You might think that the affair would already have become a famous legend to be told and retold in the pubs to the summer visitors: The Night When Half Brensham Was Afire. But instead the unpredictable village has bundled away its Bomb into the limbo of its long history to be half-remembered for a while and then forgotten as the Wars of the Roses are forgotten, and Cromwell’s Roundheads riding to Worcester fight, and the goings and comings of soldiers hunting the beaten King, the beacons of Trafalgar and Waterloo and the burning ricks of 1830, and even, in time, the bonfires of V-Day. If you should ask the company in the Horse and Harrow why there is now a pond on the green where no pond was before they will answer briefly ‘An aerioplane done it,’ adding perhaps the additional information that ‘we calls it Bomb Pond’. In a hundred years’ time, I shouldn’t mind betting, they’ll still call it Bomb Pond; but if they are asked why they’ll say that nobody knows, rightly, but it has allus been called so.

Beyond the church, at the bottom of the Rectory lawn, runs the river, Shakespeare’s Avon winding its way down to the Severn between flat meadows and osier-beds: margined with loosestrife, lily-padded, perch-haunted, meandering. This is the ultimate objective of most of our summer visitors. Many of them are anglers, who line the banks on Saturdays and Sundays patiently watching their painted floats and whooping with joy whenever they pull out a tiddler. Their needs are catered for by Jaky Jones the odd-job-man whose cottage at the end of Ferry Lane bears on its garden gate in summer the horrifying invitation:

Lobworms, Fat Maggots, Warsp-Grubs in Season, Teas.

Other visitors hire motor-launches from Elmbury, four miles downstream, and infuriate the fishermen by chugging up and down the narrow river, with their ladies browning themselves on the half-deck and looking as languid as Cleopatra in her barge, while the boat’s wash frightens the fishes and drowns the floats, and its bilge-water covers the surface of the river with a rainbow film of oil. The humbler brethren of these superior mariners take out rowing-boats and canoes which they cannot manage, upset themselves, and are profitably rescued by our villagers; while the dry-bobs, as it were, picnic in the meadows by the ferry, spoil the mowing-grass with their love-games, and amaze the aged ferryman with their exiguous sunsuits. Sooner or later they all find their way to one or other of the village pubs where they promptly catch the antic spirit of the place and drink pint-mugs of our rough local cider, which sends them away singing and acts later as a potent purge.

Meanwhile the more decorous sort sketch the quaint church or take rubbings of its Memorial Brasses; study the flora of the riverside or hunt for bee-orchids on Brensham Hill; photograph the Oldest Inhabitant and ask him questions about our Folk-lore, which he obligingly invents for their benefit; or go foraging down the leafy lanes where at almost every gateway chubby-faced and cheeky children offer bundles of’sparrow grass’, chips of strawberries, and baskets of yellow and purple plums each in their season. By the end of September there is not a fruit-grower in the district who does not believe himself to be rich, forgetting that the bundles of pound-notes are his squirrel’s hoard which must last him through the long winter.

As the days shorten, the stream of buses and cars dwindles and dries up. At weekends in October there are still a few devoted anglers to be found beside the river; but these become fewer, until one Sunday afternoon when the floods are rising the last of them turns up his coat collar and trudges reluctantly away, glancing over his shoulder as if he were defeated Canute, while the eddying water seeps over the withered sedges.

Then the oakwoods on Brensham Hill fall into a brown study, and stripped of their leaves the orchards in the vale become as drab as a monk’s habit. Brown too is the flood-water lying on the meadows, and dark sepia like the old thatch on the cottages is the ubiquitous mud. Only here and there do you see a scrap or splash of colour left over from September like the tattered relics of a carnival: a few late Laxtons and Worcester Pearmains cling to the apple boughs and are brighter than robins’ breasts in a winter hedge, a patch of tawny asparagus-tops smoulders like a squitch-fire and an isolated half-acre of red cabbage shows an iridescent gleam of purplish-bronze rather like the gleam on flakes of iodine when they catch the light. But soon even these colours fade, and we are left with a landscape of residual brown-and-green, like an Old Master upon which the varnish has become opaque; and against this landscape the figures of our hobbledehoys move to and fro among the sprout plants, as slow and plodding as cart-horses and, you might think, as stolid.

My People

And indeed they have a deceptive air of stolidity. Dwelling as they do in a countryside of sharp contrasts, of backbreaking mud and heartbreaking beauty, sprouts in December and apple blossom in May, they know that all things are transient, both the good and the bad. Because their little livelihoods are bound up with the changes and chances of English weather, at the mercy of hooligan winds, inexorable floods and unsparing frosts, they have acquired, I think, a philosophic acceptance of fate. They know alike the treason of false springs and the blessed benison of summer. They know that bountiful seasons are often followed by frugal ones, and that the worst drought is sometimes succeeded by the worst flood. They know that the apple blossom is as brief as young love, and that the longest winter melts at last into the sweetest spring. They do not, therefore, tend to lose their heads when good luck comes their way nor their hope when the world goes ill for them. They have learned to take things in their stride, be they May frosts or falling aeroplanes or, for that matter, world wars.

In the 1914 war Brensham parish sent about thirty-five men into the forces. In 1939 there were fewer young men available, because some of the potential fathers had been killed in the previous holocaust and others, during the agricultural slump, had drifted to jobs in the towns. Nevertheless the village managed to scrape together twenty-eight, which was about a fifth of the whole male population; and this time a score of young women joined up as well. They went off, these farmers’ sons and market-gardeners’ daughters, these clodhopping labourers, these poachers and odd-job-men, in no fervent nor even enthusiastic fashion but in exactly the mood of Francis Feeble whose Cotswold blood for all I know may run in their veins. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death; an’t be my destiny, so; an’t be not, so; no man’s too good to serve his Prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’

Thus unheroically the men of Brensham went to war. They who perhaps till then had caught but a glimpse of the flat sea on Bank Holiday at Weston-super-Mare now sailed across the stormy oceans; they whose previous notion of adventure was to go by cheap ticket to Birmingham to watch the Albion play football now bought Birmingham-made Buddhas in Eastern bazaars; they who had cursed the winter floods of Brensham thirsted in waterless deserts; and the poachers who had learned on our hillside the quick and silent way of killing a rabbit now learned quick and silent ways of killing men. Some of our farmers’ boys flew as tail-gunners through the fiery night above Berlin; others, like George Daniels, were dropped out of aeroplanes into strange countries with tommy-guns in their hands. They talked by signs to Greek peasants about crops and to French peasants about cows. They gave chocolates to Italian children and cigarettes to German girls. They sat in foreign catés and ate foreign dishes and sang the choruses of foreign songs with a broad rustic accent and got drunk on foreign wine.