The Blue Field (2 page)

The village pubs, too, have unusual characteristics. The Adam and Eve bears two naked figures on its hanging sign, painted by an extremely uninhibited artist and displayed by a landlord who has no puritanical notions about fig leaves. The Trumpet, not to be outdone, shows the head of
a bright-eyed, cherry-lipped, come-hither-looking minx on its sign, which strikes you as irrelevant until you learn that the name of the inn is locally corrupted to ‘The Strumpet'. Lastly there is the Horse and Harrow (which Brensham calls the Horse Narrow) with its leaded windows over which the shaggy thatch comes down like beetling eyebrows and with an elder-shrub growing absurdly out of its chimney and forming a tuft of twigs like a feather in its cap. Beside the Horse and Harrow stands a large Blenheim apple tree; and the building and the tree seem to lean together, ‘like a pair of drunks', says Joe Trentfield the landlord, ‘when you can't tell which one is propping up t'other.'

I must not forget to mention Mrs Doan's Post Office and General Stores, which is remarkable chiefly because of the strange assortment of goods displayed in its window and upon its shelves. Most of these goods are extremely old-fashioned – there are curious Victorian hair-curlers stuck on cards decorated with engravings of curious Victorian hairstyles, there are boxes of lead soldiers belonging to armies and regiments long disbanded – ‘Montenegrin Infantry' and ‘Serbian Hussars', there are babies' rattles painted in red, white and blue to celebrate the jubilee of Queen Victoria, and milk jugs bearing the legend ‘Mafeking', and framed pictures of the Coronation of King Edward the Seventh. There is even a ‘line' in frilly bloomers, discreetly stored away on a top shelf. And every year in early February Mrs Doan fetches down from an attic or store-room a boxful of nineteenth-century Valentines, printed about 1880, which she hopefully lays out upon her counter.
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Mrs Doan's mother, who had the shop before her, must I think have been possessed by a sort of
folie de grandeur
before she died; instead of ordering goods by the dozen she suddenly took to ordering them by the gross. And Mrs Doan has never troubled to replace the unsaleable lines, professing the belief that ‘Folks would come back to them in the end.' Now, at long last, her faith is justified. Fashion has come full-circle, and the hairstyle shown on the copper-plate card advertising curlers begins to look startlingly modern. Summer visitors buy the Mafeking jugs as quaint curiosities; and even the frilly bloomers, we are told, are coming into favour again. As for the Valentines, they were discovered last year by the land girls from the hostel down the road, and since there are about two dozen land girls, each of whom at any given time is sure to be in love with six young men, Mrs Doan must have sold a whole gross of them. With renewed confidence she declares ‘Folks will always come back to things, if only you've got the patience to wait long enough.'

Another old-fashioned thing which Mrs Doan deals in is peppermint – not the mildly-flavoured stuff which you buy in ordinary shops, but an aromatic concoction which will cure your cold (and very nearly blow your head off) if you pour a few drops of it into boiling water and sniff it before you go to bed. Mrs Doan distils this spirit, according to her mother's recipe, in the wash-house at the back of her shop; and the whole village know when she is doing so, for the strong sweet smell tickles your nostrils though you are fifty yards away.

Mrs Doan, as her mother did before her, also looks after the Post Office and telephone exchange, so she knows everything that goes on in the village. In her mother's day, it is said, the Post Office business was conducted entirely
coram populo,
so that the gossips would take a walk down to the Post Office ‘just to have a read at the telegrams, my dear'. Nowadays only the telephone calls are regarded as public property, and Mrs Doan's daughter has more than once saved the landlords of the local pubs from getting into trouble by ringing them up to say ‘Somebody's just phoned the policeman to tell him you're keeping open after hours. Thought you'd better know. Ta-ta.'

