The Blue Field Page 4

  Frolick Virgins once these were,

  Overloving, living here,

  and indeed the innumerable, intertwined and continually fluctuating love-affairs of Susan, Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive were the talk of the village. These affairs provided a source of unfailing entertainment when they were going well, but at moments of crisis they preyed upon our minds and tattered our nerves, for they were always conducted more or less in public, and if Lisbeth had been jilted or Betsy had stolen Ive’s young man the whole of Brensham knew about it, sorrowed and sympathized and took sides. What made these dramas all the more wearing for everybody was a perpetual uncertainty about who was in love with whom; as Mr Chorlton pointed out, in order to calculate the permutations and combinations of the Frolick Virgins and about a score of young men one would require a slide-rule. For among the six girls there was only one constant, one whose love did not veer and back like the mutable winds or ebb and flow like the tide. Susan loved George Daniels with the single-minded passion of a Juliet, and George Daniels’ devotion to her was as steady and unshifting as the Pole Star; and yet, alas, their affair went ill.

  Young Corydon

  The trouble was a combination of two of the oldest obstacles which beset the thorny path of lovers: the pride of parents and the lack of money. Susan’s father and mother, who had made a little fortune out of the refined and genteel business of ladies’ hairdressing and lived in a trim little house with its own garage in some trim little suburb where all the houses are like that, thought themselves a cut above the people who work with their hands and flatly refused to allow their daughter to marry a farmer’s boy. George, who was not exactly a Lochinvar, knew only too well the inadequacy of his ninety shillings a week and the discomforts of a labourer’s cottage; his gratuity, moreover, was quite insufficient to buy even a minimum of furniture. In these circumstances he could not bring himself to take the obvious course of marrying Susan against her parents’ wishes. He had been told that he was not good enough for her, and he was foolish enough to believe it. So although the couple walked out religiously every Sunday afternoon, and went to the village hop every Saturday night where they danced every dance together except the Paul Jones; although they took their lovers’ stroll down the twilight lanes in such close conjunction that they reminded one of Siamese twins or competitors in a three-legged race; and although the final hug with which they said goodnight in the shadow of the hostel wall went on so long that they seemed to take root there and to be a natural feature of the landscape – nevertheless a cloud hung over their love, and we in the village, hearing the sad story ad nauseam from Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive, grew almost as impatient as the unhappy couple and became partners in their frustration.

  We all loved Susan, and we all liked George, who in his modest and unassuming way had quietly won a Military Medal at Arnhem. His gallantry on that occasion made a curious contrast with his behaviour when he first met Susan. On sick-leave from Normandy after receiving a flesh-wound, he had taken a walk up Brensham Hill on a very hot Sunday and by accident had stumbled upon the Frolick Virgins, all six of them, sunbathing in a woodland clearing, where they must have looked, I imagine, rather like the Dryads themselves. George, who had little fear of the German SS soldiers, nevertheless turned tail and fled from this classical spectacle; and in his headlong flight he knocked off his claret-coloured beret against a branch and, being taken with a kind of nympholepsy, failed to notice the mishap until it was too late, when he dared not go back to retrieve it. Susan returned it to him at the village dance on the following Saturday and, his leave ending, a long correspondence ensued, of which the village knew by hearsay because everybody was informed of it by Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive.

  Letter from a Liberator

  Goodness knows how George kept it up; because he did me the honour, soon after the invasion, of writing one longish letter to me, in which the smudged indelible and the frequent crossings-out bore witness to the pain he had in writing it. I imagine he must have sucked his pencil for a long time between the words. ‘The country,’ he began – he was writing from the bocage district before Caen – ‘is rather like ours. The people are very good farmers. They drink cider. If they didn’t speak Frog they’d be just like us. It makes you think.’

  Because I was there too, though at a different stage of the battle, I could just imagine George sitting and sucking his pencil beside that road between the orchards which was so optimistically signposted to Paris. Leafless poplars, although it was July, and greyish-yellow dust covering the poplar trunks and the thick hedges and the hedgerow flowers and George’s face, hair and hands; a notice on a gate, ‘MINEN!’ with a skull and crossbones underneath it, and a field behind the gate sown with poppies, corn and death; a cart-horse, to which the notice had meant nothing, lying shattered just inside the gate . . .

