The Blue Field Read online

  For those who were hardy enough to put up with the high wind of laughter which was always blowing there, the Horse and Harrow was the perfect pub; and Joe was the perfect landlord, for he stood in direct apostolic succession from Chaucer’s Host – ‘Eek therto he was right a mery man.’ His free-and-easy bar – ‘Liberty’ All’, he called it-was probably the most important social institution in Brensham.

  Now social institutions do not occur by chance or spring up suddenly; they are the product of gradual evolution, they grow up like trees in the landscape of our lives, they root themselves deep into our history and entwine themselves round our hearts. The Horse and Harrow like our oldest oak tree has been several hundred years a-growing; and like that somewhat similar institution, the Church of England, it is the consequence of a whole series of characteristic compromises. Its ancestry is mixed, complex and by no means wholly to its credit. It has evolved gradually out of the wayfarers’ inn and the coaching-house, the dirty little gin-palace and the village drinking-den; and today it is not merely, or even primarily, a place for drinking in but forms one of the kingpins of our society.

  If the Horse and Harrow were to disappear tomorrow I do not know what we should put in its place nor how we should contrive a substitute to carry out its multitudinous functions. It is our club, meeting-place, recreation-room, social centre and goodness knows what else rolled into one. Our farmers meet to discuss their business there, our young men in the early and late stages of their courtship take their girls there in preference to the pictures, our married men take their wives there after supper in the evenings. All classes come together in its bar, play darts and shove-ha’penny and cribbage together, tell tales and sing and debate and argue about village politics and about the larger politics of the country and the world.

  Whatever changes and chances may happen to me, I think I shall cherish for as long as I live the memory of certain evenings in the Horse and Harrow after cricket, when the whole village team with their wives and their daughters and their girls crowded into Joe’s little bar, and the wind of Joe’s laughter blew about among us, and Mimi or Meg began to strum on the piano. Almost always before long Joe in his sergeant-major’s voice would propose the absurd game which always delighted him: ‘Now then, Ladies and Gentlemen, what about a round of Sing, Say or Pay?’ The principle of the game was that everybody had to sing a song, tell a story, or pay for a round of drinks; and the pleasant absurdity of the game was that we knew beforehand (since most people’s repertory was limited) exactly what favourite piece everybody would perform. Thus the familiar songs and the oft-told stories became associated with particular characters, became as it were part of their characters. Sammy Hunt, our cricket captain, who had also been a sea captain in his day, always sang a song called The Fireship:

  ‘As I strolled out one evenin’ out upon a night’s career,

  I spied a lofty fireship, and after her did steer;

  I hoisted her my sig-a-nals which she very quickly knew,

  And when she seed my bunting fly she immediately

  hove-to-o-o.’

  Alternatively he would tell an interminable story, which never came to an end although he continually promised to cut it bloody short, about how he nearly married a geisha girl in Japan or how he quelled a mutiny in the engine-room of his ship. We all knew these stories by heart and sometimes when Sammy paused we used to finish the sentence for him by chanting it in unison. But Sammy was quite unperturbed by this, and would gravely correct us if we got the sentence wrong – ‘No, it wasn’t the little yeller feller I hit on the nose – I clipped him behind the ear, see, just like this, because you can always put a Chink out by hitting him behind the ear. . . Well, to cut a long story bloody short. . .’

  Alfie Perks, the Cricket Club Secretary, a tousled little man who looked like a terrier, could scarcely sing at all, and of his only song he could only remember five lines, like this:

  ‘The Red Red Poppies,

  The Red Red Poppies,

  Down where the Red Poppies Blow.

  The Red Red Poppies,

  The Red Red Poppies,

  Oh—’

  He always said ‘Oh’ at this point, because, he said, that was where he forgot the rest of the song; and soon the ‘Oh’ became a traditional ending to the song, which we all sang in chorus.

