Brensham Village (2 page)

Oddly enough, I do not remember the precise occasion when with Dick, Donald and Ted I first scrambled up the gorsy slopes of Brensham Hill. What I remember is a synthesis of many days we spent there during that first summer holiday from prep school.

The way to the hill from Elmbury took us through Brensham Village, which was long and straggling and ran in a semi-circle more or less coincident with one of the lower contours. The houses were mostly half-timbered, with deep straw thatch, and their gardens were full of old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks and peonies, sweet-williams and rambler roses, red-hot pokers and love-lies-bleeding. There was a scent of gillyflowers which I remember still; so that whenever I smell it I think of Brensham.

There was a church with a tall spire, beside which three poplars grew, and spaced through the village at decent intervals there were three pubs, the Horse and Harrow, the
Trumpet, and the Adam and Eve. The Horse and Harrow, was locally spoken of as the Horse Narrow, which was confusing to strangers and had certainly confused the itinerant artist who had painted its inn-sign; for he had represented with meticulous accuracy a horse and an arrow. Nobody minded; nobody suggested taking the sign down and altering it, or making the artist paint a new one. The thing was a good joke; so much the better. That was the Brensham attitude and, looking back upon it now, I can see that it was typical of Brensham, where the people are humorous and tolerant and crack-brained and wise.

The Adam and Eve also had its painted sign. The artist this time had given full value for money; the tree, the forbidden fruit (undoubtedly a Cox's Orange Pippin), the serpent, the two naked figures, all were there in careful detail. If you looked closely you perceived that Eve's face wore a look of mischievous and disingenuous delight, not to say satisfaction; clearly, she had eaten the apple and enjoyed it. But there were some who said that the model for Eve had been the red-headed wanton little puss of a barmaid who served in the pub when the artist was staying there.

In the middle of the village was a turning off the road, called Magpie Lane, which led to the cricket-field and also to the Colonel's farm. Along this lane were a lot of little cottages which belonged to the Colonel; and I shall never forget my astonishment when I saw a number of small girls, who were the daughters of the cottagers, curtsy to the Colonel as he passed by on his motor-bike. He waved back, and his blue eyes twinkled. I had never seen a curtsy before; it was an enchanting sight, the small girls in their print frocks clutching the hem and bobbing, and the grotesque and wonderful old man waving back, at some peril to his stability, as he chugged by on his fantastical machine. It seemed to me entirely proper that he should receive these
marks of respect; and I tugged hard at the peak of my school-cap as he went by.

Immediately opposite Magpie Lane was Mrs Doan's Post Office and Village Stores, which sold almost everything from fish-hooks to corn-plasters. The only commodities, however, which concerned us in those days were huge and tiger-striped bull's-eyes, so indestructible that you could use them for marbles, and elastic for catapults. Mrs Doan's elastic was very thick, and square in section; surely it must have been made specially for catapults by some manufacturer with the heart of a boy, for I cannot imagine any other use for it. Nor, I think, could Mrs Doan; and since she strongly disapproved of the slaughter of birds, she had to invent an elaborate fiction to the effect that we employed our catapults for the purpose of shooting at tin cans. ‘Now, remember, no
live
targets,' she would say. ‘You will get just as much fun shooting at empty bottles; but you must take care not to cut yourselves with the broken glass.' Then she would quote to us a Victorian rhyme:

If Human Beings only knew
What sorrows little birds went through
I think that even boys
Would never think it sport or fun
To fire a nasty horrid gun
Only for the
noise.

‘Of course,' she would say, ‘I know that catapults are silent; but this elastic is
very strong
, and if you hit a poor little fluffy bird with a stone you might hurt it
very badly
.' It was all we could do to keep our faces straight; we whose catapult handles each bore a score of notches. And I don't think Mrs Doan really succeeded in believing her tin-can fiction. She sold us the stuff reluctantly, rather in the manner of the
Apothecary selling the poison to Romeo: ‘My poverty, but not my will, consents.' ‘It's very
strong
,' she would say hesitantly. And so it was. The Elmbury shops sold nothing like it, and offered us instead strips of narrow pink stuff which might have served, we thought, for a girl's garters. We were shocked and insulted and thereafter we put up with her admonitions and dealt exclusively with Mrs Doan, whose square-sided cattie-lackey was as black as liquorice and so strong that when you pulled it back to have a shot you felt like a longbowman at the Battle of Agincourt.

