The Blue Field (3 page)

You might indeed be forgiven for thinking them stolid! Yet, I who know them and have grown up among them – I have seen Bottom, Quince, Snug, Flute, and Starveling walking in their shoes, I have seen them quickened by the same strange fancy which played about the heads of that weaver and his crew in the magic ‘Wood not far from Athens'. For they are still at heart the people who hurdled the cuckoo to keep it always spring, the crack-brained incalculable people in whose hearts the secret poetry burns as bright as their late scarlet apples clinging obstinately to the trees; the cap-over-the-windmill people, no strangers to love and laughter and moderate in neither; fierce in defence of their little liberties; much given to singing and drinking; and possessed of a certain unpredictable wildness of the spirit which rises in them from time to time like a sudden wind. On the rare occasions when this happens they become, for a space, the most intractable, disorderly, turbulent people in the world.

I am going to tell you the story of a man of Brensham who was so wild and intractable and turbulent that he failed, in the end, to come to terms with our orderly world (or perhaps one could say that our orderly world failed to come to terms with him). And I shall tell you too of a time at midwinter in the dull wet colourless season of sprouts, when suddenly the wild grey-gooseweather came blowing down from the north and with it came I know not whence this boisterous wind of the spirit gusting through the hearts of Brensham folk. But first, before I come to that part of my story, I must describe some of the events which preceded it; and it will be well if we take a closer look at the structure and
pattern of the crack-brained village straggling among its orchards between the river and the hill. For that will serve both as an introduction to the characters and a prologue to the play; let us follow, then, the good advice of Bottom the weaver:

Quince:
Is all our company here?

Bottom:
You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.

We'll begin at the top of Brensham Hill because from there you will get a good idea of the kind of country in which our village is set. This is the land which has made and moulded us. Look north, south, east and west, and you shall see as it were the four corner-stones of our character: the ancient foundations of our way of thinking and living, our wisdom, folly, manners, customs, humours, what you will.

Look north, then, where the Avon snakes down from Stratford through the Evesham Vale. With the aid of glasses on a very clear day you can just make out the red-brick ordinary-looking small town which people in Patagonia and Pekin have heard of, though perhaps they couldn't name anywhere else in England save London. Shakespeare seems very close when you walk on Brensham Hill. He had friends in this neighbourhood, but a day's good tramp from his home, and just across the river lived one who witnessed his will. You will find yourself wondering, when you see a very old tree, whether he sat in the shade of it; or when you come to a pub, whether he drank there. Now and then on some old labourer's lips a country word or a turn of phrase brings him closer still. For example, we have a word which schoolboys use for the crackly dry stems of the
hemlock and the hedge-parsley: ‘kecksies', a local word which is heard, I think, nowhere else in England; but Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of the Duke of Burgundy in
Henry the Fifth:

‘Nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles,
kecksies,
burs …'

So, you see, he spoke our speech and thought our thoughts. These our woods and fields, our lanes and rivers, served him as a backcloth for Arden or Athens, Burgundy or Illyria.

Look south, downstream, to the old town of Elmbury standing at the junction of Avon and Severn. Just below the junction is the battlefield called the Bloody Meadow in which the Red Rose went down and the White Rose triumphed on a May day in 1471. By chance a deep-red flower called cranes-bill grows profusely in this meadow; at times it almost covers it; and if you look through strong glasses from the top of Brensham Hill at this patch of English earth on a summer day you will see the dreadful stain upon it, you will see it drenched in Lancastrian blood. After the battle the routed army streamed into Elmbury Abbey for sanctuary, and the young Prince Edward who fell that day is buried there. With him lie the great lords who helped to shape the fortunes of England for three centuries, the makers and unmakers of Kings whose mighty names thunder through the chronicles of Hall and Stow and Holinshed: the Despencers and the De Clares and the Warwicks and the Beauchamps, and that false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence who met his inglorious end in a butt of Malmsey wine. These old stones and bones give us, I think, a sense of the past: not a knowledge of history (for there are few men in Brensham who could tell you the date of Elmbury's battle nor which side won it) but an acceptance of history, which is
much the same thing as a sense of proportion. It accounts, perhaps, for our attitude to the Brensham Bomb and to a couple of wars in a lifetime; but it is not a conscious attitude, it is simply a piece of our background with which we have grown so familiar that we forget it is there – just as when we go to church at Elmbury we forget the Lords of Old Time who lie all round us and keep us silent company.

