Brensham Village (6 page)

Thus I got to know it and love it as well as I did Elmbury; I played cricket and darts, drank beer, sang in the pubs, fished, rode, shot and boated with the crack-brained people of Brensham until my ways became woven with theirs; and thus I learned gradually, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, the story of what went on beneath the roofs.

I used to think that the cricket-field at Brensham, on a blue afternoon in May, must surely be one of the pleasantest places in the world; and certainly, when I travelled about the world, I found few places pleasanter. About the time of the first match, the apple blossom came out, and the willows put on their young green. The first cuckoo arrived and started calling from the small adjacent meadow which was appropriately named Cuckoo Pen. There were cuckooflowers in this meadow too, a silver-lilac carpet of them, so that we did not know whether it was called after the bird or the flower. Lapwings had their nests there, and sometimes we found the mottled eggs when we were looking for a ball which had been skied. Brensham-fashion, right over the tops of the willow trees.

To match the newness of the spring, Mr Chorlton had repainted the pavilion in green and white. Against the very fresh green of the pitch - the floods had lain on it for weeks at mid-winter - the white lines of the creases showed sharp, and clear. And how white in the spring sunshine were the
flannels well creased after months in bottom-drawers, the umpires' coats, the new-blanco'd pads and cricket-boots! How bright were the many-coloured blazers, and Mr Chorlton's harlequin cap, and Mr Mountjoy's I. Zingari! (Where else had I seen those colours? Why, round the battered straw hat which the Hermit wore when he showed visitors up to the roof of the Folly on high days and holidays. Mr Mountjoy must have given it to him!)

Smells and sounds: the sweet linseed smell of bat-oil, and an indefinable clean smell (waterweed and foam?) which came from the weir and the lock up-river. The gillyflower smell which blows in little brief gusts all over Brensham when there is a wind. The satisfying smack of a well-oiled bat hitting a ball during a knock-up before the game. The first bees buzzing in the apple blossom. And in the willow-branches ubiquitous the endlessly repeated
chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff
, of the little yellow-olive bird from across the sea.

Clatter of plates in the lean-to hut behind the pavilion: the Helpers were already preparing the tea. These Helpers were a personable lot: Mrs Doan's daughter Sally, the young wife of the landlord of the Adam and Eve, and two merry little blondes, Mimi and Meg, from the Horse Narrow. We were proud of them, because they always excited the wonder and admiration of visiting teams. We were also proud of their teas, which were not teas in the sedate drawing-room sense, but were more like Hunt Breakfasts, for they consisted of home-made meat-pies, wonderful salads - lettuces, tomatoes, spring onions, watercress from the same stream in which we sometimes lost our cricket-balls - and generally a ham, home-smoked at the Adam and Eve and decorated with paper frills and parsley so that it looked like a picture out of Mrs Beeton. The tea interval was always a long one at Brensham.

And now the captains have tossed and Sammy Hunt leads us out to field. Sammy has a completely bald head, which at the beginning of the season appears startlingly white; but he scorns to wear a hat, and as the season progresses his pate becomes rubicund, and then gradually goes brown, until by mid-August it is the colour of an overwintered russet apple. Mr Chorlton, of course, wears his harlequin cap, the gayest cap in cricket, but it's old and faded and it's the very same cap, he tells us, in which he ran about the field for hours, in 1895, chasing the ball which Archie Maclaren hit so mercilessly when he scored 424 against Somerset. Mr Mountjoy, who wears his I. Zingari cap, must have been a useful cricketer too in his young days; but he can't run very fast or bend very quickly, and his old eyes - so sharp at spotting the chiff-chaff in the willow tree - are too slow to follow the ball which comes quick off the pitch and breaks away. Therefore his innings generally end with a loud
snick
and a yell of ‘How's that?' from the delighted wicket-keeper; and as the umpire's finger goes up Mr Mountjoy mutters sadly: ‘Oh Lord, that awful noise again!'

