The Blue Field (6 page)

Of course that was nearly half a century ago, in William's youth and early middle age; and the old men who sit in the Horse and Harrow now, remembering things past and shaking their heads over the present, will tell you that there are no songs in the beer today. Never a chorus, they say, in ten pints of it. But this does not mean that Brensham has ceased to sing, for the pale, harmless-looking cider which our farmers make in the autumn is stronger by far than even the pre-1914 beer. It is deceptively still, it trickles out of the cask with scarcely a bubble, and looks almost green in your glass, though it has a golden glint when you hold it up to the light. Its taste, until you get used to it, is so sharp and sour that it seems to dry up the roof of your
mouth – ‘cut-throat cider', we call it. But wait. Beyond the shock of that first astringency lies a genial and unexpected warmth, a curious after-flavour of the sunshine and the earth and the falling leaves, a taste of September. Foolish, flat and innocent did the stuff look in your glass? Wise and wicked and old it seems now as it runs down your throat; for it's been three or four years maturing in the old brandy-cask and as like as not Joe Trentfield from time to time has dropped a few scraps of meat in it, for he has a strange theory that ‘cider feeds on meat'. Whether this is true or not I do not know; but I can well believe that so fierce and tigerish a potion would welcome a beefsteak now and then to keep up its strength. The names we give to our Brensham cider are indicative of that strength: ‘tangle-foot' and ‘stunnem' and one other which I cannot print here. Yet its potency, unlike that of other drinks, seems to act rather upon the body than the brain; while it steals from your legs their ability to take you home it leaves your mind free to meditate upon the awkwardness of your predicament. Indeed it is told of William Hart that he was once accused of kicking up a row all night outside the Rector's windows and he explained that the cider in his legs had compelled him to spend the night by the roadside while the cider in his head had caused him to sing without intermission till dawn.

His drinking bouts were not very frequent, or perhaps he would not have been the good craftsman he was. For William Hart, during the first twenty years of his working life, practised the trade of a wheelwright, and he made better wagons than anybody else between Birmingham and Bristol. You see can them still if ever you visit the neighbourhood
of Brensham – for they were made to last for ever – and at farm sales the auctioneer still draws attention to them, urging the company to bid an extra five pounds. ‘Come, come, gentlemen, this is no ordinary job. None of your gimcrack jerrybuilt contraptions here. This is a William Hart wagon – see the name on it! These wheels will still be going round when you're in the churchyard.' They were mostly big wagons designed for carrying hay; Mr Hart always spoke of them as wains and himself as a wainwright. Nowadays most farmers use a haysweep instead to bring the hay to the rick (or they bale it on the ground, so that they do not need to rick it at all) and the wagons stand disused and neglected in rickyards and homesteads, but they never fall to pieces, and the bright yellow paint on them (three coats of it) doesn't flake off like modern paint – you can spot them from a mile away. General Bouverie, our local Master of Foxhounds, still keeps one in use for the curious purpose of providing transport between the coverts at his pheasant-shoot. A huge dappled horse, groomed and polished till it shines like a varnished rocking-horse, dolled up with ribbons and rosettes and shining brasses, goes between the shafts; and a dozen guests, with their loaders, guns, cartridges and enormous luncheon-hampers, pile in behind. As the day goes on the wagon becomes filled with the corpses of pheasants, tawny as the fallen leaves; and it is indeed a remarkable sight to see the yellow wagon returning from the last drive of the day, with General Bouverie sitting high on the front of it like a Roman Emperor enjoying a Triumph, the trophies hung on long poles placed crosswise across the wagon, the guests knee-deep in feather and fur.

It used to take William Hart the better part of a month to make a wagon. He built each with loving care, choosing and seasoning the timber himself, and taking infinite pains
over every joint, hinge and spoke. (‘Measure twice and cut once,' he always used to say.) But as soon as it was done, the moment he'd crossed the ‘t' of the ‘W. Hart' which although he could only read and write with difficulty he stencilled so neatly on the side of it – as soon as he'd done that he went down to the pub and got drunk. He would come bursting into the bar, and order drinks all round, with that transcendent air of blessed relaxation and utter abandon which artists know when they have put the finishing touches to a work of creation and, all passion spent, allow the tide of life to bear them where it will. Usually he stayed drunk for about a week, and it was another ten days before he regained complete sobriety. So, with repairs and odd-jobs and a bit of undertaking – it was said that his pride of craftsmanship made him take as much trouble over a coffin for his worst enemy as over a wagon for his best friend – he built about eight of his great haywains in a year. This earned him ample money for his needs.