The lower part of the village – between the Post Office and the church – still bears the scars of war; for early in 1945 a homing Lancaster, winged over Germany, fiery-tailed like a comet, ploughed its way through the churchyard, knocked down the three poplars at the edge of the Rectory garden, and finally blew up, bombs and all, on the patch of green where our boys used to play football. The explosion splintered the doors and windows of a score of cottages, added another two or three degrees to the inclination of the church spire, and threw a shower of burning wreckage upon all the thatched roofs within range. The dry thatch quickly caught fire, and soon half Brensham was burning; and because the road from Elmbury was blocked by the blazing tail of the bomber the fire engines took forty minutes to get through. By the time they arrived the old men, the women and the children of Brensham had pulled the thatch off their cottages, pitchforked the crackling straw into their gardens, hacked away the smouldering timbers, and saved every building except one cottage and an old barn. For weeks afterwards there was hardly a man in the village who did not wear bandages on his hands.

Now, three years later, the marks of the explosion have
almost disappeared. You can still see the jagged stumps of the poplar trees and the deep furrow across the churchyard; and the new thatch shows white against the brown where Jaky Jones the odd-job-man did the longest odd-job of his career – for he worked on the roofs for eighteen months and began to feel as much at home up there, he said, as an old tom-cat. But the crater, which was eight feet deep, has filled with water, so that we now have a pond on the village green, where five ducks go puddling and marsh-marigolds open golden chalices to the April rain.

As Brensham's scars heal, so does the memory of that flaming midnight fade from its people's minds. You might think that the affair would already have become a famous legend to be told and retold in the pubs to the summer visitors: The Night When Half Brensham Was Afire. But instead the unpredictable village has bundled away its Bomb into the limbo of its long history to be half-remembered for a while and then forgotten as the Wars of the Roses are forgotten, and Cromwell's Roundheads riding to Worcester fight, and the goings and comings of soldiers hunting the beaten King, the beacons of Trafalgar and Waterloo and the burning ricks of 1830, and even, in time, the bonfires of V-Day. If you should ask the company in the Horse and Harrow why there is now a pond on the green where no pond was before they will answer briefly ‘An aerioplane done it,' adding perhaps the additional information that ‘we calls it Bomb Pond'. In a hundred years' time, I shouldn't mind betting, they'll still call it Bomb Pond; but if they are asked why they'll say that nobody knows, rightly, but it has allus been called so.

Beyond the church, at the bottom of the Rectory lawn, runs the river, Shakespeare's Avon winding its way down to the Severn between flat meadows and osier-beds: margined with loosestrife, lily-padded, perch-haunted, meandering.
This is the ultimate objective of most of our summer visitors. Many of them are anglers, who line the banks on Saturdays and Sundays patiently watching their painted floats and whooping with joy whenever they pull out a tiddler. Their needs are catered for by Jaky Jones the odd-job-man whose cottage at the end of Ferry Lane bears on its garden gate in summer the horrifying invitation:

Other visitors hire motor-launches from Elmbury, four miles downstream, and infuriate the fishermen by chugging up and down the narrow river, with their ladies browning themselves on the half-deck and looking as languid as Cleopatra in her barge, while the boat's wash frightens the fishes and drowns the floats, and its bilge-water covers the surface of the river with a rainbow film of oil. The humbler brethren of these superior mariners take out rowing-boats and canoes which they cannot manage, upset themselves, and are profitably rescued by our villagers; while the dry-bobs, as it were, picnic in the meadows by the ferry, spoil the mowing-grass with their love-games, and amaze the aged ferryman with their exiguous sunsuits. Sooner or later they all find their way to one or other of the village pubs where they promptly catch the antic spirit of the place and drink pint-mugs of our rough local cider, which sends them away singing and acts later as a potent purge.

Meanwhile the more decorous sort sketch the quaint church or take rubbings of its Memorial Brasses; study the flora of the riverside or hunt for bee-orchids on Brensham Hill; photograph the Oldest Inhabitant and ask him questions about our Folk-lore, which he obligingly invents for their benefit; or go foraging down the leafy lanes where at
almost every gateway chubby-faced and cheeky children offer bundles of'sparrow grass', chips of strawberries, and baskets of yellow and purple plums each in their season. By the end of September there is not a fruit-grower in the district who does not believe himself to be rich, forgetting that the bundles of pound-notes are his squirrel's hoard which must last him through the long winter.

As the days shorten, the stream of buses and cars dwindles and dries up. At weekends in October there are still a few devoted anglers to be found beside the river; but these become fewer, until one Sunday afternoon when the floods are rising the last of them turns up his coat collar and trudges reluctantly away, glancing over his shoulder as if he were defeated Canute, while the eddying water seeps over the withered sedges.