When you started to climb the hill you left the half-timbering behind; the village still straggled along beside the steep path, but the cottages were built of limestone quarried a few hundred yards away, and the hedges gradually gave place to stone walls. Then you came to the end of the path and to the last cottage, which was inhabited by an old man with a wooden leg and a long beard. He kept in his garden a billy-goat which also had a long beard. We called him Goaty Pegleg, and thought of him as the hill's janitor, for he was almost always to be found leaning on the gate at the road's end. If he were feeling good-humoured he opened the gate for us; and we went through into a rough chalky field full of furze-bushes, ragwort, thistles and rabbits. A stony cart track led upwards towards the quarries, the banks covered with scrub and bramble, the hanging woods of oak, sycamore and ash, and the larch plantation on the hilltop, with the round preposterous tower of Brensham Folly just showing above the feathery tops of the conifers.

This was the unexplored jungle, the unclimbed mountain, the unmapped hinterland! (We didn't know what a
hinterland was but thought it must be some particularly impenetrable sort of forest.) Off we scampered, with our butterfly-nets, our rabbit snares given us by Pistol, to maraud, to slaughter, and to explore.

How often the reality disappoints even proper explorers of virgin lands! I suppose that El Dorado wasn't golden when old tired Raleigh came to the bitter end of the dream. But Brensham did not let us down; the hill which we had peopled, as we sat in the nursery window, with fabulous beasts and fabulous men did not fail us when at last we set foot upon it.

There were no hoopoes nor golden orioles, it is true; but there was a pair of merlin falcons, and before our amazed eyes a
brown
jackdaw flew away among the black ones which with loud clacking and chatter rose from the old quarries. We saw no fire-crested wrens, but plenty of goldcrests in the larch plantation. And there also, while we watched and waited for we knew not what, we heard a patter as light as falling leaves, and held our breath while three dappled shadows cantered by, paused among the bracken, became for a moment substantial in the sunlight as they twitched velvet ears and noses, and then suddenly in a panic and flurry of delicate legs rejoined the trees' lacy shadows and so vanished. The Mad Lord's fallow-deer still roamed Brensham Hill.

So did the Mad Lord. We saw him, I think, once during the summer holiday. He didn't look mad; but he certainly didn't look like a lord. He was dressed in an old jacket and breeches which would have been moderately becoming upon a scarecrow, and he rode upon a moth-eaten grey, an ancient and decrepit bag of bones which the meanest of his tenants would surely have sent to the kennels long ago. We held open for him the wicket-gate into the larch plantation; he felt in his pocket for pennies, found none, and gave us
instead a slow, gentle smile. We raised our caps, and to our astonishment he swept off his hat, if it could be called a hat, for like his jacket it would have served to frighten the rooks. He rode slowly away and we stood amazed at his courtesy: a lord had taken off his hat to us and smiled! He tittuped down the ride, on his terrible mare which was rather like Famine's mount in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse;
and it was four or five years before I saw him again. By then I had read a book and I recognized a likeness; I knew that I had seen Don Quixote riding on Rosinante.

The Mad Lord, whose wife had died, had a daughter of about our own age, a pale-faced, wide-eyed, flaxen-haired child called Jane whom we encountered from time to time during our walks on the hill. She soon became friendly and at ease with us, and one day she informed us, to our great astonishment, ‘I have an ancestor who lives in a sort of jamjar. I only show him to my special friends. You can come and see him if you like.' We followed her down by a rough scrambling path to the Mad Lord's house on the side of the hill, where she obtained from her easygoing nurse a large and important-looking key and led us down the garden to a very peculiar building which she told us was the private chapel. (It had been designed, we learned later, by the second Lord Orris who had made a Grand Tour and had been greatly impressed by Venice.) She unlocked the door and took a candle and a box of matches off the shelf.'We‘re going down to the family vault,' she said. ‘Hardly anybody goes there except relations.' She held the candle above her head to light our way down some wet slippery steps into a place of cavernous
darkness which was full of cobwebs and the rustle of bats and which had a queer damp smell. At the far end of it was an oaken door with a heavy padlock; she nodded towards it and said: ‘I've never been through there; but I know what's in it. Can you guess?'

We said we couldn't.

‘Coffins
,' said our young hostess. ‘But I expect they're not worth seeing. They are all the dull ancestors. Robert, the exciting one, is here.'

She lifted the candle to show us a small recess in the stone wall, where there stood, not a jamjar, but a beautiful urn, greeny-bronze in colour and very delicately fashioned. Hanging on the wall beneath it was a framed inscription in neat old-fashioned handwriting:

‘This Urn contains the Heart and Viscera of Robert La Bruère who fell at the Siege of Acre in 1191.'

Craning our necks we read above it another and later inscription:

‘There is a tradition that Robert La Bruère distinguished himself in the Third Crusade, and was at one time a sort of aide-de-camp to Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and eventually met his death in combat with Saladin himself. His embalmed heart and viscera were brought home in 1194 after the failure of the Crusade. Having suffered various vicissitudes they were interred here in 1790.'

