Brensham Village (16 page)

‘It's all right, Master Billy, all you want is a bit of a lie-down, see, a quiet lie-down in the spare bedroom till you feel better …'

After that I played a game of darts with Banks, while Sammy's familiar tale flowed majestically on towards its
tantalizing climax (his ship's siren was hooting for him, the Japanese girl had her arms round his neck, If you leave me, she said, I shall commit hara-kiri). Then I heard the telephone ringing, and a moment later Joe came out of his back-room and said: ‘That was the Colonel. He wants a bit of help. He says the flood's come up over the Summer Lcasow and trapped his cattle and sheep. I told him we'd all be down there in a few minutes.'

Mrs Trentfield came bustling out with Joe's mackintosh.

‘We do see Life,' she said.

We all packed into my little car, and I drove down the muddy lane which led towards the Lock. The ditches on either side of the lane were brimful, and in places were already overflowing. The Summer Leasow was a forty-acre meadow which lay in the bend of the river just past Sammy's cottage; it was a hay field in summer and in autumn the Colonel pastured his Ayr shires, and a few of his queer Spanish sheep, upon the rich lattermath.

Before we got to Sammy's cottage we were driving axle-deep through flood-water which flowed like a little river between the hedges. The rain had stopped, and a half-moon was showing through torn and ragged clouds. By its light we could see ahead of us a muddy lake which was the Summer Leasow. ‘Must be three feet of water there,' said Sammy. His cottage, which stood upon a bank, was well out of flood's way, but part of his garden was submerged and his boats, which he'd pulled up on the bank for tarring and winter repairs, were afloat already and tugging at their chains. ‘Lucky I pegged ‘em down,' he said. ‘Otherwise they'd have been halfway to Elmbury. Maybe they'll come in useful.'

Now we could see lights moving over the Summer Leasow and their stippled yellow reflections in the water. We left the car and waded towards the gate; the bitter
cold water came up to our knees. When we reached the gate we saw five figures about fifty yards away. We shouted and they came slowly towards us. They carried torches and hurricane lanterns, which showed up the bright surge of the water round their legs as they pushed through it. As they approached I recognized the Colonel and his cowman. The Colonel was wearing his fishing-waders, which came up to his waist, and in the light of his hurricane lantern he looked more wonderfully grotesque than ever; he looked like a kelpie emerging from his native lake. He was swearing hard, and the sound came to us on the wind like a deep purring growl.

‘Here we are,' we shouted. ‘What can we do to help?'

In shallower water now, he splashed more quickly towards us. I noticed that he was carrying a shepherd's crook. He said:

‘We got most of the cows out; but there are two stuck in the far hedge, and there's my goddam bull splashing about somewhere and bellowing like hell. And there are six sheep standing on that little tump of hay by the bank of the river. Can't reach the sods except by swimming.'

‘I'll go and fetch ‘em in a punt,' said Sammy.

‘How many are there of you?' called the Colonel.

I looked round, and was surprised to see that our number was increased by more than a dozen. Alfie and Dai Roberts had arrived carrying ropes, Jim Hartley from the Adam and Eve, David Groves the ganger, the Rector, two or three village boys, and even a few gipsyish figures, unmistakable as Fitchers and Gormleys who always seemed to appear magically in the village in moments of crisis. I noticed that the three men standing in the shallow water behind the Colonel were Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, and I remembered that they had been picking sprouts for him; but I should not have been at all surprised if they had
bicycled out from Elmbury, anticipating the flood, for they too delighted in crises, which gave them wonderful opportunities for scrounging, thieving, or earning tips.

‘Well, Jim,' said the Colonel to Mr Hartley, ‘I note that thee turns out a lot quicker to a flood than to a fire! Or hast'a brought thy old leaky pump to pump the river dry?' He fell easily and without affectation into our country speech; it came naturally to him; it wasn't part of a pose as it is with some of our petty squires; he was genuinely bilingual.

Sammy said:

‘We'll take four boats round by the river. Two of ‘em can take off the sheep and the other two can help you to chivvy the cows and the bull.'