  Jaky Jones, needless to say, told a gruesome story about a man who got drunk and fell into an open grave in the churchyard; Mimi sang a tinny little song about Thinking of You When Skies are Blue; Mrs Trentfield laughed so much at her own story that we never understood what it was about; and Joe’s song consisted mainly of a lively imitation of a pig grunting. Mr Chorlton, as you might expect, was the most versatile of our singers; he sang with equal enthusiasm, and equal disregard of tune, in English, French, Italian, German or Latin. We used to persuade him to sing Mihi est propositum In taberna mori because it had a good rollicking air and because the unfamiliar sound of the words always made Joe Trentfield laugh – to Joe, who as a soldier had seen most of the world, anything Foreign was automatically funny. But oddly enough the performance which the village liked best was Mr Chorlton’s recitation of the Frogs’ Chorus from the Batrachoi: ‘Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!’ of which he gave a very spirited rendering indeed. I often used to think that there was surely not another village among all the thirty thousand villages of England where you could hear a recitation from Aristophanes and see a score of market-gardeners and farm-labourers taking up the chorus one by one so that soon they were all making a passable imitation of the noise which the frogs made in the Athenian Marshland two thousand years ago.

  William Hart sang a song as prodigal as himself, an old folk-song dating I think from the time of George the Second, about a soldier and a sailor who join together in a prayer:

  ‘And the first thing they prayed for was a pound of good steak,

  And if we have one pound may we always have ten . . .

  “God send us a bellyful!” said the sailor, “Amen”.

  ‘And the next thing they prayed for was a pint of good ale,

  And if we have one pint may we always have ten . . .

  “God send us a bellyful!” said the sailor, “Amen”’

  And so on for half a dozen verses. But old William’s favourite song of all, when he came blustering into the Horse and Harrow like a March wind, was the noisiest, merriest, naughtiest song in the world, with twelve verses each more shocking than the last one and a rollicking chorus in which even Mrs Trentfield, laughing till she cried and shaking like a jelly, shamelessly joined:

  ‘Roll Me Over!

  In the clover!

  Roll Me Over – lay me down – and do it again! . . .’

  ‘Well, well, we do see Life,’ choked Mrs Trentfield, wiping away her tears.

  Fermented Happiness

  But now at long last the years began to take their toll of William. Just before the war he had his seventieth birthday, and shortly afterwards his only infirmity – an arthritis in the knees – became painfully acute. People prophesied that he’d snuff out like a guttering candle when he could no longer manage to walk to the Horse and Harrow or even hobble as far as the Adam and Eve. But he was tougher than that; and when his legs began to fail him he determined, in a less compromising spirit than Mahomet’s, that if he could not get to the drink the drink should come to him. There were obvious physical difficulties, however, in stocking his small farmhouse with sufficient beer for his needs; the brewers’ lorry would have had to climb the hill every week at least. Moreover, he had noticed and he deplored the fact, that the beer got thinner as the years went by. He decided that the time had come to renounce his customary drink in favour of one which contained a higher percentage of happiness in a smaller bulk; and it would be convenient, obviously, if this happiness could be manufactured on the premises. So William went in for home-made wine.

  He was provident in this matter if in nothing else; for he began to lay down his first vintage, as it were, several
years before the arthritis finally immobilized him. He took back from one of our annual Flower Shows, pushing it upon a large wheelbarrow, his biggest-ever vegetable marrow, which had been rejected by the judges and unkindly compared by those Philistines with Epstein’s Genesis. He hacked it into convenient pieces, fermented it with sugar, and turned it into wine. He certainly had no lack of the raw material of happiness in his proliferous garden; and that same autumn he fermented a great quantity of damsons, greengages and plums. Thanks to this piece of forethought there was no thirsty gap in his life, no dry desert in his years. One evening he. drank his last pint of beer in the Adam and Eve, hobbled painfully home on two sticks, and immediately celebrated his safe arrival by broaching the first cask of plum jerkum. He took to the stuff at once; and cottagers who passed along the lane on their way home from the pub often declared that they had heard him bellowing with joy.

