Everyman's England (16 page)

I woke what must have been three hours later, to find that my feet had come loose from the sweater, that my raincoat was covered with a thick dew and that the pillow had grown curiously hard. I wrapped my cold feet up and lay watching the moon through the trees. I watched it so long that the impression began to grow upon me that if I were rash enough to persist in my staring I should suddenly find myself flying through space, drawn towards the moon by its attraction. I turned my eyes away quickly and congratulated myself upon my lucky escape. Three or four times since I have had that feeling when looking at the moon. I know it is imagination, of course, but the conviction is strong enough to force me to turn my eyes away.

The growing cold that night soon took my thoughts from the moon. The cold started with my feet and worked along my body. I burrowed into the bracken and slept for a while. The cold did not leave me alone for the rest of the night. I slept fitfully, cursing my folly. I took the grass from my pack and strapped my feet into it for warmth, and I used the sweater as a pillow. I twisted and turned. The cold persisted.

I got up before the sun that morning and stumbled to the stream. The water was like ice. I forced myself to wash in it, gasping and panting for breath as the icy douche touched my skin. I ran around the moor in circles to get warm, and when my face was red and the blood biting through my body once more, I sat down and ate chocolate and two stale sandwiches and watched the sun come up. She crept very unwillingly into the sky and before she was high enough to give any warmth I was on the road to Challacombe.

I passed through it as though it were a village of the dead. There was no one about. Not a hen crowed nor a dog barked, and I felt myself inexpressibly elated at my earliness. While others slept I was on the road, enjoying myself. I was warm by now and surprised to discover that my night had refreshed me.

There is nothing in this world which gives a feeling of superiority more than getting up in the morning before the rest of the world, and there is nothing more annoying than to rise early and be met by the scoffing remark of a friend that he has been up for hours. Friendships have to be firm to withstand the irritation of such remarks as: ‘What? Only just got up? I've been up hours.' Or ‘Lovely now? Yes, but you should have been up at six this morning. It was grand.' Or ‘Just because you've got up early for once, must you let everybody know about it?'

Of course, you must let everybody know about it. I had been up before birdsong, before the earliest bird, and I longed to tell someone about it. I met no one until I reached the crossroads at Blackmore Gate. There I fell in with a young man who had been up before I had. He was motor cycling to Berrynarbor to see his sweetheart and had been up since three o'clock. Just why he did not say. It may have been that he had come a great distance, or his impatience to be with his love had not let him lie abed. His machine had broken down at Blackmore Gate and he had started out to walk the rest of the way to Berrynarbor. He was resting on a gateway along the road to Combe Martin when I caught him up and we kept company the rest of the way to Combe Martin, where he left me. I was not sorry when he left me, for his idea of good conversation was to regale me with the details of all the road accidents he had ever seen and to mark the various twists and turns of the roadway with stories of crashes which had taken place. If his stories were to be believed the road between Combe Martin and Blackmore Gate must be the most dangerous in the world, travelled by a fine collection of maniacs. I thought of him later during the day and wondered if he and his sweetheart were sitting on the cliffs beyond Berrynarbor, looking out to sea and, as they held hands, telling one another of the accidents which they had seen since last they met.

Combe Martin must have the longest main street of any village. It is nearly two miles long and its characteristic features are the boards outside almost every house proclaiming that the price of Bed and Breakfast is four shillings and sixpence. In some establishments, I noticed, the price was higher. In none did it sink below four shillings and sixpence, and I wondered if the people of Combe Martin had met in solemn conference and decided on this minimum charge. Someday, I thought, a daring landlady would offer Bed and Breakfast at a lower price and then the village would turn upon her and refuse to serve her with food or accord her the amenities of life until she was forced to raise her price to their minimum.

I walked the hot length of street resisting the signs of breakfast, for I was determined to eat within sight of the sea. I did; through the open doorway I perceived the legs of the passers-by and the rocks and blue of the sea. I took a long while over my breakfast; I felt I had that much time in hand.

At Combe Martin I decided it was time to turn back towards Porlock. The map showed a footpath leading along the coast to the road that curves around to Trentishoe. I could tell by the look of it on the map that I should lose it, and lose it I did somewhere near the top of the Great Hangman, where the cliffs run out to Blackstone Point. It was a hard climb to the Hangman, with the sea and the gulls on one hand and the great sweep of country running away from the other until it met the pale sky miles away. The heat came off the rocks in shimmering waves and, as I clambered over a scree of loose stone on my way down the steep side of Sherrycombe, an adder slithered away before me, leaving a moment of coldness behind. The sides of Sherrycombe are composed in most places of loose drifts of stone and to descend to the small beck at the bottom of the combe is to walk with the mutter of tiny avalanches all around one. I had to empty my shoes of grit at the bottom and again at the top… The rest of that day is a brilliant memory; Hunter's Inn, when I was dying of thirst, lunch by a tiny stream with a pair of yellow wagtails to keep me company, and tea at an hotel in Woody Bay, where an immaculately dressed serving-man eyed my unshaven face and crumpled clothes with cold wonder, which did not disappear even when I proved able to pay my score. My consumption of jam and cream must have caused him consternation.

