusually wind-swept, and Jaky Jones with his bowler hat on the back of his head. As the bar filled up, Betty, Joan and Pru began to pour out the wine and to hand round the glasses. At last when there were about thirty people in the bar, Betty nodded to Joe Trentfield and he climbed ponderously on to the counter and calling for a silence in his sergeant-major’s voice asked everybody to drink a silent toast to William Hart.

  So we drank to old William in the wine which his own hands had so skilfully concocted. The brew, I think, was Raisin Wine Extra Strong, but whatever it was, Lord, it was cockle-warming stuff! ‘Like a brazier glowing in your vitals!’ said Jeremy Briggs. Pru, like Hebe, refilled our glasses, it seemed, before we realized that we had emptied them, and so we drank again. Mr Chorlton, smacking his lips, announced that the wine was Extremely Carminative, adding that one of his schoolboys in an examination paper had defined Carminative as ‘something that makes you sing’.

  ‘Bless me,’ said Mr Chorlton, ‘if we have a few more glasses of this we shall begin to prove that he was right!’

  As Betty filled my glass again I happened to hear a curious aside spoken by her to Joan.

  ‘Do you think Pru ought to have another?’ she asked doubtfully.

  ‘The Nurse said I must never touch a drop when I was having our Ivy,’ whispered Joan, and I realized that Pru was in disgrace again. ‘She said it might bring me on else.’

  Betty gave way, however, and filled Pru’s glass. Meanwhile we were all, I think, beginning to feel the effect of the heart-warming drinks. Sammy Hunt was fairly launched on his story about the Engine-Room Mutiny (‘There were little yellow men all round me, and I felled them one by one with a clip behind the ear’), Joe Trentfield uttered from time to time his deep chuckle which was really very much the same noise as the Minnehaha Laughing Water of the tank filling when the plug was pulled, and Halliday, with reckless empiricism, had changed from Raisin Extra Strong to Plum Jerkum ‘just to see what it tasted like’. ‘Please do remember,’ said Vicky in alarm, ‘that you’ve got another meeting in Elmbury after your meeting here.’ But Halliday only laughed and said the wine would make him talk better.

  Betty came round again, holding the bottle rather unsteadily, and pressed us all to have ‘just one more’.

  ‘But not for Pru,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Oh, Joan, please’ – and Pru’s enormous china-blue eyes looked as if they were about to fill with tears.

  It was impossible, for long, to resist the pathetic stare of Pru, as half the young men in Brensham had discovered. So Betty relented, and indeed she was feeling so benevolent by now that she would, I am sure, have bestowed the whole bottle upon anybody who had asked for it. Pru, as a matter of fact, was the only person in the room who looked completely composed. She took her drink, in her quiet mouselike way, as she took life – as it came.

  It was about this time (though one tended to lose count of time) that Halliday, Vicky, Briggs and a few more went off to the political meeting; but their places were taken by new arrivals, and half Brensham was packed elbow-to-elbow in Joe’s little bar. Among the new arrivals was Sir Gerald, who made a spectacular entrance, for both his hands, were swathed in blood-stained bandages. ‘Now does he feel his secret murders sticking on his hands,’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘What the devil have you been up to, Gerald?’ Sir Gerald gave us a wan smile. Something had gone wrong with the Improved Model, he said. In some mysterious way the razor-toothed blades of the machine had ‘sprung back and sort of snapped at him’. He added with pride that the machine had nevertheless demonstrated its cutting power in a remarkable fashion: if he had not been wearing stout gloves he would certainly have lost his fingers.

  I was in no mood for politics so I didn’t go to the meeting which Halliday, elevated by a mixture of Raisin Wine and Plum Jerkum, addressed for nearly an hour. I don’t know what he talked about (save that Vicky remarked later that if there had been a reporter present he would have lost his chance of an Under-Secretaryship) and I don’t know what resolutions were passed nor what terrible threats against the Tories were uttered by Jeremy Briggs as he stamped about on the platform in his Sunday suit and gold watch chain. I only know this, that a dozen reliable witnesses affirm that as they passed the Village Hall about eight o’clock they heard the sound of singing. And the words of the song with which, it seemed, the meeting was being wound up were the words which Brensham men had sung in their pubs for generations but which nobody, I am sure, had ever before sung at a political meeting.

