Brensham Village by John Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

was dressed in white. The whole vale was carpeted with bloom under a dappled sky. It was a late season; the trees had all come out together, ten million, twenty million boughs had burgeoned on the same blue-and-white April morning. The flowery tide ran up the slope of the hill for a little way and then broke, where the orchards thinned into a mere sprinkling, a spatter of silver-white spray. In the midst of all this loveliness, half-submerged by it, were the thatched roofs of Brensham; the airy spire of the church and the three tall poplar trees rose as if out of a flood.
    We stood on the roof of the Folly; for it had become a kind of tradition that we should let the Hermit take us up the tower whenever we climbed to the top of the hill. He had put on his straw hat, a sure harbinger of spring; and he looked prouder and grander than ever as he surveyed the flowery scene through the telescope (which must have madethe plum blossom seem as yellow as primroses) and, reckoning up the thousands of trees with their April promise of August wealth, dreamed no doubt that they were his.
    How fortunate, I thought, were the people of Brensham, to live in such a village, their very roofs awash in the foam of the flowers! I was aware suddenly of the first curiosity about what went on beneath the thatched roofs. In Elmbury I had learned a little, perhaps more than my years warranted, about the teeming life which frothed and bubbled in the wide streets and the narrow streets, the crooked alleys and the tumbledown back lanes. But until now I had thought of people in terms of a pageant or a parade; the characters went by in endless procession, the merry ones, the solemn ones, the colourful ones, the drab ones, the respectable ones, the disreputable ones, the eccentrics, the fantastics, the drunks, the scroungers: all different, all fascinating, yet unrelated to each other. But now as I looked down from the Hermit’s eyrie at the brown-and-yellow thatch of Brensham among the blossoming branches I had my first inkling of the existence of a community. From street-level you see only disconnected fragments, bits of the jigsaw puzzle, unrelated men and women going by; but when you see the roofs you see the place whole, houses, shops, pubs, churches, mills, gardens make a pattern and then the people who dwell in them, buy and sell in them, drink, worship, work in them, must surely compose some sort of a pattern too.
    At all events, perched on the parapet with Dick, Donald and Ted while the Hermit surveyed his imaginary domain through the broken telescope which blurred all objects so that they appeared as misty and insubstantial as his dream, I perceived a kind of pattern in the straggling roofs of Brensham and my awakened curiosity about people was like a sharp pricking in my brain. I was possessed all at once by a huge inquisitiveness. Down there dwelt theColonel and the Mad Lord and the parson-naturalist and Mr Chorlton, Sammy Hunt with his boats and his osiers, the Fitchers and the Gormleys in perpetual strife, Mrs Doan, the pub-keepers, the cottagers, the market-gardeners, the labourers. Somehow I realized dimly that these ill-assorted, contrary and individualistic elements formed a community which perhaps was different from other communities. At any rate I decided that I wanted to know about Brensham, and about what went on under the roofs.

Part Two
The Cricket-Team
    Honorary Villager – The Cricket–ground – The Captain – The Secretary – The Blacksmith – The Potterer – The ‘Boys’ – The Drunkard – The Scorer – The Helpers – The Spectators – The Match against Woody Bourton
Honorary Villager
    Perhaps I should never have got to know much about Brensham but for the accident that I was not a very good cricketer. When I left school I returned to Elmbury and was articled to my uncle, who was an auctioneer. I joined the Elmbury Cricket Club, which played competent and rather solemn