Consequently the cultivations were patchy and higgledy-piggledy; the assortment of crops included leeks, asparagus, cabbage, sea-green sprouts and emerald-green lettuces, tangles of raspberry-canes and rows of gooseberry bushes. Upon almost every patch were the small haphazard slums of fowlhouses, chicken-runs, pigstyes and toolsheds which grow up wherever there is market-gardening.
Between the patchy cultivations and among them stood the orchard trees which were the main source of Brensham’s prosperity: apple, pear and cherry, but mainly plum. The orchards ran a little way up the hill and stretched all round it, a green hem to its skirt; they went nearly to Elmbury on both sides of the road; and they marched down into the vale almost as far as the river, stopping only at the green water-meadows which marked the limit of the winter’s flooding. Surely there wasn’t another parish in England which possessed as many trees!
Thus the people of Brensham, who looked out for eleven-twelfths of the year upon the commonplace and uninspiring spectacle of sprouts, cabbages and the like, were privileged for the remaining twelfth to live amid a scene of surpassing beauty. Upon a day between the last week of March and the third week of April the spring snowstorm swept up the vale. For a fortnight or so the orchards were transfigured by this brief precarious loveliness, and people even drove out from the big towns on ‘plum Sunday’ to marvel at the prodigal blossoming. Before the frail plum-snow blew away, the lovelier bloom came out on the apple trees; and this was all the more exquisite because of the young green leaves which accompanied it. With cherry and pear, the apple blossom lasted for another week or two; then it faded, one day a fresh wind scattered the shell-pink petals and there was an end of May. Like a bride who packs away her wedding-dress and gets busy with her pots and pans Brensham went back to its green-and-brown ordinariness, taters, sprouts, onions, cabbages, beans and peas.
Brensham in Blossom-time
But on that Easter Sunday Brensham was dressed in white. The whole vale was carpeted with bloom under a dappled sky. It was a late season; the trees had all come out together, ten million, twenty million boughs had burgeoned on the same blue-and-white April morning. The flowery tide ran up the slope of the hill for a little way and then broke, where the orchards thinned into a mere sprinkling, a spatter of silver-white spray. In the midst of all this loveliness, half-submerged by it, were the thatched roofs of Brensham; the airy spire of the church and the three tall poplar trees rose as if out of a flood.
We stood on the roof of the Folly; for it had become a kind of tradition that we should let the Hermit take us up the tower whenever we climbed to the top of the hill. He had put on his straw hat, a sure harbinger of spring; and he looked prouder and grander than ever as he surveyed the flowery scene through the telescope (which must have made the plum blossom seem as yellow as primroses) and, reckoning up the thousands of trees with their April promise of August wealth, dreamed no doubt that they were his.
How fortunate, I thought, were the people of Brensham, to live in such a village, their very roofs awash in the foam of the flowers! I was aware suddenly of the first curiosity about what went on beneath the thatched roofs. In Elmbury I had learned a little, perhaps more than my years warranted, about the teeming life which frothed and bubbled in the wide streets and the narrow streets, the crooked alleys and the tumbledown back lanes. But until now I had thought of people in terms of a pageant or a parade; the characters went by in endless procession, the merry ones, the solemn ones, the colourful ones, the drab ones, the respectable ones, the disreputable ones, the eccentrics, the fantastics, the drunks, the scroungers: all different, all fascinating, yet unrelated to each other. But now as I looked down from the Hermit’s eyrie at the brown-and-yellow thatch of Brensham among the blossoming branches I had my first inkling of the existence of a community. From street-level you see only disconnected fragments, bits of the jigsaw puzzle, unrelated men and women going by; but when you see the roofs you see the place whole, houses, shops, pubs, churches, mills, gardens make a pattern and then the people who dwell in them, buy and sell in them, drink, worship, work in them, must surely compose some sort of a pattern too.
At all events, perched on the parapet with Dick, Donald and Ted while the Hermit surveyed his imaginary domain through the broken telescope which blurred all objects so that they appeared as misty and insubstantial as his dream, I perceived a kind of pattern in the straggling roofs of Brensham and my awakened curiosity about people was like a sharp pricking in my brain. I was possessed all at once by a huge inquisitiveness. Down there dwelt the Colonel and the Mad Lord and the parson-naturalist and Mr Chorlton, Sammy Hunt with his boats and his osiers, the Fitchers and the Gormleys in perpetual strife, Mrs Doan, the pub-keepers, the cottagers, the market-gardeners, the labourers. Somehow I realized dimly that these ill-assorted, contrary and individualistic elements formed a community which perhaps was different from other communities. At any rate I decided that I wanted to know about Brensham, and about what went on under the roofs.
Honorary Villager – The Cricket–ground – The Captain – The Secretary – The Blacksmith – The Potterer – The ‘Boys’ – The Drunkard – The Scorer – The Helpers – The Spectators – The Match against Woody Bourton
Honorary Villager
Perhaps I should never have got to know much about Brensham but for the accident that I was not a very good cricketer. When I left school I returned to Elmbury and was articled to my uncle, who was an auctioneer. I joined the Elmbury Cricket Club, which played competent and rather solemn games on Saturday afternoons and which didn’t take long to discover that my rightful place in the batting-order was last. But so competent and solemn were the earlier batsmen that they very rarely got out; and in practice I hardly ever batted at all.
Now Brensham, whose parson was tolerant and broad-minded (as was to be expected of one who kept live bait in his font), sometimes played cricket on Sundays; and one day Mr Chorlton invited me to join the team. The Brensham standard was not so high as Elmbury’s; and I was put in fifth wicket down. Moreover the previous batsmen, whose approach to the game was light-hearted and happy-go-lucky smote the ball hard, high and often so that before long they were all caught in the deep. Within half an hour of the start of the innings I found myself walking to the wicket. This unfamiliar experience was so intoxicating that I was heartened to swipe the first ball over the bowler’s head for six. The next one bowled me middle-stump; but I had had my fun and I walked back cheerfully to the pavilion where Mr Chorlton, Briggs the blacksmith, and Sammy Hunt were chuckling and clapping.
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