Brensham was famous for its cricketers; it had given a dozen good players to the County team within recent memory. Its wicket was easily the best for miles around; better, some said, than Elmbury’s, which was tended by two groundsmen and upon which two or three times a season the County played its too-serious games. The men of Brensham practically worshipped their smooth impeccable oblong in the square shaven field. Its High Priest was Mr Chorlton, who marked it and mowed it and spent much of his time kneeling upon it looking for offending daisies. An acolyte, the Brensham blacksmith whose name was Briggs, rolled it every Sunday morning as a sort of religious rite.

Not far from the cricket-field was a backwater of the river among osier-beds, with a landing-stage which was called the Wharf: the hay-barges used to take on their loads there in the days when river traffic went on. That had ceased long ago; but the men of Brensham, whose village was situated so curiously between the hill and the river, had never forgotten that they were watermen as well as hillmen. You could count a score of boats at the Wharf and there were others moored up and down stream, little groups of boats tied together so that they looked like the fingers of an outspread hand, long black fishing-punts, handy clinker-built tubs, mahogany sculling-boats for hire to visitors, two or three sailing-dinghies with red-ochre sails, some Canadian canoes, a precarious Rob Roy … There were more boats pulled up on the bank for tarring or caulking, for mending or in process of building - for many of the Brensham men still made their own. They seemed to hold these craft in common; oars and rowlocks were always left on board and if you wanted a boat at Brensham you just heaved the peg out of the bank, climbed on board, and rowed away - if the owner arrived later and found his boat missing he simply borrowed somebody else’s. Indeed it was regarded as unmannerly at Brensham to chain your boat to a tree with a padlock as people did in less happy-go-lucky places. However, this easy-going practice applied only among the natives; strangers, whom the Brensham men called ‘foreigners’ even though they came from only five miles away, must hire their craft from Sammy Hunt, who owned the cottage beside the Wharf and made his living in that fashion. He also owned the osier-beds, and cut the withies every year to sell them for basket-making. Sammy was rather a curiosity among the inhabitants of Brensham for he was a sailor born and bred and such as a rule like to settle down within sight of the sea; he’d been a Master in big tramp-steamers and small liners and had sailed all over the world. Yet here he was as near as he could get to the quiet heart of England, Master of no craft bigger than a fourteen-foot punt, with what must have seemed a mere trickle of water running past his cottage - you could throw a stone across the river easily - and the fat comfortable green fields all round him: like a land-locked salmon left behind by a flood. He still looked like a sailor, having a wrinkled mahogany face and sea-blue eyes, and he possessed a great store of tales about foreign parts and foreign peoples which he would tell you for hours while he caulked his boats or coiled down the painters all shipshape and Bristol-fashion in their bows.

Sammy had a sort of henchman called Abraham who helped him with his boat-building, and who wove the cut withies into baskets and putcheons for eels. Abraham also acted as ferryman, and would paddle you across the river in a tarry black punt for a penny. He was a sombre silent old man who had the rare trick of driving his boat through the water without the slightest sound. He never spoke, and sometimes on still foggy days when I have seen his long punt glide silently towards me out of the murk I have remembered uncomfortably as I stepped aboard it that there was another taciturn Ferryman whose fee was also a penny.

Upstream of Sammy’s cottage was the Lock, and an old mill with a wooden water-wheel, which still ground corn; and beyond was another of our landmarks, the Murder House, a stark ruin, itself rather like something that had been murdered, with its blind glassless windows and its pale rafters like ribs showing through the broken red roof. We had explored it hesitantly at first, half-expecting to find bloodstains although fifty years had passed since the murder. A man called Fitcher had cleft the skull of a man called Gormley with a hatchet; and we played in a desultory way at being Fitchers and Gormleys, ‘reconstructing the crime’. Soon, however, we heard a scrabbling in the attic, and Dick shinned up there to find a barn-owl’s nest with two young birds. This interested us much more than any murder, and thereafter our concern with the place was purely ornithological. The villagers told us it was haunted, but we scoffed at them. ‘The ghost is just an old barn-owl,’ we said. Our curiosity about natural things was so large that we had none left over for the supernatural. Dracula, which we read about this time, bored us stiff; for we kept as a pet a real bat, captured in the Folly, and unbeknownst to our parents took it to bed with us, fleas and all.

Flickers and Gormleys

The murder, after fifty years, might have been forgotten but for the fact that both Fitcher and Gormley belonged to huge gipsyish families whose numerous progeny refused to forget it. The original quarrel, we were vaguely told, had been ‘something to do with a woman’ and Mr Fitcher, having split open his rival’s head, had sewn a quantity of lead into his clothes and pitched him into the river. Soon afterwards there was a flood, which carried the body down to Elmbury where, as it happened, some of the man ‘s relations owned and operated a salmon-net. Heaving in this net, and remarking that it was exceptionally heavy, they dragged out the remains of Uncle Gormley, which must have been both a shock and a disappointment to them, for he had been in the river a long time and they had expected a draught of silver salmon. Mr Fitcher was subsequently hanged; and the small shrill children of the Gormleys thereafter would call out to the Fitchers whenever they encountered them: What’s in the salmon net today? This rhetorical question was taken by the Fitchers to be a deadly insult; indeed it was unwise to mention salmon or nets in their presence. From time to time a drunken Gormley would encounter a truculent Fitcher and utter the fatal words; and then the trouble began.

Fortunately the two families did not often meet.