  The plum wine was finished in a couple of months, and then he started on the damson; and when that cask was dry he tackled the marrow, the gooseberry, the rhubarb and the blackcurrant in turn. His taste was extremely catholic, and he was always experimenting; for he believed that there was no wholesome vegetable, flower or fruit which couldn’t be improved by turning it into wine, and he boasted that his cellar was capable of providing him with a different sort of nightcap for every day of the month if he felt inclined for variety. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I’m in the mood for Artichoke and sometimes I feels like Dandelion.’ He even made wine out of parsley, which caused the villagers to shake their heads, for we have an old superstition about parsley wine, that it’s for lazy husbands and shy wives – ‘What would old William want with such stuff, at his age?’

  He soon became noted all over the district for his wonderful brews which seemed to be much more powerful than anybody else’s – perhaps Priapus saw to it that the sugar-content in his home-grown fruit and vegetables was exceptionally high. His friends and neighbours formed the habit of dropping in for a cordial glass or two to drive out the cold on chilly mornings or the damp on wet ones. But these guests reported that his stocks, despite the steady drain upon them, by no means diminished; for Mr Hart continued to be provident, and he was very mindful of a principle which politicians and economists, too, would do well to remember: consumption must not exceed production, the supply must keep pace with the demand. He therefore devised a long-term plan; what industrialists would call a production-schedule; and the cheerful assumption underlying this plan was that he would live to be a hundred and that he would tend to drink more as he grew older.

  Pru

  Meanwhile his third daughter Prudence had grown up very unlike her buxom, bouncing step-sisters. She was a little pale wisp of a thing, with a wan-looking expression, a codlins-and-cream complexion, and large china-blue eyes. They always looked slightly moist, as if she were about to cry. She was as quiet as a mouse, as prim as a Victorian maid, she spoke when she was spoken to and suffered herself to be mildly bullied by her step-sisters. We thought of her as Cinderella.

  At the beginning of the war, to everybody’s astonishment, she went off in her quiet mouselike way and joined the ATS; and very pathetic she looked, when she came home for her first leave, in a rough khaki uniform which was much too big for her. She’d never stand up to the life, people said; she had a weak chest; she was coughing badly already; sleeping in those draughty huts would kill her; and so on. But in 1940 Brensham heard that she was stationed at a lonely gun-site somewhere on the east coast. Imagine little Pru actually firing those great guns! Almost everybody in the village started simultaneously to knit her pullovers and balaclava helmets. Some even sent her their sweet rations. ‘Our little grumbles seem very silly,’ said the Rector’s wife, ‘when you think of the Hurricane pilots, and the men in the destroyers, and frail girls like Pru sacrificing themselves to keep us safe!’ Pru, in fact, became the village heroine.

  But alas, not for long. The gun-site was undoubtedly lonely, and if Pru was not homesick I am sure that she looked homesick. She was the kind of girl whom all men want to comfort, care for, and protect, though sometimes of course they go about it in a rather curious way. So early in 1941 she was invalided out of the ATS and returned to Brensham, where a few months later in her quiet mouselike way, without fuss or bother or complaint, she gave birth to a boy. She called him Jerry; and explained calmly to her scandalized step-sisters that she did so because the Jerries had been over at the time.

  Shortly after this the second Mrs Hart died, and Pru was left with the job of keeping house for William, which she did with serene efficiency, cooking almost as well as her mother had done, cheering and comforting him in his loneliness. She was his favourite daughter, because the others, who had found husbands and respectability, were both ashamed of his past and disapproving of his present, and never lost an opportunity to tell him that he’d kill himself with drinking that nasty home-made wine. Pru, on the other hand, let him drink to his heart’s content, helped him up the stairs when his knees were stiff or his legs unsteady, and did everything that a dutiful daughter could do to make his old age easy and contented. She was Cordelia to his Lear.

  She had, however, one fault; and William was tolerant of it as she was tolerant of his drinking. She seemed to have some kinship with the owls and the bats, the luminous-eyed cats and the soft downy moths, for not bolts nor bars nor chains nor locks could keep Pru in at night. Not even her twelve-month-old baby; but she was a good mother as well as a dutiful daughter, and because it would have been unreasonable to leave the crippled old man in charge of it, she solved the problem by the simple method of taking the baby with her. She wrapped it up in plenty of woollies, tucked it into the pram, and laid a mackintosh sheet on top in case of rain; and off she went. Pru’s pram, parked after dark by the side of a road and generally close to a stile, became a familiar sight in the district round Brensham; for she was courting again, and this time it was an American.

