The Blue Field (7 page)

William Hart had a hobby which he practised in his wainwright days and which made all the children love him. It was the reason why one would almost always see a crowd of
brats hanging about outside his workshop on their way back from school. He could never pick up a piece of wood without wanting to carve it into some fantastic shape or other – ‘What would you like,' he'd say, ‘a Helephant or a Cock-yolly Bird?' and swiftly in his strong, blunt-fingered hands, the knife and the chisel would fashion the curling trunk and the great ear-flaps, or the long beak and the extravagant plumes. Being a born carpenter, he loved wood above all other materials, the feel, the smell, the grain of it, the sweet sawdust and the white shavings and the flying chips; if he saw an odd-shaped piece of oak or pitchpine lying about on his bench he couldn't keep his hands off it, he perceived at once the hidden possibilities lying dormant in the wood, the possibility perhaps of a hunch-back dwarf or a giant with a club or a caricature of his next-door neighbour; and almost at a touch, it seemed, he caused the creatuies to spring to life. There was hardly a mantelpiece in Brensham which did not bear two or three of these curious sprigs and offshoots of his fancy which he poured out from his workshop as from a cornucopia to all the children who eagerly waited there.

But there were other figures which he carved for his private amusement only; for sometimes he would put too much of his own quintessential mischief into a caricature, and then he would hide it from the children or say that he had spoiled it and make them a cat or a pig instead. Later he would paint and varnish it and add it to the collection in his back-room, where upon a table covered with a dust-sheet was Brensham village in miniature, with its inhabitants all caught in their most characteristic and sometimes unfortunate attitudes – Briggs the blacksmith and demagogue addressing a political meeting, Sammy Hunt the teller of endless tales cutting a long story
bloody
short (which meant that it would go on for hours), Dai Roberts Postman
going to chapel in his black Sunday clothes with a poached rabbit sticking out of his pocket, and so on. Some of the little wooden figures were cunningly articulated so that they could be made to perform various gestures – a policeman, for example, an excellent caricature of the constable who had been stung by the bees, took off his helmet with one hand and mopped his bald head with the other; a fat man resembling Joe Trentfield raised a cider-mug to his lips; a companion-piece, which surely represented Mrs Trentfield, possessed a bosom like a pouter pigeon which became agitated and bounced up and down when you turned a handle in her back. And there were more complicated – and much naughtier – contrivances than these. Yet there was no cruelty nor malice in these caricatures, although William took pains to hide them from the victims; rather were they tokens of affection and tenderness, of William Hart's wide and catholic love for life in all its moods and manifestations, curious, comical, strange, infinitely various, life budding and blossoming everywhere about him like a garden of multiform and many coloured flowers.

There was another thing he did supremely well. Long before he became a farmer he demonstrated that he possessed a genius for growing things; for whatever he planted in his garden flourished so vastly that he carried off most of the prizes every year at all the Flower Shows in the district. Other gardeners had reason to be envious of him, for he seemed to take very little trouble over his crops and he scorned to use any of the patent fertilizers and such-like in which his competitors put their trust. ‘I turns over the good earth,' he would say. ‘I puts in the little seeds, and up they
comes!' Up they came indeed like Jack's beanstalk. You could have made out of his sweet-peas one year, people said, a hedge thick enough and tall enough to confine a bull! His tomatoes were as big as cricket-balls; his gooseberries were a match for some people's greengages; his potatoes were apt to weigh two or three pounds apiece. As for his vegetable marrows, there was something gross, something hardly decent, about the way they swelled and pullulated and waxed fat, until they looked like a herd of farrowing sows lying close together among the luxuriant foliage. Sometimes, indeed, even the judges at the Flower Show were appalled by the size of them, and disqualified them on the grounds that no ordinary housewife could handle them and that only a factory could be expected to turn them into jam.

I remember seeing William bearing away one of these gigantic marrows after the show. He carried it cradled in his arms, like a baby, but it was so heavy that he was soon compelled to pause for breath; and as he did so he looked down at his burden and smiled. Somehow it gave me a moment of exquisite pleasure to see him thus, smiling down in a proud fatherly way at the monstrous vegetable wedged against his huge belly and supported by his strong arms.

