The Blue Field (15 page)

He certainly ought to have known what he was talking about; for he was the landlord of the particular stinking rabbit-warren called Double Alley in which Pistol, Bardolph and Nym as children had run about stark-naked, as most of the slum brats did in those days. There they learned the light-fingered tricks before they were ten; pinching a few pence, I dare say, out of a drunken father's pocket as he snored. There they learned to drink before they were fifteen, and the rest of what they needed to know they were taught by the shrieking sluts in the common lodging-house which was half a brothel. Mr Councillor owned that too, and exacted for it a weekly rental of three shillings and sixpence. He
didn't collect the money himself, however. There were too many unpleasant smells and too many germs in Double Alley for his liking. The ragamuffins might have picked his pockets, or the drunken old women might have emptied the contents of their chamber-pots upon his respectable grey hairs. So he hired a cheap bully to collect his rents for him, on the strict commission basis of a shilling in the pound.

Thirty or forty years ago he sent young Pistol to prison for stealing bull's-eyes from a sweetshop. (‘Honest tradesmen must be protected.') Bardolph and Nym incurred his displeasure soon afterwards and completed their education in Gloucester jail. Oh yes, he certainly knew what he was talking about! ‘Just plain scum,' he said again.' It's the way they were bred, see. You can't do anything for people like that. Society has got to defend itself against them.'

He paused, and then with an odd sort of resentment he went on:

‘And what have they got out of it? I ask you? Thirty years of drinking, stealing, poaching, setting ‘emselves against the world – and look at 'em now? What have they got out of it?'

Then I realized suddenly that to this respectable man the crimes of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym seemed all the more shameful because of their pointlessness and futility. If they had made any profit out of the business he wouldn't have thought so badly of them. Their continued poverty was an added crime, and perhaps the worst of the lot. That they would pick his pockets of half a crown was bad enough; but that they set no value on the half-crown and would spend it within half an hour on sluts or cider – that was the real anarchy. For, you see, the truth about Pistol, Bardolph and Nym is that they not only lack the respect for
other people's
property, they lack respect for any property at all.

And while I listened wonderingly to the fat prosperous
Councillor I recollected the gay and bittersweet and mocking words which Maître François Villon, nearly five hundred years ago, had addressed to some cut-throat, crib-cracking, sneak-thieving boon-companions of his who were the Pistols, Bardolphs and Nyms of the back-alleys against the Seine: his
Ballade de Bonne Doctrine a ceulx de Mauvaise Vie.
What have you got out of it, he asks with a wry grin, out of your pinching, filching, rifling, sharping, dice-cogging, thimble-rigging and what not? In three verses and an envoi he asked the same question –
Oú en va l'acquest, que cuidez?
Where has the swag gone to? – and always he gives the same shoulder-shrugging answer, the same devil-may-care sardonic answer which respectable Mayors and Magistrates through all the centuries have never been able to understand:
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles!

But I am writing too much about things past; and I shall do less than justice to Pistol, Bardolph and Nym if I fail to record the change that has come over their fortunes during the last two or three years. Gone are the days when they thought it worthwhile to get their feet wet in my squelchy marshes for the sake of a pot-shot at a hare; gone are the hard times when Pistol would stalk me down Elmbury High Street and wheedle out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Give us 'alf a crown, Master John; I've just come out of the jug.' Today the dock at Elmbury police court and the cells at Gloucester jail know them no more; and surely the Magistrates and the warders would scarcely recognize them now, for the scarecrow jackets and the tatterdemalion trousers and the shapeless boots are discarded in favour of clean blue suits (Nym's had a pin-stripe in it, and Pistol's is padded at
the shoulders) and shining new shoes (Bardoiph's are bright orange, and pointed at the toes). In their declining years -for none of them is less than sixty – they bask in prosperity as in an autumn sun. The door they have so clumsily fumbled to unlock is opened to them, the secret they have sought so long is revealed, the faith they have held on to through so many vicissitudes is justified in the end. For they have always believed (and they have paid dearly for their belief) that if only a man could find it there must be a way of making a lot of money without doing any work. At last they have found it. They have discovered the Black Market.