And now look east to the strong Cotswolds where rugged shepherds have watched their flocks since 1350. The winds blow cold there, and at night the stars in their courses wheel slowly across an immense sky. The men from being much alone grow taciturn, and their long stride takes a queer rhythm from the slopes of the whaleback hills. Brensham, seven hundred feet high, is itself an outlier of the Cotswolds; so thence, perhaps comes our hillmen's lope, and thence the trick of being silent when we have nothing to say.

Lastly, look west to the Malverns and beyond them to the mountains of Wales. It's not very far across the Severn and the Wye to the dark shut-in valleys and the cold slate villages and the savage Fforest Fawr; it's certainly not too far for a man to go courting if he had a mind to – so if an anthropologist came to Brensham and started to measure our heads he'd discover a fine puzzling mixture of long ones and short ones and betwixts and betweens. And he'd find if he could look inside the heads a compound and amalgamation of Welsh wildness and English sedateness, Border magic and Cotswold common-sense. For though we live in a fat and fruitful vale, yet we have a sense of looking out on to the wide waste-lands and the mysterious mountains. That's where our occasional turbulence comes from, and the fancy that tried to pen the cuckoo, and our love of singing.

Now on a day in late July, if you had stood on Brensham Hill and looked down the furzy slope towards the village, you might have seen a remarkable spectacle. In the middle of William Hart's farm, which occupied about a hundred and fifty acres along the skirt of the hill, a seven-acre field had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies. It happened almost in a night. One day there was a faint azure mist upon the field, like smoke from a squitch-fire. Next morning when the sun came up a cerulean carpet covered it; and we almost caught our breath at the sight of this miracle, for although our farmers with their seasonal rotations paint the land in many colours, blue is not one of them, blue stands as it were beyond the agricultural spectrum, and this particular shade of blue, so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies, was something that we had never seen in our countryside before.

Moreover it made an extraordinary contrast with the rest of the hillside; for there was no other bright colour to share the sunlight with it. In other years, as a rule, there is purple clover or pink sainfoin or luteous charlock; but the authorities had caused most of the hill to be ploughed up for corn. So the familiar pattern was one of ash-blond oats and rust-coloured barley rippling in the wind like the fur of a marmalade cat, with the foaming green of the orchards making a hem to the skirt of the hill. Now, between the orchards and the corn, appeared this astonishing lagoon of blue which caught and held the eye so that within an hour the whole neighbourhood was talking about it. ‘Have you seen old William's field of linseed?' people said. ‘It does your heart good to look at it; but Lord, I wouldn't be in his shoes when the trouble starts!'

It was Mr Chorlton, the retired prep-school master, who first suggested to me there might be serious trouble. Being nearly seventy and very lame, he plays a smaller part than he used to in our village life; but from his garden gate the old philosopher observes and comments as shrewdly as he ever did, and acts as a sort of Greek chorus to our little comedies and tragedies.

‘I am wondering,' he said, as he gazed up the hill at the marvellous flaxfield – for linseed is a form of flax – ‘whether perhaps it is the kind of trivial gesture which begins big rows: an absurd but memorable
casus belli,
like Jenkin's ear.'

I had gone to have tea with Mr Chorlton and his old friend, Sir Gerald Hope-Kingley, in whose house he lived; for his own cottage, halfway between Brensham and Elmbury, had been destroyed by the flaming tail of that Lancaster which fell out of the sky in 1945. All his worldly possessions had been burned with it: his precious library, his collection of eighteenth-century first editions, his cabinet of butterflies which represented a lifetime's hobby, and his small cellar of wine. Yet the loss of so many cherished things did not break him as we all thought it would; he shrugged his shoulders and smiled and told us that he felt strangely free. ‘It is interesting to discover, when all is taken from one, how little one really needs,' he said soon after it happened. ‘Out of those two thousand books, I have only bothered to replace three: Shakespeare, Plato, and the Old Testament. As for butterflies, I shall probably get more pleasure out of watching them at the flowers than looking at them in my cabinet. And as for the wine, I shall strive to acquire a new taste for Government Port. The only thing I
want is a roof over my head; like Diogenes, I am looking for a tub!'

