The Blue Field (17 page)

Nor were they familiar with the traditional epilogue to a pig-killing, which involves among other things the burning-off of the bristles; so that when they arrived at the gate of the smithy and saw the flames leaping high from the pile of straw, out of which the animal's blackened face peered grotesquely like that of a half-charred heretic, they got the impression that the pig having been only partially butchered was now being roasted alive. And indeed to their unaccustomed eyes the sight must have been a fearful and horrific one. There was blood upon the ground and upon the beefy hands of Dick Tovey, who looked like a murderer in the firelight as he busied himself with his deadly knives. The flames danced above the straw-pile and two of Jeremy Briggs' grandchildren, excited as children always are by a bonfire, were dancing too. They joined hands and jigged round the pig's funeral pyre, singing and laughing, like little savages.

‘Children!' breathed Vicky Halliday. ‘Maurice, it's disgraceful!'

Meanwhile Mrs Briggs energetically scrubbed a wooden trough, somebody else filled a can with boiling water from the furnace, and Jeremy set up a spring-balance over the door of the smithy to weigh the pig; for all the neighbours, as usual, had taken tickets in a sweepstake about it. Vicky watched all these formalities with growing horror, understanding nothing, but thinking, no doubt, in terms of cannibal feasts and druidical sacrifices. To make matters worse Dick Tovey came to the gate to have a word with Mr Chorlton, and his appearance was enough to daunt any
stranger, let alone one so fastidious as Vicky. He was a hefty, gap-toothed fellow with red hair, always smiling like
le bourreau souriant,
who wore a pigskin apron smeared with grease and blood. In his belt, scabbarded like a soldier's bayonet, he carried a long knife; at his hip hung a larger scabbard or pouch which contained an assortment of more frightful cutlery still – bone-handled, murderous-looking blades which rattled together when he moved, terrible gouges, and a thing like a marline-spike. He must have seemed to Vicky the personification of all the livers and lights, kidneys and tripes, which throughout her life had gruesomely affronted her; and she shied away from him as if she were a timid horse that smelt blood.

‘Well, we've killed old Molotov,' observed Dick cheerfully. ‘Seventeen score if he's a pound.'

‘Molotov?' said Halliday.

‘Jeremy Briggs,' said Dick, ‘always gives his pigs names after chaps he don't like. He grows too fond of 'em else. At one time it was Ramsey Mac; and then it was Old Chamberlain. In the war it was Hitler and Goebbels and Musso, of course; but generally it's politicians.'

When Dick went away Vicky said to Mr Chorlton, in as matter of fact a tone as she could manage (she always believed in Facing Facts): ‘Tell me, why do they kill it here? I thought animals were always taken to an abattoir nowadays.'

‘In Brensham,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘the executioner goes to his victim.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, if you'd ever tried to shift a pig when it didn't want to be shifted, you'd understand that Dick Tovey on his bicycle is much more mobile.'

They went back to Mr Chorlton's house to tea. Vicky, who couldn't eat anything, remarked later:

‘Maurice, I'm still thinking about those children. The harm done by this sort of thing might last for the whole of their lives. It could produce a really serious pyschological trauma. You must take steps to get it stopped. You must put down a Question . . .'

And sure enough a few weeks later, as Mr Chorlton happened to glance through the Parliamentary Report in
The Times,
his eyes lit on a very elaborate Question indeed, a Question which seemed to rise in many tiers like an old-fashioned wedding-cake:

Mr Halliday
(Elmbury, Lab)
: ‘What regulations govern the slaughter of pigs on private premises in rural districts; whether these regulations have regard to considerations both of hygiene and humanity; whether it is not highly undesirable that such slaughter should take place in circumstances which give it the character of a public spectacle; and whether the presence of children and adolescents at these unedifying events is not to be deplored?'

