The Blue Field (11 page)

A Triple Alliance was responsible for this victory: the village, the evicted gypsies, and Lord Orris' daughter Jane.

The weapons employed by the village were mostly very ancient ones, though by no means blunted by time, the weapons of boycott, obstinacy, petty obstructiveness, and assumed stupidity. Hardly anybody, for instance, would work for the Syndicate; they could get no domestic help, no gardeners, and few labourers on their farms. When they obtained servants from elsewhere the village proceeded to undermine the morale of these servants by various subtle and ingenious means, ranging from suggestions that the Manor was haunted, or that everybody who lived there for more than three months died of TB, to more libellous allegations that the members of the Syndicate sacrificed goats to Satan, performed the Black Mass, and practised unnatural vices. (There was a private chapel in the Manor grounds in which generations of Orrises had worshipped God, and one Lord Orris, assisted by Mister Jack Wilkes and some other rapscallions from London, used with great earnestness to worship the Devil.) It had kept its bad name, and the wickedness of the eighteenth-century lord was still legendary in Brensham, which now wished all his known sins on to the Syndicate with the addition of a few invented ones.

Another method of dealing with the imported servants, costly but well worth the expense, was simply to make them drunk; and indeed one ancient butler, who needed little encouragement in that direction, became so drunk that he
suffered an attack of the willies during which he set fire to his bedroom. The local Fire Brigade, called to quell the outbreak, took care to play their hoses unnecessarily upon every piece of furniture in the house which looked as if it might possess any value.

It was about this time that the Home Guard took a hand in the affair. During one of the recurrent ‘flaps', when the risk of invasion seemed very real, Joe Trentfield was instructed to inform the neighbourhood as tactfully as possible that there was a chance of enemy parachutists landing on Brensham Hill. Carrying out these orders, he called at Orris Park, where the drunken butler ushered him into an oak-panelled entrance-hall decorated with stags' heads bought at a taxidermist's and suits of armour picked up at a junk merchant's. Joe was kept waiting a long time in this chilly place, which did not accord with his sense of his own dignity, whether he regarded himself as the not-unimportant landlord of the Horse and Harrow or as a Lieutenant in His Majesty's Home Guard. At last there came down to him (said Joe) ‘one of the furry women', whom he might have mistaken for a pack of silver foxes save for her pale peaky face which peered out between the heads and tails. She addressed him as ‘My man', which added nothing to Joe's regard for her; so he delivered his message sharply and urgently, going a bit beyond his orders perhaps and ‘slightly exaggerating', as he put it, the risk of parachutists landing on the hill. ‘We've been told to keep a special lookout,' he said, ‘on the Park itself, which being flat would make a likely dropping ground.' He added some hairraising instructions about what to do if the Germans arrived,
and some colourful speculations about what the Germans themselves would do, at which the pale face among the silver foxes went whiter, if possible, than it had been before. At that moment two fat men, and another furry woman, came down the staircase into the hall. Some imp of mischief prompted Joe to say casually:

‘And of course you realize that if the Huns do come they'll probably be wearing British uniforms.'

One of the fat men stammered:

‘B-but do you mean to say that there will be no way of telling f-friend from f-foe?'

‘The Huns,' said Joe grimly, ‘are likely to be the more peremptory.' He then took his leave.

On the following Saturday night the Home Guard paraded at eight-thirty and marched up the hill for the purpose of carrying out an anti-invasion exercise. There were two sections, commanded respectively by Sergeant Jeremy Briggs and Sergeant Alfie Perks. The latter were instructed to conceal themselves in a quarry until nightfall, where they whiled away the time by burning corks and blacking their faces. When Joe inspected them at dusk they were practically unrecognizable as men of Brensham. ‘It don't matter much about not being able to speak the lingo,' said Joe, ‘but it wouldn't do any harm if you was to say
jar vole
and
Hare Gott
now and then and click your heels when you get an order. And remember that though you're Huns there must be no damage to persons or property.' The section then moved off into Orris Park, where they sent up some Very lights (meaning ‘
parachutists just landed')
and proceeded to play soldiers with great verisimilitude according to the agreed plan, which was as follows.

