It happened almost in a night. One day there was a faint azure mist upon the field, like smoke from a squitch-fire. Next morning when the sun came up a cerulean carpet covered it; and we almost caught our breath at the sight of this miracle, for although our farmers with their seasonal rotations paint the land in many colours, blue is not one of them, blue stands as it were beyond the agricultural spectrum, and this particular shade of blue, so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies, was something that we had never seen in our countryside before.

Moreover it made an extraordinary contrast with the rest of the hillside; for there was no other bright colour to share the sunlight with it. In other years, as a rule, there is purple clover or pink sainfoin or luteous charlock; but the authorities had caused most of the hill to be ploughed up for corn. So the familiar pattern was one of ash-blond oats and rust-coloured barley rippling in the wind like the fur of a marmalade cat, with the foaming green of the orchards making a hem to the skirt of the hill. Now, between the orchards and the corn, appeared this astonishing lagoon of blue which caught and held the eye so that within an hour the whole neighbourhood was talking about it. ‘Have you seen old William’s field of linseed?’ people said. ‘It does your heart good to look at it; but Lord, I wouldn’t be in his shoes when the trouble starts!’

The Two Potterers

It was Mr Chorlton, the retired prep-school master, who first suggested to me there might be serious trouble. Being nearly seventy and very lame, he plays a smaller part than he used to in our village life; but from his garden gate the old philosopher observes and comments as shrewdly as he ever did, and acts as a sort of Greek chorus to our little comedies and tragedies.

‘I am wondering,’ he said, as he gazed up the hill at the marvellous flaxfield – for linseed is a form of flax – ‘whether perhaps it is the kind of trivial gesture which begins big rows: an absurd but memorable casus belli, like Jenkin’s ear.’

I had gone to have tea with Mr Chorlton and his old friend, Sir Gerald Hope-Kingley, in whose house he lived; for his own cottage, halfway between Brensham and Elmbury, had been destroyed by the flaming tail of that Lancaster which fell out of the sky in 1945. All his worldly possessions had been burned with it: his precious library, his collection of eighteenth-century first editions, his cabinet of butterflies which represented a lifetime’s hobby, and his small cellar of wine. Yet the loss of so many cherished things did not break him as we all thought it would; he shrugged his shoulders and smiled and told us that he felt strangely free. ‘It is interesting to discover, when all is taken from one, how little one really needs,’ he said soon after it happened. ‘Out of those two thousand books, I have only bothered to replace three: Shakespeare, Plato, and the Old Testament. As for butterflies, I shall probably get more pleasure out of watching them at the flowers than looking at them in my cabinet. And as for the wine, I shall strive to acquire a new taste for Government Port. The only thing I want is a roof over my head; like Diogenes, I am looking for a tub!’

A few weeks later Sir Gerald, whom we had all given up for dead, returned from a Japanese prison camp in Burma, and immediately invited Mr Chorlton to go and live with him. He was a hydraulic engineer who had retired to Brensham some years before the war for the avowed purpose of Pottering About in the Garden. He had pottered happily and unsuccessfully with Alpines, sweet-peas, cacti, lilies, Aquaria, bird-watching and nature photography until the war came, when His Majesty’s Government requested his services and he pottered off to Burma for the purpose, we understood, of destroying some complicated waterworks which had taken him three years to build. He blew them up in about three minutes, but his incurable habit of pottering got him caught by the Japs, and he spent the next two years devising an ingenious still, under the floor of his hut, for the purpose of making alcohol out of mangoes. It didn’t work very well – none of his projects ever did, unless they were huge dams and waterfalls, which he contrived with the greatest ease – and the war was over before he succeeded in distilling sufficient alcohol to make a drink. On VJ-Day, however, the machine excelled itself and produced three pints, which he shared among his fellow prisoners. They all became extremely ill, and the raw spirit acted so fiercely upon the emaciated body of Sir Gerald that he nearly died. Indeed, when at last he arrived at Brensham the porter at the station failed to recognize him; and Joe Trentfield, seeing him go by the Horse and Harrow, asked who the devil was that little wizened fellow like a Chink.

Now, in the gracious house called Gables at the top of the village, the two old friends while away the twilight of their days with Pottering and Port; and Mr Chorlton had the satisfaction of blaming the Government for the occasional attacks of gout which he had previously laid at the door of Messrs Cockburn. Because he was temporarily immobilized by one of these attacks he had asked me to go to tea and tell him the village news; and we sat on the lawn, beside the lily-pond which leaked and the rockery which was the grave of so many rare Alpines, and feasted our eyes on the blue splendour of William Hart’s flax field halfway up the hill.

‘What a colour!’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘Is it ideological, do you think? Does it not strike you as somehow rather defiant? Perhaps I associate it with the ribbons in the buttonholes of Temperance reformers who used to provoke me in my youth.’

‘They were a different shade,’ said Sir Gerald. ‘I wore one myself.’

This statement caused us no surprise; for Sir Gerald, in the few years we had known him, had dabbled in Christian Science, Spiritualism, Yoga, the British Israelites and the Oxford Group. He had been a vegetarian for a month, a Blackshirt for a week, and at one time was nearly converted to Islam. Dabbling, as he called it, was the intellectual counterpart of his physical Pottering, and was just as harmless. Indeed it was more so, for the form of Pottering in which he was engaged as we sat on the lawn seemed to involve considerable danger to life and limb. It had occurred to him, while he languished in the Japanese prison camp, that mankind was very much to blame for its wicked waste of safety-razor blades.