‘What's viscera?' we asked.

Jane gave us a superior look.

‘Insides,' she said. ‘But his heart's there as well. For all we know it might actually have a hole in it, where Saladin struck him with his scimitar.'

It was our turn to be superior.

‘Scimitars don't stick,' we said. ‘They slice.'

‘Well, then, with a slice out of it,' said Jane, tossing her head. ‘Like a melon. Naturally we haven't looked. But I was allowed to hold the jar in my hands once. It was awfully light; but my father said: “Hearts weigh surprisingly light when courage and fear have left them.”'

We began to think very highly of Jane. ‘Well, that's that,' she said, in a businesslike tone. ‘Goodbye, Robert.' She seemed to be on excellent terms with her ancestor. Then she held up the candle again and a bat's opening wings threw a huge and grotesque shadow on the roof, like that of a vampire; and Jane with scarcely a glance at it led us up the steps which were wet with green slime and showed us the way back through the garden gate. Another wonder was added to Brensham, which was surely the only village where you could find the heart of a crusader.

We had peopled the quarries with adders; and sure enough among plenty of grass snakes and blindworms and a few swift darting lizards we found before long the exquisite poisonous creature with the yellow V behind his head. We never had any fear of snakes and I even tried the dangerous experiment of picking up an adder by his tail, and cracking him like a whip; thus, Pistol, Bardolph, or Nym had told us, you snapped his neck and he couldn't possibly hurt you. But my adder's neck was made of tougher stuff; he whipped back towards my hand like a piece of Mrs Doan's cattie-lackey, and I dropped him only just in time. After that we cut ourselves forked sticks when we went adder-hunting and used them to pin our victims to the ground. It was easy then
to catch them behind the back of the neck and hold them prisoner while the forked tongue flickered out and the tail lashed back like a steel spring. One day as we held a snake thus we were astonished to discover that its belly was porcelain blue instead of the usual yellowy-white. In other respects it looked like an adder; but we had never heard of a blue-bellied adder and we accepted it as another of the marvels of Brensham. We let it go, and afterwards searched through our nature books in vain for some account of it. Many years later, in an essay by W. H. Hudson, I read how the great naturalist had found just such a snake in the New Forest and how he too had let it go rather than slay it and coil it in a bottle for the learned consideration of the herpetologists whom he despised.

Blue-bellied adders, brown jackdaws, merlins, fallow-deer - what more could we ask of Brensham? Certainly there were no Camberwell Beauties, but there was a Convolvulus Hawk Moth, which visits Britain rarely from North Africa and has a wingspan as wide as our largest native moth, the Death's Head. It sat upon a larch-trunk, resting perhaps after its long journey and awaiting its predestined captors; and we caught it with the aid of our prep-school master, Mr Chorlton, who had a holiday cottage on the roadside between Elmbury and Brensham. This great man, who made us love Latin and Greek, had played cricket for Oxford and Somerset, had written a learned commentary on the plays of Aeschylus, now drank regularly a bottle of port each night after dinner and collected butterflies and moths with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. Brensham was his favourite hunting-ground, and this in our eyes added to its glory. One
hot, still night in late August he took us up to the larch plantation and taught us the game of ‘sugaring' for moths. Half an hour before, in the kitchen of his small cottage, we had assisted at the ceremony of preparing the ‘sugar'. Mr Chorlton took off his coat and solemnly mixed the ingredients in a saucepan to the accompaniment of a running commentary which, like all his talk, was as full of quotations as a Christmas pudding of plums. ‘First, black treacle made by Mr Fowler. Not the same one who wrote English Usage, perhaps, but a great man all the same: he makes thundering good treacle. Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or Cytherea's breath. Now we add some brown Barbados sugar, which I understand you brats call Niggers' Toes. You know where Barbados is? It's one of the smaller islands in the West Indies. When the news of the outbreak of war reached Barbados in 1914 its legislature immediately cabled to Whitehall: “Get to it, England; Barbados is with you.” A stout-hearted little island; no wonder it produces such excellent sugar. Now we stir the mixture. Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire, burn, and cauldron bubble. Smell it. Taste it if you like. Isn't it good? Isn't it a feast fit for an Oleander Hawk Moth or a Glifden Nonpareil? But just you wait. We pour it off into a tin; and now Monsieur Chorlton the great chef completes his
pièce de résistance
. One or two drops, see, of Old Jamaica rum. Nothing to beat it. Nor poppy nor mandragora nor all the drowsy syrups of the world.
Now
smell it! That's the stuff that makes the sailors sing. That's the stuff that won the Battle of Trafalgar. Yo, ho, and a bottle of rum!'