They will even tell you that it was Shakespeare himself who gave us the name; but I’m afraid there’s no evidence for that. He is certainly supposed to have made up a rhyme about some other villages not far away: piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, haunted Hillbro’, drunken Bidford, and so on; and crack-brained Brensham would have fitted into the rhyme very nice by – but it isn’t there.

Anyhow, whoever invented it, the epithet is tagged on to Brensham for ever now; ours is the village where any extravagant thing may happen, and we are the unpredictable people of whom nobody knows what we’re likely to do next. We are the subject of all sorts of tales and legends and proverbs and sayings at which old men in pubs have chuckled for hundreds of years and some of which are supposed to exemplify our extreme innocence and stupidity: we are the village, for instance, which ‘mucked the church spire to make it grow’. But in others our alleged simplicity becomes mixed with a sort of wild and wayward fancy: we ‘hurdled the cuckoo to keep it always spring’. Who wouldn’t want to do that, in Brensham at blossom-time? A sublime folly indeed.

I don’t know anything about the origin of these legends, but at any rate it is true that we possess the tallest church spire in three counties, and there’s a little, square, willow-girt field next to our cricket-ground, to which the spring comes early with stitchwort and ladysmocks, and which is shown on the Ordnance Map as Cuckoo Pen.

Even the tall church spire, by the way, is slightly out of true; not startlingly so, but just enough to puzzle visitors, who cock their heads sideways to look at it and ask themselves: ‘Is that spire straight or am I seeing crooked?’ And there is another peculiarity about the church, which is dedicated, rather unconventionally, to Saint Mary Magdalene: the outside of its west wall bears traces of a coat of whitewash spattered all over with round marks each about the size of an orange. These marks are a source of great bewilderment to visiting archaeologists; but the explanation is really quite simple. Previous generations of crack-brained Brenshamites were in the habit of playing a game of their own invention – it somewhat resembled fives – against the west wall of the church, which they whitewashed annually for this purpose until some reforming clergyman decided that the practice was unseemly and had it stopped.

The village pubs, too, have unusual characteristics. The Adam and Eve bears two naked figures on its hanging sign, painted by an extremely uninhibited artist and displayed by a landlord who has no puritanical notions about fig leaves. The Trumpet, not to be outdone, shows the head of a bright-eyed, cherry-lipped, come-hither-looking minx on its sign, which strikes you as irrelevant until you learn that the name of the inn is locally corrupted to ‘The Strumpet’. Lastly there is the Horse and Harrow (which Brensham calls the Horse Narrow) with its leaded windows over which the shaggy thatch comes down like beetling eyebrows and with an elder-shrub growing absurdly out of its chimney and forming a tuft of twigs like a feather in its cap. Beside the Horse and Harrow stands a large Blenheim apple tree; and the building and the tree seem to lean together, ‘like a pair of drunks’, says Joe Trentfield the landlord, ‘when you can’t tell which one is propping up t’other.’

I must not forget to mention Mrs Doan’s Post Office and General Stores, which is remarkable chiefly because of the strange assortment of goods displayed in its window and upon its shelves. Most of these goods are extremely old-fashioned – there are curious Victorian hair-curlers stuck on cards decorated with engravings of curious Victorian hairstyles, there are boxes of lead soldiers belonging to armies and regiments long disbanded – ‘Montenegrin Infantry’ and ‘Serbian Hussars’, there are babies’ rattles painted in red, white and blue to celebrate the jubilee of Queen Victoria, and milk jugs bearing the legend ‘Mafeking’, and framed pictures of the Coronation of King Edward the Seventh. There is even a ‘line’ in frilly bloomers, discreetly stored away on a top shelf. And every year in early February Mrs Doan fetches down from an attic or store-room a boxful of nineteenth-century Valentines, printed about 1880, which she hopefully lays out upon her counter.*

Mrs Doan’s mother, who had the shop before her, must I think have been possessed by a sort of folie de grandeur before she died; instead of ordering goods by the dozen she suddenly took to ordering them by the gross. And Mrs Doan has never troubled to replace the unsaleable lines, professing the belief that ‘Folks would come back to them in the end.’ Now, at long last, her faith is justified. Fashion has come full-circle, and the hairstyle shown on the copper-plate card advertising curlers begins to look startlingly modern. Summer visitors buy the Mafeking jugs as quaint curiosities; and even the frilly bloomers, we are told, are coming into favour again. As for the Valentines, they were discovered last year by the land girls from the hostel down the road, and since there are about two dozen land girls, each of whom at any given time is sure to be in love with six young men, Mrs Doan must have sold a whole gross of them. With renewed confidence she declares ‘Folks will always come back to things, if only you’ve got the patience to wait long enough.’

Another old-fashioned thing which Mrs Doan deals in is peppermint – not the mildly-flavoured stuff which you buy in ordinary shops, but an aromatic concoction which will cure your cold (and very nearly blow your head off) if you pour a few drops of it into boiling water and sniff it before you go to bed. Mrs Doan distils this spirit, according to her mother’s recipe, in the wash-house at the back of her shop; and the whole village know when she is doing so, for the strong sweet smell tickles your nostrils though you are fifty yards away.

Mrs Doan, as her mother did before her, also looks after the Post Office and telephone exchange, so she knows everything that goes on in the village. In her mother’s day, it is said, the Post Office business was conducted entirely coram populo, so that the gossips would take a walk down to the Post Office ‘just to have a read at the telegrams, my dear’. Nowadays only the telephone calls are regarded as public property, and Mrs Doan’s daughter has more than once saved the landlords of the local pubs from getting into trouble by ringing them up to say ‘Somebody’s just phoned the policeman to tell him you’re keeping open after hours. Thought you’d better know. Ta-ta.’

The lower part of the village – between the Post Office and the church – still bears the scars of war; for early in 1945 a homing Lancaster, winged over Germany, fiery-tailed like a comet, ploughed its way through the churchyard, knocked down the three poplars at the edge of the Rectory garden, and finally blew up, bombs and all, on the patch of green where our boys used to play football. The explosion splintered the doors and windows of a score of cottages, added another two or three degrees to the inclination of the church spire, and threw a shower of burning wreckage upon all the thatched roofs within range. The dry thatch quickly caught fire, and soon half Brensham was burning; and because the road from Elmbury was blocked by the blazing tail of the bomber the fire engines took forty minutes to get through. By the time they arrived the old men, the women and the children of Brensham had pulled the thatch off their cottages, pitchforked the crackling straw into their gardens, hacked away the smouldering timbers, and saved every building except one cottage and an old barn. For weeks afterwards there was hardly a man in the village who did not wear bandages on his hands.

Now, three years later, the marks of the explosion have almost disappeared. You can still see the jagged stumps of the poplar trees and the deep furrow across the churchyard; and the new thatch shows white against the brown where Jaky Jones the odd-job-man did the longest odd-job of his career – for he worked on the roofs for eighteen months and began to feel as much at home up there, he said, as an old tom-cat. But the crater, which was eight feet deep, has filled with water, so that we now have a pond on the village green, where five ducks go puddling and marsh-marigolds open golden chalices to the April rain.

As Brensham’s scars heal, so does the memory of that flaming midnight fade from its people’s minds.