Sergeant Briggs' section, less Corporal Dai Roberts who was engaged in setting rabbit snares, were to surround the Park as soon as they saw the signal and attempt to contain
the parachutists within the pale. When the German parachutists broke out, which was inevitable, they were to occupy the outbuildings of the Manor itself and defend themselves against a further assault by the British. This tactical exercise, which had been invented by Joe himself, was perfectly legitimate and plausible; for it represented what would probably have happened if the Germans had really landed.

In the event certain things happened which had not been planned or anticipated; but it is by no means certain that they too would not have taken place if the ‘invasion' had been genuine. The black-avis'd Alfie Perks, having led his section out of the Park and established it in the gardens and outbuildings of the Manor, was assembling a Lewis gun at the edge of the shrubbery when he was suddenly confronted by two furry women and two fat men who seemed to be half-demented with terror and who demanded tremulously: ‘Are you German?'

And Alfie, who had entered into the spirit of the game but who never imagined (or so he says) that he would be taken seriously, answered:
‘Jar vole.'

The effect of this utterance was unexpected and shocking. The two men and the two women began, said Alfie afterwards, to quiver and quake and shiver and shake like frog-spawn. ‘The silver-foxes' heads was jigging and dancing about on them women's shoulders so's I could almost fancy they was snapping at me.' Meanwhile the owners of the foxes gibbered at Alfie, and then the men joined in, and soon all four were speaking together in a sort of catch or chorus, like a quartet singing madrigals.

They wanted Alfie to know that they had no personal feelings against the Germans.
Politics didn't interest them, anyhow.
We'd always been friends, hadn't we?
They were peaceful civilians. It wasn't their war.
If there was anything the soldiers wanted—
They bore no animosity against Herr Hitler or anybody else.

Alfie listened to this extraordinary performance with mounting horror, but he said nothing except occasionally
Jar vole.
Before long, according to his own story (but Alfie is given to exaggeration), they'd offered him ‘the whole works, including the best bed'. At this point, however, Sergeant Briggs delivered his assault upon the Manor. There was a rattle of rifle-fire, a thunderflash landed at Alfie's feet, and the shrieking women fled into the house. ('The men got there before 'em,' said Alfie grimly. ‘They was helluva swift-footed.') A few moments later some pyromaniac in Briggs' section set alight the shrubbery with a Molotov cocktail, and the Home Guard spent the rest of the night trying to put out the fire. Nothing more was seen of the inhabitants of the Manor until the morning, when Joe called upon them, ostensibly to make his explanations and apologies.

Needless to say, they were extremely angry. They said that they were law-abiding citizens robbed of their sleep and terrified out of their wits by a lot of thugs playing at soldiers. They declared that the fire in the shrubbery had destroyed some valuable rhododendrons recently imported from Kashmir. They claimed compensation for the damage, and they threatened to write letters to
The Times,
their Member of Parliament, the Area Commander, and the Minister for War, who was, they said, a distant relation of their aunt. Joe listened to all this in silence, and when they had finished he answered briefly and to the point. He answered in two syllables:
Jar vole.

As a matter of fact, they did write their complaint to the Area Commander; and it is said that this busy officer, who already had before him a somewhat mis-spelt but forcibly worded report from his obedient servant Alfie Perks, Sergeant, Home Guard, submitted for immediate attention through the proper Service channels, took exactly sixty seconds to consider the complaint. He then turned to one of his staff officers and said: ‘If you had a large half-empty mansion, occupied by some people who we want to keep our eyes on, what would you do about it?'

‘I'd billet a company of Poles there,' said the resourceful staff officer.

‘Exactly what I was thinking.' Next week the Poles arrived at Orris Manor, and among them was one Count Wladislaus Pniack, who took only ten days to fall in love with Mimi Trentfield, three months to marry her, and the minimum period thereafter to father her twins.