Then the oakwoods on Brensham Hill fall into a brown study, and stripped of their leaves the orchards in the vale become as drab as a monk's habit. Brown too is the flood-water lying on the meadows, and dark sepia like the old thatch on the cottages is the ubiquitous mud. Only here and there do you see a scrap or splash of colour left over from September like the tattered relics of a carnival: a few late Laxtons and Worcester Pearmains cling to the apple boughs and are brighter than robins' breasts in a winter hedge, a patch of tawny asparagus-tops smoulders like a squitch-fire and an isolated half-acre of red cabbage shows an iridescent gleam of purplish-bronze rather like the gleam on flakes of iodine when they catch the light. But soon even these colours fade, and we are left with a landscape of residual brown-and-green, like an Old Master upon which the varnish has become opaque; and against this landscape the figures of our hobbledehoys move to and fro among the sprout plants, as slow and plodding as cart-horses and, you might think, as stolid.

And indeed they have a deceptive air of stolidity. Dwelling as they do in a countryside of sharp contrasts, of backbreaking mud and heartbreaking beauty, sprouts in December and apple blossom in May, they know that all things are transient, both the good and the bad. Because their little livelihoods are bound up with the changes and chances of English weather, at the mercy of hooligan winds, inexorable floods and unsparing frosts, they have acquired, I think, a philosophic acceptance of fate. They know alike the treason of false springs and the blessed benison of summer. They know that bountiful seasons are often followed by frugal ones, and that the worst drought is sometimes succeeded by the worst flood. They know that the apple blossom is as brief as young love, and that the longest winter melts at last into the sweetest spring. They do not, therefore, tend to lose their heads when good luck comes their way nor their hope when the world goes ill for them. They have learned to take things in their stride, be they May frosts or falling aeroplanes or, for that matter, world wars.

In the 1914 war Brensham parish sent about thirty-five men into the forces. In 1939 there were fewer young men available, because some of the potential fathers had been killed in the previous holocaust and others, during the agricultural slump, had drifted to jobs in the towns. Nevertheless the village managed to scrape together twenty-eight, which was about a fifth of the whole male population; and this time a score of young women joined up as well. They went off, these farmers' sons and market-gardeners' daughters, these clodhopping labourers, these poachers and odd-job-men, in no fervent nor even enthusiastic fashion but in exactly the mood of Francis Feeble whose Cotswold blood for
all I know may run in their veins. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death; an't be my destiny, so; an't be not, so; no man's too good to serve his Prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.'

Thus unheroically the men of Brensham went to war. They who perhaps till then had caught but a glimpse of the flat sea on Bank Holiday at Weston-super-Mare now sailed across the stormy oceans; they whose previous notion of adventure was to go by cheap ticket to Birmingham to watch the Albion play football now bought Birmingham-made Buddhas in Eastern bazaars; they who had cursed the winter floods of Brensham thirsted in waterless deserts; and the poachers who had learned on our hillside the quick and silent way of killing a rabbit now learned quick and silent ways of killing men. Some of our farmers' boys flew as tail-gunners through the fiery night above Berlin; others, like George Daniels, were dropped out of aeroplanes into strange countries with tommy-guns in their hands. They talked by signs to Greek peasants about crops and to French peasants about cows. They gave chocolates to Italian children and cigarettes to German girls. They sat in foreign catés and ate foreign dishes and sang the choruses of foreign songs with a broad rustic accent and got drunk on foreign wine. They discovered the profound truth which makes a mock of wars, that all girls say much the same thing when they are in a soldier's arms and that the men of opposing nations all look much the same when they are lying dead. And when at last the extraordinary adventure was ended they came home – nineteen out of the twenty-eight came home – and bundled away the memory of the war in much the same way as their fathers and mothers bundled away the memory of Brensham's Bomb, and slipped back as if they had never left it into the rhythm and routine of Brensham's life, Saturday
afternoon cricket, and darts in the pub in the evening, apple-spraying and plum-picking, the brief beauty of April, the leafy pleasaunce of summer, haysel and harvest, the long labours of winter, mud and sprouts and cold hands.