The ferocious fecundity of William's little garden might have embarrassed or even frightened a lesser man; for there surely dwelt Priapus himself, Dionysus' son and Aphrodite's, he who makes the green things to multiply and the trees to be fruitful and gives fertility to the loins of men. But William, who had never heard of Priapus, was only slightly puzzled by the phenomenon. Sometimes he would shake out a packet of seeds into his hand, and stare at them, and wrinkle his brow. ‘They be so very, very small – but look!' and he would point to a prodigious broad bean thirty inches long, or a stick of ‘sparrow-grass' twice as thick as a man's thumb,
or a carrot which he'd just dug up and which, obviously, had been seeking the Antipodes. ‘So very small,' he'd repeat with a wondering smile, ‘but I puts 'im into the good earth and up they comes, Hey Presto!' And then, chuckling merrily, he'd retire into the teeming thicket of lilac, clematis, laburnum and honeysuckle which wildly overgrew his garden path.

As if to demonstrate that it was the special favour of Priapus, and not William's skill alone which made his garden flourish, some of his fattest potatoes and longest broad beans were self-seeded strays which came up of their own accord – as he put it ‘without an ounce of muck or a drop of sweat spent on 'em'. He called them ‘randoms' and on one occasion, to the vast annoyance of all his rivals, he won first prize at the Flower Show with a pound of tomatoes picked from a ‘random' plant which he found growing at the bottom of his garden, beside the ditch where the sewage ran into it. I believe that these waifs and strays, these casual come-by-chance by-blows of his garden, pleased William more than all the regimented, orderly, carefully-tended rows. ‘'Tis like winning something out of old Nature's sweepstake,' he said, and grinned: ‘I often thinks maybe I'm a bit of a Random myself.'

William had married young – the story of that marriage shall be told later – and his wife had died when he was still in his twenties; so he continued for many years to live with his old parents in the cottage by the wheelwright's shop and to carry on the business during his father's retirement. When his parents died – this was about forty years ago – William came into a little money; and thinking that he might as well profit by his extraordinary ability to grow things he bought the 150-acre farm on the green skirt of Brensham. He built himself a new yellow wagon – the biggest and the best wagon he had ever made – and at
Michaelmas he piled all his possessions into it, sat his two schoolgirl daughters on top of the pile, and moved up the hill.

He had bought the farm from Lord Orris, our local landowner, as he was then; and he had bought it exceedingly cheap, for two reasons: the Mad Lord, as we called him, was in debt as usual, and therefore needed the money; and, since his madness took the form of wild generosity, he could never bring himself to exact the full value for anything he sold.

Lord Orris was at that time about halfway to ruin; far speedier than Hogarth's Rake he was progressing towards penury, through his incorrigible habit of giving things away.

Once he had been rich, some say very rich; but he had handed over all his money to indigent nieces, profligate nephews, drunken wasters, scoundrelly spongers, and indeed to everybody who could persuade him – and that was not difficult – that they were in temporary or permanent need of it. To people who remonstrated with him about his indiscriminate charity he would make this sort of reply: ‘Well, the poor chap drinks, you see – and he's very foolish about women too. He just can't help it and nowadays, I understand, that sort of thing costs a great deal of money; whereas my own necessities are really very small . . .' Nor was he content to give away only his cash. He bestowed his valuable library piecemeal upon various persons who said they were fond of books (‘For honestly I read extremely little, and these old black-letter things are quite useless to an ignoramus like myself'.) He gave presents of furniture to people who said they collected antiques (‘The fellow's a
bit of a connoisseur and really
appreciates
that Louis Quinze stuff'). He made the Saturday afternoon gunners free of his woodlands (‘Take what you can find, my dear chap – I have an absurd prejudice myself against killing things') and the Sunday afternoon anglers free of his trout-pond (‘Though I warn you there's little in it beside eels, which I understand are not highly regarded by sportsmen'). And he even handed over bits of his land to tenants who were hard up, pretending to his critics that he actually gained by the transaction because ‘The man has paid me no rent for years and now at any rate he'll have to pay the tithe.'