Sammy begins to arrange his field, doing so with humanity and a sense of the fitness of things. Thus Mr Mountjoy, since he can't run far, goes to mid-off and to save him walking between overs takes point when the bowling is from the other end. Mr Chorlton, who can't or won't run at all, keeps wicket; and another elderly member of the team, a retired engineer called Hope-Kingley, alternates between mid-on and square-leg. But Briggs the blacksmith, who has huge horny hands with which he sometimes bends a six-inch nail for fun, must stand at forward short-leg or in the deep, and take what's coming to him; the village policeman goes in the slips, because, says Sammy, that's a suitable place for a bobby - ‘they catch you out when you're not
looking.' Billy Butcher, who is the village ne'er-do-weel and drunkard, is sent to long-leg in the hope that a bit of running about will do him good; and the ‘boys', a collective term for any youths whom the Secretary has roped in at the last moment to make up the team, are distributed round the boundary where with luck some high hits will harden up their palms. As for Sammy himself, he will be anywhere and everywhere, wherever the catches come low and hard, wherever the new red ball races towards the boundary there will by Sammy's bald head bobbing after it; for he is like a good general who turns up unexpectedly wherever the fight is hottest.

Our Secretary, a small, wiry market-gardener called Alfie, takes the ball for the first over. Joe Trentfield, our umpire and the landlord of the Horse Narrow, counts his six pennies and drops them one by one into the pocket of his smock. Dai Roberts the postman opens his score book at the pavilion window and licks the point of his pencil.

‘Play!' says Joe: and the season begins.

Sailors hardly ever take to cricket; they don't get the chance to practise, for one thing, and for another, I think cricket is a game for people who have roots, it is a territorial game, in which men really do bowl and bat with greater satisfaction when they do so for the place they belong to. It is an expression of parochialism; and even the County sides, which play for the money, would scorn to buy and sell their players as footballers do, dealing in men as stockbrokers deal in shares. Thus if you should meet, say, the Lancashire side and the Gloucestershire side together in a pub you could easily differentiate them by their accents; and when Somerset
and Yorkshire go on tour they take the speech of Somerset and Yorkshire with them. This territorial aspect of the game is even more evident in village cricket; and people were sometimes quite shocked that I should be allowed to play for Brensham, although I lived only four miles away. Peripatetic cricketers, who hawk their batsmanship or their fast bowling round all the teams in the district and change sides as often as Warwick the King-Maker are rare and generally disapproved of: certainly Brensham would have nothing to do with them. For cricket, as I have said, is somehow mixed up with our vigorous parochialism; and when Brensham goes out to field on Saturday afternoon, it is Brensham going to war.

Therefore it was curious that Sammy Hunt should be our captain; for he was one of the rootless, hearthless ones, a sailor, and hadn't had the opportunity, during his wandering life, to learn that absurd loyalty to a piece of well-kept turf. It was curious of course, that he should have settled down at Brensham at all, to ‘muck about with little boats', as he put it, ‘on a piddling little river'. I suppose all sailors carry with them about the world, in addition to that small green kit-bag of their personal possessions, a dream of green fields; and for most of them the dream fades or the salt water tarnishes it; but somehow or other Sammy managed to keep his fresh and bright so that when the time came for him to retire he knew exactly what kind of a cottage he wanted, knew all about the green-sprouting osiers and the slow winding river, bent like a bow as it runs round the hill, and the water-meadows where in June the wind-waves trouble the mowing-grass as if it were the sea.

However, Sammy never forgot that he was a sailor; and he often enlivened the cricket-matches with great sea-oaths or astonished the opposing team by shouting to his bowler: ‘Pitch the beggar one on the starboard side!' or commanding
a fieldman to ‘move round a couple of points to port'. In the pub afterwards he would sooner or later launch himself into one of his long salty tales, about how he ran out of coal during a storm in the Bay of Biscay, or how he dealt with a mutiny at Tiensin, or how he nearly married a geisha girl in Japan; but although we knew these tales so well, and loved to hear Sammy telling them, we never learned what happened in the end: closing-time always came too soon, leaving Sammy's tramp-steamer drifting helplessly towards Vigo, Sammy driving the mutineers into the fo'c'sle with his bare fists, or Sammy and his geisha girl locked in a timeless embrace on the seafront of Yokohama.

