The Blue Field (24 page)

When he had finished telling me his dream his wife's voice, from within the bedroom upstairs, commented that it was all them chitterlings on top of a bellyful of cider. Joe grinned tolerantly. ‘Maybe' he said, ‘but all the same it
is
blowing hard.' The gilded weathercock on the spire of the church was pointing nor'-west; and from the north-west out of a grey sky the wind came whistling up the village street, tearing at the boughs of the big apple tree beside the inn and blowing into fantastical shapes the remarkable assortment of family washing which Mrs Trentfield had hung out in the yard the night before. An outsize blouse bulged as if Mrs Trentfield's vast bosom still inhabited it; stockings, pair by pair, danced jigs and minuets; Joe's long-legged winter combinations imitated the grotesque contortions of a fat man hanging from the gibbet; suspenders dangling from a pair of corsets had captured a pale-blue brassiére which like a mackerel on a handline frantically flapped and wriggled;
wind-filled bloomers achieved voluptuous shapes resembling the jaunty and generous behinds of their owners, Mimi and Meg. Joe, who had an eye for such things, placed his hands on his hips and laughed heartily; and when a pair of pink knickers became detached from the line and sailed away over the garden fence he laughed the louder. The wind whisked away his deep guffaw and sped it up the street in the wake of the knickers, which came to rest at the feet of Dai Roberts Postman, who was delivering letters next door.

Dai Roberts picked them up, handling them with obvious distaste and embarrassment, for he was a puritanical man who believed that the cause of morals, as well as that of comfort, was best served by flannel next the skin. As he did so a sound other than Joe's laughter made him tilt back his head and stare upwards. It was a queer sound, a sort of breathless clamour, as if a pack of hounds was hunting up there in the heels of the north wind. I craned my neck, and at last I saw a small cloud the size of a man's hand, dark against the grey mass of clouds, which even as I watched it became teased out into a long skein like a ball of wool unwinding or the swift streak of an approaching line-squall, and then suddenly resolved itself into a pattern of flapping wings. Grey geese! – two score of them in the first ragged V, and a bigger lot behind stretching wing-tip to wing-tip halfway across the horizon. Their honking filled the air, a crazy wild cry out of Spitzbergen or the Siberian waste, the untamed voices of creatures inexpressibly free. It was an alien sound in our placid English countryside, and I felt a kind of pricking at the back of my neck as I listened to it. Dai Roberts too sensed the strangeness and the wildness of it; he waved and shouted. But now the vanguard was vanishing towards the south, the main body was passing overhead, the last stragglers were coming up over the
church spire. Joe declared that they formed much the same pattern in the sky as the heraldic creatures in his dream; the geese rode on the wind's back as easily and swiftly as those phenomenal leopards! He was filled with awe at the strange coincidence, and being assured now that his dream had contained a prophecy, he announced in a loud voice to his wife within the bedroom:

‘They're flying south, my dear. We shall get some rough weather.'

Joe asked me into the bar for a half-pint of beer; and because of the strong wind he closed the front door. A moment later Mimi's pink knickers and the morning letters came tumbling together into the wire letter-box. Dai's sing-song voice came after them. He is something more than a postman, for he bears every day from house to house the latest tidings, scandal or gossip.

‘Mr Trentfield', he said, ‘I haf some sad news for you. Old William Hart is dead.'

When he said that I had a queer feeling that Brensham would never be quite the same again; it was as if the whole landscape was altered, as if Brensham Hill itself had suddenly disappeared during the night.

Dai spoke through the letter-flap, for he had a strong prejudice against public houses and it was his stern boast that he had never set foot in one. He went on:

‘Died in his chair he did early this morning with a glass they do say in his hand.'

‘Old William,' said Joe. ‘Well, well.'

‘And as soon as it was light the police came to his farm, and surrounded the house, because they believed he was
desperate and armed, do you see; and all the time he was lying there dead to shame them.'

‘Well, well!' said Joe again.

‘And the boy Jerry shot at them with a catapult,' Dai went on. ‘Truncheons they had brought to deal with a maniac who carried a shotgun; and a little boy with a catapult they did find.' He paused to take breath and continued: ‘Natural causes the doctor says it was. No inquest will there be. Better part of a jugful of wine he had drunk before he died. Empty to the last drop they do say the glass was in his hand!'

