He drank to drown no sorrow nor yet, as our dreary little cocktail-sippers do, in order to get rid of the critical faculty which informs them how dreary they really are. He drank simply because he liked the stuff. The more he drank the more he liked it; and when at last it made him drunk his happiness exceeded all bounds. He had no desire to fight or to tell boring stories or to sit in a corner and cry; he only wanted to spread the tidings of his joy among his friends and neighbours and indeed the whole world. It seemed to him that the best way to do so was to make a great deal of noise; so on these evangelic occasions he shouted and sang and roared about the village boisterously like a wind, sometimes even knocking at doors and waking people up in order to communicate his enormous happiness to them. If you were coming out of the Adam and Eve, and William Hart in drink was emerging from the Horse and Harrow, you would hear him singing and hollering and bellowing his happiness although he was a quarter of a mile away.

When he was in this condition he was by no means amenable to the reprobation of angry householders or to the policeman’s suggestion that he should go home quietly; for he would then draw himself up to his full height, which was some six and a half feet, and lean back to balance the weight of his enormous belly, which had the circumference of some fifty-five inches, and wag at his persecutors an admonitory finger. ‘Thee carsn’t touch I! Thee carsn’t touch I!’ he would tell them severely, and then, if asked the reason for his supposed immunity, he would utter in ringing tones his proud boast, which had no basis in fact as far as any one could tell but which he believed throughout his life with all his heart and soul. ‘Thee carsn’t touch I-hands off, ladies and gents, hands off! – thee carsn’t touch I because I be a descendant of the poet Shakespeare!’ With a lordly gesture he would wave away the impudent person who had tried to interfere with him; and as he haughtily strode off he would resume his singing.

Carnivorous Cider

Of course that was nearly half a century ago, in William’s youth and early middle age; and the old men who sit in the Horse and Harrow now, remembering things past and shaking their heads over the present, will tell you that there are no songs in the beer today. Never a chorus, they say, in ten pints of it. But this does not mean that Brensham has ceased to sing, for the pale, harmless-looking cider which our farmers make in the autumn is stronger by far than even the pre-1914 beer. It is deceptively still, it trickles out of the cask with scarcely a bubble, and looks almost green in your glass, though it has a golden glint when you hold it up to the light. Its taste, until you get used to it, is so sharp and sour that it seems to dry up the roof of your mouth – ‘cut-throat cider’, we call it. But wait. Beyond the shock of that first astringency lies a genial and unexpected warmth, a curious after-flavour of the sunshine and the earth and the falling leaves, a taste of September. Foolish, flat and innocent did the stuff look in your glass? Wise and wicked and old it seems now as it runs down your throat; for it’s been three or four years maturing in the old brandy-cask and as like as not Joe Trentfield from time to time has dropped a few scraps of meat in it, for he has a strange theory that ‘cider feeds on meat’. Whether this is true or not I do not know; but I can well believe that so fierce and tigerish a potion would welcome a beefsteak now and then to keep up its strength. The names we give to our Brensham cider are indicative of that strength: ‘tangle-foot’ and ‘stunnem’ and one other which I cannot print here. Yet its potency, unlike that of other drinks, seems to act rather upon the body than the brain; while it steals from your legs their ability to take you home it leaves your mind free to meditate upon the awkwardness of your predicament. Indeed it is told of William Hart that he was once accused of kicking up a row all night outside the Rector’s windows and he explained that the cider in his legs had compelled him to spend the night by the roadside while the cider in his head had caused him to sing without intermission till dawn.

Mr Hart, Wainwright

His drinking bouts were not very frequent, or perhaps he would not have been the good craftsman he was. For William Hart, during the first twenty years of his working life, practised the trade of a wheelwright, and he made better wagons than anybody else between Birmingham and Bristol. You see can them still if ever you visit the neighbourhood of Brensham – for they were made to last for ever – and at farm sales the auctioneer still draws attention to them, urging the company to bid an extra five pounds. ‘Come, come, gentlemen, this is no ordinary job. None of your gimcrack jerrybuilt contraptions here. This is a William Hart wagon – see the name on it! These wheels will still be going round when you’re in the churchyard.’ They were mostly big wagons designed for carrying hay; Mr Hart always spoke of them as wains and himself as a wainwright. Nowadays most farmers use a haysweep instead to bring the hay to the rick (or they bale it on the ground, so that they do not need to rick it at all) and the wagons stand disused and neglected in rickyards and homesteads, but they never fall to pieces, and the bright yellow paint on them (three coats of it) doesn’t flake off like modern paint – you can spot them from a mile away. General Bouverie, our local Master of Foxhounds, still keeps one in use for the curious purpose of providing transport between the coverts at his pheasant-shoot. A huge dappled horse, groomed and polished till it shines like a varnished rocking-horse, dolled up with ribbons and rosettes and shining brasses, goes between the shafts; and a dozen guests, with their loaders, guns, cartridges and enormous luncheon-hampers, pile in behind. As the day goes on the wagon becomes filled with the corpses of pheasants, tawny as the fallen leaves; and it is indeed a remarkable sight to see the yellow wagon returning from the last drive of the day, with General Bouverie sitting high on the front of it like a Roman Emperor enjoying a Triumph, the trophies hung on long poles placed crosswise across the wagon, the guests knee-deep in feather and fur.

It used to take William Hart the better part of a month to make a wagon. He built each with loving care, choosing and seasoning the timber himself, and taking infinite pains over every joint, hinge and spoke. (‘Measure twice and cut once,’ he always used to say.) But as soon as it was done, the moment he’d crossed the ‘t’ of the ‘W.