The Blue Field (10 page)

‘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!'

Maurice Halliday went down from Oxford with a brilliant reputation, plenty of money, and good prospects in any profession he cared to choose. But he chose to become a Socialist and to bury himself in the office of a Left-wing publisher who clung precariously to the brink of bankruptcy until he finally toppled over the edge in the summer of 1939. Meanwhile Halliday, the unwilling bookworm, had made himself an authority on the social history of England during the Industrial Revolution and had published a fat book on the subject which hardly anybody had read (‘except me,' said Mr Chorlton. ‘I used to read everything. It's rather good'). He had also married his employer's daughter.

Then the war came, and being debarred by his twisted foot from joining the Forces he spent the next five years in the Ministry of Information: ‘just like his student-days,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘tied willy-nilly to his desk, with the war like another envied rugger-rag going on outside his study window.'

In 1945 he had won the Elmbury Division for Labour, by eleven votes after two recounts, and he had already begun to make a reputation as a promising backbencher and in particular as an indefatigable asker of Questions about almost every conceivable subject.

‘So there you are,' ended Mr Chorlton, ‘we know all about him. But old schoolmasters like me are very foolish really to pursue these inquiries. It is only once in a blue moon that we have the pleasure of teaching a boy who is not a dolt or a blockhead or a rugger hearty or a simple cretin; and almost invariably, when we follow his subsequent career, we discover that he either writes immoral novels or unintelligible poetry or preaches a political doctrine which is highly repugnant to us. These are Time's revenges upon my miserable profession!'

We had come across Halliday's wife through her activities in connexion with the crèche and because she had been searching, in vain so far, for a house in the neighbourhood. She was a brisk, businesslike and self-possessed young woman with a new-laundered smell who looked as if she ought to be a gym-mistress but turned out to be a bluestocking; her extremely attractive head was crammed chock-full of all the latest dogma, she had no doubts about anything under the sun, and she obviously prided herself upon her Rational Approach to Life. And indeed she was terribly rational, except about the Russians and the Tories, who provoked her respectively to the most unreasonable transports of love and hate, and about germs, which she viewed with similar sentiments of mistrust and horror to those she entertained for the Conservative Party. When she
was in charge of the crèche at the Village Hall she sprayed the room with so many sorts of disinfectant that it smelt like a chemist's shop. I sometimes wondered whether her husband ever grew tired of the antiseptic aura which perpetually clung to her, whether he found himself wishing that for a change she would drench herself in scent – the cheapest, the most cloying, even the most tarty scent. But even if he did I doubt if he brought himself to the point of telling her so. She was not the kind of girl to whom one could say such things.

Her age was about twenty-eight, and she was tall, long-legged, shapely and hygienic-looking, with gentian-blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair cut rather short. Her whole delight, it seemed, lay in organizing other people's lives. She had organized Mr Halliday into Parliament and poor Pru into the police court and now she threatened cheerfully that if only we could find her a house in the village she would ‘wake up' our sleepy Women's Institute, revive our moribund Youth Club, redecorate the Village Hall and get an artist friend to paint bright and modernistic friezes round the walls, and reorganize the Amateur Dramatic Society on what she called a more democratic basis. She also promised to get her husband to ask a Question in Parliament about our sewage system, which was somewhat out of date.

‘They'll tidy us up,' sighed Mr Chorlton, shaking his head, ‘and at my age I've got a horror of being tidied. For God's sake let's bribe the house agents to keep them away!' But it wasn't very long, as you shall see, before we needed the help of Mr Halliday in the matter of William Hart.

The trouble between William and the War Agricultural Executive Committee had begun as long ago as 1940, when
the Committee ploughed up Little Twittocks and destroyed the foxes' earths where he loved to watch the vixen playing with her cubs at dusk on summer evenings. It went on, in the form of a long skirmish about weeds and thistles and nettles, for the next three years; and then as I have told you came a period of open warfare about the sunflowers, which William grew on Little Twittocks in flat defiance of a cultivation order to grow potatoes.