By themselves, perhaps, they would never have hit upon it; for they had got into a rut of useless and unprofitable wrong-doing, they were conservatives and traditionalists in crime, they were set in their foolish old-fashioned ways, always poaching on the same farms, sleeping out on the same hayricks, stealing bicycles simply because bicycles were easy to steal. Pistol, however, had a son called ‘Enery who had followed in his father's footsteps by joining the Army and deserting from it – just after Dunkirk, lest he should be put in such mortal peril again. Because it would have been unsafe to return to Elmbury, where everybody knew him, ‘Enery took refuge in the pleasant haven of Soho and went into some sort of partnership with a friendly French-Canadian, who had deserted as soon as he arrived in England, being so harrowed by reading about Dunkirk that he took it to be a warning from heaven to have no more truck with the Army. When the war was over ‘Enery came home, accompanied by his friend Pierre, and together they set up in business under the style of Hauliers, though what they hauled in their ramshackle lorry was nobody's affair. They always seemed to have plenty of money, and they spent it freely in the pubs; and before long they allowed Pistol, Bardolph and Nym to share in their prosperity, either out of
sheer kindness of heart (which is unlikely) or because they found their local knowledge useful. The business, whatever it was, flourished exceedingly. Soon ‘Enery bought an old car in addition to the lorry, and it was amusing to see Pistol, Bardolph and Nym sitting up very straight and formally in it – perhaps a little self-consciously too, for their previous experience of motor travel was connected with the black maria which had taken them so often to Gloucester. At night ‘Enery and Pierre would often go off to dances in their car. They dressed up in tight-fitting dinner jackets, they wore side-whiskers, their hair was smarmed down with grease, and they talked with imitation American accents, and in their hip-pockets they carried flasks of gin; and they had a great success with many of the local girls, for they had certainly learned a thing or two in Soho.

What Messrs Pistol, Bardolph, Nym, ‘Enery and Pierre, Hauliers and General Dealers, actually dealt in I do not know. If you had asked them they would have told you ‘old iron'. But if you had then said you were not interested in old iron, but could do with a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, a few petrol coupons, a bottle of whisky, a salmon, or even half a pig, I am pretty sure that one or other of them would have whispered ‘How much?' in a suspicious sort of way, and if your offer was acceptable they would have said ‘Let's ‘andle,' and you would have received your brown paper parcel in exchange.

‘Let's ‘andle' was the phrase which was always on their lips. It was the motto and watchword of their business, the seal of every bargain. ‘Pay cash down at our price, let's ‘andle, and we'll see you get the goods.' On such terms how could they fail to prosper in 1947, when as Mr Chorlton never tired of pointing out, England provided a classic illustration of the truth of a saying by Tacitus:
Corruptissima república plurimae leges?
Nor did they fail.

No doubt it is all very reprehensible; but whenever I see Pistol, Bardolph and Nym nowadays, see them strutting like peacocks who used to sneak like jackals, see them pulling out a wad of notes who used to display the lining of their pockets in search of sixpence, I am led into a series of most uncomfortable reflections concerning ethics, morals, social justice, and the theory of rewards and punishments in general. For example, when Pistol, Bardolph and Nym went about with empty bellies and half a shirt to their backs committing a lot of silly little crimes which did more harm to themselves than to anybody else – ‘sleeping out' for example, or getting drunk on the cheap cider which we call tanglefoot or stunnem – we sent them to prison on the average about twice a year. Now that they no longer have any need to beg or to wander without visible means they go free. However, I don't suppose that these considerations trouble the minds of Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, who are accustomed by now to accepting the rough justice of the world. They would prob-bably say, if they thought about it at all, that they have received their deserts; for the long lean and scrounging years are recompensed at last by the autumnal glow and glory of their present fortune.

Their brief dealings with the Syndicate must, I think, have helped to augment this fortune. At one time all three of them found employment at the Manor. Pistol is said to have called himself a Steward, whatever that may mean; Bardolph ‘worked in the garden' – though ‘worked' was obviously a euphemism; and Nym's duties must have taken him amongst the poultry, for he conducted a flourishing black market in young cockerels and eggs. ‘Enery, I think, acted merely as liaison with the outer world; and Pierre contented himself with seducing the last, the very last, housemaid.

The fact that any of them were employed in any capacity
was a measure of the desperate straits in which the inhabitants of the Manor found themselves; and when we heard about it in the village we knew that it was the beginning of the end.