Mr Chorlton had an interesting theory that Halliday's wife was the
fons et origo
of most of the Questions with which he pestered his disapproving Front Bench. He pointed out that she possessed a quality which was fortunately uncommon in women and which was very rare indeed in girls as good-looking as Vicky: she was filled, brimful and overflowing, with reforming zeal. She was obviously one of those people, he said, who could not bear to see the wicked flourishing like the green bay tree and who never knew when to let well alone. Her path through life was beset with injustice and inequality; folly and stupidity luxuriated about it like rank weeds; hidden scandals lurked like the
poisonous nightshade; dragons and monsters of monopoly, power and privilege uttered their brazen challenge out of the dark capitalist jungle; and Hydra-headed Conservatives lay hidden everywhere in the undergrowth. Like the Knights of the Round Table (‘who were also a pretty tiresome lot,' observed Mr Chorlton dryly) she saw a simplified world in black-and-white, a woodcut-world without half-tones, and it never occured to her that dragons might have kind hearts or that some maidens might actually relish the attentions of an ogre; and with boundless energy she strove perpetually to remedy the injustice, to tidy up the disorder, to cast down the wicked, and to expose the scandal to the light of day.

Just like William Cobbett, said Mr Chorlton: abhorring hornets, and having no hornets in her own garden, she goes off and stirs up the hornets' nests of her neighbours. ‘I wouldn't mind betting,' he speculated, ‘that she pleads with her husband for Questions in the House in much the same way as other girls badger their men for new hats or fur coats. He'd probably much rather give her a hat; but more likely she wants a Parliamentary Question about the egrets' feathers in somebody else's. He'd gladly, I expect, buy her a fur coat; but no, she demands an inquiry into the fur coats with which band-leaders are alleged to bribe members of the BBC. And the poor fellow can't refuse her. As other men might pacify their wives with lollipops, he poses these Questions to please her. And I'm sure he'd bring her the Prime Minister's head upon a salver if she asked for it.'

Curiously enough, although his activities had not made Mr Halliday popular, they had a by no means adverse effect upon his career. The political gossip-writers were already suggesting that he might be offered the next available Under-Secretaryship, to keep him quiet.

Mr Chorlton's theory received fresh confirmation a few weeks later. We had heard that Pru's eldest child, Jerry, following in the family's anarchic tradition, had put a shot from his catapult through the Hallidays' drawing-room window – having missed the mistle-thrush which he was stalking in the Manor grounds. Shortly afterwards we read in the Parliamentary report:

Mr Halliday
(Elmbury, Lab)
asked the President of the Board of Trade how much rubber, in the form of elastic, was allocated for the purpose of the manufacture of catapults; and whether in view of the Wild Birds' Protection Act this wasteful employment of valuable raw material could be justified.'

This roused Mr Chorlton to such a pitch of indignation that he immediately sat down and wrote to
The Times
on behalf, he said, of ‘a section of the community which has no Society or Trades Union to defend their ancient liberties'. He stated his belief that a small boy without a catapult in his pocket (and a fluffy, half-sucked bull's eye stuck to the elastic of the catapult) was an unnatural child who was unlikely to make a good citzien. And he ended:

‘At least I am thankful that I was a boy before the foolish paternalism of Government began to take cognisance of such trivia; and perhaps it is fortunate that there were no well-meaning MPs in the days when another small boy “chose him five smooth stones out of the brook . . . and his sling was in his hand; and he drew near to the Philistine”'.

It was not to be expected that Vicky would be able for long to resist the temptation of trying to reform poor Pru, especially as Pru's favourite lane for love-making happened to be the one which led from the village to the Manor. Driving back from Elmbury on a foggy night in January, Vicky collided with a pram which was parked at the side of the lane; and the two small babies in the pram traced a neat parabola through the air and fetched up squalling on the grass verge. They were unhurt, though frightened; Pru, who came over the stile a moment later followed by a shadowy young man, was very frightened indeed; but probably the most frightened person of all was Vicky and her fright very naturally showed itself in righteous indignation. She threatened Pru with the police, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and even with a Home, at the very thought of which Pru burst into tears. She would probably have carried out these threats but for an incident which happened a few days later.

