Brensham Village (25 page)

Autumn came with its old disquiet in the winds that blew through the yellowing orchards; and with a new disquiet in the winds that blew about the world. ‘Let us consult the Oracle,' said Mr Chorlton, when somebody pulled the lavatory plug at the Horse Narrow and set up the familiar gurgling, Minnehaha, Laughing Water, in the tank above the bar ceiling. ‘For I imagine that is almost exactly the right noise. Now shall we ask it the ancient question: Will there be war?'

‘Better ask it,' said Joe Trentfield shrewdly, ‘whether it'll be this year or next.'

But before I went to the Horse Narrow again the Munich Agreement had been signed. I asked Joe his opinion of it and he said briefly: ‘I never thought I'd live to see us shamed so.' Nevertheless, he was in great good humour that evening because he had a new exhibit to show his customers and with which to decorate his bar. He had lent his old gun to one of Alfie's boys who had marked down a flock of wild duck on the river, and the first shot had blown a hole six inches long in the side of the barrel. Luckily the boy was unhurt; and as Joe passed the gun round for us to see he roared with laughter and demanded: ‘Have you ever seen such a comical thing in your life? Might have blowed his finger off!' No misfortune, short of an actual fatality, failed to tickle Joe's catholic sense of fun. ‘Bet it gave him a fright!' he chuckled; and Mrs Trentfield, laughing till she shook like a jelly, echoed him: ‘I bet it made him jump!'

‘Any road,' said Alfie, whose son had nearly been slain by it, ‘'tis one of them guns that shoot round corners now.'

And then Jeremy Briggs said grimly:

‘Pity it's bust. You might need it, Joe, before old Chamberlain makes another agreement!'

We laughed; and none of us dreamed that two years later Joe Trentfield would indeed be patrolling with a shotgun on Brensham Hill.

For the second time in his life Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith was in trouble with the Syndicate. Long ago he had refused to shoe their horses and had assaulted their chauffeur; this time he had trespassed upon their land and assaulted their keeper.

They had closed a footpath through Orris Park which local men had been in the habit of using occasionally on their way to work; and Briggs had made it his business every evening after work to parade ostentatiously along it until at last he attracted the attention of a keeper, who warned him off. He refused to go; and he then proceeded under the keeper's very eyes to remove and smash to pieces the notice ‘Strictly Private' which had been affixed to the gate. The keeper threatened him with a stick; and Briggs, who had a fist like a sledge-hammer, smote him upon the nose.

That was the simple story as it was told in court, and of course there could be no doubt about the verdict. The footpath might or might not be a right of way; that must be settled, said General Bouverie, in another court. Briggs had grievously assaulted the keeper, and he must pay the penalty.

‘There is no doubt whatever,' said the General, ‘that you are guilty of a most serious offence. Have you anything you want to say?'

‘Yes, your Worship,' said Briggs. ‘I'd like to say that I
bore the keeper no ill-will; he was only doing his duty. I lost my temper, and hit the wrong bloke, that's all.'

‘And who might be the right bloke?'

‘Them,' said Briggs emphatically.

‘Them?'

‘The keeper's bosses. Them as shut the footpath. Them as prosecuted the brats for pinching green apples. Them as has us turned off the river bank. Them—'

‘That's enough,' said the General sharply. ‘You're not exactly helping your case, and I'm not at all sure whether you are treating this court with proper respect. In fact you seem, in a vague sort of way, to be uttering threats. We are going to fine you ten pounds or a month; if you give any further trouble it will be prison without the option.'

But when the case was over and the court rose he grinned at Mr Chorlton, who had recently been appointed a JP. ‘Stout-hearted chaps you breed in Brensham,' he said. ‘We could do with some more of them.'

Briggs paid his ten pounds and went thoughtfully home. The matter of the footpath was in itself only a small grievance, but Jeremy had brooded upon it until it seemed to him a microcosm of all the oppressions under the sun, and although the right to pass through Orris Park was only a small and trivial right its importance was magnified in his mind until it became the sign and the symbol of a great Freedom and a larger Liberty. He swore that he would not let the matter rest; and one day when I was driving past his forge I found him in earnest and whispered conversation with Mr Chorlton and I guessed that there was a plot afoot.

