Nevertheless the Hermit would put it to his eye and sweep it round in a gesture as proud as if he had been Nelson counting his ships before Trafalgar. When he stood thus upon the Folly roof the Hermit seemed to gain both in stature and in confidence. His beard and his long grey locks streamed out in the wind; he had something of the witless grandeur of Lear. He leaned upon the parapet, telescope to eye, slowly turning his head and reckoning up the counties spread beneath him nor caring, apparently, that they were yellow ochre instead of green. He smiled slightly with satisfaction, as a farmer who numbers his sheep and says to himself: ‘Mine, all mine!’ And then he beckoned to us and handed us the broken telescope and waved his filthy hand with its long talon-like fingers in lordly fashion as if to say: ‘Mine, all mine; but you can look at them if you like.’

‘Mine.’ God knows, perhaps the poor crazy creature really thought so.

Bird’s Eye View

We weren’t very interested in the twelve counties, nor in the small smudge or speck which to the eye of faith represented a distant cathedral. We liked, it was true, to glance briefly beyond the serpentine Severn and the small silver glint of Wye to the mountains of Wales which looked Black indeed when the red sun was sinking behind them; but always before long our eyes came back home, to the roads we already knew and the lanes we were learning, to Elmbury among its fat green meadows and Brensham village among its leafy orchards.

Could we make out Tudor House where I lived, in Elmbury High Street? or Donald’s house at the end of the town? Dick’s and Ted’s with lawns running down to the river? We often thought so; for there were the awful unmistakable alleys and slums, tight-packed tiny roofs which looked like rows of pigstyes (and, almost, they were). There was the cattle-market, an oblong open space which seethed like an anthill on Fair days. There was the Swan Hotel where the Colonel, if it was open, would be drinking whisky, and there the flour-mills with the rivers winding past them, rivers which wound about the town so crookedly that they seemed to tie it up in an untidy parcel. And there, rising over all, was the Abbey with its fine tower which always caught whatever light there was and glowed reddish-gold or tawny because long ago a great fire had enveloped it, marking it for ever where the red tongues had licked.

Then in search of more landmarks the eye crept back towards Brensham village, following the white unmetalled road which was our way from Elmbury to the hill, tracing our familiar route past the church with the tall delicate spire, the three poplar trees, the Horse Narrow, the Bell, Mrs Doan’s Post Office, the Adam and Eve, the railway station close beside it with the bright-glinting track running through it straight as a steel rod.

Look: the Colonel’s farm. Ayrshire cows in the meadows, beautifully pied, hardly distinguishable sometimes from cloud-shadows; piebald horses; Gloster spot pigs; weird unfamiliar dappled sheep from Spain; a flutter of Plymouth Rock hens in the orchard - for everything that walked upon the Colonel’s farm, including his dogs and even the cats, had to be pied. It was one of his fads, we were told. His house, like most of our houses, was half-timbered. His farm wagons, his drays, his larger implements, were painted cream-and-black. Even the petrol-tank of his old motorcycle was striped like a zebra. Crazy, people said: crack-brained as a Brensham hare. But to us, as we looked down upon his Noah’s Ark farm, it seemed entirely reasonable that a man should indulge such a pleasant whim if he wanted to.

These easy, simplified judgements of our elders often dismayed and bewildered us. There was, for example, the matter of the Mad Lord. Round the shoulder of the hill - you could only just see it from the Folly roof - was the big, beautiful Georgian mansion where he lived. The original Orris Manor had been burned down two hundred years ago; the present one dated from 1760. It was built in the semblance of a castle but with a grace and lightness which no genuine castle possesses; and it was tumbling down. Turrets and parapets were crumbling away, a chimney leaned drunkenly and some broken panes in the top-storey windows had been repaired with brown paper so that they looked like empty eye-sockets staring blindly down towards the village. Several trees were down in the park, the arch which bridged the moat had collapsed into the water, a dam had burst and turned half the garden into a bog. Nor was this surprising for the moat had been made in the steep hillside by damming a stream and contained its muddy water in flat defiance of the laws of hydraulics.

It was incredible that a lord should inhabit such a ruin; but when we inquired the reason we were told simply: ‘You see, he has no money.’ That was another shock to us; we had always thought that lords and great wealth were inseparable. However, it was explained that he had possessed some money once, but he hadn’t known how to look after it, cheats and moneylenders had robbed him of it, rascals had ‘borrowed’ it, beggars had begged it; there was hardly any left. Poor as a church mouse and mad as a hatter was the Mad Lord Orris of Brensham. We asked wonderingly: ‘In what way is he mad?’ and got the puzzling answer: ‘You see, he doesn’t think money matters; he actually doesn’t mind being poor.’ We pondered this obiter dictum and I am glad to say that even at the age of ten we were able to see the flaw in it. Our secret friends of the Elmbury alleys, Pistol, Bardolph, Nym and their kind, hardly ever had a penny to bless themselves with nor seemed to care for money at all - whatever they got by begging and scrounging they spent in the pub within a few hours; and yet it was apparent to us that they were completely sane. Therefore, we reasoned, the Mad Lord was probably sane too; he was merely a more eminent Pistol, a refinement of Bardolph, a lordlier Nym. We remembered how he had swept off his hat to us when we opened the gate for him, how he had smiled at us as he rode away, and we decided that, mad or sane, he came into our category of Special People, which included the three musketeers, a bird-catcher who taught us how to make bird-lime and set springes, Mr Chorlton, a professional fisherman called Bassett, the Colonel, and the Hermit, who was Special because he could catch rabbits with his hands.

Below the Mad Lord’s unkempt park the land fell steeply towards the river: apple trees gave place to old and crooked willows, which grew along the banks of all the ditches and beside the river itself. Brensham’s cricket-field was here, on the very frontier between orchard and water-meadow: a light-green square with orchards on two sides of it and small sallows on the other two.