Read Online The Blue Field by John Moore - Free Book Online Page B

loins of men. But William, who had never heard of Priapus, was only slightly puzzled by the phenomenon. Sometimes he would shake out a packet of seeds into his hand, and stare at them, and wrinkle his brow. ‘They be so very, very small – but look!’ and he would point to a prodigious broad bean thirty inches long, or a stick of ‘sparrow-grass’ twice as thick as a man’s thumb,or a carrot which he’d just dug up and which, obviously, had been seeking the Antipodes. ‘So very small,’ he’d repeat with a wondering smile, ‘but I puts ’im into the good earth and up they comes, Hey Presto!’ And then, chuckling merrily, he’d retire into the teeming thicket of lilac, clematis, laburnum and honeysuckle which wildly overgrew his garden path.
    As if to demonstrate that it was the special favour of Priapus, and not William’s skill alone which made his garden flourish, some of his fattest potatoes and longest broad beans were self-seeded strays which came up of their own accord – as he put it ‘without an ounce of muck or a drop of sweat spent on ’em’. He called them ‘randoms’ and on one occasion, to the vast annoyance of all his rivals, he won first prize at the Flower Show with a pound of tomatoes picked from a ‘random’ plant which he found growing at the bottom of his garden, beside the ditch where the sewage ran into it. I believe that these waifs and strays, these casual come-by-chance by-blows of his garden, pleased William more than all the regimented, orderly, carefully-tended rows. ‘’Tis like winning something out of old Nature’s sweepstake,’ he said, and grinned: ‘I often thinks maybe I’m a bit of a Random myself.’
    William had married young – the story of that marriage shall be told later – and his wife had died when he was still in his twenties; so he continued for many years to live with his old parents in the cottage by the wheelwright’s shop and to carry on the business during his father’s retirement. When his parents died – this was about forty years ago – William came into a little money; and thinking that he might as well profit by his extraordinary ability to grow things he bought the 150-acre farm on the green skirt of Brensham. He built himself a new yellow wagon – the biggest and the best wagon he had ever made – and atMichaelmas he piled all his possessions into it, sat his two schoolgirl daughters on top of the pile, and moved up the hill.
    He had bought the farm from Lord Orris, our local landowner, as he was then; and he had bought it exceedingly cheap, for two reasons: the Mad Lord, as we called him, was in debt as usual, and therefore needed the money; and, since his madness took the form of wild generosity, he could never bring himself to exact the full value for anything he sold.
The Ruin of Orris
    Lord Orris was at that time about halfway to ruin; far speedier than Hogarth’s Rake he was progressing towards penury, through his incorrigible habit of giving things away.
    Once he had been rich, some say very rich; but he had handed over all his money to indigent nieces, profligate nephews, drunken wasters, scoundrelly spongers, and indeed to everybody who could persuade him – and that was not difficult – that they were in temporary or permanent need of it. To people who remonstrated with him about his indiscriminate charity he would make this sort of reply: ‘Well, the poor chap drinks, you see – and he’s very foolish about women too. He just can’t help it and nowadays, I understand, that sort of thing costs a great deal of money; whereas my own necessities are really very small . . .’ Nor was he content to give away only his cash. He bestowed his valuable library piecemeal upon various persons who said they were fond of books (‘For honestly I read extremely little, and these old