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really a by-product of their differences; for if they hadn’t enjoyed arguing we should not have had two good groundsmen for nothing.
    Briggs’ smithy was next door to the Adam and Eve. There was no spreading chestnut tree, only a heap of old iron in the yard, with some broken carts, rusty farm implements and dismantled motor-cars. A notice-board announced: ‘J. BRIGGS, SHOEING ETC. SMITH. CONTRACTS UNDERTOOK; ODD-JOBING.’ I once asked him what Contracts he Undertook; and it turned out that he had an arrangement with a market-gardener to shoe his pony all round twice a year in return for four bundles of asparagus and a pot of plums.
    There was plenty of work for Briggs in Brensham. Most of the farmers’ sons had their hunters and Point-to-Pointers, the district abounded with children’s ponies, there was a riding-school at Elmbury, and the Hunt stables were only five miles away. Briggs, for whom the colour red had a very different connotation from that of pink coats, shod these Hunt horses somewhat reluctantly, pointing out to the Whips and Second Horsemen who brought them to his smithy that Hunt Servants were merely the misguided flunkeys of the idle rich. The Whips, secure in their certainty that jumping a stiff blackthorn or hollering a fox away as he creptdown the winter covertside was a very different thing from flunkeydom, merely smiled and wondered how a man who could handle horses so confidently came to believe in Labour. There was a close association, in their minds, between horseflesh and Conservatism.
    But when it came to a question of working for the Syndicate Briggs stuck his toes in. The Syndicate kept horses for hacking; they did not hunt. They liked, we thought, to have their photographs taken on horseback when they came down from town for the weekend. Briggs, who merely disapproved of the Hunt, really hated the Syndicate. The Hunt, after all, performed its wicked Capitalist actions openly, publicly and indeed ostentatiously, with shiny top-hats and red coats and polished top-boots. It galloped over your holding and broke down your fences with a hurrah and a holloa. If you got in the way, and General Bouverie cursed you, you could curse him back; you could scowl at the elegant gentlemen and the great ladies and the fat smug farmers and the feckless farmers’ sons and pleasantly contemplate stringing them up to the lamp-posts in the fullness of time. But the Syndicate worked in darkness and in disguise: it was the kind of Capitalism which pulled the invisible wires and made poor men dance to its tune. It was part of the monstrous mysterious Thing which sent up the rent of cottages and sent down the miner’s wage; which contrived a glut of coffee in Brazil or a rice famine in Bengal by fiddling about in some unexplained way with Foreign Exchange. In some unspecified fashion, Briggs was sure of it, the Syndicate was associated with the terrible, powerful, nameless people whom he thought of as ‘They’. ‘They’ had their offices in London and New York and Amsterdam; ‘They’ were supernational; ‘They’ played with Governments as if Governments were pawns, stood above Prime Ministers and Kings, and laughed cynically at revolutions, being confidentthat ‘They’ could easily corrupt the revolutionaries with the gift of a little illusory power. ‘They’ was invisible, anonymous, unidentified; you couldn’t curse them, break their windows, imprison them or hang them. Briggs had serious doubts whether even the Russian Communists had effectively got rid of Them.
    Seeing in the Syndicate’s workings a trivial, fragmentary manifestation of Their power, Briggs stoutly refused to shoe their horses and assaulted their Head Groom who apparently ‘called him names’. For this he was bound over by the Justices of the Peace for Elmbury. ‘What did he actually call you?’ asked General Bouverie, who was Chairman of the