The Blue Field (12 page)

Imagine William, then, in his hot youth; ‘prenticed to his father who was a wainwright before him, but apt to play truant from the workshop whenever his father's back was turned if there was any football or cricket to be had, or if the Fair with its itinerant boxing-booths happened to come to the district. By all accounts he was a young giant who lorded it over the rough football games, and swiped the bowling out of the cricket-ground and into Cuckoo Pen or beyond into the river itself. (They say that he once slammed three balls in succession as far as Sammy Hunt's osier-bed, where they were lost for ever in the tangled undergrowth
and the squelchy mud; and that was the end of cricket for the season, although it was only August, for the Club couldn't raise enough money to buy any more.) He could swim as fast under water as most people can on top of it, and he used to terrify his companions by diving off the top of Elmbury Weir; he won prizes at the Regatta for rowing; and he could stick on the back of any half-broken wild farmer's colt until it was tired of trying to unseat him. His favourite sport, however, was boxing. Whenever the Fair came to Elmbury or Brensham you would always find William hanging about round the improvised canvas ring where the showman strode up and down uttering his brazen challenge like the champion in an ancient battle: ‘Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and see who's got the courage to step into the ring with Terrible Twin the Tonypandy Tornado. Ten silver shillings for anybody who beats him on points and a golden sovereign for anybody who knocks him out. Now then, you sportsmen, here's your chance to show the girls what you're made of. Who'll dare to climb over these ropes and face the Man-eating Tiger from Wales?'

Then William with great deliberation would take off in turn his coat, his waistcoat, his shirt and his singlet, fold them into a neat pile and set a friend to keep guard over them, and purposefully stride forward towards the ropes. And the showman, of course, would keep up his swift patter, knowing that words won as many fights as fists. ‘Well, well, well, here's an upstanding young chap. They breeds 'em big in these parts. But I fear he's over-young for the Tornado. He likes 'em young, does Terrible Twm. He'll
eat you up,
young feller-me-lad, Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman . . . Still keen to have a try? You're mammy oughtn't to let you loose, that she oughtn't. Well, don't say I didn't warn you . . .' Then, while William went
quietly to his corner and put on the gloves, perhaps the showman would say:

‘On my right, ladies and gents, Terrible Twm the Tony-pandy Tornado, Champion of the Valleys, now on tour to challenge all comers. On my left – what might be your name, young feller-me-lad?'

‘Never you mind,' said William, and grinned: ‘I be a descendant of the poet Shakespeare!'

Only the very old men, who were boys when he was a boy, remember seeing William fight and tell tales of it in the Horse and Harrow. Doubtless they exaggerate, as old men will, but they all agree in one thing: he fought, they say, ‘like the wind'. Whether there was much art or science in it they are not sure; but they say he rushed out of his corner like a gale and Terrible Twm or Basher Joe or whoever the broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared wretch happened to be went down before that fierce buffeting like a rotten elm tree before the March wind. A score of times, they swear, William
blew down
his opponents at Elmbury Mop, until at last the travelling showmen became wary of him, and would no longer offer their golden guineas as a reward, and their poor peripatetic pugs as a sacrifice, to the young man who uttered the word ‘Shakespeare' as if it were a battlecry. No doubt, as I say, the old men embroider these stories with the fanciful embroidery of fifty years; but there must be a great deal of truth in them, because they help to explain William's triumphant encounter with the Fitchers and Gormleys, which happened when he was twenty-five.

By then William had already begun to sow his crop of wild oats, which didn't fade as most people's do but went on sprouting green for thirty years. You may be sure that he was as practised with his lips as with his fists and that the brown slip of a gypsy girl who used to sneak secretly out of the camp in Lord Orris' Park wasn't by any means the first
to discover how gentle as well as strong his big hands could be.