A few minutes later I found myself pulling one of Sammy's row-boats down the channel between his osier-beds. Sammy and Abraham the ferryman took the long black punts, and Joe Trentfield followed me in a fourteen-foot dingy. Sammy had provided each of us with ropes, neatly coiled, and we each had a passenger armed with a boathook. Mine was a murderous looking Fitcher or Gormley who seemed extremely unhappy, having, perhaps, some atavistic disquiet about boats and ropes and floods and midnight adventuring upon the river.

As soon as we got out of the channel and into the main stream I felt the strength of the flood. The current gave a sharp tug at the stern and pulled the boat round so that I lost ten yards before I began to make headway. Ahead of me I could see Sammy and Abraham standing up in their punts as they paddled them; Joe passed me with a couple of strong pulls. What watermen the people of Brensham were! They could all swim like otters from childhood and they could handle any sort of boat with the skill and confidence of longshoremen. I thought: but they are hillmen too, they walk like hillmen, and they're as happy on horse-back
as they are on the river; and they plough and dig and grow better sprouts than anybody else in the district! And they hang together, I thought, as Pistol once said. I felt proud to be with them and to belong to them, and I pulled hard at the sculls and got some way on the boat at last, so that I came level with Joe and saw over my shoulder the rhythmic dip of Sammy's paddle as he drove the long punt round the bend.

The horned Spanish sheep were jumping about and playing king of the castle upon the isolated hay-tump; they looked rather like ibex. Sammy shouted to me: ‘They're too big for your boats. Abraham and I will take ‘em off in the punts. You and Joe go hard a-starboard and help chivvy the old bull.' I swung my boat round the hay-tump and watched Sammy with two huge strokes bring his punt beautifully alongside it; then standing on the seat and looking like a giant against the moon he seized a struggling sheep and lowered it into the stern. Abraham's punt as black as Charon's nosed in beside his. I gave two hard pulls and felt the grip of the current suddenly loosen; it plucked feebly at the stern and then suddenly the boat shot ahead into the yellowish-brown backwater of the Summer Leasow.

I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of the moving lights carried by the Colonel and his men; and as I rowed towards them the Fitcher, or Gormley, cried ‘Listen!' and I heard shouts, splashes and furious bellowing ahead. There were cries of ‘Head him off! Head him off!' and a moment later the Ayrshire bull appeared in front of us, swimming like a hippo towards the river. Joe came along with the dinghy, and together we approached the bull until we were close enough to see his great flat head and the short curls between his horns. Then with an angry snort he turned, and we drove him back towards the shallower
water, rowing alongside him and prodding him now and then with the boathook.

There was a gateway at the top of the meadow, the side nearest to the Colonel's farm, and the men in the water were herding two cows towards it; we drove the bull in the same direction. Soon he joined the cows and with boats and men forming a half-moon behind them they plunged on through three feet of water towards the gap.

The approach to the gateway, of course, was deep and muddy; we should have to swim them through it; but the Colonel somehow or other had managed to open the gate and he was now perched on top of it, swearing, waving, and shouting instructions. The cows went through quietly enough, but the bull took fright at the Colonel, who was certainly a most alarming figure, and in the course of his passage through the gateway he charged the open gate. The Colonel toppled backwards off it and disappeared beneath the water.

We in the boats could move quicker than the men who were wading; so we were first in the gateway and I was able to rescue, just as it was sinking, the Colonel's remarkable hat. (The barbs of several fish-hooks pricked my fingers as I grabbed it out of the water.) At first we could find no trace of the Colonel himself; but Joe spotted two hands clutching the middle bar of the gate and a moment later a grey head appeared, and then an apologetic red face and a pair of shoulders – this was indeed a kelpie rising from his native deeps! - and we caught hold of the two hands and tried to lift the Colonel out.

He was snorting exactly like his bull.

‘You'll have to heave hard,' he spluttered. ‘I seem to be stuck in a sort of pismire.'