The Village Hall had been redecorated and the Women's Institute woken up; and to celebrate the decorations and demonstrate the awakening a Baby Show had been arranged at which Vicky had been asked to judge the exhibits and Lord Orris to give away the prizes. Therefore, on Thursday afternoon, about a score of babies (for Brensham was a very philoprogenitive village) sat about in the hall staring without comprehension at the frieze of formalized tractors which Vicky's artist friend had painted round the wall, while their mothers, who understood what it meant even less than the babies, comforted each other with the assurance that the dust and the cigarette smoke would doubtless fade the daubs before long. In due course Vicky arrived, and also
Lord Orris, who was wearing his only suit which did not hang about him like the rags on a scarecrow. This outfit, miraculously saved from the pawnshops and the moneylenders, consisted of light-grey trousers, almost as tight-fitting as the mess-trousers of a cavalryman, and a cutaway tail-coat, originally black but now bearing faint traces of green mould due to the pervasive damp of Orris Manor. Lord Orris also wore spats, patent leather boots, and a grey bowler hat; and he looked exactly like a ‘Spy' cartoon. He was in good heart, however, and got on very well with the babies, who delighted to pull his long drooping grey moustache. Vicky was less at home in his company; for I think she had been brought up on the idea that the aristocracy were all Wicked and Rich, and was having difficulty in adjusting her sense of values to the discovery that a real Lord could be both gentle and poor. Moreover, it probably embarrassed her to find out that she had more or less bought the Lord with the Manor; for he still lived in the Lodge, and if you felt as Vicky did about the evils of privilege it must have been extremely uncomfortable to have a representative of the Privileged Classes living upon your charity.

When the time came for judging, Vicky announced that there must be no suspicion of favouritism and everything must be done in a Democratic way. She would therefore have the babies brought to her, one by one, by the district nurse; then she wouldn't know whom they belonged to. She examined them all with the greatest care, and indeed she did possess some qualifications as a judge for she had originally trained as a nurse and had worked in a hospital during the war. She took a long time to make her decision, and at last she announced that the result was a tie. There were two babies, two little girls, which were obviously healthier, better nourished, and better cared for than all the
others; and that was saying a good deal. She suggested that the mothers of these two girls should divide the prize.

There was rather a long pause before Pru, who was the mother of both, padded up to the platform with her soft cat's tread, pushed from behind by the other mothers because she was so shy, and with a demure little curtsy and a look of misty-eyed wonder received her prize from Lord Orris. She was no doubt terrified of Vicky, because of that terrible threat about a ‘Home'; but she needn't have worried any more. It would have been very difficult to maintain that the best mother in Brensham was in need of care and protection herself.

Altogether it was a bad afternoon for Vicky. After the judging, the smaller babies were confined in a play-pen while their mothers had tea. Before long the most horrible noises, shrieks and gurglings, gasps and what sounded like death-rattles, began to rise from this pen, in which the unruly children of the Fitchers and Gormleys reproduced in miniature (like a battle demonstrated on a sand-table) their parents' larger strife. At first Vicky watched this dismaying spectacle with the too-deliberate unconcern of the conscientiously broad-minded; having no children of her own she probably believed that if one prevented them from doing what they desired they suffered from inhibitions in later life. However, when a Fitcher boy began to savage the ear of a Gormley girl, and it seemed that the latter might be permanently disfigured, she could stand it no longer and gallantly entered the arena in order to part them. In doing so she got herself bitten on the hand, and since it was to be supposed that the bite of a Fitcher or Gormley would be peculiarly poisonous there was a hurried search for the. iodine-bottle, which could not be found. Poor Vicky, whose terror of germs was well known, thereupon lost her self-possession altogether and began to look as if she were
going to cry. She was comforted in a very chivalrous and old-fashioned way by Lord Orris, who courteously gave her his arm and took her outside for ‘a breath of fresh air'. He was probably the only person who wasn't surprised by Vicky's unexpected behaviour; for he had had nothing whatever to do with women since early Edwardian times, when they were apt to cry or swoon at the least provocation. He was therefore completely master of the situation and dealt with it beautifully.