She was only seventeen, in that far-off spring when she and William began their secret courtship; but the gypsies are quick to mature, and the old men say that already she walked with the lovely arrogance of the gypsy women, which has the pride of Lucifer and the slyness of a fox mixed up together in it, and like them she would toss her head and like them give the furtive look over the shoulder – but what do the old men remember of such things? You can imagine her striding up the hill to her trysting-place with William among the bracken and the furze and the may-bushes which were smudges of white in the twilight, her brown eyes like a fawn's peering this way and that, half-eager, half-timid, till she found him waiting by the accustomed stile; you can see her running back on swift sure feet in the darkness, pausing breathless at the Park pale because a twig had crackled under his tread, creeping through the gap in the broken fence, whispering hush! to the lurcher dog which stirred beneath the caravan, and the rough terrier which whimpered in its sleep beside the dying fire.

I don't know how long it was before the gypsies got to hear of the affair. Not many weeks, I suppose; for though the girl knew how to be secret there was never anything clandestine about William. Sooner or later, surely, he would drink publicly a toast to his Pheemy in the Adam and Eve or the Horse and Harrow, or shout her name for all to hear in a song which he made up as he rolled home half-drunk with love and beer. Nor was Brensham hilltop, even at night, so secret a place as lovers were wont to imagine.
There were other couples besides William and Pheemy, and farmers looking to their lambs, and mischievous boys benighted after bird-nesting, to say nothing of Peeping Tom and Paul Pry. There were poachers too (though it was long before Dai Roberts' day) and these poachers no doubt kept their eyes and ears open for their enemies the keepers and so would not fail to notice the parted bracken which stirred and swayed even though there was no wind. The Fitchers and Gormleys themselves set snares on the hill for rabbits and hares and sought out the snuffling hedgehogs there which they loved to bake in clay upon their smouldering camp-fires. Foolish Pheemy, if she thought that waist-high bracken and sheltering may-bush and love-performing night could keep her secret for long! As for William he cared no more than Antony cared whether the whole world saw him at the side of his Cleopatra.

But, of course, as soon as the Fitchers and Gormleys knew there was bound to be trouble. Perhaps this is the only integrity which they have left – that they keep themselves to themselves and have no truck with the village people. Generations ago they renounced, for what reason I know not, the major portion of their gypsy heritage: they ceased to be wanderers on the face of the earth and made a colony on Brensham Hill, rooting themselves in the neighbourhood. By doing so they sacrificed the ancient freemasonry of road and common, and cut themselves off from the other gypsies and tinkers, who now seem to despise them and who give Brensham a wide berth when they pass it in the course of their seasonal migrations. No true travelling gypsy will camp near the Fitchers and Gormleys if he can help it. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the Fitchers and Gormleys cling all the more fiercely to the tradition of gypsy isolationism; because it is the last relic of their gypsydom. They drink in our pubs when they are thirsty,
they beg at our back doors when they are hungry, they steal our chickens and dogs and hedge-stakes, they pick our peas or plums for hire, and their women come wheedling at our gates with baskets of clothes-pegs every spring; but these tenuous contacts are the only communication they have with us, they give us no friendship and get none from us, and now I come to think of it I have never once seen a handshake between our people and theirs. I have sometimes thought that we actually hate each other – they hate us because of our possessions and our security and we hate them because their need of neither makes a mockery of all we believe. Certainly our housewives fear them, for they cunningly mix with their cajoling a kind of intimidation which keeps just on the safe side of the law. Surely the women must have been briefed before they set out by some wickedly-wise old grandmother gypsy who has taken infinite pains to study the silly laws of the gorgios! For if a gypsy says ‘Buy my clothes-pegs, lady, or you'll have bad luck,' she is uttering threats and telling fortunes and goodness knows what else which may land her in a police court. But if she merely looks slyly at the housewife who happens to be wearing a green blouse and says ‘Green is a very unlucky colour, lady,' she is simply voicing a common superstition and if the housewife finds it necessary to cross her palm with silver to counteract the bad luck, well, that's not the gypsy's fault! The back door, then – or the foot unobtrusively placed just inside the back door, to prevent it being shut in their faces – was as near as the gypsies got towards intruding into our lives. Their numerous encampments, scattered all round Brensham Hill, formed a microcosmos within our larger world; but there was no common citizenship, and it would have surprised the village less that one of our lads should have brought home a Zulu or an Eskimo as his wife than that he should marry a Gormley girl. To the gypsies, whose
isolation from us was somehow bound up with the last vestiges of their self-respect, such a match must have been still more unthinkable. Therefore the whole Gormley clan, including the girl's parents, looked upon her courtship with William as an act of treachery and proceeded to deal with her as a traitor. Rumours began to fly about the village, that she was being beaten and starved, or locked up in solitary confinement within one of the caravans; that they had cut off her hair as a mark of shame; or that they proposed to cast her out of their tribe penniless into the world. Whether there was any truth in these stories I cannot tell; but before long William got to hear of them – perhaps he had waited night after night at the. trysting-stile in vain - and at once he girded up his loins for battle.