‘It would be,' said Joe, nodding his head in grave approval of this demonstration of the fitness of things. ‘Aye, it would be empty.' Dai withdrew his mouth from the letter-slit and the flap went back with a loud click. As he took Mimi's crumpled knickers and the letters out of the box Joe shook his head and sighed.

‘That's a queer ending,' he said, ‘to the case of William Hart.'

‘Perhaps in a way the best ending,' I said. I was thinking of Mr Chorlton's dreadful prophecy: ‘I suppose that in the end they'll have him certified.'

‘Aye. He had a good innings,' went on Joe. ‘He must ‘a' bin nearly eighty. ‘Tis ten years at least since we saw him in this bar.' I followed his glance as he looked towards the chimney-corner by the fireplace which had been William's favourite seat, and as if it were yesterday I could remember the wild old man sitting there. I saw him with a red-hot poker in his hand warming up a pot of the spiced ale which always set him singing. The ale fizzed into brown froth round the poker till it had a great mushroom head in it overhanging the rim of the pot. William raised it to his lips and drank deep, and the foam flecked his white moustache and beard. Then while he beat time with the blackening
poker he began to sing. Surely nobody had ever possessed such powerful lungs as he! When he sang it was like a tornado blowing through the bar. You had an impulse to pick up your glass off the counter lest it should be swept away by that torrent of sound.

‘What a man!' said Joe reflectively. It was curious how often people said ‘What a man!' when they spoke of William. He shrugged his shoulders. I suppose if you keep a pub your bar becomes increasingly populated by ghosts as the years go by, although there are always new customers, young and vigorous, elbowing them out of the way. The memory of William Hart, I thought, would surely be one of those late-lingering and obstinate ones which wouldn't readily give way to the youngsters and which would never again take any notice (William when alive had never taken much notice) of 'Time, Gentlemen, Please!' It was difficult, even now, to imagine him lying dead. Life in him had been like a yeast, ever fermenting and renewing itself and furiously working again.

Joe picked up his broom and began energetically to sweep out the bar, as if he would sweep the ghost of William out of the way. For a moment or two he swept in silence, then as the rising wind howled in the crooked chimney he paused on the broom and glanced out of the window at the dark threatening sky where the clouds surged like waves in a rough sea.

‘'Tis William Hart's own weather,' he said oddly. ‘You could almost think him to be up there in the wind.'

For three days after William Hart's death the boisterous wind barged about Brensham with the aimless mischief of a
cart-horse colt. It thundered through the orchards and gave the plum trees a rough and ready pruning. It plucked the thatch from cottages and the hats from people's heads. It tugged at sleeves and fluttered skirts, and somehow when it did so it seemed to tug at the spirit and flutter the heart as well. It was a rollicking, uproarious, antic wind, which reminded us all, as it had reminded Joe Trentfield, of the free spirit of William Hart.

And indeed one felt, somehow, as one went about Brensham during those three days, a strange sort of restlessness, wildness, excitement, what you will. If there was grief and anger blowing about in the wind, there was laughter and song as well, and something else which I cannot explain, something which I can only describe as a turbulence of the spirit as well as of the air. Dai Roberts felt it, when he went about his rounds singing
Land of My Fathers
at the top of his voice and composing, he told me, a poem of forty stanzas about the Pentecost in the manner of the great bard Taliesin. Mr Chorlton felt it when his hat went spinning down the village street and, forgetting his gout, he pursued and fielded it as smartly as he'd fielded many a ball when he played cricket for Somerset forty years ago. Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith felt it, when he stood at the door of his smithy and remarked to me that his bellows, compared with the wind, were as puny as the Labour Government, and discoursed of a revolution after his own simple heart which should be as fierce and brave and cleansing as the gale.

Odd things happened which matched our turbulent mood. The wind toppled over one of the dredger-cranes which was engaged in destroying Sammy Hunt's osier-bed, and as it fell into the river Sammy performed a war-dance of delight upon the bank. Then in accordance with the tradition of his sea service, which will not let even an enemy
drown, he took out his boat and rescued the crane's operator who had fallen in with it.

