He was incorrigible and anti-social and I suppose that in the sort of society advocated by Mr Bernard Shaw he would have been told ‘We bear you no ill will, my dear fellow, but society must be protected’ and popped into a humane and hygienic lethal chamber in no time. We, on the other hand, having a vague and unformulated belief that one of the fundamental Rights of Man was his right to go to the devil in his own fashion, bought him drinks, lent him money, put up with his occasional bouts of window-smashing, and in fact allowed him to drink himself slowly towards a far more uncomfortable death than Mr Shaw would have devised for him.

Was society worse off in consequence, or better? I don’t know. We should have been richer by more than a few pounds; for Billy was an expensive companion. But what are a few pounds compared with a lot of laughter, a lot of low comedy, a fragment of high comedy, an hour or two every week of wild and gorgeous talk? Billy gave us all that; for he was two other things as well as a drunkard, things which do not often go together: he was a clown and he was a poet. His clowning was spontaneous, irrepressible, and sometimes sublime. He didn’t have to try to be funny, and his fooling was of the same nature as Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s, it ‘came natural’. The truth of the matter was, I think, that for certain brief periods in the process of his drunkenness he saw the whole of life as an absurd and enormous comedy, and all he did then was to play his own part in it. If he made us laugh, it was simply because we, to him, appeared almost unbearably funny. Finding the whole world peopled with figures of fun, he did no more than adapt himself to his environment.

As for his poetry, that was a very different matter. It was not at all obvious, it was something which had its source deep within him, it dwelt in the secret places of Billy’s heart where no doubt it teased and tortured and tormented him as such Daemons will. To quell it he drank whisky: more and more whisky, have another boys, well I don’t mind if I do, down the hatch - and perhaps if he drank long enough the Daemon lay still. But sometimes the opposite thing happened. There was a Tom Tiddler’s Ground, a no-man’s-land between semi-drunkenness and complete drunkenness, in which shadowy territory Billy sometimes found himself. Then for an hour, or half an hour, the poetry would bubble up. He became possessed. He talked sublime and airy nonsense. He quoted. His subconscious heaved - and brought up great undigested slabs of Shakespeare, gobbets of Swinburne, ill-assorted scraps and fragments from Chaucer, Skelton, Sir Thomas Browne. He was not showing off; it was sheer agony: the stuff gushed out of him. But the fit didn’t last long. Let’s have another, he cried almost desperately, another and another, as if the whisky were a sort of purge for poetry: and soon he was empty. Then we would see the sweat standing out on his forehead and the tears welling up in his eyes. ‘I can’t bear it,’ Billy would say.

‘Bear what?’

‘Everything.’

And then, leaning against the bar, with his head in his hands, he would cry his heart out, until some kindly person led him away.

If Billy had been a newcomer, I suppose we should have been less tolerant of him; but he was a native of Brensham, born in the pleasant house called Gables which Hope-Kingley now owned. He was the son of Colonel Butcher, a stiff moustachio’d warrior-scholar who had spent his last ten years in our village writing a grammar of the Urdu language. His wife had died in India, and the boy ran wild as a Brensham hare. While the old gentleman worked in his study, young Billy at the age of seventeen was discovering the queer dirty little pubs in the back streets of Elmbury and flirting with alley-wenches at Elmbury Mop. There was some trouble, when Billy was eighteen, over a girl in the village; and Colonel Butcher briefly interrupted his study of Urdu to deal with the situation, which he did by packing Billy off to a crammer for the Army. Six months later the boy was back; no princely fee, said the crammer, would compensate him for the disgrace and ill-fame which Billy’s presence brought upon his establishment. So the Urdu grammar suffered another set-back while its author made arrangements to dispatch his son to West Africa. ‘At least,’ he said bitterly, ‘you will find no blonde housemaids there.’ This was doubtless true; but Billy found something much more dangerous.