It must be admitted that the WAEC had been, on the whole, pretty patient with William. He was extremely wayward and obstinate, and I suppose to some extent he was even what prim reformers call an irreconcilable. At any rate he was either unable or unwilling to fit himself into a world in which there are a great many regulations and multitudes of forms.

His attitude to forms was very peculiar indeed. He could write only with difficulty, he could read simple statements only if they were in large print, and in common with some of His Majesty's Judges he was utterly unable to understand the language which civil servants use when they try to make their orders and regulations clear to the ordinary man. Being a farmer, he naturally received a large number of these forms. They asked him to make a return of all the labourers he employed, ‘differentiating between male and female'. They demanded from time to time a census of his horses, cows, sheep, pigs and poultry. They wanted to know whether his hens suffered from fowl-pest or his blackcurrants from Big Bud, and whether the wire-netting he had applied for was to keep Rabbits (Domestic) in or Rabbits (Wild) out. Pestered as he was with these forms, William at last grew cunning and wary of them, and developed a sort of defensive mechanism against bureaucracy which for a season or two served him very well. He had learned by experience that forms bred like guinea-pigs: the answer to any one question, even if a man could comprehend the
question and write out the answer, engendered a litter of new questions each more troublesome than the last. Nor was it any use writing in the blank space provided ‘You bloody well find out'; he'd tried that, with disastrous consequences. But these forms, he discovered, could nevertheless be gelded like tom-cats by the simple process of writing NIL all over them. A nice short simple word, and you never heard any more from the clerks in their office if you answered NIL to every question on the form. Having made this discovery, William no longer troubled to read the questions or to ask Pru to read them for him; he merely filled in each of the blank spaces with a large, blotchy and spidery NIL. Later he improved on this method. Instead of NIL he wrote SEE OVER (actually he spelt it SEA OVER) and matched it with a second SEA OVER on the other side of the page. He had thought out this manoeuvre very carefully, and for nearly two years it seemed to work like a charm. But Governments, like the Gods, remember everlastingly; and the time arrived when William's sins came home to roost like a flock of homing pigeons and he was assailed, not with forms only, but with hosts of angry letters, reply-paid letters, and even threats of prosecution if he failed to provide a true and correct answer to paragraph 5 sub-section 2 (d) within seven days.

Among this considerable correspondence which Dai Roberts Postman delivered almost daily at William Hart's farm was a document headed DEFENCE REGULATIONS: CULTIVATION OF LANDS ORDER, 1939. We hereby direct you, it said, to carry out in respect of the lands described in the schedule hereto the works of cultivation specified in the said schedule.
Parish:
Brensham.
No on Ordnance Map
123.
Acres.
71·34. known as Little Twittocks.
Required Cultivation:
to plough and plant with potatoes in a good and husbandlike manner.

William, I regret to say, took no more notice of it than he took of all the threatening letters. He ploughed the field, it is true; but when the time came for planting he had forgotten all about the cultivation order, and because he was short of food for his hens he took it into his crackpot old head to grow sunflowers. He'd only got enough seed to plant a small part of the field, so he decided to grow maize on the rest. The subsequent wet weather suited neither the maize nor the sunflowers; and the Chairman of the War Agricultural Executive Committee, making an inspection in August, was unable to see them for weeds.

About this time, to make matters worse, the Committee received a complaint about his bad husbandry from William's neighbour; or perhaps I should say ‘neighbours', for the land all round his farm was owned by a Syndicate consisting of some financial gentlemen from London. William's 150 acres, forming a little island in the middle of their estate, was probably a great nuisance to them; and it was certainly an obstacle to some mysterious plans which they had for future ‘development'. They looked upon it as Ahab from his palace looked upon the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite; and they offered William the worth of it in money, but he refused to sell. And so when the light breezes of summer blew the thistledown from Little Twittocks on to their tidy field over the boundary-hedge, they said to themselves that it was an ill wind which blew nobody any good and instructed their solicitors to write a complaint to the War Agricultural Executive Committee. In due course that letter found its way from desk to desk and office to office and took its proper place in the docket about William Hart which wandered to and fro about the Ministry and now grew bulky and gravid as it ponderously approached gestation.