  Not much like Brensham; but George saw the similarities and ignored the differences. Like most Englishmen abroad he expected to find everything strange and was astonished when he discovered things which reminded him of home. He was enormously impressed by his discovery of a little pink weed which turned out to be the same troublesome bindweed which crawled in the cornfields at home; he’d expected strange and unfamiliar and foreign flowers. And he felt at home among the apple trees, Pearmains and Pippins, with the fruit just forming. Like William Hart’s orchard. That made you think, too.

  But a painful incident had happened to him which had made him think more than anything else. He set it down at great length and without much evidence of schooling; so I will paraphrase it. He had called at a farm, it seemed, to ask for some water. It was a smallholding really, not much bigger than Alfie Perk’s at Brensham. The soil was clean, the headlands were narrow, not a square yard of earth was wasted; but the land, he thought, could have done with a good dose of phosphates.

  He met the farmer close to the cottage. He was tending a big dappled cow whose hind leg had been badly shattered by a bomb splinter. She was a magnificent cow; George became almost lyrical in her praise. At home you’d have to pay sixty pounds for such a cow. He wanted to tell the farmer how much he admired her, and to ask how much milk she gave a day and what she was worth in Normandy. But of course he didn’t even know the French for ‘cow’. He stood and grinned and looked a fool.

  Then the farmer shook his hand and things became easier. They looked at the cow’s leg together and the farmer said ‘Bomb.’ George said ‘English?’ and the farmer nodded and shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘It’s not your fault.’ But the leg was very bad, and it was awful to think that we had done that.

  The farmer took him into the cottage. Inside it was just like home. The earthenware jug of cider, rough, raw, cool and sharp, was so familiar that it made him miserably homesick. He didn’t feel at all strange in the company of the farmer, his wife and the three children, and although he didn’t understand a word of French he often knew what they were saying. When the farmer’s wife turned to her husband and asked a question he guessed at once that she was asking about the cow; and he knew that the farmer’s reply meant ‘I shall have to kill her.’ He wanted to say ‘Have you any other cows?’ but of course he couldn’t and in any case he knew the answer. They had no more. They were poor people, you could see that, and the cow must have been worth a lot of money, especially in wartime when prices were high.

  So to make up for the British airman’s bomb he took his assault ration out of his haversack and gave all the boiled sweets, which he’d been saving for the battle because he liked to suck sweets in a battle, to the farmer’s three children. Then he gave his slab of chocolate to the farmer’s wife and his cigarettes to the farmer. But he knew it was all nothing compared with the cow.

  When he had to go the farmer walked with him as far as the gate. He said something which George didn’t understand. Then he touched the butt of the rifle, and George knew at once. They went to the barn, where the cow was lowing. She was down on her haunches now. George unslu
ng his rifle and handed it to the farmer. He shouldn’t have done that really, a soldier should never part with his rifle, but it seemed important that the farmer should do the thing himself.

  It reminded him of his father shooting an old dog he was very fond of.

  The farmer gave the rifle back and shrugged his shoulders; they shook hands again and they understood each other perfectly, they didn’t need any words.

  That was three days ago, wrote George; but it still made him think. He wished he could write a proper letter to explain that Frenchmen weren’t Froggies but were just like people at home. But he couldn’t explain so he finished up in much the same strain as he had begun:

  ‘They are very good people,’ declared George. ‘Their cider is peart like ours. When we’ve got this lot finished we’ll go down to the local and I’ll tell you all about it. They have fine cows and they are just like us. It makes you think.’