I returned that night to the comforts of civilisation at a farmhouse standing on the hill high above Watersmeet. A shave and a hot bath took the day's fatigue from me. From the farm the land fell away into the deep wooded valley that stretched back to Lynton and, above Watersmeet, divided into two arms, one running up to Brendon and the other towards Cheriton. The air was so clear that I could make out the cars moving up and down the shoulder of Countisbury across the valley. The trees were a greenish blue in the evening light where the shadows massed in the valley.

Before lunchtime the next day I was moving across Brendon Common, setting a course by the sun and doubting my accuracy every fifteen minutes, for the Doone Valley. If you enter the Doone Valley by way of Brendon it loses most of its surprise and wild splendour. The proper way – at least I shall always think so because that is how I saw it first – is to come down Hoccombe Combe, across the springy turf, taking drinks now and then from the pools along the tiny stream where the boulders are covered with a soft feathery moss. At the head of Doone Valley, before reaching Badgworthy Water, there stands a ruined house, said to have been the home of the Doones. It was near this ruin that I found the skull of a deer. At least I have always maintained, against the opinion of all my friends, that it is a deer's skull and not a sheep's. I packed the skull in my sweater for safety while I walked, and I treasured it for years. At last it was lost, but I do know it was a deer's skull – not a sheep's.

I crossed Badgworthy Water, jumping from one stone to another. The water slide up which Jan Ridd worked his way catching loaches does not exist, and the Doone Valley, although it is remote enough, is not so inaccessible, nor ever could have been so hidden, as Blackmore made it. It was the ferocity of the Doones that secured them from interference rather than the difficulty of finding their little valley.

I did not go down to Oare. I struck away across the moor and dipped to the valley at Robber's Bridge and then climbed through an oak wood on to the main Porlock-Lynton road, and that night I was many miles from Exmoor.

I have been back to Exmoor since then. I have made my pilgrimage to the church at Oare, seen the window through which Carver Doone shot Lorna Doone, and signed my name in the register. I have stopped at Exford again and made friends with the waiter who looked so hot in his formal clothes, and I have even found the spot where I slept so uncomfortably under the hedge and, as I looked at it, wondered what magic there was in that blue evening to make me welcome such discomfort. But I can never forget my first acquaintance with this country, the momentary unreality of wild deer, the potency of cider drunken at midday, the long rolling sweeps of purple and brown moor with the solitary scrawl of a twisted may tree to break the line of hills, and the music of swift streams boiling and threshing over the boulders in their beds and flinging up spray to wet the low branches of birches… I sat for a long time by the cupboard with the map in my hand. Those three hot, walking days over Exmoor were a long way behind me. I put the map down. Perhaps it was all a dream and had never happened outside my mind. My arm touched an unsteady pile of books and they fell flapping to the ground. By the wall behind them something white showed, and from the gloom two sightless eye sockets fixed me with a sad stare and a mouth full of white tusks grinned at me. It was my old deer skull, the cranium covered with a fine mantle of webs and dust.

CHAPTER 17

There are some questions which do not need an answer. How long has Dorchester been a town, is one of them. Nobody knows, and nobody cares. It is enough that Dorchester exists without questioning its origin.

I know – and you will know too, if you have ever been to Dorchester – that its old British name was Dwrinwyr, meaning the settlement by the dwyr, the dark waters of the Frome, that its Roman name was Durnovaria, a prettier name, I think, than the other, and that in time it became Dorchester. Even when you know these things, you still know very little about Dorchester except that at various periods it has been inhabited by Britons, Romans and now the English.

I visited the town with a friend of an enquiring nature. His eagerness for knowledge is remarkable and his capacity to obtain it by his own research negligible. If he reads this he will not be offended, for he covers his laziness with the plea that it is better to learn from the lips of others than by reading from books.

We stood outside the Antelope Hotel and I said to him: ‘Would you care to go to the pictures?'

‘Why?'

‘I thought you might like entertainment.'

‘I came here to see Dorchester, not the films, and I want instruction. You've studied the guidebook, haven't you?'

‘In a way. I've looked at most of the pictures.'

‘You've been lazy. Well, you'll have to lead me to the various places of interest and read about them from the guidebook. Where shall we go first?'

‘There is a picture of Maumbury Rings which looks interesting.'

‘That will do.'

We found Maumbury Rings on the south side of the town. It is a wide, grass-grown amphitheatre, constructed by the Romans during their occupation of the town. Here they had their games and sports.

