Free Brensham Village by John Moore

stone-waller; his favourite stroke was what he imagined to be a neat and professional cut through the slips, off which he was generally caught in the gulley. And at darts he had a most curious style which seemed to be a flat contradiction of his great size and strength: he threw rather like a girl. He possessed a set of darts of his own, very tiny and, as one might say, sissy darts, which he picked up deliberately between his enormous fingers (which weren’t half as clumsy as they looked) and propelled very neatly and primly into the particular double or treble he wanted.
The Potterer
    At the time when I began to play cricket for Brensham, the elderly, sick-looking, sallow-faced man called Hope-Kingley was a newcomer there; and the village didn’t quite know what to make of him. He was shy and extremely reserved; and he never talked about himself. He had a quiet, pleasant, middle-aged wife and one small son. We knew he had livedabroad for most of his life, but that was all. Jeremy Briggs said he was a very good example of the Idle Rich who had nothing better to do than potter about; and although there was no evidence that he was rich we all agreed that he was a Potterer. He started pottering as soon as he was settled in his house. He began to build himself a rock-garden, and left it half-done to make a lily-pond. He went in for Aquaria. He bred Sealyhams. He planted expensive Alpines in the unfinished rock-garden, and the slugs devoured them. He tried without much success to grow asparagus and prize sweetpeas.
    He seemed to do nothing very well. You would meet him wandering about with a gun under his arm and he would tell you that he was Pottering after Pigeons; but it was very rarely that he shot anything and when he did so he was generally more embarrassed than pleased. I once saw him haloed as it were with a cloud of pale grey feathers, blood spattered all over his face, and a pigeon’s head in one hand, its body in the other. ‘I wounded it,’ he confessed miserably, ‘and I didn’t know how to kill it. I wanted to put the poor thing out of its misery, so I tried to screw its neck; and then as you see I panicked.’
    Encouraged by Mr Chorlton, he even took to butterfly-collecting; but he wasn’t very good at that either. I have stood and watched him chasing Clouded Yellows, which are as fleet as Atalanta, among the tall thistles at the edge of a field of lucerne, and he has reminded me,” as he pranced about, of a rather battered and elderly faun. I confess I laughed; and of course he didn’t catch any Clouded Yellows. In the end he had to employ Johnnie Perks, Alfie’s son, who got him half a dozen in ten minutes.
    Children loved him. They didn’t seem to notice his tiresome ineffectiveness. Although he wore thick glasses and had rather bleary eyes it seemed that he was able to find birds’-nests which even schoolboys failed to find; and during the nesting season you hardly ever saw him without three or four of the village brats at his heels. One day we heard that he had actually shinned up a tree, in search of a magpie’s nest, and had become stuck there. Magpies generally build in the thickest and thorniest of trees and poor old Hope-Kingley hung there like Absalom. The attendant children rescued him, of course, and the incident merely strengthened their conviction that he was some kind of hero. For our part we remarked that the old boy must be getting into his second childhood; and Jeremy Briggs said it would have served him right if he’d broken his neck.
    At cricket, as at everything else, he simply pottered. He bowled a bit and batted a bit (though he was extremely liable to run out himself or his fellow batsman) and he fielded with sublime ineptitude for though he was incapable of catching or picking up the ball himself he frequently contrived to collide with anybody else who was about to do so. If he did get hold of the ball he threw it in with great