The Blue Field Read online

  It used to take William Hart the better part of a month to make a wagon. He built each with loving care, choosing and seasoning the timber himself, and taking infinite pains over every joint, hinge and spoke. (‘Measure twice and cut once,’ he always used to say.) But as soon as it was done, the moment he’d crossed the ‘t’ of the ‘W. Hart’ which although he could only read and write with difficulty he stencilled so neatly on the side of it – as soon as he’d done that he went down to the pub and got drunk. He would come bursting into the bar, and order drinks all round, with that transcendent air of blessed relaxation and utter abandon which artists know when they have put the finishing touches to a work of creation and, all passion spent, allow the tide of life to bear them where it will. Usually he stayed drunk for about a week, and it was another ten days before he regained complete sobriety. So, with repairs and odd-jobs and a bit of undertaking – it was said that his pride of craftsmanship made him take as much trouble over a coffin for his worst enemy as over a wagon for his best friend – he built about eight of his great haywains in a year. This earned him ample money for his needs.

  Goodman Delver

  At one time Jaky Jones, he who served the visiting anglers with teas and wasp-grubs, was pupil or apprentice to William Hart in the wheelwright’s business. When that trade began to die out Jaky turned his hand, which had learned its skill from William, to another trade which will never die out as long as men are mortal: he became the village undertaker. But because Brensham is a small place and its inhabitants are long-lived, a man could not make a living in it out of coffins alone; so Jaky joined the ranks of those free and independent and extremely useful people whom we call odd-job-men. In addition to making coffins, he digs the graves. He will also thatch your cottage, tidy up your garden, clean your car, or mend your burst pipes after a frost. If there is anything the matter with your drains, you call in Jaky; likewise you send round for him if you want a lock mended or a tree felled or a chicken-house knocked together out of a few old boards. Perhaps the strangest of the duties which he performs for the community is connected with cats. He is an expert gelder; and it is a village joke that all the toms in the village flee when they hear him coming.

  He is a peaky-faced, sharp-nosed little man with a curiously nasal voice, who always wears an ancient bowler hat on the back of his head. His speech is larded with pet phrases which he utters with a small sly grin, phrases like ‘Matey’ and ‘How’s your father’. Both his manner and his conversational style are somewhat macabre, as befits a member of his profession, and I remember in particular a gruesome piece of dialogue which I heard one night in the Horse and Harrow.

  ‘Twenty-two inches across the shoulders,’ said Jaky.

  ‘Only twenty-two?’ said Joe Trentfield. ‘Well, well. I should have thought ’a’ was more than that. A beamy chap.’

  Jaky Jones pushed his bowler hat on to the back of his head and consulted a crumpled and dirty piece of paper.

  ‘Six foot one and twenty-two across,’ he said. ‘They tends to shrink when they gets older.’

  There was a pause, and then Jaky uttered one of his favourite dicta.

  ‘A green Christmas makes a full churchyard,’ he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.

  As he spoke, the ghost of a grin played upon his sardonic features; and I was troubled with a curious sense of familiarity, as if he reminded me of someone else or I had heard that voice long ago. He went on:

  ‘Rector wants ’im put at the bottom end by the yew-hedge. But I says to the Rector, Matey, I says, ’tis too wet, I says; ’tis too near the culvert; afore you gets down three feet you finds the water seeping through the clay. Matey, I says, I wouldn’t put a dog in there.’

  Again and again, throughout this sombre speech, some gesture or trick in Jaky’s manner struck a chord in my memory. It was like a pin-table game when the ball bouncing from pin to pin makes a contact and lights a momentary flicker of electric bulbs. Such a flicker occurred when he said ‘’Tis too wet.’ ‘How macabre!’ I thought. ‘But I suppose he gets accustomed to it . . .’ and the word ‘custom’ went flickering along another memory-track, custom, custom, custom hath made it in him a property of easiness – and then the flicker became a flash, illuminating all. I suddenly saw the stage brightly lit and within that glowing oblong framed by the dark proscenium there leaned upon his spade the very spit and image of Jaky Jones. At Ophelia’s half-finished graveside stood Hamlet and Horatio; and Jaky with his hat on the back of his head and the ghost of a grin on his clownish face looked up at them. ‘And water,’ said the gravedigger, ‘is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.’