The City Rusticates – The Allies
– ‘
Exercise Paratroops' – ‘Oi?'
–
‘My mother said
—' –
The Good Fight – The Reconciliation
–
The Wind on the Heath, Brother – The Patriarch – Works of Darkness
–
Three Swashers-; ‘Booze and the Wenches Take the Lot'
–
The World's My Oyster – At Tolpuddle Hall
–
A Purgatory for Planners
–
The Pig-killing – Crusaders by Proxy – The Boy David – The Baby Show – ‘We'll Tame Her'

NOW LET us turn for a moment from the case of William Hart to the affairs of the Syndicate, which had been causing a good deal of excitement in Brensham for the last eighteen months and which now suddenly came to a head. First you must hear a piece of old history.

Long ago, when the addle-pated Lord Orris first began to borrow from the moneylenders, he had pledged a portion of his estate to some City financiers who had already bought up a good deal of land on the other side of Brensham Hill. Subsequently he had increased his borrowings and pledged still more of his land; until at last only the dilapidated mansion was left and he raised his ultimate loan on that. Meanwhile the clever financiers watched and waited, and
when they thought that the time was ripe they foreclosed on their mortgages and took possession of the property. It wasn't a very valuable property; for the house through years of neglect had become draughty and damp, the wasted land grew just enough coarse grass to support its unparalleled population of rabbits, the muddy Moat had breached its banks and turned the garden into a snipe-marsh, and even the spinneys and copses had been despoiled for firewood by the gypsyish families in tents and caravans whom the Mad Lord had permitted to camp upon his Park. The financiers, however, were not primarily interested in agriculture; it was rumoured that they intended to build holiday-bungalows on the side of the hill, to turn the Manor into a country club and the Moat into a swimming-pool, and to lay out the Park as a golf course. In the years immediately before the war they had bought up two more farms in the district, and they even got their long talons into Brensham village itself, where they snapped up the few cottages and holdings which happened from time to time to come into the market.

At first the various members of the Syndicate used the Manor as a weekend residence for themselves and their, guests, while Lord Orris lived on sufferance in the small Lodge at the end of the drive. It was an odd thing about them that although they came and went, with their wives and families, almost every weekend, they failed to establish distinct identities, and we always thought of them collectively as ‘The Syndicate' or ‘The folks from London'. They all had big cars, and the men all wore black homburg hats, and the womenfolk seemed inseparable from their furs even in summer so that one tended to think of them not as human beings covered with smooth skin but as creatures bearing pelts, like animals. Nor did the village get to know them any better when they established themselves in the
Manor on a permanent basis, as soon as the bombs began to fall in London. Immediately they started to exercise what they called their rights. They evicted the gypsyish folk from the Park, and set keepers to chivvy the labouring men who thought it no theft to take an occasional rabbit out of the teeming abundance. (Only Dai Roberts Postman was undeterred by the keepers; and he who because of his high moral principles had previously poached only on week-days poached now with a kind of religious and revivalist fervour on Sundays as well.) They prosecuted the village children for ‘stealing' their apples even though in a season of glut the fruit lay rotting on the ground, and they put up notices that Trespassers would be Prosecuted along every field-path and beside every gate. They drove off Brensham Hill not only the seasonal mushroom-gatherers and blackberry-pickers but also the courting couples and the families out for a Sunday afternoon airing, although it was pointed out to them that our people had wandered foot-free over those grassy slopes for as long as anybody could remember. Because of these things the village passionately hated them, and there was an element of fear in the hatred, for it really looked at one time as if the Syndicate would overwhelm Brensham and impose their shabby get-rich-quick régime upon it, tyrannize and subdue and cheapen and emasculate it, and turn it at last into a tributary province of their far-flung financial empire. As you will see, however, Brensham dealt with the threat in its own way; our turbulent, obstinate, intractable and crack-brained people dealt with it so effectively that within six months of the end of the war the posters went up advertising the whole estate for sale by auction; and the inhabitants of the Manor were reported to be packing up and preparing to take themselves off again to the slick, smooth, West End world which was all they understood and where, as Joe Trentfield suggested in
the Horse and Harrow, they doubtless ‘felt at home in the same way as snakes feel at home in the jungle'.