The Blue Field (8 page)

We sat down to tea, and I amused myself by trying to count the number of animals in the room. There was a terrier and a spaniel bitch in pup, and a lot of cats all of which either had, or were obviously about to have, kittens. William loved cats, and two of them perched on his broad shoulders during tea. A fox cub appeared as if from nowhere and began to play with the terrier, and William told me how he'd picked it up in a cold wet furrow last spring (the vixen had been moving her litter away from the floods) and how he'd fed it with milk out of a fountain-pen filler until it was strong enough to fend for itself. When tea was finished he scraped up a handful of crumbs and threw them out of the window; and there suddenly materialized what I can only describe as a
cloud
of birds, sparrows and finches and thrushes and tits – they darkened the room for a second with their fluttering shadows as they showered down from the eaves and spoutings and bushes and boughs where they'd been waiting for the bounty scattered by William's prodigal hand.

Though he loved birds and beasts and all wild things and liked to have them about him, it was not in William's nature, itself so wild and free, to wish to cage or confine them. The pet fox cub therefore had its freedom to come and go at its will. It showed no particular interest in the
poultry, but it often went hunting for rats and moorhens in the osier-bed adjoining the lower boundary of William's farm; and there, one morning towards the end of the cubbing season, General Bouverie's huntsman saw it sneaking down the brookside and holloaed the hounds on to its line.

They were, without a doubt, the slowest, stupidest and most riotous pack in England; and as most of them were pursuing moorhens, whimpering after water-rats, or simply standing at the edge of the osier-bed and waving their sterns, the fox cub had a fairly good start. It ran in a circle for about two miles, and gave the Hunt their fastest gallop of the season; but the hounds were close behind it when it came lolloping back towards the farmhouse and slipped through the hedge-gap near William's drive gate.

William had heard the hounds, and as he rushed out to rescue his fox cub he had armed himself, rather absurdly, with a shotgun, which in any case was unloaded. He was in time to see the hounds pull down the cub in his orchard – it was their first and last kill in the open during the whole of that season – and he was also in time to intercept General Bouverie and the rest of the field as they came puffing and snorting, a long way behind the hounds, full gallop up to his gate. There he confronted them, looking rather like a prophet of old with his bristling white beard, holding the shotgun at the ready.

General Bouverie, a mild and courteous person when he was not on horseback, always became so excited during a hunt that he went purple in the face, blasted everybody he encountered with weird and terrible oaths, and demanded of them in furious tones, ‘Have you seen my fox, damn you?' Peaceful shepherds, market-gardeners ploughing their land, and even passing motorists who were not aware there was a fox for miles, were often cursed up hill and down dale because they were too stupefied by the General's demented
appearance to answer this terrifying question. But now, as the General pounded up to the gate and yelled out to William, ‘Have you seen my fox, damn you?' he received a reply which he had certainly never had before.

‘I have seen
my
fox,' said William sternly, ‘and your hounds have just killed it.'

‘Your fox?' spluttered General Bouverie, who believed like all Masters of Foxhounds that he had a prescriptive right to all the foxes within the boundaries of his hunting-country, ‘What the devil do you mean by
your
fox?' And he uttered his favourite oath, which was the most extraordinary one I have ever heard: ‘Fishcakes and haemorrhoids!'

‘All the same,' said William, with quiet dignity, ‘it was my fox; and this is my land; and if any of you dares to step over the boundary of my land I've got a gun.'

A ridiculous situation arose, in which everybody talked except William. A woman with a drawling voice said, ‘The fellow must be drunk,' several times. General Bouverie's huntsman encouraged his hounds from a distance (although they needed no encouragement) to ‘tear 'im up, my beauties, tear 'im and worry 'im, worry, worry, worry!' The General himself called upon fishcakes and haemorrhoids repeatedly but with diminishing conviction. And the Secretary of the Hunt, who was a lawyer, endeavoured to reason with William in a very learned way by pointing out that foxes, like other wild beasts, were legally considered to be animals
ferae naturae,
that is to say of a wild nature, in which the law recognized no private property whatsoever.

