Portrait of Elmbury Read Free Page B

owners of the houses having a frontage on the main street. Nobody got more than a few shillings for his share; but at least every man, woman and child in Elmbury had the right to walk and play in the field, which gave them a good possessive feeling about it. It was always “our Ham.” In the winter we shot snipe there, and sometimes hares, without let or hindrance. In the spring, when the patches of ladysmocks were silver-white like pools of lingering flood-water, we hunted for plovers’ nests and listened to the whistle of the redshanks and the weird sad cry of the curlews which came to the Ham in breeding-time. In May, when buttercups gilded it, and the grass was as high as your waist, the courting couples used its cover for their amorous games, flattening out neat circles where they had lain, as if they had rotated on their axis, which perhaps they had, so unquiet alas is love.
    But in June the lovers’ hiding-places were laid bare, and those same lovers, probably, were toiling and sweating on the wagons, bringing in the hay. Three big rickyards grew up like little towns. Then, while the quick-growing aftermath painted the field green again, and the ochreous sheep or the white-faced Hereford cattle were turned out to graze on it—then the Ham became more than ever Elmbury’s playground. Cricket pitches, on which the ball broke unpredictably, made brown scars on the turf. From the banks of the river jutted out numberless fishing-rods; little boys with willow-wands conjured up minnows, bigger boys dapped with houseflies for bleak, middle-aged tradesmen perched sedately on wicker creels legering for bream, while the more energetic ones, swift of eye and wrist, fished for roach, and the more adventurous wandered here and there, carrying a jar of minnows, live-baiting for perch. The “gentry,” possessing more expensive tools, threw big hackled flies over flopping chub. And the very old, and the very stupid, content with the meredregs of angling, heaved enormous lobworms impaled upon enormous hooks into the deepest and stillest backwaters and then went to sleep until Fate, in the guise of a shiny yellow eel, accepted at last their unheroic challenge.
    Meanwhile along the towpath, on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons paraded those who were not immediately concerned with fish: shopkeepers and their wives taking the same leisurely stroll they had been accustomed to take, maybe, for twenty years; mothers wheeling their babies out for an airing; boys and girls “walking out” prior to courtship; and so on. But even these would pause now and then to watch the motionless or the gently-bobbing float. “Caught owt, Willum?” “Nobbut daddy-ruffs and tiddlers.” “Wants a fresh o’ rain, like as not.” “Maybe. But maybe there’s tempest hanging about somewheres.”
    Fishermen always have the same excuses.
A Vision of Piers Plowman
    I have devoted rather a lot of space to the Ham because it was part of the life as well as the landscape of Elmbury. I have called it the town’s playground; by which I mean a very different thing from a playing-field. A playing-field associates itself with serious and organised games and sedate tennis-courts and terrible bouncing gym-mistresses teaching people how to keep fit. We had none of that nonsense. But Elmbury used its Ham for real “play”—all sorts of play, from catching tiddlers to poaching salmon, from birds’ nesting to tumbling wenches in the hay.
    And so, if you had climbed to the top of the Toot on a summer evening, you would have had the vision of Piers Plowman; which he had when he stood upon a higher hill not very far from Elmbury. You would have seen “a fair field full of folk” stretched out below. It was a very fair field indeed, with the townsfolk going to and fro upon it in the calm of evening; with the silver rivers ribboned all round it, the tumbling weir with small