Mr Chorlton waved to me and signalled for a lift; I was going back to Elmbury and could drop him at his cottage on the way. As he got into the car I heard him say, ‘Sunday, then?' and Briggs with a broad grin said: ‘Sunday at half past two.'

On the way we passed Lord Orris, who was riding back from the blacksmith's upon his deplorable bag of bones. Briggs nowadays shod the Mad Lord's mare for nothing, because he had come to look upon him as one of the Oppressed rather than the Privileged Classes - a victim of the capitalists, a martyr even to the Big Businessmen. Mr Chorlton, who could never resist making a quotation when one sprang to his mind in Latin or Greek or even in what he called the Vulgar Tongue, turned to watch him ambling down the road and declaimed:

‘“We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,

And a new people takes the land; and still it is not we.”

He whistled. ‘By Jove, it's more apt than I thought! Chesterton's ‘Secret People'. Listen:

‘“They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,

Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.

They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;

They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies,

And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs.

Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.”

How perfectly it describes the Syndicate!' Mr Chorlton went on. ‘And in a way it expresses what poor Jeremy was trying to tell us in court.
Them
, he said. He wanted to hit
Them;
but he didn't know who
They
were, and that was really what he resented. Now I believe he was right; for I think one of the most horrible and dangerous modern tendencies is this growth of what I'll call anonymous tyrannies. You get it in industry - huge combines, trusts and so on; you get it in bureaucracy - a Civil Service that seems to become more impersonal every day as it gets bigger; and now we've got an example of it in the countryside. The Syndicate! You can't hit a syndicate with your heavy fist; and that is Briggs' complaint. I'm with him. In the old days, if a factory owner sweated his workpeople, sooner or later, if things got bad enough, they stoned his carriage or booed him in the street. If a farmer was a wicked employer they burned his ricks. And if a landlord was cruel enough and oppressive enough, they could break his windows or at any rate march up to his house in a body and caterwaul outside his front door.

‘Now the point is, they knew who the industrialist was, who the farmer was, who the landlord was. Those people had names and faces, and it was common knowledge where they lived. Even the greatest tyrants the world has ever seen - Nero, Tiberius, Napoleon - were known and recognized, and if you liked to risk it you could have a shot at assassinating them. But this new tyranny is quite different. You don't know where the head of a combine lives, even if you happen to know his name. As for the Civil Service, it's all arms, body and legs, but you can't find the head: if you have a quarrel with, say, the Inspector of Weights and Measures, you can't tackle him about it in the street, because you don't know him from Adam. And it's the same with the Syndicate, “the new unhappy lords”. Tyrants
ought to have names so that they can be held personally responsible for their tyranny. Don't you agree?'

‘Absolutely,' I said. ‘But what do you propose to do about it?'

‘There's precious little we can do. But I have been having a talk with Briggs and we've got an idea. In fact I'm not sure that the latest member of the County Bench hasn't instigated a bit of “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace”.'

‘What's the plot?' I said.

‘Come along to Briggs' forge at two-thirty on Sunday afternoon and you'll see.'

I duly went there; and I was astonished to find the biggest crowd I have ever seen in Brensham gathered together outside the blacksmith's shop. Sammy Hunt was there, and Mr and Mrs Hartley, Sir Gerald and his family, Joe Trentfield, Mimi and Meg in their absurdly fashionable Sunday hats, Mrs Trentfield huge and blowsy and in full sail like a square-rigged ship going into action, David Groves, Alfie, and a dozen more, with a large number of children of all ages and a score or so of Gormleys and Fitchers, fortunately segregated from each other, standing about and muttering in little groups. Jeremy Briggs, who seemed to be acting as a kind of Master of Ceremonies, was wearing a bowler hat and his black Sunday suit, with the gold watch chain across his waistcoat, which he always wore at political meetings and on General Election days. But this was not a political meeting. ‘There will be no speeches and there must be no rowdyism,' he said severely. ‘All you have to do is to walk.'