  Roll Me Over, came the chorus, borne up the street from the Village Hall on the wings of the north wind, Roll me Over – in the clover – Roll me Over, Lay me Down, and do it agen!

  Runaways’ Eyes May Wink

  Now I shall find it difficult to write coherently of the remaining events which happened on Brensham’s craziest evening, the evening of December the Twenty-First which, as Alfie Perks remarked, quoting an old rhyme, was

  St Thomas’s grey, St Thomas’s grey,

  The longest night and the shortest day.

  First of all the crowd came back from the meeting, a sudden rout swirling into the tight-packed bar, and they told us that there were trees down all the way along the Elmbury road and there was another blocking the lane at the top of the village, so that the Hallidays could neither return to their house nor go on to the meeting at Elmbury. ‘Tory Plot,’ said Halliday with a sideways grin at his wife, who surprised us all by grinning back; she did not, as a rule, think that Tory Plots were anything to make fun of. Halliday added with obvious satisfaction that the telephone-lines were down too and it was impossible to get through to Elmbury. It gave him the greatest pleasure, I think, to picture his Agent anxiously biting his nails, and the little bespectacled Secretary running about in a flap in the horrible cobwebby Tolpuddle Memorial Hall. How much more pleasant to stay in the Horse and Harrow and drink William’s cockle-warming wine than to stand before the dusty carafe of water with the glass upside down on top of it and face the persistent heckling of the unspeakable man with the pimply red face and the rainbow-striped Old School Tie!

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ said Halliday cheerfully. ‘There’s no way of getting to Elmbury so that’s that. You cannot legislate against the wind.’ And as if this rather curious phrase pleased him, he repeated it slowly, and I realized that he was more than a little drunk. It occurred to me that it was probably years since he had been drunk if indeed he had ever been drunk before in his life and that he was obviously enjoying the unfamiliar sensation. Once again he repeated that stray wisp of a sentence which seemed to be related to nothing in particular ~ ‘You cannot legislate against the wind. By God,’ he said, ‘I like that. It’s the sort of thing a Frenchman might have said, Danton himself might have said, when the mobs were marching to the Marseillaise!’

  Meanwhile Vicky in her precise way was explaining to Joe about the fallen trees. ‘So, you see,’ she ended, ‘we can’t go on to Elmbury and we can’t go back home.’

  ‘Well, you be proper buggered!’ said Joe, roaring with laughter because nobody’s minor misfortune ev
er failed to delight him. ‘You’ll have to stay the night here.’

  Just then the door opened and there entered, in procession, Pistol, Bardolph, Nym, ‘Enery and Pierre, followed by George Daniels and Susan. Through the open door we could see ‘Enery’s old lorry piled high with mistletoe. While Pru, who remained perfectly calm and self-possessed, speaking only when she was spoken to in her small prim voice, poured them out glasses of wine, Pistol told us a long story about how with George’s help they had collected nearly half a ton of mistletoe, and how a man they knew in Birmingham had offered to buy it for seventeen pounds a hundredweight. ‘So “Let’s ‘andle,” says I, and we done the deal.’

  Then Wistaria climbed on to the counter and announced dramatically that George and Susan were going to run away together and get married. George, it seemed, had made enough money out of his share of the mistletoe-deal to furnish a cottage, and they were going to buy a tractor and set up in a little business. (‘Ploughing by Contract,’ said Susan proudly.) So we all drank their health and wished them luck, and when they drove off with ‘Enery in the lorry to Birmingham, where Susan said she had a married sister living (though nobody really believed this) the Frolick Virgins all rushed out and cheered them away as if they had indeed been setting out on their honeymoon.

  ‘St Thomas’s grey, St Thomas’s grey,’ cried Alfie Perks in valediction, ‘the longest night and the shortest day!’