Shortly afterwards the Syndicate left and the whole estate was sold by auction. The farms and small holdings mostly went to their tenants, who had done well in the war, and these fetched a good price. The Manor was offered as a separate lot, and the newspapers on the very morning of the sale took the opportunity of asking once again whether there was a curse on it; so Mr Halliday, who didn't believe in curses, was able to buy it cheap.

It was some weeks before the Hallidays moved into the Manor, and meanwhile Mr Chorlton happened to notice the advertisements of a Grand Rally of the Elmbury Labour Party at which our MP was giving an address. ‘I think we ought to go and listen to the Lord of the Manor,' he suggested one day. ‘After all he spent a good deal of his young life listening to
me
talking. Let's collar him afterwards and take him out for a drink; if he does drink, which I doubt.' He turned to Sir Gerald. ‘You'll come along as well? Two old Drones, they'll call us. But I was a man-eating Fabian when I was at Oxford. Now I suppose I'm the last Gladstonian Liberal, a museum piece like a stuffed great auk.'

So on the following Saturday the three of us drove into Elmbury and duly took our seats in the back row at the Tolpuddle Memorial Hall. This remarkable building stood in one of the narrow side-streets of the old town, and made a striking contrast with the half-timbered houses which ad-joined
it. Glazed red bricks, in the public-lavatory style, made up its façade, and yellowish stones of various shapes were set among the bricks to form a mosaic of the most revolting pattern. Within, the place was austere and cobwebby, and one got the impression that it was haunted by the spirits of innumerable Temperance Reformers who in the past had preached there. A couple of hundred hard-arsed chairs faced a unusually high platform upon which even a shuffling foot rang hollowly and which was so bare and sombre that whoever climbed on to it felt rather as if they were mounting the scaffold.

In these dreadful surroundings we sat and waited the arrival of Mr Halliday, who was late. His Agent, who had a nervous habit of biting his nails, strode anxiously to and fro between the door and the platform with his fingers in his mouth. The Branch Secretary, an earnest little woman with horn-rimmed glasses and an unpowdered nose, followed at his heels complaining every few moments: ‘Oh,
dear,
I can't
think
what's happened to the dear Member!' The pianist on the platform fussed nervously with her tattered scores and played a couple of ten-year-old tunes, of no ideological significance, with excruciating ineptitude. The Honorary Treasurer got up and proposed his conventional plan to wipe out the usual deficit by means of a jumble sale. And the senile and inaudible County Councillor in the chair seized the opportunity provided by Mr Halliday's lateness to talk for fifteen minutes instead of three.

At last Mr Halliday arrived and mounted the platform with as much enthusiasm as if he were indeed going to his execution. He explained that he had had a puncture and, forestalling his Chairman, who was rising to make a second speech, he plunged straightway into his address.

I took to him at once. He was a rather serious and desperately sincere politician of forty, with slightly rounded
shoulders, greying hair, a keen, thoughtful face, and some anxious wrinkles on his forehead. Yet I suspected that his seriousness was not so much native in him as something which through force of circumstances he had gradually acquired; it was like a monk's habit, which is no part of him and yet if he wears it long enough he grows grave to match it. He certainly had a sense of fun, which showed itself once or twice in his replies to a heckler, but it was suppressed and well-disciplined and kept under; whenever it peeped out he metaphorically spanked it and sent it back whence it came from. For the most part his address was cool, factual and unrhetorical. He didn't abuse his opponents and so he got little applause.

Then came the time for questions. Sitting all round us in the back rows were the people who go to every meeting for the sole purpose of airing their own views. One by one they jumped to their feet, the cranks and the honest-doubters and the earnest-inquirers and the exhibitionists, to ask about the Member's attitude to vivisection or to Russia, to gambling, blood sports, divorce, equal pay for women, proportional representation and goodness knows what else; and among them was a man with a red face in which the veins made a pattern like that of a railway system on a map, and a pimple on the end of his nose with hair sprouting out of it, and a rainbow-striped Old School Tie of unfamiliar pattern. This man was obviously Mr Halliday's sworn and dedicated persecutor. He clutched numberless pieces of crumpled paper in his hands, and referred to these documents every time he asked a question. He had evidently gone to great pains to learn the more intimate details of Mr Halliday's career and barbed with that knowledge his questions sped like poisoned arrows straight to his victim's heart. When, for instance, the school age was under discussion, he rose with a bland smile.