  Gravediggers haven’t changed much in the countryside round Stratford in three hundred-odd years.

  The Poacher

  Like most of the Brensham men, Jaky is a devoted fisherman, but he possesses the curious eccentricity that he prefers to fish without rod, reel, line or hook. Legitimate angling bores him; and on the rare occasions when he takes a rod he must needs add spice to his pastime by using illicit baits, such as salmon roe, which he prepares according to a secret method which he discovered in an old book. This book, which he once showed me as a special favour, contains some horrifying recipes for the making of pastes with such ingredients as ‘Cat’s Fat and Heron’s Oil, and Mummy Finely Powdered’, and there is one which runs like this: ‘Take the Bone or Scull of a dead man, at the opening of a Grave, and beat the same into a powder, and put of this powder into the Moss wherein you keep your Worms; but others like Grave-earth as well . . .’ I asked Jaky whether he had ever tried this experiment, and although he shook his head I think I detected a guilty look in his eyes. The anglers from Birmingham certainly suspect that he uses some kind of dark and mysterious wizardry; for he does a roaring trade every season in ‘Jaky Jones’ Special Red Worms’, which he sells in little canvas bags for half a crown a quarter-pound.

  But as I said, a rod and line, even when it has a Special Worm wriggling on the end of it, does not appeal to Jaky and he prefers to go fishing with such unusual implements as a shotgun, a spear, a willow-wand, a length of rabbit-wire, a tin of carbide, a sledge-hammer, or a wicker waste-paper basket which has had the bottom knocked out. With the shotgun he shoots pike as they bask on the surface in high summer. With the spear, which resembles Britannia’s trident, he catches eels as they wriggle up the muddy ditches. With the willow-wand and the wire he fashions a noose which he can dangle far out into the stream and slip over the tails of fish lying near the top of the water. The carbide he pours into screw-top bottles, weighted with stones, to which he adds a little moisture before he screws up the top. He then casts the bottles into the river and awaits the explosion, which stuns all the fish within twenty yards. When they come to the surface he paddles round in his boat collecting the spoils like a punt-gunner picking up the bag after a successful shot.

  The sledge-hammer and the waste-paper basket are used in a very ingenious way. He takes them to some part of the river, such as a lock, where an old brick or stone wall runs along the bank. First he splashes about in the water so that the fish take refuge in the holes and crannies under the wall; and then he smites the top of the wall two or three times with the sledge-hammer so that the fish are knocked out by the vibration and float belly-upwards to the surface. If any should escape him, by darting out of the wall into the weeds, he takes his waste-paper basket, wades out to the weed-clump, and drops the basket neatly over the clump so that any fish which were lurking there are imprisoned. Then he rolls up his sleeves and pulls them out one by one.

  There is one kind of fishing which particularly delights Jaky, and that is catching elvers with a cheese-cloth net when the little eels run up the river in springtime. He sets out at night with a lamp slung round his neck and returns in the morning with three or four bucketfuls of the small transparent fingerlings, which he hawks round the village at one and six a pound. It is a familiar thing in Brensham, at breakfast-time on April mornings, to hear Jaky’s nasal voice vyin
g with the cuckoo as he marches up the village street, with his bowler hat cocked on the back of his head and a couple of buckets slung over his shoulders on a yoke. ‘Yelvers! Yelvers! Yelvers all alive-o!’