  ‘The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe’

  When George came back from the war Susan invited him to spend a weekend with her parents. He put on his demob suit, which didn’t fit at all, and his demob tie which was wonderfully striped like a Neapolitan ice, and he succeeded in looking exactly what he wasn’t, the gooping village bumpkin dressed up for a trip to town. We never heard what happened during that weekend; but it was clear enough that everything had gone wrong. When it was over George wrapped the precious demob suit away in tissue paper and put on his old paratroop’s jacket again and went to work for William Hart. He lived at home with his parents and was able to save about two pounds a week out of his pay; and it was estimated that at this rate he would have saved two hundred pounds in two years’ time, with which in some mysterious way he would Better Himself and find favour in the eyes of Susan’s parents. But in practice the sum didn’t work out like that; for love makes nonsense of mathematics and George would have been a poor sort of lover if he hadn’t been moved from time to time by the glory and splendour of his state to buy some absurd and prodigal present for Susan or to squander his week’s savings recklessly on squiring all six of the Frolick Virgins to the Horse and Harrow and buying them gin. So it looked as if it might be ten years, rather than two, before George was able to afford to furnish a cottage let alone to Better Himself. Meanwhile the star-crossed pair continued to discover every imaginable delight in each other’s company and to say goodnight to each other in an atmosphere of considerable drama outside the land girls’ hostel every evening. Mr Chorlton, who liked to walk in the garden at twilight and wrap himself in his thoughts, observed sadly that it was extremely difficult to concentrate while what appeared to be a combination of Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Romeo and Juliet, breathed eternal farewells just outside the gate.

  Anon Mrs Merrythought, with much banging of bolts and clanking of chains, would indicate that she was about to lock up and Susan would scuttle inside. But the lovers’ parting was not for long; at seven o’clock next morning they would be reunited; for the land girls were hired out to various farmers in twos and threes and needless to say Susan generally contrived to be among those who worked for Mr Hart. And so together, like characters in some ancient pastoral, the lovers mowed and reaped, ploughed and planted, and even discovered a kind of bliss in sprout-picking when they did it side by side. They were accessories to the crime, if it was one, of growing linseed in Little Twittocks; for Susan had ploughed the field and George had sown the seed. As for old William, he was so crippled with rheumatism that he was only able to hobble as far as the gate and lean over it; but that was probably enough, for it was always said of him that he’d only got to look at something to make it grow.

  The Wild Old Man

  It is high time that I told you something of the history of this wild and strange old man, whose boisterous mischief, or prankishness as our people aptly described it, was notable even in crack-brained Brensham.

  This mischief, in his youth and early middle age, had populated the village with numerous bastards, whom he cheerfully and shamelessly acknowledged; in later life it had manifested itself in the form of uproarious drunkenness and elaborate practical jokes. Impish even when he was sober, Mr Hart in drink had been liable to ring the church bells at midnight or call out the Fire Brigade to an imaginary fire; he had introduced a squealing pig into a choir practice and a donkey into the deliberations of the Parish Council; and he had defended himself against an angry policeman with the effective though double-edged weapon of a swarm of bees. But though his absurd pranks caused annoyance to their victims, everybody agreed that there was no real harm in him. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ people said. The constable, smothered in blue-bag and smarting from a dozen bee-stings, might perhaps have contested this; but they meant that his broad buffooning had its roots in a sort of innocence, his sins were original sins, without any later admixture of vice. Even his occasional drunkenness had a childlike quality which robbed it of offence. He drank to drown no sorrow nor yet, as our dreary little cocktail-sippers do, in order to get rid of the critical faculty which informs them how dreary they really are. He drank simply because he liked the stuff. The more he drank the more he liked it; and when at last it made him drunk his happiness exceeded all bounds. He had no desire to fight or to tell boring stories or to sit in a corner and cry; he only wanted to spread the tidings of his joy among his friends and neighbours and indeed the whole world. It seemed to him that the best way to do so was to make a great deal of noise; so on these evangelic occasions he shouted and sang and roared about the village boisterously like a wind, sometimes even knocking at doors and waking people up in order to communicate his enormous happiness to them. If you were coming out of the Adam and Eve, and William Hart in drink was emerging from the Horse and Harrow, you would hear him singing and hollering and bellowing his happiness although he was a quarter of a mile away.