At last we got him into my boat. He looked pretty bad. His teeth were chattering and his face was no longer
scarlet but bluish-grey. We laid him down between the seats and for a few moments he closed his eyes. I thought he had fainted; but his hand began to move feebly and patted the pocket of his jacket. His trembling fingers found the opening, the hand was inserted, and a moment later it brought out the flask. Immediately the Colonel opened his eyes and sat up. He unscrewed the top of the flask and began to drink. By some extraordinary chance it must have been full; for he was drinking for a good thirty seconds and we could hear the gulp and gurgle as the whisky went down. When the last drop was finished he wiped his moustache and the expression upon his face, which had been that of a dying grampus, suddenly changed. A thousand creases, puckers, and wrinkles appeared in his cheeks and round his eyes. ‘Whisky inside and water out,' he grunted. He grinned. ‘Do you know what happened?' he said. ‘I fell in head first and my waders were filled with wind; so there I was like a bloody duck with me head in the muck and me arse in the air and floating round and round like a teetotum. I swear I must have swallowed half a dozen fishes!' - and then he threw back his head and began to laugh so loudly that even the men in the water, forty yards away, knew that he was still alive, so merrily that Pistol, Bardolph and Nym began to laugh too, a harsh cackle, a throaty guffaw, and a squeaky giggle respectively, borne to us across the swirling flood.

In the Colonel's sitting-room, before a great log fire, we watched him slowly and steamily drying himself; for as usual he scorned to change his clothes and when Mr Chorlton prudently suggested that he should go to bed with
a hot water bottle he declared that he'd been to bed in his time with a lot of peculiar things but never thank God with that. He had invited us all back for drinks and he had provided whisky, perry, home-made sloe gin, parsnip wine, and two of his sister's famous caraway-seed cakes. He drank most of the whisky himself, because, he said, none of the other drinks would tolerate the amount of dilution occasioned by the fact that his belly was half-full of river water. Also, he declared, it would take something pretty strong to kill the fishes which were swimming round and round inside him.

There were at least twenty of us in the room, each dripping our separate little pools upon the Colonel's carpet. I was surprised to see Lord Orris and Jane, and even more surprised to see Billy Butcher. He'd been sick, he whispered, and the cold water had sobered him, and now he was prepared to get drunk again on the Colonel's sloe gin. He was said to have done great deeds in the water, having actually swum twenty yards to release one of the cows which was stuck in the hedge. ‘Village drunk makes good,' he said with a grin. ‘Plucking bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon.'

Each had his tale of adventure or mishap. Jane, who feared bulls though probably she feared nothing else on earth, had plunged into a blackthorn hedge, and torn her skirt to ribbons, when the bellowing beast splashed towards her. However, she still had a light of triumph in her-eyes; for she had paid her call upon the Syndicate, though she would not tell us what she had said to them. ‘It was an extraordinary thing,' she said, ‘but I got the impression they were afraid of me.' I didn't think it was extraordinary at all; what mortal would not be afraid when Pallas Athene stood before him speaking winged words?

Lord Orris, ineffectual as ever, had succeeded in lassooing
a cow by the horns but had caught his own leg in the rope, so that he fell flat on his back in the water as soon as the cow plunged away. Sammy Hunt had been butted in the behind by the Spanish ram, which had nearly knocked him out of the punt. Sir Gerald Hope-Kingley had broken his spectacles, without which he was half blind, and Mr Mountjoy, misadventuring into a quagmire, had lost one of his shoes.

But incomparably the most perilous accidents had befallen Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. The bull, it seemed, had all but gored them in vulnerable and sensitive places; Bardolph, on one occasion had only escaped it by swimming underwater for twenty yards; Nym, on another, had actually leaped upon its back and steered it by the horns. The sheep, the cows and the bull would all have perished but for the courageous intervention of these three heroes. We listened to their tales in wonderment and admiration which was increased when we perceived that all three of them had managed to perform their aquatic feats without getting wet.

However, the Colonel gave them ten shillings each and being very full of perry they made a speech declaring that he was a gentleman for whom it would always be a pleasure to put themselves in mortal peril if the need should arise again. Then they took themselves off, and it was not until half an hour later, when the rest of the guests were leaving, that we missed three mackintoshes from the stand in the hall.

But they were old mackintoshes and their owners, who were Mr Chorlton, Billy Butcher, and Joe Trentfield, were mellowed by sloe gin so that they only laughed when Banks asked if they wanted him to take any action officially. ‘Let the rogues have ‘em,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘for upon my soul I love a good rogue.'