  The Trophy

  In the last war, although he was nearly fifty, Jaky joined up and fought in the Battle of Alamein. He once told me a story about that battle while he sawed the side of a coffin in his workshop, and a draught coming in under the door teased the sawdust into miniature dust-devils which reminded him, he said, of the sands of Egypt. ‘I minds as if it were yesterday,’ said Jaky, ‘boiling a can of strong tea over a petrol fire . . .’ A small man wearing an Australian hat had suddenly appeared as if from nowhere and offered him a cigarette. Thinking the man was some sort of war correspondent, for such people were free with their cigarettes, Jaky had conversed with him in his usual free-and-easy manner for several minutes. He had also expressed a forcible opinion about Generals. The man smiled slightly and got into his car. Jaky was about to light the cigarette when he noticed the flag on the car’s bonnet; so he saluted as smartly as he could (but in the manner, I expect, of one who touches his hat to the squire) and put the cigarette away, swearing that he’d never smoke it, not if he was dying for a puff, but would take it home as a trophy for his son and his son’s sons. This high resolution was sorely tried next morning; for he was wounded in the first assault, and as he jolted down the line in an ambulance the pain came on suddenly and he wanted a smoke more than anything else in the world. He resisted the temptation, however, and there was the cigarette – ‘in case you don’t believe me, Matey’ – in a neat little glass case, suitably inscribed, hanging on the wall over his work-bench. ‘How’s your father,’ observed Jaky, for no reason in particular; and he began to whistle, as he performed his sombre task, that gay and lilting air which was one of the fruits of our desert victory, that piece of unsubstantial booty which we took from Rommel’s men, the tune of Lilli Marlene.

  ‘A Foolish Thing Was but a Toy’

  William Hart had a hobby which he practised in his wainwright days and which made all the children love him. It was the reason why one would almost always see a crowd of brats hanging about outside his workshop on their way back from school. He could never pick up a piece of wood without wanting to carve it into some fantastic shape or other – ‘What would you like,’ he’d say, ‘a Helephant or a Cock-yolly Bird?’ and swiftly in his strong, blunt-fingered hands, the knife and the chisel would fashion the curling trunk and the great ear-flaps, or the long beak and the extravagant plumes. Being a born carpenter, he loved wood above all other materials, the feel, the smell, the grain of it, the sweet sawdust and the white shavings and the flying chips; if he saw an odd-shaped piece of oak or pitchpine lying about on his bench he couldn’t keep his hands off it, he perceived at once the hidden possibilities lying dormant in the wood, the possibility perhaps of a hunch-back dwarf or a giant with a club or a caricature of his next-door neighbour; and almost at a touch, it seemed, he caused the creatuies to spring to life. There was hardly a mantelpiece in Brensham which did not bear two or three of these curious sprigs and offshoots of his fancy which he poured out from his workshop as from a cornucopia to all the children who eagerly waited there.

  But there were other figures which he carved for his private amusement only; for sometimes he would put too much of his own quintessential mischief into a caricature, and then he would hide it from the children or say that he had spoiled it and make them a cat or a pig instead. Later he would paint and varnish it and add it to the collection in his back-room, where upon a table covered with a dust-sheet was Brensham village in miniature, with its inhabitants all caught in their most characteristic and sometimes unfortunate attitudes – Briggs the blacksmith and demagogue addressing a political meeting, Sammy Hunt the teller of endless tales cutting a long story bloody short (which meant that it would go on for hours), Dai Roberts Postman going to chapel in his black Sunday clothes with a poached rabbit sticking out of his pocket, and so on. Some of the little wooden figures were cunningly articulated so that they could be made to perform various gestures – a policeman, for example, an excellent caricature of the constable who had been stung by the bees, took off his helmet with one hand and mopped his bald head with the other; a fat man resembling Joe Trentfield raised a cider-mug to his lips; a companion-piece, which surely represented Mrs Trentfield, possessed a bosom like a pouter pigeon which became agitated and bounced up and down when you turned a handle in her back. And there were more complicated – and much naughtier – contrivances than these. Yet there was no cruelty nor malice in these caricatures, although William took pains to hide them from the victims; rather were they tokens of affection and tenderness, of William Hart’s wide and catholic love for life in all its moods and manifestations, curious, comical, strange, infinitely various, life budding and blossoming everywhere about him like a garden of multiform and many coloured flowers.