On the cricket-field Sammy's word was law; but between matches it was Alfie Perks, the Secretary, who held the team together, who saw to the buying of the bats, balls, pads, gloves, stumps and score-books we needed, and who organized the dreadful rummage sale which was supposed to wipe out the usual autumnal deficit and the whist drive and dance which actually did so when the rummage sale had failed. It was he who wrote, painfully, slowly, and rather illiterately, those long complicated letters to other Secretaries, and made sense of their complicated and illiterate replies, so that by mid-February, when the pitch generally lay two feet under water and cricket seemed further off than the Millennium, he was able to send to the printer our list of fixtures for the next season. When the season came round, it was Alfie who had the job of notifying the players - eleven postcards scratched out in agonized copper-plate! - of arranging the transport - Who had a car? Who had a motor-bike? Who had room for a fat man with a cricket
bag? - and of drawing the pub at midday on Saturday for those very uncertain quantities, ‘the boys', who were always likely to let us down because they were haymaking or harvesting, or wanted to go fishing or to dig in their gardens or to fiddle with their motor-bikes or to take their wenches to the pictures.

All this would have been extremely burdensome if Alfie had allowed it to worry him; but being a market-gardener and fruit-grower, owning twelve acres of plum orchard and five of apple, his fortune hanging yearly on the chancy weather between April and June, he had long ago given up worrying about anything. He knew that a soft spring might make him prosperous, a late frost might ruin him. There was nothing he could do about it, except grin and bear it; so Alfie grinned. His grin was characteristic, typical, and familiar. With it he greeted impartially the sight of overladen boughs in good seasons or blackened buds after frost. Fruit-growing, he said, was like horse-racing; but there were more certainties on the racecourse. If he lost all his fruit, or if Mr Chorlton dropped three catches running off his bowling, Alfie grinned and shrugged his shoulders; and his comment on the large disaster was the same as his summary of the little one: That's the way it is.

Alfie bowled leg-breaks: three paces to the wicket, longish fair hair falling over his forehead, a hop, skip and a jump, and an innocent-looking good-length, ball delivered with a sort of tousled grin. He was one of those small persistent men who inevitably remind one of terriers; and as it happened he owned a small tousled terrier, which also grinned. It was called Rexy and it followed Alfie everywhere and somehow resembled him; for both had bushy eyebrows, an air of perky truculence, and a hamorous acceptance of fate. For a week or two in late winter the resemblance was even closer. Alfie's face, at that reason, went brick-ted and peeled as if
he'd been in the sun, although there had been no strong sun for months. His eyebrows and eyelashes became curiously sandy, like those of desert soldiers. Rexy's eyebrows, nose and whiskers went sandy too, and when we saw him running about the village like that we knew that Alfie had been spraying.

For the spray dripped off the trees into the grass and stained Rexy's paws as he followed his master. Whenever there was a wind the liquid blew back like fine rain into Alfie's face and burned it, peeled his nose and bleached his eyebrows, and made his eyes as red as a ferret's. Both master and dog looked as if they had just come back from crossing the Sahara.

This tedious uncomfortable business of spraying was probably the biggest single operation in Alfie's busy year. It took a long time, and it was also very expensive; so that less conscientious growers were apt to ‘give it a miss' in seasons when their bank balances were in red or when they wanted to buy a new motor-car. There was a great temptation to do so; for if a sharp frost should come when the fruit was just forming, all the money and labour of spraying would have been spent in vain. The frost could slay more plums in a night than the little green caterpillars could devour in a season; and as the fruit-growers said when they looked for an excuse: ‘You can't spray against Jack Frost.'

But Alfie, who was painstaking and persistent and whose integrity showed itself in everything he did, never made that excuse. He felt, I think, a sort of obligation to his trees. He must do his best for them; and if thereafter the frost took all, if there was not a plum left on the boughs nor a penny of profit from all the twelve acres, he would still have the curious consolation that his orchards looked ‘clean', the abhorred caterpillars did not thrive in them, his neighbours need have no fear lest the pest should spread from Alfie's
land. He had the true countryman's dislike of a botched job, the craftsman's determination to leave nothing to chance. So every year, in January or February, Rexy went blond as a film star and Alfie with his peeling face looked very unlike a film star indeed, and the village knew that Alfie was spraying. Once again he'd decided to put off buying a motor-car.