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was fairly slight. At Christmas-time, however, and especially onNew Year ‘s Eve, the Fitchers and the Gormleys were apt to foregather simultaneously in the pubs of Brensham (whose landlords dreaded and hated them both impartially). There they would sit in separate groups, glaring at each other, and waiting for somebody to mention salmon-nets, or even accidentally to use any of the other words, such as ‘hatchet’ or ‘rope’, which were taboo because of their association with the fifty-year-old crime. This was sure to happen before closing-time, and then the Fitchers and Gormleys would stream forth into the peaceful village of Brensham like Montagues and Capulets into the streets of Verona. Both sides would call up reinforcements which appeared miraculously from nowhere; and for half an hour or so the running fight would go on all the way from the Horse Narrow to the Adam and Eve, the men punching each other, the women scratching each other, the small children biting and kicking. Nobody came to much harm, though the noise was terrifying; and the village policeman generally contrived to keep out of the way, knowing that his intervention was the only thing in the world capable of uniting the Fitchers and Gormleys, who would immediately make common cause against him. The sum of the damage was generally a few black eyes and bloody noses and some broken glasses in the pubs; the brief disturbance subsided as suddenly as it had begun, and the Fitchers and Gormleys relapsed into a state of mistrustful armistice until the season of peace and good-will came round again.
Christmas Holidays
    We were the delighted witnesses of one of these battles, which occurred upon Boxing Day at the time when the pubs were closing in the early afternoon. A rout of Gormleyscame scampering down the road pursued by Fitcher males with sticks and Fitcher females with umbrellas. Later, however, we discovered some small Gormley boys endeavouring, apparently, to gouge the eyes out of some small Fitcher girls, so honours were even. Shortly afterwards the Hunt came galloping by and old General Bouverie the Master yelled in a terrible voice to Gormleys and Fitchers impartially:
Have you seen my fox, damn you?
and in a helter-skelter of red coats, horses, shouting men, screaming women and children crying
What’s in the salmon-nets today-ay?
the whole fantastic riot melted away and the violated village returned to its usual mid-winter quietude.
    Brensham in winter, apart from such occasional liveliness, presented a workaday landscape; for the fields were full of sprout-stalks which stank sulphurously as they rotted, the orchard-trees were black and bare, the market-gardens were littered with the left-over debris of late autumn, and the smoke from a score of squitch-fires made blue streaks across the land like smudged chalkmarks: a miniature industrial haze. The river, every month or so, crept out over the water-meadows, licked the bottom slopes of the hill, lapped the doorsteps of a few low-lying cottages, and then sullenly went back, leaving a brown scum on the fields. The people of Brensham paddled about in gumboots and cursed their rich dark soil which made such sticky mud.
    But it would have taken more than mud to keep us away from Brensham Hill, and we were up there, I dare say, on the first day of the holidays and almost every day thereafter for the next three weeks. However rough the weather or sharp the season we never failed to find fun or mischief in the quarries and coverts. Mr Chorlton, who was apt to call us Beastly Little Barbarians, read us a passage from a very old play,
The Play of the Wether
, which he said summarized our whole attitude to life:
    â€˜Forsothe, sir, my mynd is thys, at few wordes,
All my pleasure is in catchynge of byrdes,
And makynge of snow-ballys and throwynge the same …
O, to se my snow-ballys lyght on my felowes heddys,
And to here the byrdes how they flycker their wynges
In the pytfall! I say yt