  Old Adam

  There was another thing he did supremely well. Long before he became a farmer he demonstrated that he possessed a genius for growing things; for whatever he planted in his garden flourished so vastly that he carried off most of the prizes every year at all the Flower Shows in the district. Other gardeners had reason to be envious of him, for he seemed to take very little trouble over his crops and he scorned to use any of the patent fertilizers and such-like in which his competitors put their trust. ‘I turns over the good earth,’ he would say. ‘I puts in the little seeds, and up they comes!’ Up they came indeed like Jack’s beanstalk. You could have made out of his sweet-peas one year, people said, a hedge thick enough and tall enough to confine a bull! His tomatoes were as big as cricket-balls; his gooseberries were a match for some people’s greengages; his potatoes were apt to weigh two or three pounds apiece. As for his vegetable marrows, there was something gross, something hardly decent, about the way they swelled and pullulated and waxed fat, until they looked like a herd of farrowing sows lying close together among the luxuriant foliage. Sometimes, indeed, even the judges at the Flower Show were appalled by the size of them, and disqualified them on the grounds that no ordinary housewife could handle them and that only a factory could be expected to turn them into jam.

  I remember seeing William bearing away one of these gigantic marrows after the show. He carried it cradled in his arms, like a baby, but it was so heavy that he was soon compelled to pause for breath; and as he did so he looked down at his burden and smiled. Somehow it gave me a moment of exquisite pleasure to see him thus, smiling down in a proud fatherly way at the monstrous vegetable wedged against his huge belly and supported by his strong arms.

  The ferocious fecundity of William’s little garden might have embarrassed or even frightened a lesser man; for there surely dwelt Priapus himself, Dionysus’ son and Aphrodite’s, he who makes the green things to multiply and the trees to be fruitful and gives fertility to the loins of men. But William, who had never heard of Priapus, was only slightly puzzled by the phenomenon. Sometimes he would shake out a packet of seeds into his hand, and stare at them, and wrinkle his brow. ‘They be so very, very small – but look!’ and he would point to a prodigious broad bean thirty inches long, or a stick of ‘sparrow-grass’ twice as thick as a man’s thumb, or a carrot which he’d just dug up and which, obviously, had been seeking the Antipodes. ‘So very small,’ he’d repeat with a wondering smile, ‘but I puts ’im into the good earth and up they comes, Hey Presto!’ And then, chuckling merrily, he’d retire into the teeming thicket of lilac, clematis, laburnum and honeysuckle which wildly overgrew his garden path.

  As if to demonstrate that it was the special favour of Priapus, and not William’s skill alone which made his garden flourish, some of his fattest potatoes and longest broad beans were self-seeded strays which came up of their own accord – as he put it ‘without an ounce of muck or a drop of sweat spent on ’em’. He called them ‘randoms’ and on one occasion, to the vast annoyance of all his rivals, he won first prize a
t the Flower Show with a pound of tomatoes picked from a ‘random’ plant which he found growing at the bottom of his garden, beside the ditch where the sewage ran into it. I believe that these waifs and strays, these casual come-by-chance by-blows of his garden, pleased William more than all the regimented, orderly, carefully-tended rows. ‘’Tis like winning something out of old Nature’s sweepstake,’ he said, and grinned: ‘I often thinks maybe I’m a bit of a Random myself.’

  William had married young – the story of that marriage shall be told later – and his wife had died when he was still in his twenties; so he continued for many years to live with his old parents in the cottage by the wheelwright’s shop and to carry on the business during his father’s retirement. When his parents died – this was about forty years ago – William came into a little money; and thinking that he might as well profit by his extraordinary ability to grow things he bought the 150-acre farm on the green skirt of Brensham. He built himself a new yellow wagon – the biggest and the best wagon he had ever made – and at Michaelmas he piled all his possessions into it, sat his two schoolgirl daughters on top of the pile, and moved up the hill.