The only commodities, however, which concerned us in those days were huge and tiger-striped bull’s-eyes, so indestructible that you could use them for marbles, and elastic for catapults. Mrs Doan’s elastic was very thick, and square in section; surely it must have been made specially for catapults by some manufacturer with the heart of a boy, for I cannot imagine any other use for it. Nor, I think, could Mrs Doan; and since she strongly disapproved of the slaughter of birds, she had to invent an elaborate fiction to the effect that we employed our catapults for the purpose of shooting at tin cans. ‘Now, remember, no live targets,’ she would say. ‘You will get just as much fun shooting at empty bottles; but you must take care not to cut yourselves with the broken glass.’ Then she would quote to us a Victorian rhyme:

If Human Beings only knew
What sorrows little birds went through
I think that even boys
Would never think it sport or fun
To fire a nasty horrid gun
Only for the noise.

‘Of course,’ she would say, ‘I know that catapults are silent; but this elastic is very strong, and if you hit a poor little fluffy bird with a stone you might hurt it very badly.’ It was all we could do to keep our faces straight; we whose catapult handles each bore a score of notches. And I don’t think Mrs Doan really succeeded in believing her tin-can fiction. She sold us the stuff reluctantly, rather in the manner of the Apothecary selling the poison to Romeo: ‘My poverty, but not my will, consents.’ ‘It’s very strong,’ she would say hesitantly. And so it was. The Elmbury shops sold nothing like it, and offered us instead strips of narrow pink stuff which might have served, we thought, for a girl’s garters. We were shocked and insulted and thereafter we put up with her admonitions and dealt exclusively with Mrs Doan, whose square-sided cattie-lackey was as black as liquorice and so strong that when you pulled it back to have a shot you felt like a longbowman at the Battle of Agincourt.

The Mad Lord

When you started to climb the hill you left the half-timbering behind; the village still straggled along beside the steep path, but the cottages were built of limestone quarried a few hundred yards away, and the hedges gradually gave place to stone walls. Then you came to the end of the path and to the last cottage, which was inhabited by an old man with a wooden leg and a long beard. He kept in his garden a billy-goat which also had a long beard. We called him Goaty Pegleg, and thought of him as the hill’s janitor, for he was almost always to be found leaning on the gate at the road’s end. If he were feeling good-humoured he opened the gate for us; and we went through into a rough chalky field full of furze-bushes, ragwort, thistles and rabbits. A stony cart track led upwards towards the quarries, the banks covered with scrub and bramble, the hanging woods of oak, sycamore and ash, and the larch plantation on the hilltop, with the round preposterous tower of Brensham Folly just showing above the feathery tops of the conifers.

This was the unexplored jungle, the unclimbed mountain, the unmapped hinterland! (We didn’t know what a hinterland was but thought it must be some particularly impenetrable sort of forest.) Off we scampered, with our butterfly-nets, our rabbit snares given us by Pistol, to maraud, to slaughter, and to explore.

How often the reality disappoints even proper explorers of virgin lands! I suppose that El Dorado wasn’t golden when old tired Raleigh came to the bitter end of the dream. But Brensham did not let us down; the hill which we had peopled, as we sat in the nursery window, with fabulous beasts and fabulous men did not fail us when at last we set foot upon it.

There were no hoopoes nor golden orioles, it is true; but there was a pair of merlin falcons, and before our amazed eyes a brown jackdaw flew away among the black ones which with loud clacking and chatter rose from the old quarries. We saw no fire-crested wrens, but plenty of goldcrests in the larch plantation. And there also, while we watched and waited for we knew not what, we heard a patter as light as falling leaves, and held our breath while three dappled shadows cantered by, paused among the bracken, became for a moment substantial in the sunlight as they twitched velvet ears and noses, and then suddenly in a panic and flurry of delicate legs rejoined the trees’ lacy shadows and so vanished. The Mad Lord’s fallow-deer still roamed Brensham Hill.

So did the Mad Lord. We saw him, I think, once during the summer holiday. He didn’t look mad; but he certainly didn’t look like a lord. He was dressed in an old jacket and breeches which would have been moderately becoming upon a scarecrow, and he rode upon a moth-eaten grey, an ancient and decrepit bag of bones which the meanest of his tenants would surely have sent to the kennels long ago. We held open for him the wicket-gate into the larch plantation; he felt in his pocket for pennies, found none, and gave us instead a slow, gentle smile. We raised our caps, and to our astonishment he swept off his hat, if it could be called a hat, for like his jacket it would have served to frighten the rooks. He rode slowly away and we stood amazed at his courtesy: a lord had taken off his hat to us and smiled! He tittuped down the ride, on his terrible mare which was rather like Famine’s mount in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and it was four or five years before I saw him again. By then I had read a book and I recognized a likeness; I knew that I had seen Don Quixote riding on Rosinante.

The Bottled Crusader

The Mad Lord, whose wife had died, had a daughter of about our own age, a pale-faced, wide-eyed, flaxen-haired child called Jane whom we encountered from time to time during our walks on the hill. She soon became friendly and at ease with us, and one day she informed us, to our great astonishment, ‘I have an ancestor who lives in a sort of jamjar. I only show him to my special friends. You can come and see him if you like.’ We followed her down by a rough scrambling path to the Mad Lord’s house on the side of the hill, where she obtained from her easygoing nurse a large and important-looking key and led us down the garden to a very peculiar building which she told us was the private chapel. (It had been designed, we learned later, by the second Lord Orris who had made a Grand Tour and had been greatly impressed by Venice.) She unlocked the door and took a candle and a box of matches off the shelf.’We‘re going down to the family vault,’ she said.