By the time he had got rid of the whole of his patrimony in this fashion he had fallen into an incurable habit of giving, and like a dipsomaniac he was unable to stop; and so with a kind of sublime innocence he went to the moneylenders and borrowed at a high rate of compound interest the largesse which he continued to distribute to all comers. His bank manager tried to point out the folly of this behaviour: ‘Really, sir, the equation doesn't work out!' ‘Alas, I am the worst mathematician in the world!' smiled the Mad Lord. His friends, seeing him drift towards bankruptcy, renewed their attempts to persuade him to mend his ways; and he answered them with sweet reasonableness and a logic which does not belong to our hard world. ‘But, my dear friend, it is not strictly accurate to say that I
gave
the man a hundred pounds. He was very clever with figures – so unlike me! – and he had discovered an infallible system of winning money at roulette; but he'd lost all he had in trying it out at Monte Carlo. All I did was to
lend
him a hundred pounds so that he could return there and win it back again!'

So it went on, until the dilapidated mansion and the un-tended gardens were a match for their threadbare owner, and the shabby-looking beggars who slouched almost daily
along the weedy drive were joined by shabbier-looking duns, and at last there came a time when neither beggars nor duns found it worth their while any longer to make that pilgrimage; for nothing was left but the crumbling stones of Orris Manor and the green acres in which it stood and which alone of the Mad Lord's possessions they could not carry away.

Without a doubt William had the trick of making things grow. Much of the hillside land was thin and chalky, sheep-grazing ground rather than arable; and like all the Mad Lord's estate it had been woefully neglected. Nevertheless within two or three years William was growing such crops of oats and barley and clover as Brensham had never seen. It was true that the weeds came up as well – perhaps the Garden-god is not selective! – and the good and the bad flourished together, the golden corn and the rank tares. William's was not a tidy or orderly farm. Nevertheless he got a huge yield off it, and in a period of scarcity, during and after the First World War, he made, from time to time, a good deal of money. He never kept it long, for that was not his way, and he still had his occasional bouts of wild drinking during which he let the farm go hang and spent every shilling he could lay hands on.

In 1924, being then well over fifty, he courted, in a boisterous and highly indecorous fashion which you shall hear of later, the cook from Brensham Rectory. The Rector's reluctance to marry them (for she was an excellent cook) was offset by his suspicion that there was a child on the way; and sure enough the child was born five months later, and was christened, perhaps inappropriately, with the name of
Prudence. About the same time William's two daughters by his first wife, who had married village lads, were also having babies; so what with the teeming crops and the outrageous weeds in William's fields, and the squalling brats in his house, one got the impression of a vast fecundity.

It was in this year that I had occasion to see William about some business and called at his farm about teatime on an afternoon in late summer. I remember very well the sense of fruitfulness and prodigality; the enormous yellow wagon lumbering along, piled house-high, it seemed, with golden stooks, and a field of uncut corn beside the drive with the straight stalks standing up to my waist, and yet with such a crop of poppies among the stalks that they made a crimson glow beneath the gold, like embers at the heart of a fire. And within the house, in the big kitchen which small farmers always use for living in, I discovered a cheerful bear-garden filled with babies, nappies, laughter, sizzling bacon, the steam from a kettle boiling over, and the intermingled smells of burning fat and scorched toast. There were, I suppose, only three babies, but I had the feeling that there were at least ten, because they all crawled on the floor in company with a number of dogs, cats and kittens, so that it was practically impossible to take a step without treading on something which yelped, mewed, squeaked or hollered. Betty and Joan (the two married daughters) also took up a good deal of room, for they were naturally buxom and there were two more babies on the way. Mrs Hart, the Rector's late cook, was reasonably ample, and William, who had just come in to his tea, towered over all. I remember him picking up Prudence (and as he did so a black cat jumped on his shoulder) and holding her up in his arms so that she could tug at his beard. Just then I accidentally trod on the fingers of another baby, who let out a loud yell. Everybody roared with laughter,
one of the dogs began to bark, the water from the boiling kettle hissed furiously on the fire, the cat leaped off William's shoulder into the general mêlée, and the kitchen wore an aspect of confused pandemonium which Mrs Hart, ‘hoping I didn't mind', referred to with considerable meiosis as homeliness.