Thursday was market day. Chaps with round red faces like pumpkins and dirty smocks and huge boots covered with dry cow-dung, carrying long hazel switches, used to drive their brutes into the market- place early in the m. For hours there』d be a terrific hullabaloo: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen』s vans who wao get through the crush crag their whips and cursing, and everyone who had anything to do with the cattle shouting and throwing sticks. The big noise was always when they brought a bull to market. Even at that age it struck me that most of the bulls were harmless law-abiding brutes that only wao get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn』t have been regarded as a bull if half the town hadn』t had to turn out and chase it. Sometimes some terrified brute, generally a half-grown heifer, used to break loose and charge down a side street, and then anyone who happeo be in the way would stand in the middle of the road and swing his arms backwards like the sails of a windmill, shouting, 『Woo! Woo!』 This was supposed to have a kind of hypnotic effe an animal aainly it did frighten them.
Half-way through the m some of the farmers would e into the shop and run samples of seed through their fingers. Actually Father did very little business with the farmers, because he had no delivery van and couldn』t afford to give long credits. Mostly he did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen』s horses and so forth. Old Brewer, of the Mill Farm, who was a stingy old bastard with a grey -beard, used to stand there for half an hour, fingering samples of chi aing them drop into his pocket in an absent-minded manner, after which, of course, he finally used to make off without buying anything. In the evenings the pubs were full of drunken men. In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and uhe beer nowadays it had some guts in it. All through the Boer War the recruiting sergeant used to be in the four-ale bar of the Gee every Thursday and Saturday night, dressed up to the nines and very free with his money. Sometimes m you』d see him leading off some great sheepish, red-faced lump of a farm lad who』d taken the shilling when he was too drunk to see and found in the m that it would cost him twenty pounds to get out of it. People used to stand in their doorways and shake their heads when they saw them go past, almost as if it had been a funeral. 『Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!』 It just shocked them. Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl』s going oreets. Their attitude to the war, and to the Army, was very curious. They had the good old English notions that the red-coats are the scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and ght to hell, but at the same time they were good patriots, stuion Jacks in their windows, and held it as an article of faith that the English had never beeen in battle and never could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonists, used to siimental songs about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died otlefield far away. These soldier boys always used to die 『when the shot and shell were flying』, I remember. It puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could uand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales abou