It was part of the monstrous mysterious Thing which sent up the rent of cottages and sent down the miner’s wage; which contrived a glut of coffee in Brazil or a rice famine in Bengal by fiddling about in some unexplained way with Foreign Exchange. In some unspecified fashion, Briggs was sure of it, the Syndicate was associated with the terrible, powerful, nameless people whom he thought of as ‘They’. ‘They’ had their offices in London and New York and Amsterdam; ‘They’ were supernational; ‘They’ played with Governments as if Governments were pawns, stood above Prime Ministers and Kings, and laughed cynically at revolutions, being confident that ‘They’ could easily corrupt the revolutionaries with the gift of a little illusory power. ‘They’ was invisible, anonymous, unidentified; you couldn’t curse them, break their windows, imprison them or hang them. Briggs had serious doubts whether even the Russian Communists had effectively got rid of Them.

Seeing in the Syndicate’s workings a trivial, fragmentary manifestation of Their power, Briggs stoutly refused to shoe their horses and assaulted their Head Groom who apparently ‘called him names’. For this he was bound over by the Justices of the Peace for Elmbury. ‘What did he actually call you?’ asked General Bouverie, who was Chairman of the Bench.

‘A bloody Bolshie, your Worship,’ said Briggs.

‘Very provocative. I should have hit him myself,’ said General Bouverie, who knew all about Briggs’ politics. ‘In the circumstances I shall refrain from imposing a fine.’

Of course, Briggs could easily afford to refuse the custom of the Syndicate; he was an extremely prosperous tradesman. There is a mistaken notion that the blacksmith’s is a dying trade; and those who are always moaning and mourning the departure of Ye Olde things, the William-Morrissy-arty-crafty people, will tell you that the village smith is disappearing, another craftsman-victim of ‘the thing we miscall Progress’. In fact I believe that Jeremy Briggs made a good deal more money than James Briggs his father, who owned the smithy before him. It is true that there were not so many farm-horses in 1930 as there were in late Victorian times (although there were more hunters); but the ‘odd-jobing’ which he so proudly advertised more than redressed the balance. If there were fewer horses, there was more farm-machinery; and when the binder or the hay-sweep went wrong it was generally the blacksmith’s job to put it right. Again, fewer horses meant more motor-cars; and these motor-cars from time to time ran into each other head-on. When the drivers had been taken to hospital, and the vehicles had been towed to the garage, and the doctors, the motor-manufacturers and the garagemen had all levied their dues upon the insurance company, there often remained a kind of residue in the shape of two bent front-axles which found their way to Briggs’ forge. Besides, being a skilled worker in most metals, Briggs made a good many profitable odds-and-ends in his spare time; the local builder alone gave him enough work to pay for the beer which he drank in enormous quantities. He certainly didn’t deserve the pity of the arty-crafty crowd who went in for folk-dancing and played upon pan-pipes and taught long-suffering villagers to make useless things out of raffia.

Like most blacksmiths, Briggs possessed notable biceps, forearms and hands. When he was a young man he could tear a pack of cards in two. His palms were criss-crossed with old calloused scars, which were the consequence of his youthful foolishness in bending six-inch nails for the entertainment of the company at the Adam and Eve. In later years, becoming less reckless, he wrapped handkerchiefs round his hand before starting his demonstration.

At one time he was the terror of travelling showmen at the local fairs; for whether it v/as a matter of bending pokers or lifting weights, Briggs could always do it better than they could. When the Strongest Man in the World with painful effort and streams of perspiration had managed to give a slight twist to an iron bar, Briggs, pleading with affected innocence ‘Let me try that, mister! Let me have a go!’ would mount the rostrum and without apparent exertion bend the bar almost double. All the Strongest Men in the World hated and feared him.

At Elmbury Mop he elected one night to try his strength upon one of those machines which you smite with a mallet. He had had a great deal of beer, and what happened would have served as a good advertisement for the brewery. With his first shot, being as he freely admitted a bit unsteady on his pins, he missed altogether. The showman laughed; and this annoyed him. He took a lot of trouble over his next shot, his great hands which had clamped in their awful grip the kicking hoof of an angry stallion clasped the handle of the mallet, the muscles of his forearms stood out like the roots of an old tree, and Briggs smote. He hit the machine fair and square with such force that it fell apart; the head of the mallet flew off into the crowd. Satisfied, he shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

Yet at cricket he hardly ever hit sixes, but batted with a huge stolidity which would have done credit to a Lancashire stone-waller; his favourite stroke was what he imagined to be a neat and professional cut through the slips, off which he was generally caught in the gulley. And at darts he had a most curious style which seemed to be a flat contradiction of his great size and strength: he threw rather like a girl. He possessed a set of darts of his own, very tiny and, as one might say, sissy darts, which he picked up deliberately between his enormous fingers (which weren’t half as clumsy as they looked) and propelled very neatly and primly into the particular double or treble he wanted.

The Potterer

At the time when I began to play cricket for Brensham, the elderly, sick-looking, sallow-faced man called Hope-Kingley was a newcomer there; and the village didn’t quite know what to make of him.