A few weeks later Sir Gerald, whom we had all given up for dead, returned from a Japanese prison camp in Burma, and immediately invited Mr Chorlton to go and live with him. He was a hydraulic engineer who had retired to Brensham some years before the war for the avowed purpose of Pottering About in the Garden. He had pottered happily and unsuccessfully with Alpines, sweet-peas, cacti, lilies, Aquaria, bird-watching and nature photography until the war came, when His Majesty's Government requested his services and he pottered off to Burma for the purpose, we understood, of destroying some complicated waterworks which had taken him three years to build. He blew them up in about three minutes, but his incurable habit of pottering got him caught by the Japs, and he spent the next two years devising an ingenious still, under the floor of his hut, for the purpose of making alcohol out of mangoes. It didn't work very well – none of his projects ever did, unless they were huge dams and waterfalls, which he contrived with the greatest ease – and the war was over before he succeeded in distilling sufficient alcohol to make a drink. On VJ-Day, however, the machine excelled itself and produced three pints, which he shared among his fellow prisoners. They all became extremely ill, and the raw spirit acted so fiercely upon the emaciated body of Sir Gerald that he nearly died. Indeed, when at last he arrived at Brensham the porter at the station failed to recognize him; and Joe Trentfield, seeing him go by the Horse and Harrow, asked who the devil was that little wizened fellow like a Chink.

Now, in the gracious house called Gables at the top of the village, the two old friends while away the twilight of their days with Pottering and Port; and Mr Chorlton had the satisfaction of blaming the Government for the occasional
attacks of gout which he had previously laid at the door of Messrs Cockburn. Because he was temporarily immobilized by one of these attacks he had asked me to go to tea and tell him the village news; and we sat on the lawn, beside the lily-pond which leaked and the rockery which was the grave of so many rare Alpines, and feasted our eyes on the blue splendour of William Hart's flax field halfway up the hill.

‘What a colour!' said Mr Chorlton. ‘Is it ideological, do you think? Does it not strike you as somehow rather defiant? Perhaps I associate it with the ribbons in the buttonholes of Temperance reformers who used to provoke me in my youth.'

‘They were a different shade,' said Sir Gerald. ‘I wore one myself.'

This statement caused us no surprise; for Sir Gerald, in the few years we had known him, had dabbled in Christian Science, Spiritualism, Yoga, the British Israelites and the Oxford Group. He had been a vegetarian for a month, a Blackshirt for a week, and at one time was nearly converted to Islam. Dabbling, as he called it, was the intellectual counterpart of his physical Pottering, and was just as harmless. Indeed it was more so, for the form of Pottering in which he was engaged as we sat on the lawn seemed to involve considerable danger to life and limb. It had occurred to him, while he languished in the Japanese prison camp, that mankind was very much to blame for its wicked waste of safety-razor blades. He was reminded of this deplorable fact every morning, because he greatly desired a shave; and as he fingered his long, hot and itchy beard he used to contemplate with sorrow and even with indignation the huge and prodigal expenditure of blades which went on every minute of the day all over the civilized world. He whiled away many hours trying to estimate the daily wastage; but it was incalculable. He remembered bitterly that there were
at least a hundred old blades lying in a box in his bathroom at home, because he had never been able to discover any way of disposing of them other than by burial, and he had been too idle to dig a hole. What would he not have given now for the oldest, rustiest, bluntest of them all? From this sad reflection his thoughts turned to the various possible uses of razor blades, other than for shaving the face. One could make them into pencil sharpeners, of course; but nobody needed a hundred pencil sharpeners. It was surely not beyond the wit of man to devise some other employment for those multitudinous little pieces of tempered steel! Therefore when he was not taking to pieces or putting together his illicit still, Sir Gerald devoted himself to the consideration of this problem; and now on his lawn he was engaged in putting his theories to a practical test. He had obtained several strips of metal with holes in – I think they must have been part of a meccano set – and having joined them together in a length of about three feet he was bolting razor blades along them to make a frightful serrated cutting-edge which, he declared, would ultimately form part of a patent lawn-mower.