Brensham Village by John Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

games on Saturday afternoons and which didn’t take long to discover that my rightful place in the batting-order was last. But so competent and solemn were the earlier batsmen that they very rarely got out; and in practice I hardly ever batted at all.
    Now Brensham, whose parson was tolerant and broad-minded (as was to be expected of one who kept live bait in his font), sometimes played cricket on Sundays; and one day Mr Chorlton invited me to join the team. The Brensham standard was not so high as Elmbury’s; and I was put in fifth wicket down. Moreover the previous batsmen, whose approach to the game was light-hearted and happy-go-luckysmote the ball hard, high and often so that before long they were all caught in the deep. Within half an hour of the start of the innings I found myself walking to the wicket. This unfamiliar experience was so intoxicating that I was heartened to swipe the first ball over the bowler’s head for six. The next one bowled me middle-stump; but I had had my fun and I walked back cheerfully to the pavilion where Mr Chorlton, Briggs the blacksmith, and Sammy Hunt were chuckling and clapping. ‘That’s the sort of innings we like to see at Brensham,’ they said. After the match we all went to the Adam and Eve and played darts; and I drank more beer than a seventeen-year-old is supposed to be able to carry. Sammy Hunt, who was the captain of the team, invited me to play for it regularly; and since whatever loyalty I possessed to the Elmbury Club had been dissipated by beer I gladly accepted.
    Thereafter, on Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer, I made my way to the small square cricket-field which lay between the orchards and the river; at first by bicycle, later upon an old ramshackle Triumph, and once or twice when the Triumph broke down, on horseback. The spectacle of a young man in blazer and white flannels, carrying a bat, trotting down the village street on a lanky chestnut didn’t at all surprise the people of Brensham; for almost everybody in the place was a horseman, and the neighbouring farmer’s sons would often ride to the village dances in white waistcoats and tails. And already I was accepted as belonging to the village; for they had known me as a boy, buying cattie-lackey at Mrs Doan’s shop or wandering over the hill where the keepers employed by the Syndicate spoke of me and my three friends as ‘they young Varmins’. In the Adam and Eve after a cricket-match, an old man wearing the traditional velveteens came up to me grinning and said: ‘I knows thee. Thee be one of they young Varmins.’So although I was technically a ‘foreigner’ (for I lived four miles away, and even the people of neighbouring Dykeham, just across the river, were considered foreigners) I was permitted a sort of honorary membership of the Brensham community.
    Thus I got to know it and love it as well as I did Elmbury; I played cricket and darts, drank beer, sang in the pubs, fished, rode, shot and boated with the crack-brained people of Brensham until my ways became woven with theirs; and thus I learned gradually, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, the story of what went on beneath the roofs.
The Cricket-ground
    I used to think that the cricket-field at Brensham, on a blue afternoon in May, must surely be one of the pleasantest places in the world; and certainly, when I travelled about the world, I found few places pleasanter. About the time of the first match, the apple blossom came out, and the willows put on their young green. The first cuckoo arrived and started calling from the small adjacent meadow which was appropriately named Cuckoo Pen. There were cuckooflowers in this meadow too, a silver-lilac carpet of them, so that we did not know whether it was called after the bird or the flower. Lapwings had their nests there, and sometimes we found the mottled eggs when we were looking for a ball which had been skied. Brensham-fashion,