Being a born carpenter, he loved wood above all other materials, the feel, the smell, the grain of it, the sweet sawdust and the white shavings and the flying chips; if he saw an odd-shaped piece of oak or pitchpine lying about on his bench he couldn’t keep his hands off it, he perceived at once the hidden possibilities lying dormant in the wood, the possibility perhaps of a hunch-back dwarf or a giant with a club or a caricature of his next-door neighbour; and almost at a touch, it seemed, he caused the creatuies to spring to life. There was hardly a mantelpiece in Brensham which did not bear two or three of these curious sprigs and offshoots of his fancy which he poured out from his workshop as from a cornucopia to all the children who eagerly waited there.

But there were other figures which he carved for his private amusement only; for sometimes he would put too much of his own quintessential mischief into a caricature, and then he would hide it from the children or say that he had spoiled it and make them a cat or a pig instead. Later he would paint and varnish it and add it to the collection in his back-room, where upon a table covered with a dust-sheet was Brensham village in miniature, with its inhabitants all caught in their most characteristic and sometimes unfortunate attitudes – Briggs the blacksmith and demagogue addressing a political meeting, Sammy Hunt the teller of endless tales cutting a long story bloody short (which meant that it would go on for hours), Dai Roberts Postman going to chapel in his black Sunday clothes with a poached rabbit sticking out of his pocket, and so on. Some of the little wooden figures were cunningly articulated so that they could be made to perform various gestures – a policeman, for example, an excellent caricature of the constable who had been stung by the bees, took off his helmet with one hand and mopped his bald head with the other; a fat man resembling Joe Trentfield raised a cider-mug to his lips; a companion-piece, which surely represented Mrs Trentfield, possessed a bosom like a pouter pigeon which became agitated and bounced up and down when you turned a handle in her back. And there were more complicated – and much naughtier – contrivances than these. Yet there was no cruelty nor malice in these caricatures, although William took pains to hide them from the victims; rather were they tokens of affection and tenderness, of William Hart’s wide and catholic love for life in all its moods and manifestations, curious, comical, strange, infinitely various, life budding and blossoming everywhere about him like a garden of multiform and many coloured flowers.

Old Adam

There was another thing he did supremely well. Long before he became a farmer he demonstrated that he possessed a genius for growing things; for whatever he planted in his garden flourished so vastly that he carried off most of the prizes every year at all the Flower Shows in the district. Other gardeners had reason to be envious of him, for he seemed to take very little trouble over his crops and he scorned to use any of the patent fertilizers and such-like in which his competitors put their trust. ‘I turns over the good earth,’ he would say. ‘I puts in the little seeds, and up they comes!’ Up they came indeed like Jack’s beanstalk. You could have made out of his sweet-peas one year, people said, a hedge thick enough and tall enough to confine a bull! His tomatoes were as big as cricket-balls; his gooseberries were a match for some people’s greengages; his potatoes were apt to weigh two or three pounds apiece. As for his vegetable marrows, there was something gross, something hardly decent, about the way they swelled and pullulated and waxed fat, until they looked like a herd of farrowing sows lying close together among the luxuriant foliage. Sometimes, indeed, even the judges at the Flower Show were appalled by the size of them, and disqualified them on the grounds that no ordinary housewife could handle them and that only a factory could be expected to turn them into jam.

I remember seeing William bearing away one of these gigantic marrows after the show. He carried it cradled in his arms, like a baby, but it was so heavy that he was soon compelled to pause for breath; and as he did so he looked down at his burden and smiled. Somehow it gave me a moment of exquisite pleasure to see him thus, smiling down in a proud fatherly way at the monstrous vegetable wedged against his huge belly and supported by his strong arms.

The ferocious fecundity of William’s little garden might have embarrassed or even frightened a lesser man; for there surely dwelt Priapus himself, Dionysus’ son and Aphrodite’s, he who makes the green things to multiply and the trees to be fruitful and gives fertility to the loins of men. But William, who had never heard of Priapus, was only slightly puzzled by the phenomenon. Sometimes he would shake out a packet of seeds into his hand, and stare at them, and wrinkle his brow. ‘They be so very, very small – but look!’ and he would point to a prodigious broad bean thirty inches long, or a stick of ‘sparrow-grass’ twice as thick as a man’s thumb, or a carrot which he’d just dug up and which, obviously, had been seeking the Antipodes. ‘So very small,’ he’d repeat with a wondering smile, ‘but I puts ’im into the good earth and up they comes, Hey Presto!’ And then, chuckling merrily, he’d retire into the teeming thicket of lilac, clematis, laburnum and honeysuckle which wildly overgrew his garden path.

As if to demonstrate that it was the special favour of Priapus, and not William’s skill alone which made his garden flourish, some of his fattest potatoes and longest broad beans were self-seeded strays which came up of their own accord – as he put it ‘without an ounce of muck or a drop of sweat spent on ’em’. He called them ‘randoms’ and on one occasion, to the vast annoyance of all his rivals, he won first prize at the Flower Show with a pound of tomatoes picked from a ‘random’ plant which he found growing at the bottom of his garden, beside the ditch where the sewage ran into it. I believe that these waifs and strays, these casual come-by-chance by-blows of his garden, pleased William more than all the regimented, orderly, carefully-tended rows. ‘’Tis like winning something out of old Nature’s sweepstake,’ he said, and grinned: ‘I often thinks maybe I’m a bit of a Random myself.’

William had married young – the story of that marriage shall be told later – and his wife had died when he was still in his twenties; so he continued for many years to live with his old parents in the cottage by the wheelwright’s shop and to carry on the business during his father’s retirement. When his parents died – this was about forty years ago – William came into a little money; and thinking that he might as well profit by his extraordinary ability to grow things he bought the 150-acre farm on the green skirt of Brensham. He built himself a new yellow wagon – the biggest and the best wagon he had ever made – and at Michaelmas he piled all his possessions into it, sat his two schoolgirl daughters on top of the pile, and moved up the hill.

He had bought the farm from Lord Orris, our local landowner, as he was then; and he had bought it exceedingly cheap, for two reasons: the Mad Lord, as we called him, was in debt as usual, and therefore needed the money; and, since his madness took the form of wild generosity, he could never bring himself to exact the full value for anything he sold.

The Ruin of Orris

Lord Orris was at that time about halfway to ruin; far speedier than Hogarth’s Rake he was progressing towards penury, through his incorrigible habit of giving things away.

Once he had been rich, some say very rich; but he had handed over all his money to indigent nieces, profligate nephews, drunken wasters, scoundrelly spongers, and indeed to everybody who could persuade him – and that was not difficult – that they were in temporary or permanent need of it. To people who remonstrated with him about his indiscriminate charity he would make this sort of reply: ‘Well, the poor chap drinks, you see – and he’s very foolish about women too. He just can’t help it and nowadays, I understand, that sort of thing costs a great deal of money; whereas my own necessities are really very small . . .’ Nor was he content to give away only his cash. He bestowed his valuable library piecemeal upon various persons who said they were fond of books (‘For honestly I read extremely little, and these old black-letter things are quite useless to an ignoramus like myself’.) He gave presents of furniture to people who said they collected antiques (‘The fellow’s a bit of a connoisseur and really appreciates that Louis Quinze stuff’). He made the Saturday afternoon gunners free of his woodlands (‘Take what you can find, my dear chap – I have an absurd prejudice myself against killing things’) and the Sunday afternoon anglers free of his trout-pond (‘Though I warn you there’s little in it beside eels, which I understand are not highly regarded by sportsmen’).