The town presses closely about this Dorset coliseum; a railway line hems it on one side, a police station on another and a road studded with Belisha beacons on a third. Despite these crowding signs of a later age, the old arena still retains its dignity and grandeur. From its ramparts we had a good view of the town, a spread of red-brick and grey houses, mixed up with the dark crests of trees. In the foreground were the railway station and the bulk of a brewery. Beyond the brewery, and less intimidating, rose the steeples of various churches.

‘I notice,' said my friend, after I had finished reading about the Roman amphitheatre, ‘that the grass of the arena is very much worn in places.'

‘I suspect the small boys of the town. This maybe, is one way they get their own back on the Romans who bother them during lessons. They come here and play cricket. The glory of Rome has gone when small boys play ball where gladiators fought and died.'

‘If I know anything about boys,' came the reply, ‘they probably played ball in the arena when the Romans were here and kept a sharp lookout for angry gladiators instead of policemen. Tell me, did the townspeople never use this place after the Romans for their own sports and festivals?'

‘Undoubtedly. I think the most popular form of entertainment held here were the Hanging Fairs. Public executions drew huge crowds. In 1705 as many as ten thousand spectators assembled here to watch the strangling and burning of a woman for the murder of her husband, a Dorchester tradesman. Her name was Mary Channing –'

‘A relation of yours?'

‘There is no h in my name,' I replied haughtily.

‘A pity. They certainly had a pretty taste in entertainment. I think the burning after the strangling was rather unnecessary. I wonder what kind of man the official strangler was. It's diverting to imagine that perhaps he was a meek man, fond of his children and with no more ambition than to grow prize cabbages. I suppose he did it with his hands?'

‘Did what?' I was watching the movements of a pair of gulls of the arena.

‘The strangling.'

‘The guidebook says nothing about that.' ‘Would you go to watch public executions if they happened today?'

‘I might go to one, but I certainly should not make a habit of it. Nor would many people, I think.'

‘You're wrong. We haven't changed a great deal from those days. If men and women were hanged in public there would always be a crowd, and a nucleus of regular spectators who never missed a hanging. There must be something satisfying to watch someone losing life while you still retain it.'

‘It sounds beastly to me.'

‘It is – but bestiality is good box office. The smell of carrion is enough to bring the vultures. Have you ever seen a crowd outside the gates of a gaol waiting to read the notice that some poor devil has been duly hanged and sent to his Maker? It affords very unpleasant material for speculation on the animal antecedents of mankind. They can't see anything, they can't hear anything; but there they are, waiting in a crowd, just waiting.'

We left Maumbury and went on to Poundbury, a vast, oblong entrenchment outside the town and not far from the Artillery Barracks. Older than Maumbury, Poundbury's origin is lost in the dimness of the past. Successive civilisations and races have used it, but the people who first raised its ramparts and dug its trenches might have never lived for the little we know about them.

We walked around the top of the entrenchment, the wind from the valley of the Frome whistling by our ears. A hare started away from the round barrow in the centre of the camp and disappeared behind the rifle range by the river. The river was running in spate and the meadows were cut and quartered by long arms of flood water. Behind us lay the town, clinging to the hill above the river, solid, respectable and secure, its grey streets filled with the noise of country traffic, clerks working in offices, boys bent over their desks, shopkeepers making up their accounts and arranging their windows… all busy in a life which was hundreds of years removed from the life which had once animated Poundbury and made it a scene of activity. Fires must once have burned in the camp, women in skins cooked and men worked their flints and bare children run tumbling and playing across the grass. Some of them lay buried deeply beneath the smooth turf, uncaring that a few yards from them and vibrating their dry bones every hour or so ran engines along the railway tunnel which pierces one side of the huge mound. Someday our civilisation will be a memory and a ruin and a new race of man will disturb our bones in their resting place as they tunnel and bore. The graves of the dead without name can be ravished without sacrilege. Close to Poundbury, down the valley towards the town, runs a line of pylons, slender and beautiful in their long-reaching perspectives. One day their rusted frames will be dug from the alluvium of the Frome and puzzle wiseheads as Poundbury puzzles wiseheads today.

‘There was some sense in building a camp up here,' said my friend. ‘It must have been easy to see your enemies coming, and when there were no enemies in sight what better thing to do than admire the view. Perhaps they built it here for the view more than for protection against the enemies they had. We don't credit these ancient peoples with enough artistic sense.'

‘Well, all you need to do today is admire the view. You needn't bother about enemies.'

‘No? Others are bothering though.' He nodded towards the rifle range and I saw small brown figures stretched out on the grass and heard the thin crack of rifle shots.

‘Today we are more civilised. Only some of us keep an eye on enemies, while others admire the view. In the old days you had to do both things yourself.'

