They discovered the profound truth which makes a mock of wars, that all girls say much the same thing when they are in a soldier’s arms and that the men of opposing nations all look much the same when they are lying dead. And when at last the extraordinary adventure was ended they came home – nineteen out of the twenty-eight came home – and bundled away the memory of the war in much the same way as their fathers and mothers bundled away the memory of Brensham’s Bomb, and slipped back as if they had never left it into the rhythm and routine of Brensham’s life, Saturday afternoon cricket, and darts in the pub in the evening, apple-spraying and plum-picking, the brief beauty of April, the leafy pleasaunce of summer, haysel and harvest, the long labours of winter, mud and sprouts and cold hands.

You might indeed be forgiven for thinking them stolid! Yet, I who know them and have grown up among them – I have seen Bottom, Quince, Snug, Flute, and Starveling walking in their shoes, I have seen them quickened by the same strange fancy which played about the heads of that weaver and his crew in the magic ‘Wood not far from Athens’. For they are still at heart the people who hurdled the cuckoo to keep it always spring, the crack-brained incalculable people in whose hearts the secret poetry burns as bright as their late scarlet apples clinging obstinately to the trees; the cap-over-the-windmill people, no strangers to love and laughter and moderate in neither; fierce in defence of their little liberties; much given to singing and drinking; and possessed of a certain unpredictable wildness of the spirit which rises in them from time to time like a sudden wind. On the rare occasions when this happens they become, for a space, the most intractable, disorderly, turbulent people in the world.

I am going to tell you the story of a man of Brensham who was so wild and intractable and turbulent that he failed, in the end, to come to terms with our orderly world (or perhaps one could say that our orderly world failed to come to terms with him). And I shall tell you too of a time at midwinter in the dull wet colourless season of sprouts, when suddenly the wild grey-gooseweather came blowing down from the north and with it came I know not whence this boisterous wind of the spirit gusting through the hearts of Brensham folk. But first, before I come to that part of my story, I must describe some of the events which preceded it; and it will be well if we take a closer look at the structure and pattern of the crack-brained village straggling among its orchards between the river and the hill. For that will serve both as an introduction to the characters and a prologue to the play; let us follow, then, the good advice of Bottom the weaver:

Quince: Is all our company here?

Bottom: You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.

The Top of the Hill

We’ll begin at the top of Brensham Hill because from there you will get a good idea of the kind of country in which our village is set. This is the land which has made and moulded us. Look north, south, east and west, and you shall see as it were the four corner-stones of our character: the ancient foundations of our way of thinking and living, our wisdom, folly, manners, customs, humours, what you will.

Look north, then, where the Avon snakes down from Stratford through the Evesham Vale. With the aid of glasses on a very clear day you can just make out the red-brick ordinary-looking small town which people in Patagonia and Pekin have heard of, though perhaps they couldn’t name anywhere else in England save London. Shakespeare seems very close when you walk on Brensham Hill. He had friends in this neighbourhood, but a day’s good tramp from his home, and just across the river lived one who witnessed his will. You will find yourself wondering, when you see a very old tree, whether he sat in the shade of it; or when you come to a pub, whether he drank there. Now and then on some old labourer’s lips a country word or a turn of phrase brings him closer still. For example, we have a word which schoolboys use for the crackly dry stems of the hemlock and the hedge-parsley: ‘kecksies’, a local word which is heard, I think, nowhere else in England; but Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of the Duke of Burgundy in Henry the Fifth:

‘Nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs …’

So, you see, he spoke our speech and thought our thoughts. These our woods and fields, our lanes and rivers, served him as a backcloth for Arden or Athens, Burgundy or Illyria.

Look south, downstream, to the old town of Elmbury standing at the junction of Avon and Severn. Just below the junction is the battlefield called the Bloody Meadow in which the Red Rose went down and the White Rose triumphed on a May day in 1471. By chance a deep-red flower called cranes-bill grows profusely in this meadow; at times it almost covers it; and if you look through strong glasses from the top of Brensham Hill at this patch of English earth on a summer day you will see the dreadful stain upon it, you will see it drenched in Lancastrian blood. After the battle the routed army streamed into Elmbury Abbey for sanctuary, and the young Prince Edward who fell that day is buried there. With him lie the great lords who helped to shape the fortunes of England for three centuries, the makers and unmakers of Kings whose mighty names thunder through the chronicles of Hall and Stow and Holinshed: the Despencers and the De Clares and the Warwicks and the Beauchamps, and that false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence who met his inglorious end in a butt of Malmsey wine. These old stones and bones give us, I think, a sense of the past: not a knowledge of history (for there are few men in Brensham who could tell you the date of Elmbury’s battle nor which side won it) but an acceptance of history, which is much the same thing as a sense of proportion. It accounts, perhaps, for our attitude to the Brensham Bomb and to a couple of wars in a lifetime; but it is not a conscious attitude, it is simply a piece of our background with which we have grown so familiar that we forget it is there – just as when we go to church at Elmbury we forget the Lords of Old Time who lie all round us and keep us silent company.

And now look east to the strong Cotswolds where rugged shepherds have watched their flocks since 1350. The winds blow cold there, and at night the stars in their courses wheel slowly across an immense sky. The men from being much alone grow taciturn, and their long stride takes a queer rhythm from the slopes of the whaleback hills. Brensham, seven hundred feet high, is itself an outlier of the Cotswolds; so thence, perhaps comes our hillmen’s lope, and thence the trick of being silent when we have nothing to say.

Lastly, look west to the Malverns and beyond them to the mountains of Wales. It’s not very far across the Severn and the Wye to the dark shut-in valleys and the cold slate villages and the savage Fforest Fawr; it’s certainly not too far for a man to go courting if he had a mind to – so if an anthropologist came to Brensham and started to measure our heads he’d discover a fine puzzling mixture of long ones and short ones and betwixts and betweens. And he’d find if he could look inside the heads a compound and amalgamation of Welsh wildness and English sedateness, Border magic and Cotswold common-sense. For though we live in a fat and fruitful vale, yet we have a sense of looking out on to the wide waste-lands and the mysterious mountains. That’s where our occasional turbulence comes from, and the fancy that tried to pen the cuckoo, and our love of singing.

The Blue Field

Now on a day in late July, if you had stood on Brensham Hill and looked down the furzy slope towards the village, you might have seen a remarkable spectacle. In the middle of William Hart’s farm, which occupied about a hundred and fifty acres along the skirt of the hill, a seven-acre field had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies.