He was often in trouble with the stricter section of his congregation for offences of this kind; his churchwardens, for instance, objected to his fixing nesting-boxes over the church porch. They declared it was unseemly.’ My dear fellows,’ said Mr Mountjoy,’ can you think of anything less sacrilegious than a pair of spotted flycatchers?’ Sometimes, apparently, his parishioners took their complaints to higher authority; for he confessed to us once:’ You won’t see me tomorrow. I’ve got to go and take a wigging from the Bishop.’ We feared greatly for him. ‘I wonder,’ said Dick, ‘what the Bish will actually do to him?’ But next day he was with us on the hill, unchastened and schoolboyish as ever, showing us the place where a hare ran through the hedge and telling Pistol with a wink: ‘If you have any respect whatever for my cloth you will refrain from setting your wires until I am out of sight.’

The Syndicate

The keepers, whom Pistol, Bardolph and Nym delighted to deceive, looked after the northern face of the hill. The southern half, the side nearest Brensham, was owned by Lord Orris, who kept no keepers nor, had he done so, would there have been anything for them to keep. The Mad Lord’s attitude to poachers was bewildering to respectable people and disconcerting even to the poachers themselves. If by chance he caught anybody unlawfully shooting his pheasants or netting his rabbits he would cheerfully wish them luck and apologize for having disturbed them. ‘Carry on, my dear fellow,’ he would say, ‘and take what you can get. God knows, it’s little enough that I possess which is of any use to anybody; but out of my pittance you are welcome to anything you can find.’ Curiously enough the poachers resented this invitation, because it did not accord with their notion of how a landlord should behave, and they perversely went off and poached elsewhere.

But the northern side of the hill was preserved most rigorously. There were numerous keepers, there was barbed wire, notices everywhere proclaimed that Trespassers would be Prosecuted by Order, mantraps, it was said were illegally set in the coverts at certain seasons. Naturally we wanted to know the name of the landlord who was so jealous of his rights and so ruthless in the defence of his boundaries; but we were told that he had no name, the northern slope of the hill was owned by a Syndicate. Even then, before we understood much about it, or guessed what a dangerous threat this strange anonymous ownership held for Brensham, we felt that there was something sinister and unpleasant about a Syndicate. It had no face by which you could recognize it, no voice to greet you, no ears to hear your argument or your excuses. Even its habitation was not known. It came and went mysteriously: ‘The Syndicate,’ people said, ‘is coming down from town this week.’ Then you would hear an innumerable popping and banging in the coverts at the top of the hill. ‘Ah, the Syndicate!’ That was its only outward manifestation, that and the big cars with wooden-faced chauffeurs which swished by, hooting imperiously, whenever the Syndicate was about. But at other times its subtle and secret workings betrayed it, like mole-runs on a lawn even when there was no other indication of its presence. A man would be prosecuted for poaching and a lawyer whose face was unknown in Elmbury would get up in court: ‘I represent, your worships, a Syndicate …’ A hideous petrol-station was erected in a hamlet which was noted for its quiet loveliness. ‘The Syndicate,’ people said, ‘put up the money.’ And one day we found the gate into the larch plantation padlocked and surmounted by barbed wire. We hurried to tell Mr Chorlton. ‘The Syndicate held a mortgage on it,’ he said, ‘and I suppose poor old Orris couldn’t find enough money to pay the interest.’ ‘Tell us,’ we asked him, ‘exactly what a Syndicate is.’ But Mr Chorlton was put out, and for once he failed to provide us with a ready explanation. ‘Oh, a damnable thing,’ he said, ‘and there’ll be no more sugaring in the larch plantation for us. But what’s worse, I fancy it’s got its claws into old Orris. Soon it’ll put the squeeze on; and that’ll be the end of him.’

But for a while the terrible Syndicate bided its time. Season by season the notice-boards which were its outposts advanced very slowly over the crest of the hill; the barbed wire and the keepers followed them, taking a field here, capturing a coppice there, as if they preferred to nibble away at the Orris land rather than gobble it wholesale. We came to think of the Syndicate as if it were some huge and shapeless elemental thing, ingens et horribilis, couched invisibly in the coverts above Brensham, looking greedily down upon the Mad Lord’s ruined lands, licking its lips and awaiting the moment when it would pounce.

The Brief Loveliness

It was in January that the Syndicate bought or seized the larch plantation. (In subsequent years we noticed that most of the Syndicate’s encroachments occurred shortly after Quarter Days, when the mortgage interest fell due.) At Easter we found the wood bristling with notice-boards and were smartly chivvied out of it when we entered in search of a goldcrest’s nest. We got our own back by springing, next day, a number of open steel traps which the keepers had set for vermin.

That Easter was the first occasion when I looked down on Brensham in blossom. In winter, as I have said, and indeed for most of the year, the landscape was a workaday one. It wasn’t a ‘show’ village; for although it had the same unselfconscious good looks as all our villages had, its immediate surroundings spoiled it, because the rich soil had long ago been broken up into market-gardens.