Brensham Village by John Moore Read Free Book Online

Chorlton was put out, and for once he failed to provide us with a ready explanation. ‘Oh, a damnable thing,’ he said, ‘and there’ll be no more sugaring in the larch plantation for us. But what’s worse, I fancy it’s got its claws into old Orris. Soon it’ll put the squeeze on; and that’ll be the end of him.’
    But for a while the terrible Syndicate bided its time. Season by season the notice-boards which were its outposts advanced very slowly over the crest of the hill; the barbed wire and the keepers followed them, taking a field here, capturing a coppice there, as if they preferred to nibble away at the Orris land rather than gobble it wholesale. We came to think of the Syndicate as if it were some huge and shapeless elemental thing,
ingens et horribilis
, couched invisibly in the coverts above Brensham, looking greedily down upon the Mad Lord’s ruined lands, licking its lips and awaiting the moment when it would pounce.
The Brief Loveliness
    It was in January that the Syndicate bought or seized the larch plantation. (In subsequent years we noticed that most of the Syndicate’s encroachments occurred shortly after Quarter Days, when the mortgage interest fell due.) At Easter we found the wood bristling with notice-boards andwere smartly chivvied out of it when we entered in search of a goldcrest’s nest. We got our own back by springing, next day, a number of open steel traps which the keepers had set for vermin.
    That Easter was the first occasion when I looked down on Brensham in blossom. In winter, as I have said, and indeed for most of the year, the landscape was a workaday one. It wasn’t a ‘show’ village; for although it had the same unselfconscious good looks as all our villages had, its immediate surroundings spoiled it, because the rich soil had long ago been broken up into market-gardens. Consequently the cultivations were patchy and higgledy-piggledy; the assortment of crops included leeks, asparagus, cabbage, sea-green sprouts and emerald-green lettuces, tangles of raspberry-canes and rows of gooseberry bushes. Upon almost every patch were the small haphazard slums of fowlhouses, chicken-runs, pigstyes and toolsheds which grow up wherever there is market-gardening.
    Between the patchy cultivations and among them stood the orchard trees which were the main source of Brensham’s prosperity: apple, pear and cherry, but mainly plum. The orchards ran a little way up the hill and stretched all round it, a green hem to its skirt; they went nearly to Elmbury on both sides of the road; and they marched down into the vale almost as far as the river, stopping only at the green water-meadows which marked the limit of the winter’s flooding. Surely there wasn’t another parish in England which possessed as many trees!
    Thus the people of Brensham, who looked out for eleven-twelfths of the year upon the commonplace and uninspiring spectacle of sprouts, cabbages and the like, were privileged for the remaining twelfth to live amid a scene of surpassing beauty. Upon a day between the last week of March and the third week of April the spring snowstorm swept up the vale.For a fortnight or so the orchards were transfigured by this brief precarious loveliness, and people even drove out from the big towns on ‘plum Sunday’ to marvel at the prodigal blossoming. Before the frail plum-snow blew away, the lovelier bloom came out on the apple trees; and this was all the more exquisite because of the young green leaves which accompanied it. With cherry and pear, the apple blossom lasted for another week or two; then it faded, one day a fresh wind scattered the shell-pink petals and there was an end of May. Like a bride who packs away her wedding-dress and gets busy with her pots and pans Brensham went back to its green-and-brown ordinariness, taters, sprouts, onions, cabbages, beans and peas.
Brensham in Blossom-time
    But on that Easter Sunday Brensham