Mr Chorlton, who was chuckling with delight, marshalled
the crowd into a sort of crocodile. Briggs marched at its head, and led us up the lane to Orris Park, where he solemnly opened the gate at the end of the footpath. ‘There must be no Wilful Damage,' he shouted. ‘All you does is to walk, backwards and forwards, up and down.'

And that is what we did. Our ridiculous crocodile wound its way slowly across the Park to the gate at the farther end, turned round and came back, turned once more, and crawled back at funeral pace to the end of the path again. Nobody interfered with us, though a couple of keepers appeared in the distance, gaped at us, conferred together, and unhappily shuffled away. Backwards and forwards, up and down, to and fro we marched for an hour, until we had worn a noticeable track through the thin grass which previously had known the footsteps of no more than one or two wayfarers in a month. When we had finished we carefully shut the gates; and as we walked home Mr Chorlton in high spirits came up to me and took my arm. ‘How's that for the Secret People?' he said with a grin; and once more he quoted:

‘“Smile at us, pass us, pay us; but do not quite forget, For we are the people of England, that has not spoken yet.'“

The Colonel had not taken part in the demonstration, because he had been suddenly taken ill. Three days later he died.

‘They'll have to carry me there,' he had said, vowing that he would never willingly go to church again. And now, sooner than he or any of us had expected, he was carried
there and laid to rest. For many months a sharp angina had troubled him, but he had made light of the pain, and had disobeyed his doctor's advice to take things quietly. If he could no longer walk over the hill, wade in the water, lie in wait at evening for the wild ducks that came flighting down from the north with the first flurry of snow, he didn't want to go on living. So he went spinning for pike as usual in September, and walked after the partridges through the yellow stubble-fields; and when the end came it came quickly - he was drinking whisky in the Horse Narrow a week before he died. For months afterwards we found it difficult to believe that we should see him no more. He had been almost a part of the landscape for so long that we missed him as we should miss a great oak beneath which we had played in childhood, and which we had known all our lives as a kindly shade in summer or a thing of rugged splendour when the leaves fell.

In the spring his farming-stock was sold, the piebald horses, the deep-sided dappled Ayrshires, the Gloster Spot pigs, the monstrous Spanish sheep for which not even the dealers were eager to bid. I went to the sale and bought the Colonel's gun and fishing-rod for old times' sake. Afterwards I walked down to the Summer Leasow to have a look at the Heronry; but although last year's nests were still there, black rafters at the tops of the greening elms, this season the birds had not come back. Nor did they ever come to Brensham again, to gladden us with their lovely flight as they winged their way over the river across the sunset sky towards their precarious haphazard homes in the windy tree-tops.

A few weeks later the Colonel's farm itself was offered at auction. Now his next-door neighbour, on the river side, had been Sammy Hunt, who owned the osier-beds and a couple of meadows next to Summer Leasow; and a week
before the sale to Sammy's great surprise he received a visit from the same ‘long-nosed snooping lawyer' who had first appeared in Brensham after the great frost. This man proceeded to put up to Sammy a rather curious proposition. He began by saying that he represented what he called an ‘interest' which was anxious to acquire the Colonel's farm. Next he asked if Sammy was in the market for it, and Sammy answered ‘No'. ‘Excellent,' said the lawyer, ‘then we shall find it easy to agree,' Sammy thought privately that he would find it easier to agree with a tarantula, but he held his peace. The lawyer went on:

‘You are well known in the district, and are held, if I may presume to say so, in great respect and esteem. Now my clients - I need make no secret of it to you, they already own the greater part of the farmland round Brensham - are less well known personally and have encountered from time to time a certain unreasonable local prejudice against themselves. Our proposition, to be very frank, is that
you
should bid for the farm; since unfriendly people who might deliberately “run up” my clients would certainly not do so if you were the bidder. If it is knocked down to you, at a price which we will discuss, my clients will repurchase it from you at a hundred pounds more than you gave for it. They will also pay all legal costs. In a nutshell - you get a hundred pounds for an afternoon's trouble. What about it?'