That was an uncomfortable winter for the Syndicate. They did not get on with the Poles, whose Commanding Officer, a polished gentleman in most respects, possessed an idio-xsyncracy about candles which has also been recorded of the great Dr Johnson: when they failed to burn well he held them upside down and shook them over the best carpet. It was during this winter, too, that our local garage-man took to introducing sugar into the petrol whenever he filled up one of the Syndicate's big cars; he also was a member of the Home Guard, and he made the excuse that he wanted to test the effect of sugar in petrol in case the Germans came. Generally speaking, however, the village refrained from actual sabotage. It was thought better, on the whole,
to cause a multitude of small niggling inconveniences than a few large and obvious ones. So Mrs Doan, at the Village Shop and Post Office, took a hand by making innumerable mistakes over the rations, muddling up the weekly bills, and giving wrong telephone numbers, all of which things she did by the light of nature, and Dai Roberts contrived to deliver the Syndicate's most important-looking letters to the wrong addresses or even to drop them down a rabbit-hole when he was setting his snares.

But perhaps the deadliest weapon of all, and certainly the one which Brensham most enjoyed using, was the assumption of sheer, block-headed, gawkish stupidity. The village which had mucked the church spire to make it grow lived up to its reputation and put on its zany's expression for the Syndicate's benefit. And this, after all, is the traditional weapon of our countryfolk against all forms of tyranny; poachers, rick-firers, sheep-stealers often saved their necks by it two hundred years ago. It is so simple an armament that the veriest fool can use it; indeed it is most effective when employed by a fool. It consists of saying ‘Oi' when asked a question and then reiterating ‘Oi?' with a faint note of interrogation every time the question is repeated. Many of the present inhabitants of Brensham owe their very existence to the fact that their astute ancestors, threatened with deportation to Australia, stood for hours in the dock doltishly saying ‘Oi?' to the clever counsel in their august wigs and even to His Majesty's Judges of Assize.

Crack-brained Brensham has a reputation for this kind of thing. Indeed in many of the stories which are told about our oafish simplicity there is also a suggestion of sly mischief; it generally turns out in the end that we are not such fools as we seem. Once upon a time, they say – telling what is surely the oldest story of them all – a gentleman from the City lost his way and found himself in Brensham on a dark
and dirty night. He stopped his carriage and leaned out and asked a stupid-looking puddin'-faced chap the way to Gloucester. The chap said he didn't know, so the gentleman asked the way to Elmbury, being aware that it was only a few miles off. Once more the chap shook his head, and the gentleman neighed angrily in his whinnying London voice: ‘Don't you know anything, you stupid fellow?' There was a short silence, and then the Brensham man said quietly: ‘Mebbe I'm stoopid; but I knows where I be, which is more than thee does, mister.'

The gypsies' tactics against the Syndicate were more direct and less lawful than those employed by the villagers. We didn't altogether approve of them, and we were in any case distrustful of the rough and riotous tribes. Little love was lost between Brensham and the gypsies; but our temporary alliance with them was less extraordinary than the armistice between the gypsies themselves, who belonged to two hostile families called respectively the Fitchers and the Gormleys. These families, like Montagues and Capulets, bore each other an ancient grudge. Fifty years ago one of the Fitchers had murdered a Gormley, cleaving his head with a hatchet during a quarrel over a woman and subsequently casting his body into the river, whence by ill-chance it was carried down to the Severn by a sudden flood and found its way into a salmon-net operated by some relations of the Gormleys above Elmbury Weir. In due course the murderous Fitcher was hanged and ever since then the families had lived in perpetual enmity, for although the cause of the original trouble was half forgotten the implication of insult remained like an ineradicable taint in certain words and phrases – ‘hatchet', ‘rope', ‘gallows-bird' and ‘What's in the salmon-nets today?' – which the factions abusively hurled at each other whenever they wanted a fight. Their hatred of the Syndicate, however, proved stronger than
their internecine enmity; and they made common cause to take their revenge.

If they knew of the Syndicate's intervention in the Case of William Hart, the gypsies had another good reason for joining in the fight; and doubtless they did know, for they seemed to have some sort of bush-telegraph which informed them of everything that went on in the neighbourhood. William was the only man in Brensham for whom these feckless, fickle and secret families possessed any respect or affection; he was the only person, apart from their patriarchal chieftains, who had any authority over them, who could settle their quarrels and quell their fights and even send them packing from the village pubs when they were drunk. Indeed these Heathens, as Joe Trentfield said won-deringly, ‘worshipped the ground he trod on', and to find the reason for this phenomenon we have to go back more than fifty years and listen to a strange old tale which has been told a hundred times on winter nights round the fire at the Horse and Harrow.