At one time Jaky Jones, he who served the visiting anglers with teas and wasp-grubs, was pupil or apprentice to William Hart in the wheelwright's business. When that trade began to die out Jaky turned his hand, which had learned its skill from William, to another trade which will never die out as long as men are mortal: he became the village undertaker. But because Brensham is a small place and its inhabitants are long-lived, a man could not make a living in it out of coffins alone; so Jaky joined the ranks of those free and independent and extremely useful people whom we call odd-job-men. In addition to making coffins, he digs the graves. He will also thatch your cottage, tidy up your
garden, clean your car, or mend your burst pipes after a frost. If there is anything the matter with your drains, you call in Jaky; likewise you send round for him if you want a lock mended or a tree felled or a chicken-house knocked together out of a few old boards. Perhaps the strangest of the duties which he performs for the community is connected with cats. He is an expert gelder; and it is a village joke that all the toms in the village flee when they hear him coming.

He is a peaky-faced, sharp-nosed little man with a curiously nasal voice, who always wears an ancient bowler hat on the back of his head. His speech is larded with pet phrases which he utters with a small sly grin, phrases like ‘Matey' and ‘How's your father'. Both his manner and his conversational style are somewhat macabre, as befits a member of his profession, and I remember in particular a gruesome piece of dialogue which I heard one night in the Horse and Harrow.

‘Twenty-two inches across the shoulders,' said Jaky.

‘Only twenty-two?' said Joe Trentfield. ‘Well, well. I should have thought 'a' was more than that. A beamy chap.'

Jaky Jones pushed his bowler hat on to the back of his head and consulted a crumpled and dirty piece of paper.

‘Six foot one and twenty-two across,' he said. ‘They tends to shrink when they gets older.'

There was a pause, and then Jaky uttered one of his favourite
dicta.

‘A green Christmas makes a full churchyard,' he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.

As he spoke, the ghost of a grin played upon his sardonic features; and I was troubled with a curious sense of familiarity, as if he reminded me of someone else or I had heard that voice long ago. He went on:

‘Rector wants 'im put at the bottom end by the yew-hedge.
But I says to the Rector, Matey, I says, 'tis too wet, I says; 'tis too near the culvert; afore you gets down three feet you finds the water seeping through the clay. Matey, I says, I wouldn't put a dog in there.'

Again and again, throughout this sombre speech, some gesture or trick in Jaky's manner struck a chord in my memory. It was like a pin-table game when the ball bouncing from pin to pin makes a contact and lights a momentary flicker of electric bulbs. Such a flicker occurred when he said ‘'Tis too wet.' ‘How macabre!' I thought. ‘But I suppose he gets accustomed to it . . .' and the word ‘custom' went flickering along another memory-track, custom, custom,
custom hath made it in him a property of easiness
– and then the flicker became a flash, illuminating all. I suddenly saw the stage brightly lit and within that glowing oblong framed by the dark proscenium there leaned upon his spade the very spit and image of Jaky Jones. At Ophelia's half-finished graveside stood Hamlet and Horatio; and Jaky with his hat on the back of his head and the ghost of a grin on his clownish face looked up at them.
‘And water,'
said the gravedigger,
‘is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.'

Gravediggers haven't changed much in the countryside round Stratford in three hundred-odd years.

Like most of the Brensham men, Jaky is a devoted fisherman, but he possesses the curious eccentricity that he prefers to fish without rod, reel, line or hook. Legitimate angling bores him; and on the rare occasions when he takes a rod he must needs add spice to his pastime by using illicit baits, such as salmon roe, which he prepares according to a secret method which he discovered in an old book. This book,
which he once showed me as a special favour, contains some horrifying recipes for the making of pastes with such ingredients as ‘Cat's Fat and Heron's Oil, and Mummy Finely Powdered', and there is one which runs like this: ‘Take the Bone or Scull of a dead man, at the opening of a Grave, and beat the same into a powder, and put of this powder into the Moss wherein you keep your Worms; but others like Grave-earth as well . . .' I asked Jaky whether he had ever tried this experiment, and although he shook his head I think I detected a guilty look in his eyes. The anglers from Birmingham certainly suspect that he uses some kind of dark and mysterious wizardry; for he does a roaring trade every season in ‘Jaky Jones' Special Red Worms', which he sells in little canvas bags for half a crown a quarter-pound.