The old men who tell this tale say that he strode into the Horse and Harrow one September dusk and that he was ‘rascally drunk', having already spent two or three hours at the Adam and Eve and the Trumpet. At the Horse and Harrow he drank no less than six pints of beer; but instead of making him more drunk this fabulous draught seemed to sober him, and he became all at once very quiet and thoughtful, and refused to play darts or to join in the usual Saturday evening singing. At last he handed his gold turnip-watch to the landlord, asking him to look after it until the morning; and without another word he walked out into the dark night.

He reached the Gormley's camp in Orris Park at about half past eleven, when the last of their fires were flickering out and the majority of the inhabitants of the tents and caravans were settling down to sleep. The camp contained about thirty men and boys, to say nothing of the women, who are famous viragos. Note that it was a Saturday night, when most of the men had probably been drinking in the various local pubs; and the Gormleys after a bout are as
quick to strike as a nest of adders suddenly wakened from their slumber in the sun. Furthermore it was pitch-dark, and William did not know his way among the tent-pegs and caravans; and he was alone.

You can imagine the howling set up by the score of mongrel dogs as he strode into the camp; the whinnying of the horses; the grunts and growls and oaths and snores of the awakening Gormleys. They may have thought that the midnight visitor was a policeman come to make unwelcome inquiries about a lost dog or somebody's hens which had unaccountably vanished; at any rate they were in no hurry to show themselves, and were content at first to challenge the intruder with sleepy shouts of' Who's there?' And then William smote them like a gale.

He had provided himself with a sheath-knife, long and lovingly sharpened on the whetstone. First he slashed the headropes of all the horses and with a great holler drove them full-gallop through the encampment. Their hoofs sent the sparks flying from the still-smouldering fires, and by that little light, and the flicker of a few twigs rekindled, William went among the tents cutting the guy-ropes. The Gormleys are notoriously slovenly in their camping arrangements -they lost their woodcraft long ago when they ceased to be nomads – and I dare say most of the guy-ropes were rotten and many of the tent-poles depended on a couple of ropes instead of half a dozen. William had laid half the tents flat before the Gormleys realized what was happening, and he had also in his fine fury pushed over a ramshackle caravan, which by chance had a paraffin stove inside it, so that it immediately caught fire. The blaze, which added to the Gormley's confusion, helped William to see his enemies as they gathered about him. He threw away the knife, for it had done its business, and he did not fight with knives; and with his bare fists he went into the fray.

The Gormleys, you must remember, had been taken entirely by surprise. William's sudden onslaught had caught them when they were sleepy and fuddled, and at least half of them were trapped beneath the fallen tents, where they writhed and struggled helplessly. The galloping, neighing horses, the yelping dogs, and the flame and smoke from the burning caravan completed their bewilderment. There were probably not more than a dozen men on their feet when the real fight started; there was only one on his feet when it ended.

William fought, as the old men put it, ‘like the wind'. Now he was a tornado, a typhoon, a hurricane blowing through their camp, knocking over the tents like ninepins and toppling the men as a woodcutter fells trees. It must have seemed to the Gormleys that there was not one but a hundred Williams, shouting upon the name of Shakespeare and challenging them in a voice of thunder: ‘You carsn't touch I! You carsn't touch II'