But William, who was somewhat
ferae naturae
himself, took no notice. Perhaps he didn't even listen, perhaps he was too full of grief for his little fox and of horror at the worrying noises of the hounds. But he continued to stand at the gate holding the gun awkwardly (for he hardly ever
used it) and looking rather like a stiff sentry ‘On guard' in a bad Victorian oleograph. Anon the huntsman blew his horn, and the hounds began to come back to him in twos and threes, bloody and stinking of fox, carrying tatters of fur in their mouths. General Bouverie called and cursed them alliteratively:

‘Hey, Barmaid, Bosphorus, blast the bitch, Bellman, Bountiful! Here, Dimple, Daisy, Dairymaid, Dauntless, damn the dog, Daffodil!' and at last he turned his horse and rode away, followed by the disconsolate company. ‘I
did
want to see them break up their fox,' said the drawling lady. ‘It's so rarely the poor darlings ever get the chance . . . What an uncouth, what a
barbaric
old man!'

After that William gave notice to General Bouverie that he would never allow the Hunt on his land; and this action of his was to have far-reaching consequences, as you shall see. It had one immediate consequence, which was that the Hunt no longer bought their hay from him, and because the Depression was just beginning he was left with two big ricks of seeds on his hands. Then one of his cows got foot and mouth disease, and the Ministry of Agriculture sent their slaughterers to kill every beast on the farm. They had to fetch the village policeman before they dared to do it, for they had heard tales of how William had threatened the Hunt with a gun. In the end, however, he gave them surprisingly little trouble. When he saw the preparations for the burning, the faggots and hedge-brash piled high in his Home Ground, the fight went out of him suddenly and the policeman, who knew how to handle him, led him brokenhearted into the house.

Because of this loss, and the time it took him to re-stock his farm, the Depression hit him badly. For two or three seasons there was a glut of fruit and nobody to buy it; the price of sprouts didn't pay for the cost of growing them; sometimes it was actually cheaper to plough a crop into the ground than to try to market it. William, like all the other farmers round about Brensham, got into debt with the bank, the seed-merchant, the local tradesmen, and even the village pub; but unlike some of the others he paid them all in full when the new war began to loom up on the horizon and the farmers were suddenly prosperous again.

Neither debt nor disaster could tame him, and even during the worst of the Depression he would often blow into Brensham like the wind, shattering the uncomfortable quietude of those stricken days when it seemed indeed as if we were taking part in the obsequies of a dying countryside, as if a graveside hush lay over the land. Into the Adam and Eve or the Trumpet or the Horse Narrow blew William, boisterous, thunderous, always discovering at the bottom of his trousers-pocket a forgotten half-crown to pay for another round of drinks; then out into the street at closing-time, singing and shouting his defiant happiness to the world at large, banging on the windows and doors of friends, acquaintances and strangers alike, and answering their sleepy protests with that strange proud boast about his apocryphal ancestry – ‘Thee carsn't touch I! Thee carsn't touch I! For I be descended from the poet Shakespeare!' and so, with huzza and tolderolloll, away home to the farm on the hill.

One of the most endearing things about William Hart was his complete lack of any shame or remorse afterwards; indeed he seemed to glory in the memory of his bouts and to look back on them with only one regret, that they were over. When the Rector happened to meet him on the morning
following a particularly riotous night, and said to him sternly, ‘I hear you were very noisy last night, William,' the wild old man threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Noisy?' he said. ‘Why, I was drunk – rascally drunk!' And he fairly smacked his lips over the night's junketings –
‘Rascally
drunk, Rector!'

William's favourite pub was certainly the Horse and Harrow, because it had a boisterous atmosphere in which he felt at home. Its landlord, Joe Trentfield, who was a retired sergeant-major, and his huge wife who moved with the ponderous dignity of a full-rigged ship sailing into action, were boon-companions for William because like him they possessed an infinite capacity for laughter. Little came amiss to them as a source of fun; and the world as they saw it was a rich plum-pudding stuffed with joke and jest.

