The Fitchers for the most part lived in tumbledown cottages on the Brensham side of the hill; the Gormleys were encamped, mainly in caravans, on the other side. Both got their living in a precarious and gipsy-like way by hiring themselves to farmers for seasonal work such as pea-picking and fruit-picking; and since no farmer was so foolish as to employ both families at the same time the risk of an encounter was fairly slight. At Christmas-time, however, and especially on New Year ‘s Eve, the Fitchers and the Gormleys were apt to foregather simultaneously in the pubs of Brensham (whose landlords dreaded and hated them both impartially). There they would sit in separate groups, glaring at each other, and waiting for somebody to mention salmon-nets, or even accidentally to use any of the other words, such as ‘hatchet’ or ‘rope’, which were taboo because of their association with the fifty-year-old crime. This was sure to happen before closing-time, and then the Fitchers and Gormleys would stream forth into the peaceful village of Brensham like Montagues and Capulets into the streets of Verona. Both sides would call up reinforcements which appeared miraculously from nowhere; and for half an hour or so the running fight would go on all the way from the Horse Narrow to the Adam and Eve, the men punching each other, the women scratching each other, the small children biting and kicking. Nobody came to much harm, though the noise was terrifying; and the village policeman generally contrived to keep out of the way, knowing that his intervention was the only thing in the world capable of uniting the Fitchers and Gormleys, who would immediately make common cause against him. The sum of the damage was generally a few black eyes and bloody noses and some broken glasses in the pubs; the brief disturbance subsided as suddenly as it had begun, and the Fitchers and Gormleys relapsed into a state of mistrustful armistice until the season of peace and good-will came round again.

Christmas Holidays

We were the delighted witnesses of one of these battles, which occurred upon Boxing Day at the time when the pubs were closing in the early afternoon. A rout of Gormleys came scampering down the road pursued by Fitcher males with sticks and Fitcher females with umbrellas. Later, however, we discovered some small Gormley boys endeavouring, apparently, to gouge the eyes out of some small Fitcher girls, so honours were even. Shortly afterwards the Hunt came galloping by and old General Bouverie the Master yelled in a terrible voice to Gormleys and Fitchers impartially: Have you seen my fox, damn you? and in a helter-skelter of red coats, horses, shouting men, screaming women and children crying What’s in the salmon-nets today-ay? the whole fantastic riot melted away and the violated village returned to its usual mid-winter quietude.

Brensham in winter, apart from such occasional liveliness, presented a workaday landscape; for the fields were full of sprout-stalks which stank sulphurously as they rotted, the orchard-trees were black and bare, the market-gardens were littered with the left-over debris of late autumn, and the smoke from a score of squitch-fires made blue streaks across the land like smudged chalkmarks: a miniature industrial haze. The river, every month or so, crept out over the water-meadows, licked the bottom slopes of the hill, lapped the doorsteps of a few low-lying cottages, and then sullenly went back, leaving a brown scum on the fields. The people of Brensham paddled about in gumboots and cursed their rich dark soil which made such sticky mud.

But it would have taken more than mud to keep us away from Brensham Hill, and we were up there, I dare say, on the first day of the holidays and almost every day thereafter for the next three weeks. However rough the weather or sharp the season we never failed to find fun or mischief in the quarries and coverts. Mr Chorlton, who was apt to call us Beastly Little Barbarians, read us a passage from a very old play, The Play of the Wether, which he said summarized our whole attitude to life:

‘Forsothe, sir, my mynd is thys, at few wordes,
All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes,
And makynge of snow-ballys and throwynge the same …
O, to se my snow-ballys lyght on my felowes heddys,
And to here the byrdes how they flycker their wynges
In the pytfall! I say yt passeth all thynges.

‘That,’ he would say, ‘was written about 1540. It is a sobering thought to an old schoolmaster that in spite of four hundred years of education boys haven’t improved one whit since that time!’

Mr Chorlton, who detested winter walking, refused to accompany us at this time of year. There were no moths to lure him up to the larch plantation, so he stayed at home, rearranging his collection, reading Aeschylus, Horace, and the wine-merchants’ catalogues, and drinking port. This gave him his annual attack of gout which always lasted from Christmas until the first butterflies came out at Easter. Instead of him, we had for companions the bird-catcher, Jim Mellor, who despite the Wild Birds’ Protection Act still carried on a profitable illicit trade in goldfinches; the fisherman Bassett, who took us live-baiting for pike whenever a frost kept the river within its banks; the three musketeers, who brought rabbit-nets and graciously allowed us to use our ferret, Boanerges, to bolt the rabbits; and - most unexpectedly - the old Rector of Brensham, who turned out to be a fine naturalist and was delighted to show us badgers’ and foxes’ tracks when the first light snow covered Brensham Hill.

This good and gentle clergyman, whose name was Mr Mountjoy, remained sufficiently boyish at the age of seventy to borrow our catapults for an occasional pot-shot at a sitting rabbit or crow. (‘I deplore blood sports,’ he said, ‘but you can scarcely call it a blood sport if you never hit anything.’) He was not in the least embarrassed to be seen in the company of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, who shamelessly used his cloth as cover for their poaching, disappearing into the bushes to set their wires and hastily returning to his side if the keeper came into view. ‘What are you men doing up here?’ asked a keeper once, knowing only too well. ‘A-walking with His Reverence,’ they growled. ‘His Reverence invited us to come for a stroll.’ For a long time we thought that Mr Mountjoy in his very great innocence was unaware of the three scoundrels’ frightful reputation; we were somewhat surprised, therefore, when one day he turned to Pistol with a diffident smile and said in his precise way: ‘I’m going to ask you a question and I hope you won’t mind answering it to satisfy my idle curiosity: What’s the food really like in jail?’

One of his hobbies was keeping bees. He had about fifty hives in his garden, and told us that their total population was nearly four million. ‘That’s as many bees as there are people in a great city. What a vast kingdom I rule!’ On the first spring days he would stand contentedly for hours watching the workers sally forth and come back with the yellow crocus-pollen upon them; but at high summer he would often load some of the hives in the back of his small open car and go prospecting far afield for patches of beanflower or clover or saintfoin, and then beg the owner’s permission to leave a hive or two there so that his bees could gather the honey. It was a familiar sight to see the Rector driving down the lanes with half a dozen skeps occupying the back seat while a little swarm of his turbulent passengers rose from them like a thin smoke and swirled about his head.

He was also a keen ornithologist. I suspect that Mr Mountjoy, like another and greater parson-naturalist, took more interest in his feathered parishioners than his human ones, was less concerned with his Easter sermon than with the arrival of various little migrants about that season. Certainly he spent more time in the fields and woods than in his church or rectory. He was inordinately fond of fishing, especially pike-fishing, and it was scandalously related of him that between christenings he would keep his live bait in the font.