The Blue Field Read online

  He had bought the farm from Lord Orris, our local landowner, as he was then; and he had bought it exceedingly cheap, for two reasons: the Mad Lord, as we called him, was in debt as usual, and therefore needed the money; and, since his madness took the form of wild generosity, he could never bring himself to exact the full value for anything he sold.

  The Ruin of Orris

  Lord Orris was at that time about halfway to ruin; far speedier than Hogarth’s Rake he was progressing towards penury, through his incorrigible habit of giving things away.

  Once he had been rich, some say very rich; but he had handed over all his money to indigent nieces, profligate nephews, drunken wasters, scoundrelly spongers, and indeed to everybody who could persuade him – and that was not difficult – that they were in temporary or permanent need of it. To people who remonstrated with him about his indiscriminate charity he would make this sort of reply: ‘Well, the poor chap drinks, you see – and he’s very foolish about women too. He just can’t help it and nowadays, I understand, that sort of thing costs a great deal of money; whereas my own necessities are really very small . . .’ Nor was he content to give away only his cash. He bestowed his valuable library piecemeal upon various persons who said they were fond of books (‘For honestly I read extremely little, and these old black-letter things are quite useless to an ignoramus like myself’.) He gave presents of furniture to people who said they collected antiques (‘The fellow’s a bit of a connoisseur and really appreciates that Louis Quinze stuff’). He made the Saturday afternoon gunners free of his woodlands (‘Take what you can find, my dear chap – I have an absurd prejudice myself against killing things’) and the Sunday afternoon anglers free of his trout-pond (‘Though I warn you there’s little in it beside eels, which I understand are not highly regarded by sportsmen’). And he even handed over bits of his land to tenants who were hard up, pretending to his critics that he actually gained by the transaction because ‘The man has paid me no rent for years and now at any rate he’ll have to pay the tithe.’

  By the time he had got rid of the whole of his patrimony in this fashion he had fallen into an incurable habit of giving, and like a dipsomaniac he was unable to stop; and so with a kind of sublime innocence he went to the moneylenders and borrowed at a high rate of compound interest the largesse which he continued to distribute to all comers. His bank manager tried to point out the folly of this behaviour: ‘Really, sir, the equation doesn’t work out!’ ‘Alas, I am the worst mathematician in the world!’ smiled the Mad Lord. His friends, seeing him drift towards bankruptcy, renewed their attempts to persuade him to mend his ways; and he answered them with sweet reasonableness and a logic which does not belong to our hard world. ‘But, my dear friend, it is not strictly accurate to say that I gave the man a hundred pounds. He was very clever with figures – so unlike me! – and he had discovered an infallible system of winning money at roulette; but he’d lost all he had in trying it out at Monte Carlo. All I did was to lend him a hundred pounds so that he could return there and win it back again!’

  So it went on, until the dilapidated mansion and the un-tended gardens were a match for their threadbare owner, and the shabby-looking beggars who slouched almost daily along the weedy drive were joined by shabbier-looking duns, and at last there came a time when neither beggars nor duns found it worth their while any longer to make that pilgrimage; for nothing was left but the crumbling stones of Orris Manor and the green acres in which it stood and which alone of the Mad Lord’s possessions they could not carry away.

  O Fortunatos Nimium

  Without a doubt William had the trick of making things grow. Much of the hillside land was thin and chalky, sheep-grazing ground rather than arable; and like all the Mad Lord’s estate it had been woefully neglected. Nevertheless within two or three years William was growing such crops of oats and barley and clover as Brensham had never seen. It was true that the weeds came up as well – perhaps the Garden-god is not selective! – and the good and the bad flourished together, the golden corn and the rank tares. William’s was not a tidy or orderly farm. Nevertheless he got a huge yield off it, and in a period of scarcity, during and after the First World War, he made, from time to time, a good deal of money. He never kept it long, for that was not his way, and he still had his occasional bouts of wild drinking during which he let the farm go hang and spent every shilling he could lay hands on.

