Hart’ which although he could only read and write with difficulty he stencilled so neatly on the side of it – as soon as he’d done that he went down to the pub and got drunk. He would come bursting into the bar, and order drinks all round, with that transcendent air of blessed relaxation and utter abandon which artists know when they have put the finishing touches to a work of creation and, all passion spent, allow the tide of life to bear them where it will. Usually he stayed drunk for about a week, and it was another ten days before he regained complete sobriety. So, with repairs and odd-jobs and a bit of undertaking – it was said that his pride of craftsmanship made him take as much trouble over a coffin for his worst enemy as over a wagon for his best friend – he built about eight of his great haywains in a year. This earned him ample money for his needs.

Goodman Delver

At one time Jaky Jones, he who served the visiting anglers with teas and wasp-grubs, was pupil or apprentice to William Hart in the wheelwright’s business. When that trade began to die out Jaky turned his hand, which had learned its skill from William, to another trade which will never die out as long as men are mortal: he became the village undertaker. But because Brensham is a small place and its inhabitants are long-lived, a man could not make a living in it out of coffins alone; so Jaky joined the ranks of those free and independent and extremely useful people whom we call odd-job-men. In addition to making coffins, he digs the graves. He will also thatch your cottage, tidy up your garden, clean your car, or mend your burst pipes after a frost. If there is anything the matter with your drains, you call in Jaky; likewise you send round for him if you want a lock mended or a tree felled or a chicken-house knocked together out of a few old boards. Perhaps the strangest of the duties which he performs for the community is connected with cats. He is an expert gelder; and it is a village joke that all the toms in the village flee when they hear him coming.

He is a peaky-faced, sharp-nosed little man with a curiously nasal voice, who always wears an ancient bowler hat on the back of his head. His speech is larded with pet phrases which he utters with a small sly grin, phrases like ‘Matey’ and ‘How’s your father’. Both his manner and his conversational style are somewhat macabre, as befits a member of his profession, and I remember in particular a gruesome piece of dialogue which I heard one night in the Horse and Harrow.

‘Twenty-two inches across the shoulders,’ said Jaky.

‘Only twenty-two?’ said Joe Trentfield. ‘Well, well. I should have thought ’a’ was more than that. A beamy chap.’

Jaky Jones pushed his bowler hat on to the back of his head and consulted a crumpled and dirty piece of paper.

‘Six foot one and twenty-two across,’ he said. ‘They tends to shrink when they gets older.’

There was a pause, and then Jaky uttered one of his favourite dicta.

‘A green Christmas makes a full churchyard,’ he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.

As he spoke, the ghost of a grin played upon his sardonic features; and I was troubled with a curious sense of familiarity, as if he reminded me of someone else or I had heard that voice long ago. He went on:

‘Rector wants ’im put at the bottom end by the yew-hedge. But I says to the Rector, Matey, I says, ’tis too wet, I says; ’tis too near the culvert; afore you gets down three feet you finds the water seeping through the clay. Matey, I says, I wouldn’t put a dog in there.’

Again and again, throughout this sombre speech, some gesture or trick in Jaky’s manner struck a chord in my memory. It was like a pin-table game when the ball bouncing from pin to pin makes a contact and lights a momentary flicker of electric bulbs. Such a flicker occurred when he said ‘’Tis too wet.’ ‘How macabre!’ I thought. ‘But I suppose he gets accustomed to it . . .’ and the word ‘custom’ went flickering along another memory-track, custom, custom, custom hath made it in him a property of easiness – and then the flicker became a flash, illuminating all. I suddenly saw the stage brightly lit and within that glowing oblong framed by the dark proscenium there leaned upon his spade the very spit and image of Jaky Jones. At Ophelia’s half-finished graveside stood Hamlet and Horatio; and Jaky with his hat on the back of his head and the ghost of a grin on his clownish face looked up at them. ‘And water,’ said the gravedigger, ‘is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.’

Gravediggers haven’t changed much in the countryside round Stratford in three hundred-odd years.

The Poacher

Like most of the Brensham men, Jaky is a devoted fisherman, but he possesses the curious eccentricity that he prefers to fish without rod, reel, line or hook. Legitimate angling bores him; and on the rare occasions when he takes a rod he must needs add spice to his pastime by using illicit baits, such as salmon roe, which he prepares according to a secret method which he discovered in an old book.