The Blue Field by John Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

Impish even when he was sober,Mr Hart in drink had been liable to ring the church bells at midnight or call out the Fire Brigade to an imaginary fire; he had introduced a squealing pig into a choir practice and a donkey into the deliberations of the Parish Council; and he had defended himself against an angry policeman with the effective though double-edged weapon of a swarm of bees. But though his absurd pranks caused annoyance to their victims, everybody agreed that there was no real harm in him. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ people said. The constable, smothered in blue-bag and smarting from a dozen bee-stings, might perhaps have contested this; but they meant that his broad buffooning had its roots in a sort of innocence, his sins were original sins, without any later admixture of vice. Even his occasional drunkenness had a childlike quality which robbed it of offence. He drank to drown no sorrow nor yet, as our dreary little cocktail-sippers do, in order to get rid of the critical faculty which informs them how dreary they really are. He drank simply because he liked the stuff. The more he drank the more he liked it; and when at last it made him drunk his happiness exceeded all bounds. He had no desire to fight or to tell boring stories or to sit in a corner and cry; he only wanted to spread the tidings of his joy among his friends and neighbours and indeed the whole world. It seemed to him that the best way to do so was to make a great deal of noise; so on these evangelic occasions he shouted and sang and roared about the village boisterously like a wind, sometimes even knocking at doors and waking people up in order to communicate his enormous happiness to them. If you were coming out of the Adam and Eve, and William Hart in drink was emerging from the Horse and Harrow, you would hear him singing and hollering and bellowing his happiness although he was a quarter of a mile away.
    When he was in this condition he was by no means amenableto the reprobation of angry householders or to the policeman’s suggestion that he should go home quietly; for he would then draw himself up to his full height, which was some six and a half feet, and lean back to balance the weight of his enormous belly, which had the circumference of some fifty-five inches, and wag at his persecutors an admonitory finger. ‘Thee carsn’t touch I! Thee carsn’t touch I!’ he would tell them severely, and then, if asked the reason for his supposed immunity, he would utter in ringing tones his proud boast, which had no basis in fact as far as any one could tell but which he believed throughout his life with all his heart and soul. ‘Thee carsn’t touch I-hands off, ladies and gents, hands off! – thee carsn’t touch I because I be a descendant of the poet Shakespeare!’ With a lordly gesture he would wave away the impudent person who had tried to interfere with him; and as he haughtily strode off he would resume his singing.
Carnivorous Cider
    Of course that was nearly half a century ago, in William’s youth and early middle age; and the old men who sit in the Horse and Harrow now, remembering things past and shaking their heads over the present, will tell you that there are no songs in the beer today. Never a chorus, they say, in ten pints of it. But this does not mean that Brensham has ceased to sing, for the pale, harmless-looking cider which our farmers make in the autumn is stronger by far than even the pre-1914 beer. It is deceptively still, it trickles out of the cask with scarcely a bubble, and looks almost green in your glass, though it has a golden glint when you hold it up to the light. Its taste, until you get used to it, is so sharp and sour that it seems to dry up the roof of yourmouth – ‘cut-throat cider’, we call it. But wait. Beyond the shock of that first astringency lies a genial and unexpected warmth, a curious after-flavour of the sunshine and the earth and the