  She had her second baby in the spring of 1944, by which time the American soldier had been moved to an extremely secret headquarters where, it appeared, no letters could reach him. Whether Pru grieved, in her quiet mouselike way, nobody ever knew. To outward appearances she was utterly unmoved. She brought up the new baby, a fine bouncing girl, with the same thoughtful care which she had lavished on her first one; and she continued to look after William as well, keeping the house spotless and cooking all his favourite dishes for dinner. She also milked the cows, fed the poultry, and at busy seasons helped with the picking of plums and sprouts. It was a wonder how she found time to do so much; and still more of a wonder when the soft dark autumn nights came again and Pru, her day’s work finished, resumed her late-walking with two babies in the pram.

  This time it was an airman. He came from the extreme north of Scotland, speaking a tongue which only Pru could understand. Perhaps even she could not properly understand it, for he stoutly maintained during the subsequent proceedings that he had repeatedly told her he was a married man and that she had said it didn’t matter in the least. Pru celebrated VJ-Day by having her third baby which turned out to be another girl.

  She herself, who accepted life as it came, would never, I think, have troubled to sue for a paternity order against the Scot; she was badgered into this course by Mrs Merrythought, who persisted in regarding her as an innocent victim of the wolfishness of men, and by Mrs Halliday, the wife of our newly-elected Member of Parliament, who ran a créche in the village hall during the plum-picking season and was moved by what she regarded as Pru’s pitiable condition to start a sort of crusade on her behalf. ‘The girl must have her Rights,’ said Mrs Halliday, who believed that she had a vocation to see that everybody received justice in a manifestly unjust world. But the only Rights which Pru got in the end consisted of ten shillings a week and the right to appear in the Magistrates’ Court at Elmbury, where her moist eyes and innocent expression so deeply moved the Chairman of the Bench that he described the unfortunate airman as a blackguard and a cad whom he would have h
ad the greatest pleasure in horse-whipping personally if only the Law had allowed it. When the court was over Mrs Halliday, whom we suspected of being a crypto-communist, took Pru to a café where she bought her a cup of coffee and spent twenty minutes or so telling her how much better the Russians look after girls who got into trouble; butPru’s stepsisters, who had accompanied her to court and to the café, said that Pru paid very little attention, and that she kept looking over her shoulder, with those large love-in-the-mist eyes, at a sailor on leave who happened to be sitting at the next table.

  Our MP

  ‘Simple folk,’ Mr Chorlton once remarked, ‘often become Socialists because they are poor and others are rich; more complicated people sometimes do so because they cannot bear to be rich while others are poor.’ Our Member of Parliament was one of the latter sort; and we knew quite a lot about him because it had turned out that he was the same M. R. Halliday (Halliday minor) to whom Mr Chorlton had taught the appreciation of Virgil’s hexameters about the year 1919. Old schoolmasters delight to indulge in a complicated sort of detective-game when the names of their ex-pupils get into the papers; and Mr Chorlton, who had an enormous acquaintance among gossipy old dons at Oxford, succeeded in piecing together what was probably a fairly accurate history of Mr Halliday’s career.

  It seemed that he was one of those people who are driven into scholarship almost against their will; for he suffered from a slight deformity of his foot, which at school and at Oxford had prevented him from playing the usual games. ‘I’ve had half a dozen boys like that,’ said Mr Chorlton, ‘they slog away at their books with a sort of melancholy fanaticism while all the time they’re eating their hearts out to do the absurd things which footballers do after matches -to run riot in the streets and climb lamp-posts and make away with the helmets of policemen. And when they get Double Firsts and become Presidents of the Union and Senior Wranglers and whatnot it’s an empty triumph because they’d much rather have had a rugger Blue or rowed in the boat-race!’