It was bid for by groups of men, little combines, who saw to it that they bought contiguous pieces of sufficient area to make a sizable rick. But while the hay crop was private property, the meadow itself, the soil that grew the hay, belonged to “the burgesses of Elmbury”; these burgesses, the householder, the ironmonger, the draper, the chemist, the doctor, possessed no cows or sheep to graze upon it, so they too each season sold the aftermath by auction and distributed the proceeds, according to an ancient law, among the owners of the houses having a frontage on the main street. Nobody got more than a few shillings for his share; but at least every man, woman and child in Elmbury had the right to walk and play in the field, which gave them a good possessive feeling about it. It was always “our Ham.” In the winter we shot snipe there, and sometimes hares, without let or hindrance. In the spring, when the patches of ladysmocks were silver-white like pools of lingering flood-water, we hunted for plovers’ nests and listened to the whistle of the redshanks and the weird sad cry of the curlews which came to the Ham in breeding-time. In May, when buttercups gilded it, and the grass was as high as your waist, the courting couples used its cover for their amorous games, flattening out neat circles where they had lain, as if they had rotated on their axis, which perhaps they had, so unquiet alas is love.

But in June the lovers’ hiding-places were laid bare, and those same lovers, probably, were toiling and sweating on the wagons, bringing in the hay. Three big rickyards grew up like little towns. Then, while the quick-growing aftermath painted the field green again, and the ochreous sheep or the white-faced Hereford cattle were turned out to graze on it—then the Ham became more than ever Elmbury’s playground. Cricket pitches, on which the ball broke unpredictably, made brown scars on the turf. From the banks of the river jutted out numberless fishing-rods; little boys with willow-wands conjured up minnows, bigger boys dapped with houseflies for bleak, middle-aged tradesmen perched sedately on wicker creels legering for bream, while the more energetic ones, swift of eye and wrist, fished for roach, and the more adventurous wandered here and there, carrying a jar of minnows, live-baiting for perch. The “gentry,” possessing more expensive tools, threw big hackled flies over flopping chub. And the very old, and the very stupid, content with the mere dregs of angling, heaved enormous lobworms impaled upon enormous hooks into the deepest and stillest backwaters and then went to sleep until Fate, in the guise of a shiny yellow eel, accepted at last their unheroic challenge.

Meanwhile along the towpath, on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons paraded those who were not immediately concerned with fish: shopkeepers and their wives taking the same leisurely stroll they had been accustomed to take, maybe, for twenty years; mothers wheeling their babies out for an airing; boys and girls “walking out” prior to courtship; and so on. But even these would pause now and then to watch the motionless or the gently-bobbing float. “Caught owt, Willum?” “Nobbut daddy-ruffs and tiddlers.” “Wants a fresh o’ rain, like as not.” “Maybe. But maybe there’s tempest hanging about somewheres.”

Fishermen always have the same excuses.

A Vision of Piers Plowman

I have devoted rather a lot of space to the Ham because it was part of the life as well as the landscape of Elmbury. I have called it the town’s playground; by which I mean a very different thing from a playing-field. A playing-field associates itself with serious and organised games and sedate tennis-courts and terrible bouncing gym-mistresses teaching people how to keep fit. We had none of that nonsense. But Elmbury used its Ham for real “play”—all sorts of play, from catching tiddlers to poaching salmon, from birds’ nesting to tumbling wenches in the hay.

And so, if you had climbed to the top of the Toot on a summer evening, you would have had the vision of Piers Plowman; which he had when he stood upon a higher hill not very far from Elmbury. You would have seen “a fair field full of folk” stretched out below. It was a very fair field indeed, with the townsfolk going to and fro upon it in the calm of evening; with the silver rivers ribboned all round it, the tumbling weir with small withy-grown islands in mid-stream, the old mill above its placid millpool, and behind it the great Abbey rising up, massive and solid as England’s history, and yet as airy-light as a dream.

But I must insist that Elmbury, although beautiful, was not a beauty-spot; for that implies, I think, a rather sterilised sort of beauty, unspoiled, preserved, and sacrosanct; whereas in Elmbury beauty and ugliness grew up side by side and merged into a single entity, indivisible and unique, in which you could no more easily separate and distinguish those two qualities than you could winnow out the good and evil in the heart of man.

Missed Opportunities

Like wrecks out of a receding tide, the ruins of Elmbury’s industries rose up among its slums: a disused flour-mill, rat-run warehouses, a derelict shirt-and-collar factory, and what was left of an establishment which once made mustard.

Three or four industries precariously survived: a big modern flour-mill, a maltster’s, a collection of sheds and wharves and slipways where ancient craftsmen who loved their trade built boats of all kinds from canoes to river-steamers. But these concerns were not nearly sufficient to provide a living for a population of five thousand people. The town had known better days; for trade, which once came by river, now followed the railway, and the industrial prosperity of one nearby city, and the social prosperity of another, made a sharp contrast with Elmbury’s backwardness. This was supposed to be the fault of a previous generation of Elmburians, who cold-shouldered the railway until the main-line had gone elsewhere and who, finding spring-waters of remarkable nastiness almost at their front-doors, failed to exploit them until half the fashionable world was curing its gout ten miles away. So Elmbury slumbered beside a branch line of the railway, and the ridiculous building which it pretentiously called “The Spa” saw no Beau Brummells, fell into disuse, and finally became a farm-house, keeping its name “The Spa Farm,” long after the majority of the people had forgotten why it was called so.

Odd-Job Man’s Delight

But for their obstinacy, then, but for the short-sightedness of those ancient Elmbury Die-Hards, the place might have been either blackened by belching chimneys or blighted by the withering presence of decrepit colonels drawing out their last meaningless days. Miraculously preserved from both disasters, the little town muddled along contentedly enough in its own haphazard way; and although I suppose a very high percentage of the population must have been technically “unemployed” there was much less poverty and very much less distress than you would find in similar circumstances in an industrial town. The city-dweller, when he is out of work, is generally helpless; there are few “odd-jobs” to be had, even if he were adaptable enough to be capable of doing them. But in the country and in the country-town it is different; and Elmbury was an odd-job man’s paradise. The farmers in the neighbourhood needed casual labour for a dozen seasonal jobs, haymaking, harvest, fruit-picking, turnip-pulling and what not; a man could earn a few shillings and a quart of cider almost any day he’d a mind to. There was drovering, and there was timber-felling, and there was rick-cutting; thatching, ditch-cleaning, and hedging.