Free Brensham Village by John Moore Page A

force several yards wide of the wicket-keeper, so that it went to the boundary.
    However, he apologized so nicely for all his mistakes, and seemed to enjoy the game so much, that Sammy hadn’t the heart to drop him from the team. In any case we were generally two players short by noon on Saturday and would have gladly fielded a blind man if he’d offered to turn out for us.
    One summer - it must have been Hope-Kingley’s second at Brensham - the old potterer tired of his rock-garden, his lily-pond, his Sealyhams, his goldfish and his butterflies and determined to dam the stream which ran through his orchard and to make a big pool which he could stock with rainbow trout. He undertook this task himself, and would accept no advice or assistance from anybody. He carried itout, so it seemed to us, in a very slipshod and amateurish way, and we warned him that his dam wouldn’t hold, the water would run out of it. ‘Dear, dear!’ he said. ‘Perhaps it will. How foolish I am!’ And sure enough, he let the water in that night, and the new pond was dry again by breakfast-time. Briggs, who had prophesied this, spent most of his dinner-hour leaning on the orchard gate and grinning at the muddy morass. Other villagers, more polite, told Mr Hope-Kingley:
    â€˜We’re very sorry to hear about your trout-pond!’
The old man smiled a queer and quizzical smile.
‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘I shall have to try again.’
    Once more he let in the water; and once more the pond was dry within twelve hours. And again, when people sympathized, Mr Hope-Kinglev gave them that queer little smile.
    The next day, as it happened, was the King’s birthday, and the honours came out in the paper. Somebody, glancing through the list of ‘Knights’, read with astonishment:
    â€˜To be Knight Commander of the Indian Empire: Gerald Devereux Hope-Kingley: For distinguished services in hydraulic engineering in India, Burma and Malay.’
    Mr Chorlton and I were not altogether surprised, when we passed the trout-pond that evening on our way to fish in the river, to find that it was full; and this time the water was not running out. Hope-Kingley was pottering in his garden.
    â€˜Sir Gerald,’ said Mr Chorlton. ‘You’ve been pulling our legs.’
    â€˜Dear me,’ he said mildly. ‘You must forgive me. You must let an old man have his little joke.’
    He asked us in to have a glass of sherry. He showed us therock-garden and the slug-bitten Alpines, and his draggled collection of butterflies and the tropical fishes in his aquarium which were dying off from some mysterious disease.
    â€˜You see,’ he said, ‘none of these things go right, do they? And I suppose that’s because I’m such an awful potterer. For forty years I promised myself, almost every day, that when I retired I would give myself the pleasure of deciding over my early-morning tea what particular form of pottering I should practise after breakfast!’
    I thought of the long uncomfortable years that had given him the right to potter: the steamy jungles of Burma and Malay, the high peaks of the North-west Frontier, the great watersheds above Nepal; the malaria and the insects and the damp heat which blurred the eyepiece of the theodolite; the great rains and the melting snow and the rivers thundering down and the agony of waiting to see whether the dam would hold.
    Sir Gerald butted in upon my thoughts.
    â€˜Next autumn,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make a bird-table outside my study window. And then I shall rig up some sort of camera contrivance so that I can photograph the birds. One might invent an automatic one, don’t you think, which would take a picture whenever a bird alighted on the table? It would amuse me when I’m kept to the house, which is pretty often; for I had too long in the tropics to stick an English winter well. I always promised myself that when I