And he even handed over bits of his land to tenants who were hard up, pretending to his critics that he actually gained by the transaction because ‘The man has paid me no rent for years and now at any rate he’ll have to pay the tithe.’

By the time he had got rid of the whole of his patrimony in this fashion he had fallen into an incurable habit of giving, and like a dipsomaniac he was unable to stop; and so with a kind of sublime innocence he went to the moneylenders and borrowed at a high rate of compound interest the largesse which he continued to distribute to all comers. His bank manager tried to point out the folly of this behaviour: ‘Really, sir, the equation doesn’t work out!’ ‘Alas, I am the worst mathematician in the world!’ smiled the Mad Lord. His friends, seeing him drift towards bankruptcy, renewed their attempts to persuade him to mend his ways; and he answered them with sweet reasonableness and a logic which does not belong to our hard world. ‘But, my dear friend, it is not strictly accurate to say that I gave the man a hundred pounds. He was very clever with figures – so unlike me! – and he had discovered an infallible system of winning money at roulette; but he’d lost all he had in trying it out at Monte Carlo. All I did was to lend him a hundred pounds so that he could return there and win it back again!’

So it went on, until the dilapidated mansion and the un-tended gardens were a match for their threadbare owner, and the shabby-looking beggars who slouched almost daily along the weedy drive were joined by shabbier-looking duns, and at last there came a time when neither beggars nor duns found it worth their while any longer to make that pilgrimage; for nothing was left but the crumbling stones of Orris Manor and the green acres in which it stood and which alone of the Mad Lord’s possessions they could not carry away.

O Fortunatos Nimium

Without a doubt William had the trick of making things grow. Much of the hillside land was thin and chalky, sheep-grazing ground rather than arable; and like all the Mad Lord’s estate it had been woefully neglected. Nevertheless within two or three years William was growing such crops of oats and barley and clover as Brensham had never seen. It was true that the weeds came up as well – perhaps the Garden-god is not selective! – and the good and the bad flourished together, the golden corn and the rank tares. William’s was not a tidy or orderly farm. Nevertheless he got a huge yield off it, and in a period of scarcity, during and after the First World War, he made, from time to time, a good deal of money. He never kept it long, for that was not his way, and he still had his occasional bouts of wild drinking during which he let the farm go hang and spent every shilling he could lay hands on.

In 1924, being then well over fifty, he courted, in a boisterous and highly indecorous fashion which you shall hear of later, the cook from Brensham Rectory. The Rector’s reluctance to marry them (for she was an excellent cook) was offset by his suspicion that there was a child on the way; and sure enough the child was born five months later, and was christened, perhaps inappropriately, with the name of Prudence. About the same time William’s two daughters by his first wife, who had married village lads, were also having babies; so what with the teeming crops and the outrageous weeds in William’s fields, and the squalling brats in his house, one got the impression of a vast fecundity.

It was in this year that I had occasion to see William about some business and called at his farm about teatime on an afternoon in late summer. I remember very well the sense of fruitfulness and prodigality; the enormous yellow wagon lumbering along, piled house-high, it seemed, with golden stooks, and a field of uncut corn beside the drive with the straight stalks standing up to my waist, and yet with such a crop of poppies among the stalks that they made a crimson glow beneath the gold, like embers at the heart of a fire. And within the house, in the big kitchen which small farmers always use for living in, I discovered a cheerful bear-garden filled with babies, nappies, laughter, sizzling bacon, the steam from a kettle boiling over, and the intermingled smells of burning fat and scorched toast. There were, I suppose, only three babies, but I had the feeling that there were at least ten, because they all crawled on the floor in company with a number of dogs, cats and kittens, so that it was practically impossible to take a step without treading on something which yelped, mewed, squeaked or hollered. Betty and Joan (the two married daughters) also took up a good deal of room, for they were naturally buxom and there were two more babies on the way. Mrs Hart, the Rector’s late cook, was reasonably ample, and William, who had just come in to his tea, towered over all. I remember him picking up Prudence (and as he did so a black cat jumped on his shoulder) and holding her up in his arms so that she could tug at his beard. Just then I accidentally trod on the fingers of another baby, who let out a loud yell. Everybody roared with laughter, one of the dogs began to bark, the water from the boiling kettle hissed furiously on the fire, the cat leaped off William’s shoulder into the general mêlée, and the kitchen wore an aspect of confused pandemonium which Mrs Hart, ‘hoping I didn’t mind’, referred to with considerable meiosis as homeliness.

We sat down to tea, and I amused myself by trying to count the number of animals in the room. There was a terrier and a spaniel bitch in pup, and a lot of cats all of which either had, or were obviously about to have, kittens. William loved cats, and two of them perched on his broad shoulders during tea. A fox cub appeared as if from nowhere and began to play with the terrier, and William told me how he’d picked it up in a cold wet furrow last spring (the vixen had been moving her litter away from the floods) and how he’d fed it with milk out of a fountain-pen filler until it was strong enough to fend for itself. When tea was finished he scraped up a handful of crumbs and threw them out of the window; and there suddenly materialized what I can only describe as a cloud of birds, sparrows and finches and thrushes and tits – they darkened the room for a second with their fluttering shadows as they showered down from the eaves and spoutings and bushes and boughs where they’d been waiting for the bounty scattered by William’s prodigal hand.

‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood’

Though he loved birds and beasts and all wild things and liked to have them about him, it was not in William’s nature, itself so wild and free, to wish to cage or confine them. The pet fox cub therefore had its freedom to come and go at its will. It showed no particular interest in the poultry, but it often went hunting for rats and moorhens in the osier-bed adjoining the lower boundary of William’s farm; and there, one morning towards the end of the cubbing season, General Bouverie’s huntsman saw it sneaking down the brookside and holloaed the hounds on to its line.

They were, without a doubt, the slowest, stupidest and most riotous pack in England; and as most of them were pursuing moorhens, whimpering after water-rats, or simply standing at the edge of the osier-bed and waving their sterns, the fox cub had a fairly good start. It ran in a circle for about two miles, and gave the Hunt their fastest gallop of the season; but the hounds were close behind it when it came lolloping back towards the farmhouse and slipped through the hedge-gap near William’s drive gate.

William had heard the hounds, and as he rushed out to rescue his fox cub he had armed himself, rather absurdly, with a shotgun, which in any case was unloaded. He was in time to see the hounds pull down the cub in his orchard – it was their first and last kill in the open during the whole of that season – and he was also in time to intercept General Bouverie and the rest of the field as they came puffing and snorting, a long way behind the hounds, full gallop up to his gate.