  In 1924, being then well over fifty, he courted, in a boisterous and highly indecorous fashion which you shall hear of later, the cook from Brensham Rectory. The Rector’s reluctance to marry them (for she was an excellent cook) was offset by his suspicion that there was a child on the way; and sure enough the child was born five months later, and was christened, perhaps inappropriately, with the name of Prudence. About the same time William’s two daughters by his first wife, who had married village lads, were also having babies; so what with the teeming crops and the outrageous weeds in William’s fields, and the squalling brats in his house, one got the impression of a vast fecundity.

  It was in this year that I had occasion to see William about some business and called at his farm about teatime on an afternoon in late summer. I remember very well the sense of fruitfulness and prodigality; the enormous yellow wagon lumbering along, piled house-high, it seemed, with golden stooks, and a field of uncut corn beside the drive with the straight stalks standing up to my waist, and yet with such a crop of poppies among the stalks that they made a crimson glow beneath the gold, like embers at the heart of a fire. And within the house, in the big kitchen which small farmers always use for living in, I discovered a cheerful bear-garden filled with babies, nappies, laughter, sizzling bacon, the steam from a kettle boiling over, and the intermingled smells of burning fat and scorched toast. There were, I suppose, only three babies, but I had the feeling that there were at least ten, because they all crawled on the floor in company with a number of dogs, cats and kittens, so that it was practically impossible to take a step without treading on something which yelped, mewed, squeaked or hollered. Betty and Joan (the two married daughters) also took up a good deal of room, for they were naturally buxom and there were two more babies on the way. Mrs Hart, the Rector’s late cook, was reasonably ample, and William, who had just come in to his tea, towered over all. I remember him picking up Prudence (and as he did so a black cat jumped on his shoulder) and holding her up in his arms so that she could tug at his beard. Just then I accidentally trod on the fingers of another baby, who let out a loud yell. Everybody roared with laughter, one of the dogs began to bark, the water from the boiling kettle hissed furiously on the fire, the cat leaped off William’s shoulder into the general mêlée, and the kitchen wore an aspect of confused pandemonium which Mrs Hart, ‘hoping I didn’t mind’, referred to with considerable meiosis as homeliness.

  We sat down to tea, and I amused myself by trying to count the number of animals in the room. There was a terrier and a spaniel bitch in pup, and a lot of cats all of which either had, or were obviously about to have, kittens. William loved cats, and two of them perched on his broad shoulders during tea. A fox cub appeared as if from nowhere and began to play with the terrier, and William told me how he’d picked it up in a cold wet furrow last spring (the vixen had been moving her litter away from the floods) and how he’d fed it with milk out of a fountain-pen filler until it was strong enough to fend for itself. When tea was finished he scraped up a handful of crumbs and threw them out of the window; and there suddenly materialized what I can only describe as a cloud of birds, sparrows and finches and thrushes and tits – they darkened the room for a second with their fluttering shadows as they showered down from the eaves and spoutings and bushes and boughs where they’d been waiting for the bounty scattered by William’s prodigal hand.

  ‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood’

  Though he loved birds and beasts and all wild things and liked to have them about him, it was not in William’s nature, itself so wild and free, to wish to ca
ge or confine them. The pet fox cub therefore had its freedom to come and go at its will. It showed no particular interest in the poultry, but it often went hunting for rats and moorhens in the osier-bed adjoining the lower boundary of William’s farm; and there, one morning towards the end of the cubbing season, General Bouverie’s huntsman saw it sneaking down the brookside and holloaed the hounds on to its line.

  They were, without a doubt, the slowest, stupidest and most riotous pack in England; and as most of them were pursuing moorhens, whimpering after water-rats, or simply standing at the edge of the osier-bed and waving their sterns, the fox cub had a fairly good start. It ran in a circle for about two miles, and gave the Hunt their fastest gallop of the season; but the hounds were close behind it when it came lolloping back towards the farmhouse and slipped through the hedge-gap near William’s drive gate.