But as I said, a rod and line, even when it has a Special Worm wriggling on the end of it, does not appeal to Jaky and he prefers to go fishing with such unusual implements as a shotgun, a spear, a willow-wand, a length of rabbit-wire, a tin of carbide, a sledge-hammer, or a wicker waste-paper basket which has had the bottom knocked out. With the shotgun he shoots pike as they bask on the surface in high summer. With the spear, which resembles Britannia's trident, he catches eels as they wriggle up the muddy ditches. With the willow-wand and the wire he fashions a noose which he can dangle far out into the stream and slip over the tails of fish lying near the top of the water. The carbide he pours into screw-top bottles, weighted with stones, to which he adds a little moisture before he screws up the top. He then casts the bottles into the river and awaits the explosion, which stuns all the fish within twenty yards. When they come to the surface he paddles round in his boat collecting the spoils like a punt-gunner picking up the bag after a successful shot.

The sledge-hammer and the waste-paper basket are used
in a very ingenious way. He takes them to some part of the river, such as a lock, where an old brick or stone wall runs along the bank. First he splashes about in the water so that the fish take refuge in the holes and crannies under the wall; and then he smites the top of the wall two or three times with the sledge-hammer so that the fish are knocked out by the vibration and float belly-upwards to the surface. If any should escape him, by darting out of the wall into the weeds, he takes his waste-paper basket, wades out to the weed-clump, and drops the basket neatly over the clump so that any fish which were lurking there are imprisoned. Then he rolls up his sleeves and pulls them out one by one.

There is one kind of fishing which particularly delights Jaky, and that is catching elvers with a cheese-cloth net when the little eels run up the river in springtime. He sets out at night with a lamp slung round his neck and returns in the morning with three or four bucketfuls of the small transparent fingerlings, which he hawks round the village at one and six a pound. It is a familiar thing in Brensham, at breakfast-time on April mornings, to hear Jaky's nasal voice vying with the cuckoo as he marches up the village street, with his bowler hat cocked on the back of his head and a couple of buckets slung over his shoulders on a yoke.
‘Yelvers! Yelvers! Yelvers all alive-o!'

In the last war, although he was nearly fifty, Jaky joined up and fought in the Battle of Alamein. He once told me a story about that battle while he sawed the side of a coffin in his workshop, and a draught coming in under the door teased the sawdust into miniature dust-devils which reminded him, he said, of the sands of Egypt. ‘I minds as if it
were yesterday,' said Jaky, ‘boiling a can of strong tea over a petrol fire . . .' A small man wearing an Australian hat had suddenly appeared as if from nowhere and offered him a cigarette. Thinking the man was some sort of war correspondent, for such people were free with their cigarettes, Jaky had conversed with him in his usual free-and-easy manner for several minutes. He had also expressed a forcible opinion about Generals. The man smiled slightly and got into his car. Jaky was about to light the cigarette when he noticed the flag on the car's bonnet; so he saluted as smartly as he could (but in the manner, I expect, of one who touches his hat to the squire) and put the cigarette away, swearing that he'd never smoke it, not if he was dying for a puff, but would take it home as a trophy for his son and his son's sons. This high resolution was sorely tried next morning; for he was wounded in the first assault, and as he jolted down the line in an ambulance the pain came on suddenly and he wanted a smoke more than anything else in the world. He resisted the temptation, however, and there was the cigarette – ‘in case you don't believe me, Matey' – in a neat little glass case, suitably inscribed, hanging on the wall over his work-bench. ‘How's your father,' observed Jaky, for no reason in particular; and he began to whistle, as he performed his sombre task, that gay and lilting air which was one of the fruits of our desert victory, that piece of unsubstantial booty which we took from Rommel's men, the tune of
Lilli Marlene.