  When he was in this condition he was by no means amenable to the reprobation of angry householders or to the policeman’s suggestion that he should go home quietly; for he would then draw himself up to his full height, which was some six and a half feet, and lean back to balance the weight of his enormous belly, which had the circumference of some fifty-five inches, and wag at his persecutors an admonitory finger. ‘Thee carsn’t touch I! Thee carsn’t touch I!’ he would tell them severely, and then, if asked the reason for his supposed immunity, he would utter in ringing tones his proud boast, which had no basis in fact as far as any one could tell but which he believed throughout his life with all his heart and soul. ‘Thee carsn’t touch I-hands off, ladies and gents, hands off! – thee carsn’t touch I because I be a descendant of the poet Shakespeare!’ With a lordly gesture he would wave away the impudent person who had tried to interfere with him; and as he haughtily strode off he would resume his singing.

  Carnivorous Cider

  Of course that was nearly half a century ago, in William’s youth and early middle age; and the old men who sit in the Horse and Harrow now, remembering things past and shaking their heads over the present, will tell you that there are no songs in the beer today. Never a chorus, they say, in ten pints of it. But this does not mean that Brensham has ceased to sing, for the pale, harmless-looking cider which our farmers make in the autumn is stronger by far than even the pre-1914 beer. It is deceptively still, it trickles out of the cask with scarcely a bubble, and looks almost green in your glass, though it has a golden glint when you hold it up to the light. Its taste, until you get used to it, is so sharp and sour that it seems to dry up the roof of your mouth – ‘cut-throat cider’, we call it. But wait. Beyond the shock of that first astringency lies a genial and unexpected warmth, a curious after-flavour of the sunshine and the earth and the falling leaves, a taste of September. Foolish, flat and innocent did the stuff look in your glass? Wise and wicked and old it seems now as it runs down your throat; for it’s been three or four years maturing in the old brandy-cask and as like as not Joe Trentfield from time to time has dropped a few scraps of meat in it, for he has a strange
theory that ‘cider feeds on meat’. Whether this is true or not I do not know; but I can well believe that so fierce and tigerish a potion would welcome a beefsteak now and then to keep up its strength. The names we give to our Brensham cider are indicative of that strength: ‘tangle-foot’ and ‘stunnem’ and one other which I cannot print here. Yet its potency, unlike that of other drinks, seems to act rather upon the body than the brain; while it steals from your legs their ability to take you home it leaves your mind free to meditate upon the awkwardness of your predicament. Indeed it is told of William Hart that he was once accused of kicking up a row all night outside the Rector’s windows and he explained that the cider in his legs had compelled him to spend the night by the roadside while the cider in his head had caused him to sing without intermission till dawn.

  Mr Hart, Wainwright

  His drinking bouts were not very frequent, or perhaps he would not have been the good craftsman he was. For William Hart, during the first twenty years of his working life, practised the trade of a wheelwright, and he made better wagons than anybody else between Birmingham and Bristol. You see can them still if ever you visit the neighbourhood of Brensham – for they were made to last for ever – and at farm sales the auctioneer still draws attention to them, urging the company to bid an extra five pounds. ‘Come, come, gentlemen, this is no ordinary job. None of your gimcrack jerrybuilt contraptions here. This is a William Hart wagon – see the name on it! These wheels will still be going round when you’re in the churchyard.’ They were mostly big wagons designed for carrying hay; Mr Hart always spoke of them as wains and himself as a wainwright. Nowadays most farmers use a haysweep instead to bring the hay to the rick (or they bale it on the ground, so that they do not need to rick it at all) and the wagons stand disused and neglected in rickyards and homesteads, but they never fall to pieces, and the bright yellow paint on them (three coats of it) doesn’t flake off like modern paint – you can spot them from a mile away. General Bouverie, our local Master of Foxhounds, still keeps one in use for the curious purpose of providing transport between the coverts at his pheasant-shoot. A huge dappled horse, groomed and polished till it shines like a varnished rocking-horse, dolled up with ribbons and rosettes and shining brasses, goes between the shafts; and a dozen guests, with their loaders, guns, cartridges and enormous luncheon-hampers, pile in behind. As the day goes on the wagon becomes filled with the corpses of pheasants, tawny as the fallen leaves; and it is indeed a remarkable sight to see the yellow wagon returning from the last drive of the day, with General Bouverie sitting high on the front of it like a Roman Emperor enjoying a Triumph, the trophies hung on long poles placed crosswise across the wagon, the guests knee-deep in feather and fur.