  William had heard the hounds, and as he rushed out to rescue his fox cub he had armed himself, rather absurdly, with a shotgun, which in any case was unloaded. He was in time to see the hounds pull down the cub in his orchard – it was their first and last kill in the open during the whole of that season – and he was also in time to intercept General Bouverie and the rest of the field as they came puffing and snorting, a long way behind the hounds, full gallop up to his gate. There he confronted them, looking rather like a prophet of old with his bristling white beard, holding the shotgun at the ready.

  General Bouverie, a mild and courteous person when he was not on horseback, always became so excited during a hunt that he went purple in the face, blasted everybody he encountered with weird and terrible oaths, and demanded of them in furious tones, ‘Have you seen my fox, damn you?’ Peaceful shepherds, market-gardeners ploughing their land, and even passing motorists who were not aware there was a fox for miles, were often cursed up hill and down dale because they were too stupefied by the General’s demented appearance to answer this terrifying question. But now, as the General pounded up to the gate and yelled out to William, ‘Have you seen my fox, damn you?’ he received a reply which he had certainly never had before.

  ‘I have seen my fox,’ said William sternly, ‘and your hounds have just killed it.’

  ‘Your fox?’ spluttered General Bouverie, who believed like all Masters of Foxhounds that he had a prescriptive right to all the foxes within the boundaries of his hunting-country, ‘What the devil do you mean by your fox?’ And he uttered his favourite oath, which was the most extraordinary one I have ever heard: ‘Fishcakes and haemorrhoids!’

  ‘All the same,’ said William, with quiet dignity, ‘it was my fox; and this is my land; and if any of you dares to step over the boundary of my land I’ve got a gun.’

  A ridiculous situation arose, in which everybody talked except William. A woman with a drawling voice said, ‘The fellow must be drunk,’ several times. General Bouverie’s huntsman encouraged his hounds from a distance (although they needed no encouragement) to ‘tear ’im up, my beauties, tear ’im and worry ’im, worry, worry, worry!’ The General himself called upon fishcakes and haemorrhoids repeatedly but with diminishing conviction. And the Secretary of the Hunt, who was a lawyer, endeavoured to reason with William in a very learned way by pointing out that foxes, like other wild beasts, were legally considered to be animals ferae naturae, that is to say of a wild nature, in which the law recognized no private property whatsoever.

  But William, who was somewhat ferae naturae himself, took no notice. Perhaps he didn’t even listen, perhaps he was too full of grief for his little fox and of horror at the worrying noises of the hounds. But he continued to stand at the gate holding the gun awkwardly (for he hardly ever used it) and looking rather like a stiff sentry ‘On guard’ in a bad Victorian oleograph. Anon the huntsman blew his horn, and the hounds began to come back to him in twos and threes, bloody and stinking of fox, carrying tatters of fur in their mouths. General Bouverie called and cursed them alliteratively:

  ‘Hey, Barmaid, Bosphorus, blast the bitch, Bellman, Bountiful! Here, Dimple, Daisy, Dairymaid, Dauntless, damn the dog, Daffodil!’ and at last he turned his horse and rode away, followed by the disconsolate company. ‘I did want to see them break up their fox,’ said the drawling lady. ‘It’s so rarely the poor darlings ever get the chance . . . What an uncouth, what a barbaric old man!’

  Ups and Downs

  After that William gave notice to General Bouverie that he would never allow the Hunt on his land; and this action of his was to have far-reaching consequences, as you shall see. It had one immediate consequence, which was that the Hunt no longer bought their hay from him, and because the Depression was just beginning he was left with two big ricks of seeds on his hands. Then one of his cows got foot and mouth disease, and the Ministry of Agriculture sent their slaughterers to kill every beast on the farm. They had to fetch the village policeman before they dared to do it, for they had heard tales of how William had threatened the Hunt with a gun. In the end, however, he gave them surprisingly little trouble. When he saw the preparations for the burning, the faggots and hedge-brash piled high in his Home Ground, the fight went out of him suddenly and the policeman, who knew how to handle him, led him brokenhearted into the house.

