Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore Page A

window of Mr. Tanner the greengrocer the first time I rode it.
    As for pubs, by Christmas time there were very few in Elmbury or in the neighbouring villages which I didn’t know. On Boxing Day we drank our way from the office to a dance at Brensham Village Hall which involved stops at the George, the Shakespeare, the Black Bear, the White Bear, the Trumpet, the Cross Keys, the Fox and Hounds, the Royal Oak and the Railway.
    It was a useful apprenticeship which I served with these two merry ruffians; for I am sure it is a good thing to learn about drinking when you are young. At seventeen you are an experimentalist; and your methods are empirical. You learn by trial and error, you make yourself sick, you make yourself sozzled, but you’re very unlikely to make yourself a drunkard. Not so the man who has remained a teetotaller until he is thirty. He has been brought up in the belief that drink is an evil, and that it is only tolerable if taken “as a medicine” or “in strict moderation.” So at some time when the winds of the world blow unkindly about him, chilling his thin teetotaller’s blood, he takes a drop “as medicine” and perhaps he takes two or three drops because after all that is “strict moderation”; but—mark this carefully—he is too old and too set in his ways to undertake empirical experiments, he hasn’t the guts to get roaring drunk to see what happens. Instead he applies reason to the matter, and takes each day just as much as he thinks will “do him good” (biologically the right amount to do him the maximum harm). He’s afraid of the stuff; and the man who is afraid of it is already halfway to a toper’s grave. He discovers that it takes a little more “to do him good” every month or every week; and down he goes to his dreary end, without even having had his money’s worth of fun.
    So I thank the good god Dionysus for the company of Stan and Geoff, those rip-roaring sons of yeomen who taught me the rights of the matter when I was seventeen. The worst consequencethat happened was a spill off the back of a motor-bike when we skidded at forty round a sharp corner slick with frost. I was thrown slap into some milk-churns which were standing on the grass verge; and I daresay I should have hurt myself if I had been sober.
Come Lassies and Lads
    Village dances were minor Bacchanalia, and would probably have shocked the Bright Young Things of Mayfair who at that time were very much in the news. It is a fallacy that country boys and girl dance the polka and sing folk songs; the favourite dance of the 1924 season was the Charleston, and Ern, the leader of the band, who also played centre forward in the football team, sang hot jazz. As for drink, there was the pub next door; and our village virgins weren’t too finicky to enter its little bar nor too unsophisticated to drink gin and Italian.
    My memory of the affairs is made up of noise, kisses, and warm sticky hands. But they weren’t just village hops; a dance was an occasion, and the farmers’ sons wore tails and white waistcoats, the girls wore their best and most exiguous frocks. It was the accepted custom towards the end of the evening to lead your heart’s fancy outside, snow or fine, and to walk with her down the dark lane where you might or might not find a car to sit in. (For most of the young men came on motor-bikes, nor was it very unconventional to ride to the dance on horseback, as I did before I’d saved up enough money to buy an old Triumph). The astonishing thing, remembered in tranquillity, is the fortitude of those village maidens, who would face frost and blizzard in a thin scrap of a dress all for the sake of a little inept and rough-and-tumble love-making.
Satellite Villages
    The dozen or so little villages that lay in a circle about Elmbury were as planets to her sun. Economically, they were sub-markets, smaller distributing centres for