Mimi and Meg, being brought up in this genial air, soon added their quota to the general merriment. They were both serving in the bar (illegally, I dare say) before they were fourteen; and in one of my earliest memories of William Hart I can see the two strapping little girls sitting on his knees, while he warmed a pint of beer with a red-hot poker and told them stories. He was a born storyteller and I think the only time he was ever serious was when he was inventing tales for the children. He would then tell the most comic story with that quiet gravity which children love. I remember very well the beginning of one of these tales, which will show you what kind of a storyteller William was.

‘Once upon a time there was a village called Merry-come-Sorrow and the folks who lived there were so mean,
you'd never believe it, on Guy Fawkes' night they actually let off their fireworks down a deep well so as the folks in the next village shouldn't see 'em for nothing . . .' He had a fund of old country sayings which he worked into the tales like proverbs worked into the design of a sampler – sayings like ‘It isn't spring until you can plant your foot on twelve daisies' and ‘Mists in March mean frosses in May'; and his vocabulary was crammed with peculiar words such as ‘tom-tolly' and ‘mollock' which seemed to possess large and comprehensive meanings – ‘mollock', for example, meant ‘the-sound-and-sensation-when-you-slipped-up-in-the-mud-and-fell-into-a-puddle'. I never found out what ‘tomtolly' meant; but the children seemed to understand William's kind of shorthand, for they listened in grave silence and never dreamed of interrupting him to ask for explanations.

For those who were hardy enough to put up with the high wind of laughter which was always blowing there, the Horse and Harrow was the perfect pub; and Joe was the perfect landlord, for he stood in direct apostolic succession from Chaucer's Host – ‘Eek therto he was right a mery man.' His free-and-easy bar – ‘Liberty' All', he called it-was probably the most important social institution in Brensham.

Now social institutions do not occur by chance or spring up suddenly; they are the product of gradual evolution, they grow up like trees in the landscape of our lives, they root themselves deep into our history and entwine themselves round our hearts. The Horse and Harrow like our oldest oak tree has been several hundred years a-growing; and like that somewhat similar institution, the Church of England, it is the consequence of a whole series of characteristic compromises. Its ancestry is mixed, complex and by no means wholly to its credit. It has evolved gradually out of the wayfarers' inn and the coaching-house, the dirty
little gin-palace and the village drinking-den; and today it is not merely, or even primarily, a place for drinking in but forms one of the kingpins of our society.

If the Horse and Harrow were to disappear tomorrow I do not know what we should put in its place nor how we should contrive a substitute to carry out its multitudinous functions. It is our club, meeting-place, recreation-room, social centre and goodness knows what else rolled into one. Our farmers meet to discuss their business there, our young men in the early and late stages of their courtship take their girls there in preference to the pictures, our married men take their wives there after supper in the evenings. All classes come together in its bar, play darts and shove-ha'penny and cribbage together, tell tales and sing and debate and argue about village politics and about the larger politics of the country and the world.

Whatever changes and chances may happen to me, I think I shall cherish for as long as I live the memory of certain evenings in the Horse and Harrow after cricket, when the whole village team with their wives and their daughters and their girls crowded into Joe's little bar, and the wind of Joe's laughter blew about among us, and Mimi or Meg began to strum on the piano. Almost always before long Joe in his sergeant-major's voice would propose the absurd game which always delighted him: ‘Now then, Ladies and Gentlemen, what about a round of Sing, Say or Pay?' The principle of the game was that everybody had to sing a song, tell a story, or pay for a round of drinks; and the pleasant absurdity of the game was that we knew beforehand (since most people's repertory was limited) exactly what favourite piece everybody would perform. Thus the familiar songs and the oft-told stories became associated with particular characters, became as it were part of their characters. Sammy Hunt, our cricket captain,
who had also been a sea captain in his day, always sang a song called
The Fireship
:

‘As I strolled out one evenin' out upon a night's career,