  Because of this loss, and the time it took him to re-stock his farm, the Depression hit him badly. For two or three seasons there was a glut of fruit and nobody to buy it; the price of sprouts didn’t pay for the cost of growing them; sometimes it was actually cheaper to plough a crop into the ground than to try to market it. William, like all the other farmers round about Brensham, got into debt with the bank, the seed-merchant, the local tradesmen, and even the village pub; but unlike some of the others he paid them all in full when the new war began to loom up on the horizon and the farmers were suddenly prosperous again.

  Neither debt nor disaster could tame him, and even during the worst of the Depression he would often blow into Brensham like the wind, shattering the uncomfortable quietude of those stricken days when it seemed indeed as if we were taking part in the obsequies of a dying countryside, as if a graveside hush lay over the land. Into the Adam and Eve or the Trumpet or the Horse Narrow blew William, boisterous, thunderous, always discovering at the bottom of his trousers-pocket a forgotten half-crown to pay for another round of drinks; then out into the street at closing-time, singing and shouting his defiant happiness to the world at large, banging on the windows and doors of friends, acquaintances and strangers alike, and answering their sleepy protests with that strange proud boast about his apocryphal ancestry – ‘Thee carsn’t touch I! Thee carsn’t touch I! For I be descended from the poet Shakespeare!’ and so, with huzza and tolderolloll, away home to the farm on the hill.

  One of the most endearing things about William Hart was his complete lack of any shame or remorse afterwards; indeed he seemed to glory in the memory of his bouts and to look back on them with only one regret, that they were over. When the Rector happened to meet him on the morning following a particularly riotous night, and said to him sternly, ‘I hear you were very noisy last night, William,’ the wild old man threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Noisy?’ he said. ‘Why, I was drunk – rascally drunk!’ And he fairly smacked his lips over the night’s junketings – ‘Rascally drunk, Rector!’

  Liberty ’All

  William’s favourite pub was certainly the Horse and Harrow, because it had a boisterous atmosphere in which he felt at home. Its landlord, Joe Trentfield, who was a retired sergeant-major, and his huge wife who moved with the ponderous dignity of a full-rigged ship sailing into action, were boon-companions for William because like him they possessed an infinite capacity for laughter. Little came amiss to them as a source of fun; and the world as they saw it was a rich plum-pudding stuffed with joke and jest.

  Mimi and Meg, being brought up in this genial air, soon added their quota to the general merriment. They were both serving in the bar (illegally, I dare say) before they were fourteen; and in one of my earliest memories of William Hart I can see the two strapping l
ittle girls sitting on his knees, while he warmed a pint of beer with a red-hot poker and told them stories. He was a born storyteller and I think the only time he was ever serious was when he was inventing tales for the children. He would then tell the most comic story with that quiet gravity which children love. I remember very well the beginning of one of these tales, which will show you what kind of a storyteller William was.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a village called Merry-come-Sorrow and the folks who lived there were so mean, you’d never believe it, on Guy Fawkes’ night they actually let off their fireworks down a deep well so as the folks in the next village shouldn’t see ’em for nothing . . .’ He had a fund of old country sayings which he worked into the tales like proverbs worked into the design of a sampler – sayings like ‘It isn’t spring until you can plant your foot on twelve daisies’ and ‘Mists in March mean frosses in May’; and his vocabulary was crammed with peculiar words such as ‘tom-tolly’ and ‘mollock’ which seemed to possess large and comprehensive meanings – ‘mollock’, for example, meant ‘the-sound-and-sensation-when-you-slipped-up-in-the-mud-and-fell-into-a-puddle’. I never found out what ‘tomtolly’ meant; but the children seemed to understand William’s kind of shorthand, for they listened in grave silence and never dreamed of interrupting him to ask for explanations.