‘That’s the sort of innings we like to see at Brensham,’ they said. After the match we all went to the Adam and Eve and played darts; and I drank more beer than a seventeen-year-old is supposed to be able to carry. Sammy Hunt, who was the captain of the team, invited me to play for it regularly; and since whatever loyalty I possessed to the Elmbury Club had been dissipated by beer I gladly accepted.

Thereafter, on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer, I made my way to the small square cricket-field which lay between the orchards and the river; at first by bicycle, later upon an old ramshackle Triumph, and once or twice when the Triumph broke down, on horseback. The spectacle of a young man in blazer and white flannels, carrying a bat, trotting down the village street on a lanky chestnut didn’t at all surprise the people of Brensham; for almost everybody in the place was a horseman, and the neighbouring farmer’s sons would often ride to the village dances in white waistcoats and tails. And already I was accepted as belonging to the village; for they had known me as a boy, buying cattie-lackey at Mrs Doan’s shop or wandering over the hill where the keepers employed by the Syndicate spoke of me and my three friends as ‘they young Varmins’. In the Adam and Eve after a cricket-match, an old man wearing the traditional velveteens came up to me grinning and said: ‘I knows thee. Thee be one of they young Varmins.’ So although I was technically a ‘foreigner’ (for I lived four miles away, and even the people of neighbouring Dykeham, just across the river, were considered foreigners) I was permitted a sort of honorary membership of the Brensham community.

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.

The Cricket-ground

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.