How foolish I am!’ And sure enough, he let the water in that night, and the new pond was dry again by breakfast-time. Briggs, who had prophesied this, spent most of his dinner-hour leaning on the orchard gate and grinning at the muddy morass. Other villagers, more polite, told Mr Hope-Kingley:

‘We’re very sorry to hear about your trout-pond!’
The old man smiled a queer and quizzical smile.
‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘I shall have to try again.’

Once more he let in the water; and once more the pond was dry within twelve hours. And again, when people sympathized, Mr Hope-Kinglev gave them that queer little smile.

The next day, as it happened, was the King’s birthday, and the honours came out in the paper. Somebody, glancing through the list of ‘Knights’, read with astonishment:

‘To be Knight Commander of the Indian Empire: Gerald Devereux Hope-Kingley: For distinguished services in hydraulic engineering in India, Burma and Malay.’

Mr Chorlton and I were not altogether surprised, when we passed the trout-pond that evening on our way to fish in the river, to find that it was full; and this time the water was not running out. Hope-Kingley was pottering in his garden.

‘Sir Gerald,’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘You’ve been pulling our legs.’

‘Dear me,’ he said mildly. ‘You must forgive me. You must let an old man have his little joke.’

He asked us in to have a glass of sherry. He showed us the rock-garden and the slug-bitten Alpines, and his draggled collection of butterflies and the tropical fishes in his aquarium which were dying off from some mysterious disease.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘none of these things go right, do they? And I suppose that’s because I’m such an awful potterer. For forty years I promised myself, almost every day, that when I retired I would give myself the pleasure of deciding over my early-morning tea what particular form of pottering I should practise after breakfast!’

I thought of the long uncomfortable years that had given him the right to potter: the steamy jungles of Burma and Malay, the high peaks of the North-west Frontier, the great watersheds above Nepal; the malaria and the insects and the damp heat which blurred the eyepiece of the theodolite; the great rains and the melting snow and the rivers thundering down and the agony of waiting to see whether the dam would hold.

Sir Gerald butted in upon my thoughts.

‘Next autumn,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make a bird-table outside my study window. And then I shall rig up some sort of camera contrivance so that I can photograph the birds. One might invent an automatic one, don’t you think, which would take a picture whenever a bird alighted on the table? It would amuse me when I’m kept to the house, which is pretty often; for I had too long in the tropics to stick an English winter well. I always promised myself that when I couldn’t even potter I’d amuse myself with a bird-table and rig up a camera to photograph the birds.’

The ‘Boys’

The last five or six places in our cricket-team were filled, generally at the last moment, by various unreliable and often unwilling youths whom Alfie impressed out of the pubs: labouring boys, farmers’ sons, and so on. The former, who toiled all the week in the fields and market-gardens, found no enjoyment whatever in chasing a cricket-ball in the hot sun upon their afternoon off; the latter, whose interest lay chiefly in fiery horses and powerful motor-bikes, had little enthusiasm for a game which offered no prospect of a broken neck. However, Alfie by his press-gang methods usually captured a few of them; and some, especially the farmers’ sons, often slogged happily and heartily or took a few wickets with their murderous fast bowling.

We included in the category of ‘the boys’, because they were equally unreliable, Billy Butcher the village ne’er-do-weel and Banks, the village policeman. We could not count on either: the former because he was almost always drunk and the latter because he was often on duty. On one occasion we lost both players through the same cause: Billy Butcher chose a Saturday afternoon to go roaring round the village merrily breaking windows, and Banks was called out to arrest him.

That must have been the only arrest Banks made in his first five years at Brensham. He arrived, as all our village policemen do, as a young, efficient and rather officious constable, eager for promotion, willing to go out of his way to look for trouble, and inclined to hang about in the neighbourhood of the pubs at closing-time. He had succeeded an elderly, easy-going fellow who knew our ways; and at first we regarded Banks with suspicion and dismay. But Joe Trentfield, the landlord of the Horse Narrow, who’d seen village policemen come and go for twenty years, laughed at our fears and said philosophically: ‘’Tis alius the same with new brooms. Wait a bit, and you’ll see we’ll tame him. Be they real tigers, Brensham alius tames ‘em in the end.’

And sure enough, we tamed Banks. We married him off, for one thing, to Joe Trentfield’s daughter. We persuaded him to play for us at cricket and darts. Sam Hunt built him a boat and taught him to fish for chub. Soon he learned that the business of a village constable was concerned, not with criminals and crooks, but with foot and mouth disease and swine fever, straying animals and lost dogs: and that the nearest he was likely to get to dealing with a murder was his annual duty of quelling a row between the Fitchers and the Gormleys about a murder which had happened fifty years ago. He discovered (Joe Trentfield’s daughter may have had something to do with the discovery) that the best way of making sure that the pub closed at ten was to drop in for a quiet drink with the landlord at ten-thirty. He found out that prosecuting people for having no dog licence or riding a bicycle without lights was not, after all, a short cut to promotion; and before very long the dream of quick promotion faded, and a different dream took its place: he began to save up towards buying a cottage with perhaps a little orchard and a couple of pigstyes, so that he could still live in the shadow of Brensham Hill when he retired.

The Drunkard

Billy Butcher, at the age of thirty-five, was still the village’s Problem Child.