As a rule I do not like museums. There is always far too much to see and not enough time. If you make up your mind to go and look at one section, say the natural history section, you are constantly aware of the temptation to wander away and look at the ceramics or the geological exhibits. It is hard to disabuse the mind of its conception that the first duty towards a museum is to see everything in it, and the gentle race from case to case and from hall to hall is, in itself, an exhibition of man's pitiable febrility of mind.

I wanted to avoid Dorchester's museum. My friend would not allow this.

‘If a town goes to the trouble of collecting antiquities from the neighbourhood, and a curator spends no little amount of time, generally for a negligible salary, arranging and cataloguing exhibits, the least one can do is to go and look at them. Besides, who knows what may not be learned in a museum. I once got a very good recipe for an excellent cheese pudding from a man I met in the British Museum.'

‘I don't mind visiting the museums, if they are as you say. From my experience most of them never rise any higher than a few collections of flint arrowheads, some doubtful pieces of terracotta pottery, and cases of foreign birds brought back from his world tour by the local squire.'

I was taken to the museum, and I am glad now that I went. Dorchester's museum is quite different from any other. It is small enough to prevent a man from surfeiting himself with the exhibits, it is well arranged, and has less unlabelled exhibits than any other museum of its size that I know. Most important, its exhibits are interesting and nearly all concerned with Dorset and Dorchester. If you buy the official guide you can, with a little patience and a great deal of satisfaction, see illustrated, from the cases of exhibits, the story of mankind in Dorset (and therefore in England) through the ages. If you do not care to trace the history of man through the Neolithic, the various Bronze and Iron Ages up to the coming of the Romans, then you can go and stand on the tessellated pavements, found from time to time in Dorchester, which are laid in the main hall, or stare at the collection of man-traps and try to decide of which one it was that Thomas Hardy wrote: ‘It produced, when set, a vivid impression that it was endowed with life and exhibited the combined aspects of a stork, a crocodile and a scorpion.' A queer beast.

Nowhere did I see any of the useless abracadabra which is often turned out of the large houses of the county and, for want of a better home, presented to the museum, and I would have spent more time in there if I had been allowed to by my friend. With true tourist energy he professed to have sucked the marrow from the museum bone within half an hour and was impatient to be off.

‘I have had enough of the past. Let us go out into the present again,' he protested. So we did. But the past still clung to us, for we found ourselves having tea in a building which had served as the lodgings of the hated Judge Jeffries. Today, where the infamous judge bullied serving wenches and thundered at frightened men, there are no sounds more alarming than the rattle of teacups, the polite, subdued chatter of tourists and the innocuous music of a gramophone. He held his Bloody Assize in a room at the Antelope Hotel around the corner from the teahouse. I wonder if the people of Dorset flocked to the hanging fairs then to see the last moments of men and women they loved.

Judge Jefferies was not the first to bring mass tragedy into the lives of the Dorchester people. An older, more terrible enemy than any man visited them more than once. Three or four times the town was fired and burnt to the ground almost, and I think these fires explain Dorchester's anomalous architecture features. In a county whose most characteristic buildings are the colour-washed thatched cottages, it is strange to find that there are very few such cottages or thatched houses in Dorchester itself. Except for one or two buildings there are few old houses in Dorchester. Thatch was good fuel for fire, and the primitive firefighting implements must have made poor show against the blaze that burst from roof to roof. A contemporary writer describes Dorchester after one of these fires as ‘a ruinated Troy or decayed Carthage.'

Some of the old hooks used for tearing the thatch off the cottages, and the primitive water pumps are in the museum. Men were quicker in inventing the means to fight one another than they were in fashioning weapons to combat fire.

After tea we walked about the town, forgetting the guidebook and content to wander. We found ourselves lazing by the river with a flotilla of ducks rivalling the roar of a tiny weir with their quacking. Trees came low over the water and, across the valley plain, cattle stood silently in the meadows like dark shadows against the wall of the sky. We followed the shaded walks that mark the site of the old walls that once fortified the town and suddenly we were standing before the bronze figure of a seated, bare-headed man, staring into the gathering mist of the twilight. We stood for a while, remembering the man who brought so much fame to the town and the county which he called Casterbridge and Wessex. His love for the county was no flamboyant, boisterous affection. It flowed in a deep spirit, steady as the hills of Wessex and as pure as the air and water that move across the country. The quiet streets of the town, the hedge-sides laced with a border of flowering cow parsley, the long downs broken by patches of gorse and the rudely-cut figures from a past age, the copses in the hollows of the hills and the small clouds of sheep along the ridges all bring back memories of his works. Dorset belongs to Hardy as surely as Exmoor is Blackmore's and Cumberland Walpole's. His statue stands, a silent symbol of a respect which will endure for generations. The tragic Tess and the pathetic Jude are not the only phantoms that live again in the blue evening mist of the Dorset evenings, and Dorset was in need of no statue to keep the memory green of her poet and lover.