Free Brensham Village by John Moore Page B

couldn’t even potter I’d amuse myself with a bird-table and rig up a camera to photograph the birds.’
The ‘Boys’
    The last five or six places in our cricket-team were filled, generally at the last moment, by various unreliable and oftenunwilling youths whom Alfie impressed out of the pubs: labouring boys, farmers’ sons, and so on. The former, who toiled all the week in the fields and market-gardens, found no enjoyment whatever in chasing a cricket-ball in the hot sun upon their afternoon off; the latter, whose interest lay chiefly in fiery horses and powerful motor-bikes, had little enthusiasm for a game which offered no prospect of a broken neck. However, Alfie by his press-gang methods usually captured a few of them; and some, especially the farmers’ sons, often slogged happily and heartily or took a few wickets with their murderous fast bowling.
    We included in the category of ‘the boys’, because they were equally unreliable, Billy Butcher the village ne’er-do-weel and Banks, the village policeman. We could not count on either: the former because he was almost always drunk and the latter because he was often on duty. On one occasion we lost both players through the same cause: Billy Butcher chose a Saturday afternoon to go roaring round the village merrily breaking windows, and Banks was called out to arrest him.
    That must have been the only arrest Banks made in his first five years at Brensham. He arrived, as all our village policemen do, as a young, efficient and rather officious constable, eager for promotion, willing to go out of his way to look for trouble, and inclined to hang about in the neighbourhood of the pubs at closing-time. He had succeeded an elderly, easy-going fellow who knew our ways; and at first we regarded Banks with suspicion and dismay. But Joe Trentfield, the landlord of the Horse Narrow, who’d seen village policemen come and go for twenty years, laughed at our fears and said philosophically: ‘’Tis alius the same with new brooms. Wait a bit, and you’ll see we’ll tame him. Be they real tigers, Brensham alius tames ‘em in the end.’
    And sure enough, we tamed Banks. We married him off, for one thing, to Joe Trentfield’s daughter. We persuaded him to play for us at cricket and darts. Sam Hunt built him a boat and taught him to fish for chub. Soon he learned that the business of a village constable was concerned, not with criminals and crooks, but with foot and mouth disease and swine fever, straying animals and lost dogs: and that the nearest he was likely to get to dealing with a murder was his annual duty of quelling a row between the Fitchers and the Gormleys about a murder which had happened fifty years ago. He discovered (Joe Trentfield’s daughter may have had something to do with the discovery) that the best way of making sure that the pub closed at ten was to drop in for a quiet drink with the landlord at ten-thirty. He found out that prosecuting people for having no dog licence or riding a bicycle without lights was not, after all, a short cut to promotion; and before very long the dream of quick promotion faded, and a different dream took its place: he began to save up towards buying a cottage with perhaps a little orchard and a couple of pigstyes, so that he could still live in the shadow of Brensham Hill when he retired.
The Drunkard
    Billy Butcher, at the age of thirty-five, was still the village’s Problem Child. He was incorrigible and anti-social and I suppose that in the sort of society advocated by Mr Bernard Shaw he would have been told ‘We bear you no ill will, my dear fellow, but society must be protected’ and popped into a humane and hygienic lethal chamber in no time. We, on the other hand, having a vague and unformulated belief that one of the fundamental Rights of Man was his right to go to the devil in his own fashion, bought him drinks, lenthim money, put up with his