  Pru, whose pram I nearly fell over when I went out to see George and Susan drive away, took advantage of a moment when her sisters weren’t looking to slip out through the door. Light-hating, dark-loving, ‘negatively phototropic’ as Mr Chorlton put it, she wheeled away her babies into the windy darkness; and shortly afterwards Pierre crept out after her. Perhaps it was Pru’s last chance, for we were told that she was going to live with her step-sister Betty, who had declared a firm resolve to ‘keep her out of mischief in future’. ‘This,’ quoted Mr Chorlton, ‘will be the decay of lust and late-walking throughout the realm!’

  Age, libertate Decembri

  Meanwhile Betty and Joan and Mimi and Meg still went about through the crowded room like almsgivers dispensing old William’s particular brand of happiness to anybody who happened to have an empty glass. In retrospect the wine seems to have had a peculiar lightning property of illuminating certain incidents with vivid unforgettable flashes, while others have disappeared for ever into the darkness of oblivion. Of these disconnected flashes my memory of the evening is made up.

  I remember, for instance, watching Halliday sitting in a corner with Pistol, Bardolph and Nym while they vied with each other in telling him stories about the campaigns they’d fought against Germans and Italians and Arabs and Afghans and fuzzy-wuzzies of various kinds. On Halliday’s face, as he listened to these fantastic tales, there was – I swear – a look of real envy. This was the kind of things which he would have liked to have done himself! And when Bardolph held up his hand to demonstrate that he’d lost two fingers at Mons, and Pistol pulled up his trouser-leg to show the long scar which he said was due to the thrust of an assegai, what matter if I was aware that Bardolph had once put his hand under a circular-saw and that Pistol had spiked himself when he climbed over a fence to escape from an angry keeper? For the moment at any rate they were veterans of Agincourt:

  Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars And say,

  these wounds I had on Crispin’s Day,

  and as I watched them I had the same sense of the proximity of Shakespeare and of the continuity and immortality of his people as I had had before when I talked to Jaky Jones and saw suddenly, peering out from under his bowler hat, the grim clown who dug Ophelia’s grave.

  I remember, in another vivid flash, a strange speech by Betty (orwas it Joan?) when she declared that she could never forgive herself for telling her father, on some occasion long ago, that his home-made wine was like the Devil inside him, making him bawl and holler. Too late, said Betty, she realized that she had been wrong; for she herself felt now as if she were filled, not with devils but with a whole choir of chanting angels; and to everybody’s astonishment, in a rather quavering voice, she began to sing.

  That set everybody singing. Mimi strummed on the piano, and we sang such a medley and mixture of songs as not even Brensham, surely, had ever sung before: a mixture half-Christian and half-Pagan like ourselves, for there were carols and folk-songs and soldiers’ songs in the mixture, we sang impartially of Good King Wenceslas and Tom Pearce’s Grey Mare, and the rats of exceptional size in the quartermaster’s stores and of some unspecified person who would be wearing silk pyjamas when she came; of shepherds watching their flocks and of the wonderful Wizard of Oz; of Billy Boy and his charming Nancy Grey (‘She lies as close to me As the bark is to the tree!’), of Mademoiselle from Armentiéres and John Peel. Alfie sang about the red poppies and Joe sang his imitation of the grunting pig, and the Frolick Virgins sang a song of their own invention, a very mournful song, about picking sprouts. And Sammy, of course, bellowed in his deep sailor’s voice about the girl who had a dark and a rolling eye,

  ‘And her hair hung down in ringalets,

  She was a nice girl and a decent girl,

  But one of the rakish kind!’

  And then suddenly, without being conscious that we were doing so, we found ourselves singing one by one all the songs which old William used to sing when he sat in the corner-seat by the fireplace and beat time with the poker. It was as if, said Alfie Perks, he stood close to us and prompted us; for there was no need for anybody to suggest a song, as soon as we’d finished one we were on with the next, as if the same thoughts ran through all our minds at the same moment.

