Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore Page B

goods, smaller receiving centres for produce; but each was a social entity nevertheless, each had built around its church, pub, shop, and village hall a local tradition. All shared the common tradition of Elmbury; each possessed its own individuality and character, as the different sons of one mother.
    Thus Brensham was the cricket-village. As long as men could remember its village green had been rolled and mown till it looked every summer like a billiard cloth. If you passed through Brensham after work in the spring you’d scarcely fail to see old Briggs the blacksmith rolling the pitch, and some of the village boys loosening up their bowling-arms or knocking a ball about the nets. Each Brensham generation gave one or two professionals to the county team; and often you would see a Harlequin cap on the village green, as Mr. Chorlton, standing behind the net, taught the yokels how to slam a loose ball round to leg.
    Yet the neighbouring village, Kinderton, had no cricket team and was noted for darts and drunkenness, which it practised simultaneously. The Men of Overfield had a tradition of poaching; there was a permanent gipsy camp on their common, and a gipsy admixture in their blood—dark and sombre men, they were, who would never tell you whither they were going nor whence they had come. Dykeham folk were fishermen and liars, to a man; they had a stuffed pike in their village pub which they said weighed twenty pounds and had been caught on a minnow; yet it was common knowledge, outside Dykeham, that the creature had weighed just twelve and a half pounds and had been picked up dead after the draining of Dykeham Pond thirty years ago.
    The Tirley people were famous boatmen; as indeed they must needs be, for their low-lying village was half-flooded for three months of the year; they were Rough Islanders indeed.At Tredington, which was river-rounded too, the people grew osiers and were handy at making baskets and wickerware. The village of Warren was noted for fair women and also for promiscuity; its illegitimate birth-rate was the highest in the county, a fact of which it was proud and boastful. Flensham was well known for its footballers; Marsham by reason of the fact that every cottager possessed a pig; Oxton for wheelwrights; Lower Hampton for woodmen; and Adam’s Norton for singing— everybody sang in Adam’s Norton, its church choir often came to Elmbury and sang in the Abbey, while in the Salutation Inn (which was the curious name of the Adam’s Norton pub) you could hardly hear yourself speak for the hollering of old songs and new songs and particularly of bawdy songs, which the wicked old men of the village had invented and matched to hymn-tunes and handed down to their sons.
    There was only one of the satellite villages which seemed to have no individuality or character of its own. This was Partingdon, which possessed a rich and generous squire. He ran the cricket club, the football, the village whist drives and had built the cricket pavilion and the village hall. His wife organised the Women’s Institute and the Mothers’ Union. His gardeners mowed the cricket field.
    In Partingdon every well-behaved person was certain of employment; because the Squire employed everybody on his estate. He also housed them, arranged their recreation, and pensioned them when they were old.
    There were no ill-behaved persons in Partingdon.
    Yet this ideal village, where nobody ever got drunk or had illegitimate babies or sang bawdy sons or made revolutionary statements in the pub, seemed somehow unnatural and we always felt vaguely uncomfortable if we went there to play cricket or darts. It was the same kind of uncomfortable feeling which one has when one visits a hospital; Partingdon was a sterilised sort of place. “ ’Twould give a man the willies to live in Partingdon,” was the kind of remark one heard afterwards. The well-meaning paternalism had somehow emasculated it; and to go from