Free The Blue Field by John Moore Page A

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.
    We sat down to tea, and I amused myself by trying to count the number of animals in the room. There was a terrier and a spaniel bitch in pup, and a lot of cats all of which either had, or were obviously about to have, kittens. William loved cats, and two of them perched on his broad shoulders during tea. A fox cub appeared as if from nowhere and began to play with the terrier, and William told me how he’d picked it up in a cold wet furrow last spring (the vixen had been moving her litter away from the floods) and how he’d fed it with milk out of a fountain-pen filler until it was strong enough to fend for itself. When tea was finished he scraped up a handful of crumbs and threw them out of the window; and there suddenly materialized what I can only describe as a
cloud
of birds, sparrows and finches and thrushes and tits – they darkened the room for a second with their fluttering shadows as they showered down from the eaves and spoutings and bushes and boughs where they’d been waiting for the bounty scattered by William’s prodigal hand.
‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood’
    Though he loved birds and beasts and all wild things and liked to have them about him, it was not in William’s nature, itself so wild and free, to wish to cage or confine them. The pet fox cub therefore had its freedom to come and go at its will. It showed no particular interest in thepoultry, but it often went hunting for rats and moorhens in the osier-bed adjoining the lower boundary of William’s farm; and there, one morning towards the end of the cubbing season, General Bouverie’s huntsman saw it sneaking down the brookside and holloaed the hounds on to its line.
    They were, without a doubt, the slowest, stupidest and most