And late one afternoon, as I was walking, I was startled to hear the sound of singing, coming, it seemed, out of the very sky. I looked up, and nearly at the top of a sixty-foot aspen tree I saw George Daniels, hanging on for dear life and hacking away with his knife at a misletoe bough to which he had already attached a rope. The tall tree creaked and groaned, and the swaying motion, accompanied by the rush of air, must have reminded George of the time when he parachuted down to fight the Germans at Bruneval.

yelled George.

‘They'll be wearing their red berets when they come!
They'll be wearing their red berets,
They'll be wearing their red berets,
They'll be wearing their red berets when they come!'

But just as he cut through the mistletoe bough an extra strong gust interrupted the song, and for a moment he was compelled to cling to the rough stem of the aspen with both his hands and both his knees. The tree leaned so far with the wind that its branches grated against those of another tree; then as it slowly righted itself George lowered the mistletoe to the ground, steering it neatly between the branches, to where Pierre and 'Enery stood ready to receive it. (Their lorry, I now saw, was parked by the side of the lane.) ‘I've had enough of this hushabye-baby stuff!' shouted George; and quickly followed the mistletoe bough, digging his climbing-irons into the bark and hugging the rough aspentrunk
as tightly, I'm sure, as he'd ever hugged the slim waist of Susan.

Then Jaky Jones, who was busy making William's coffin, brought back a strange report from the farmhouse where he had been to do his necessary business. He told me this story as he planed a piece of wood in his workshop and grumbled at its twisted grain and the rough knots in it. (‘Lord knows what old William would say!') I must tell it here in my own way, for I cannot attempt to sustain for long the individual manner of Jaky, every paragraph peppered with ‘Matey' and ‘How's your father'. Jaky, it seems, when he came downstairs from William's room, found the three daughters, Betty, Joan and Pru, ‘looking a bit queer' and when he saw the bottle on the table he realized that they'd been at William's home-made wine. This bottle was labelled ‘Sloe gin'; no doubt they had thought it a ladylike, respectable and almost teetotal drink, and being unaccustomed to drinking had taken too much. Without speaking, they beckoned to him and led him along a passage towards the still-room. At the end of the passage Joan opened the door, stood back, and said simply: ‘Look.'

It was an astonishing sight. The small still-room was filled, from floor to ceiling, with casks and bottles. The casks occupied the whole of the floor-space and were stacked three deep; Jaky said they made him think of Gunpowder Plot. The bottles took up four long shelves, and he reckoned there must be twenty dozen at least. All were carefully labelled, and there were almost as many sorts as there were bottles.
Elderberry, Elderflower, Dandelion, Mead, Mangel-Wurzel, Nettle, Parsnip, Carrot, Potato, Raspberry, Gooseberry, Rhubarb, Raisin, Blackcurrant Extra Strong
. . .

Listening to Jaky, I could well imagine that Guy Fawkes' well-stocked cellar had contained nothing half so dangerous. What pranks and riots and fights and foolishness were
confined like genii in those two hundred-odd bottles! What devilry lay dormant in those piled-up casks! What concentrated mischief grew daily more potent as it fermented privily in that little dark room! The place, said Jaky, was like an arsenal and the stupendous thought that troubled him was this:
The old gentleman had really intended to drink the lot!

Back in the kitchen, Joan poured Jaky out a glass of sloe gin; she also refilled her own and her sisters' glasses. The effect of the drink was so palpably beneficial that nobody saw any harm in having another; and after that it became almost a sacred duty to have a third. By this time Betty's eyes had a curious dreamy look, while Joan's cheeks were the colour of a ripe Ribstone Pippin.

‘'Tis sad but certain,' said Joan in a far-away voice, ‘that we couldn't drink all that wine ourselves, not if we lived to be a hundred.'

Betty nodded gravely.

‘Not if we lived to be as old as ‘Thuselah,' she declared.

‘'Thuselah, ‘Thuselah,' repeated Pru solemnly; and suddenly giggled.

‘The thing that's worrying me,' said Joan, ‘is what in the world shall we do with it all?'