Books: Pastoral Symphony

THE FAIR FIELD (240 pp.)—John Moore—Simon & Schusfer ($2.75).

In 1944, British Navy flyer John Moore lay in a Normandy field and watched ancient buildings in the town of Caen go up in flames. Near by, a Norman farmer, cursing quietly and steadily, was extracting a bomb splinter from a cow’s hindquarters. But for the accident of the English Channel, Moore reflected, this scene might have been laid in his own birthplace—the once-Norman market town of Elmbury, near Stratford on Avon.

The Fair Field is John Moore’s way of putting Elmbury on the map before tomorrow’s enemy bombs or friendly “improvements” have wiped it off forever. Frankly nostalgic and romantic, The Fair Field is also gay, bucolic, and crammed with anecdotal vitality. It is a record ofMoore’s years in Elmbury (a fictitious name) from the year of his birth (1907) to World War II, but it is also a portrait of country life as lived by thousands from Cornwall to Northumberland.

When Author Moore left school, he joined the old family firm of auctioneers. “My uncle . . . believed that if a man bought Lot 224 Bedroom Utensil and sundries for two shillings the fact should be recorded for two years”—so no one threw out the vast accumulation of records that had been gathering dust since 1750. Open the books, read between the lines of “the clerks’ cold copper-plate,” and one might find “a microcosm of English life and history,” a story of the effects of generations of alternating prosperity and depression upon men who worked the land at Poppie’s Parlor, Salley Furlong, Coneygree, Hungry Harbor, Merry-come Sorrow.

Rosy-Fingered Sales Talk. Auctioneers, says Moore, have conventions “as strict as that which bound great Homer himself. The Residence must be Desirable; just as the dawn was always rosy-fingered.” But they see man at his best and worst, at his poorest and richest.

In Elmbury, the beautiful and hideous flourished side by side. In the shadow of the magnificent Norman abbey lay “hundreds of acres of the worst slums in England . . . tottering hunchbacked cottages,” their beds crawling with vermin, their wardens ablaze with roses. Down twisting High Street once a year, wearing robes and cocked hats, paraded the newly elected Town Council—popularly known as the Town Scoundrels. On market days “the real wealth of England” poured through like a flood—white-faced Herefords, red Shorthorns, sows whose huge bellies brushed the ground, flocks of sheep so bulky and close-packed that the yelping sheep dogs could scamper to & fro upon the tops of the woolly backs. And down this same street, in 1914 and again in 1940, Auctioneer Moore saw the Elmbury Territorials march.

Like every country town, Elmbury had its respected eccentrics (” ‘Tis summat in the air as breeds ’em,” was the usual explanation)—men who drank twelve pints of beer at one sitting; squires who spent their patrimony on crazy “Follies”; Poor Tom, “who thought he had Heaven’s commandment to empty the river and who might have been seen almost any day happily bailing it out with a leaky bucket.” Other notables:

¶ Ragged lunatic Black Sal, who, for decades, followed Elmbury’s city fathers around the town singing obscene ditties (composed by herself) about their moral and business practices. One day, well-meaning health authorities swooped down on Black Sal and gave her a bath and a sterilized bed—a shock that killed her.¶ The Colonel—a onetime big-game hunter who made his own shoelaces out of eelskins and whose favorite sport was goose shooting. He wore his sister’s nightdress for camouflage, and would say firmly as he crawled up on a flock of geese in his strange disguise: “You’ve got to put yourself in their place.” .

¶ Mr. Sparrow, Elmbury’s greatest fisherman and champion liar. ” ‘Caught a [fish] this evening,’ he’d say, ‘and he’s four pound and three ounces by the kitchen scales; I’ll go fell if ‘e ent.’ One day his wife had a baby, and the nurse used [Mr. Sparrow’s] kitchen scales to weigh it. ‘It was certainly a fine fat baby. It was just a shade less than 22 pounds.’ “