  We were still singing Roll Me Over when the company in twos and threes began to go home; and for hours afterwards, it seemed, people were singing in the streets, little snatches of song were blowing about Brensham on the wind. William’s home-made wine was a carminative drink indeed!

  The Last Untidy Corner

  At last there were only about half a dozen of us left sitting round the sweet-smelling cherry-log fire which Joe always built up with architectural skill so that it made a bright pyramid of flame. Then Sammy put on his duffel-coat, slung the hood over his bald head, and remarked that it was time he went home to see if his house was still there or whether it had sunk under the river. Jaky Jones pushed his bowler hat still farther on to the back of his head, gave a sardonic shrug, and said, ‘The Missus’ll be lying in wait for me, else. And then it’s Matey, look out!’ They went home together, and Sammy called back to us through the door: ‘The wind’s going uphill, you can feel the sharp edge of it.’ ‘Feels like snow,’ Jaky added. ‘‘Ow’s your father!’ The five of us, Mr Chorlton and Sir Gerald, the Hallidays and I, still sat in front of the fire while Joe washed up the glasses. We had lost all sense of time.

  Mr Chorlton glanced from Halliday to Vicky, and said:

  ‘Well, you’ve seen us at our most disorderly now. Crack-brained Brensham at its best or worst. We’re one of the last untidy corners in your tidy England. Do you still want to tidy us up?’

  Vicky shook her head slowly.

  ‘No, Diogenes . . .’ That was her pet name for him now, Diogenes in his tub. ‘No, I don’t, but in some way or other I want to fit you in.’

  ‘Can you?’ Mr Chorlton leaned forward. ‘Can you so arrange this planned and orderly world which you dream of so that there is still a place in it for the rebellious, the eccentric, the unruly – for people like William Hart? In such a world will we not all have to be good and bad in the same ways, all possessing the same moral stature, or being at any rate neatly graded – “From the left, in two ranks, size!” Can you fit in, let us say, people like Sammy Hunt who likes rivers to be crooked, or the odd-job-man (or do you call him a self-employed person now?) like Jaky Jones? Or even such an amorous individualist as Pru?’

  Halliday was silent, wrinkling his forehead and staring into the fire as if he saw two conflicting dreams there and was trying t
o sort them out. Mr Chorlton went on:

  ‘In the story of your England, will the huge shadow of Falstaff ever fall across the page? And the smaller, sneaking, troublesome shadows of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym? Or will you quietly eliminate them as Spivs and Drones? Will the people in that tale possess humours in the Elizabethan sense? Will ginger still taste hot i’ the mouth to them? Will your standard of living, as you call it, have regard to fun, without which living is hardly worthwhile? Or will fun itself be something which has to be organized or controlled under a Minister of Popular Recreation with twenty psychologists and half a hundred censors on his staff?’ He paused. ‘Let William Hart, for a moment, be the yardstick by which we judge your world. Have you room in it for these strange flowers that blossom in unexpected places, and give colour to the scene, like poppies in corn or wild weeds in a well-kept garden? Those people who, however headstrong and wrong-headed, nevertheless reaffirm in their lives the ancient freedom and dignity of man? Because if not, I warn you, though your great machines serve you like slaves, though your citizens have only to press a button to obtain all the ease and comfort and all the pleasure and knowledge they desire, then it will all be meaningless, it will taste like dust and ashes upon the tongue. So I ask you again: Can you fit in the William Harts?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Halliday gravely. ‘I don’t know.’ He looked up suddenly from the fire. ‘But by God we’ll try!’

  Mr Chorlton smiled. ‘Well, good luck to you! It’s time I hobbled home.’ He got up painfully; his joints were old and stiff. ‘But one last word before I go. I’m going to say something now which is far more subversive than anything you’ve said or even thought of—’ He smiled at Vicky. ‘A more dangerous proposition than ever my female Cobbett has dared to put forward. It’s simply this: The ideal citizen is not the ideal man. Norman Douglas, I think, was the person who said it. The ideal citizen is not the ideal man.’