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would put too much of his own quintessential mischief into a caricature, and then he would hide it from the children or say that he had spoiled it and make them a cat or a pig instead. Later he would paint and varnish it and add it to the collection in his back-room, where upon a table covered with a dust-sheet was Brensham village in miniature, with its inhabitants all caught in their most characteristic and sometimes unfortunate attitudes – Briggs the blacksmith and demagogue addressing a political meeting, Sammy Hunt the teller of endless tales cutting a long story
bloody
short (which meant that it would go on for hours), Dai Roberts Postmangoing to chapel in his black Sunday clothes with a poached rabbit sticking out of his pocket, and so on. Some of the little wooden figures were cunningly articulated so that they could be made to perform various gestures – a policeman, for example, an excellent caricature of the constable who had been stung by the bees, took off his helmet with one hand and mopped his bald head with the other; a fat man resembling Joe Trentfield raised a cider-mug to his lips; a companion-piece, which surely represented Mrs Trentfield, possessed a bosom like a pouter pigeon which became agitated and bounced up and down when you turned a handle in her back. And there were more complicated – and much naughtier – contrivances than these. Yet there was no cruelty nor malice in these caricatures, although William took pains to hide them from the victims; rather were they tokens of affection and tenderness, of William Hart’s wide and catholic love for life in all its moods and manifestations, curious, comical, strange, infinitely various, life budding and blossoming everywhere about him like a garden of multiform and many coloured flowers.
Old Adam
    There was another thing he did supremely well. Long before he became a farmer he demonstrated that he possessed a genius for growing things; for whatever he planted in his garden flourished so vastly that he carried off most of the prizes every year at all the Flower Shows in the district. Other gardeners had reason to be envious of him, for he seemed to take very little trouble over his crops and he scorned to use any of the patent fertilizers and such-like in which his competitors put their trust. ‘I turns over the good earth,’ he would say. ‘I puts in the little seeds, and up theycomes!’ Up they came indeed like Jack’s beanstalk. You could have made out of his sweet-peas one year, people said, a hedge thick enough and tall enough to confine a bull! His tomatoes were as big as cricket-balls; his gooseberries were a match for some people’s greengages; his potatoes were apt to weigh two or three pounds apiece. As for his vegetable marrows, there was something gross, something hardly decent, about the way they swelled and pullulated and waxed fat, until they looked like a herd of farrowing sows lying close together among the luxuriant foliage. Sometimes, indeed, even the judges at the Flower Show were appalled by the size of them, and disqualified them on the grounds that no ordinary housewife could handle them and that only a factory could be expected to turn them into jam.
    I remember seeing William bearing away one of these gigantic marrows after the show. He carried it cradled in his arms, like a baby, but it was so heavy that he was soon compelled to pause for breath; and as he did so he looked down at his burden and smiled. Somehow it gave me a moment of exquisite pleasure to see him thus, smiling down in a proud fatherly way at the monstrous vegetable wedged against his huge belly and supported by his strong arms.
    The ferocious fecundity of William’s little garden might have embarrassed or even frightened a lesser man; for there surely dwelt Priapus himself, Dionysus’ son and Aphrodite’s, he who makes the green things to multiply and the trees to be fruitful and gives fertility to the