Everyman's England (7 page)

CHAPTER 7

What is there about small things which excites our interest and our sympathy, and evokes an excess of kindness which takes control of us before we have time to be ashamed of it?

Sheep are dull, stupid creatures, which in flocks achieve a certain picturesqueness, but individually have little interest save for their shepherd. Is there any man or woman, however, who has not felt something stir within at the sight of a young spring lamb, butting at its fellows and arching its back in tiny leaps? Grace, beauty and overflowing life; it has them all to make us feel happier at the sight of it. Kittens; fluffed-up young thrushes, trying their wings for the first time; a puppy working itself into a frenzy as it chases its own tail… is there anyone so occupied with his own cares that he cannot stop to smile at these small creatures?

We can always find a place in our heart for the smallest of things, and if I love Rutland it is perhaps because it is our smallest county, and not so large that a man cannot come to know it without years of exploration. Yorkshire we must love in parts. It is too vast to claim an entire affection. England is so small that to love part of it is to love all of it.

If anyone asked me which county in England is least spoiled, I should answer without hesitation – Rutland. In some miraculous way it has escaped the horrors which have attacked other counties. Its greatest quality is its unobtrusiveness. There is nothing to excite or alarm you in Rutland. It still retains that quiet leisurely English atmosphere which was typical of the eighteenth century. It would not have surprised me to have discovered a Rutland Sir Roger de Coverley leading his grumbling parishioners to church and daring any to sleep through the sermon but himself, or that the cottage wives flout the aid of modern therapeutics and give the juice of crushed snails to their children to cure them of whooping cough, or prescribe a dish of minced mice to ward off the Evil One.

I cannot tell you where to go and what to see in Rutland, for there is nowhere to go and nothing to see. If you want to understand Rutland you must just go to any village, picked out at random, and there leave your bicycle, bus or motor car and without consulting a map strike away in the direction which appeals most to you. You will never be disappointed. Within a mile you will be lost in old England, an England where the news of the battle at Bunker's Hill in faraway America might still be being told from cottage to cottage, where the only sounds to disturb the peace of the morning were the sudden winding of a hunting horn from a copse and the crisp beat of hooves across dead grass…

Somewhere in the county there is a little, grey-stoned cottage, not unlike the cottages of the Cotswolds, with sprays of yellow jasmine guarding the doorway, and friendly hens pecking between the unfolding daffodils of the flower-beds, while from the roof pent white fantails pursue their courtships with more noise than nicety.

I cannot tell you where the cottage is – for I do not know. I only know that it is somewhere in Rutland, and that when I first saw it I welcomed it with all the joy of a wanderer. I was lost. This may appear impossible, but in Rutland it very easily happens. For what seemed like hours I went along narrow roadways and lanes, twisting up wooded heights and dipping down into wide river-paved valleys. Once I came to a small village that straggled along the roadway, graced by a tiny, untidy green where a donkey was grazing half-heartedly, ignoring the persistent attentions of two small boys.

I went into the post office to enquire my way to Oakham and found that I had wandered right out of Rutland and was in Northamptonshire. Rutland is an elusive county. One minute you are in it and the next – you are away in Leicestershire or Lincolnshire.

I was soon lost again for I tried to take a short cut on the advice of the postmistress…

When I found the cottage I was despairing of ever reaching Oakham at all. I wish all lost travellers such a happy ending to their wanderings as I found in that cottage.

At my knock on the door it was opened by a large genial woman. She wore a blue-and-white print overall, and her hair was piled on her head in an old-fashioned bun and her face was obviously the face of a woman who loved children, animals and anything which had strayed. I came into the last category and, almost before I had finished explaining that I was lost, that I was thirsty, and that I wanted to get to Oakham, she had taken me in hand.

I was conducted through a low room, full of plush-framed pictures and photographs, with a mantelshelf burdened by a vase of imitation chenille flowers, to a kitchen that smelt of cleanliness, and soon I was washing myself under a tap.

‘Freshen yourself up there, my dear,' she said and disappeared. It was a hot spring day and I needed that wash. And afterwards I sat in the wooden porch-way, with the sun cutting slants of golden-moted light across the shadows and slaked my thirst; but not with draughts of well-water, or the proverbial glass of milk fresh from the cow, or even the herby homemade beer which the cottagers of the Peak district love to force upon one. No, Rutland is a homely English county and I was given tea, and I wanted nothing else. Whilst I drank and smoked my pipe and tried to stop one of a horde of black kittens from drowning itself in my cup, the good lady told me about her life and her garden.

‘It's lonely here at times,' she said, ‘for the master's away most of the day. I find me company in the animals and the garden, though.' As she spoke she relieved me of the kitten which was about to make another attempt in my cup. The ‘master' was her husband, who was a hedger and ditcher.

‘You like animals?' I asked.

She nodded. ‘They take the place of children with me. There's the pigeons, the kittens – I don't know where the old lady is. She's away mousing in the barns very likely. And Sarah, our bitch that is, she's away today with the master. She's due for her pups soon. It keeps a house lively to have young things around –'

To have young things around – I wondered what sorrow lay behind her words.

‘Then there's always the garden,' she went on. ‘Master does the kitchen garden at the back when he comes home and I look after the flowers. You should come and see the garden in the summer. It's a real picture. That's the one thing I want to go to London for. I suppose you've been to Kew Gardens many a time?'

I nodded.

‘They say it's a rare sight. Maybe if I went and saw it I should feel dissatisfied with our little plot here.'

I thought of Kew and wondered if she would feel dissatisfied, and I was afraid she might for a while, though I doubt whether Kew could ever mean as much to anyone as her garden meant to her.

It was while I sat there, resting and enjoying the sunshine, that I realised for the first time that spring had really come. She always comes with a burst, and there is a moment when we open our eyes and acknowledge her presence with a cry of surprise. And at that moment in the porch-way spring came to Rutland.

Not far away a dark-coloured stream rushed by in spate, the green flags dipping and bowing in the current. Over the water hung a tall willow, the light through its young leaves turning it into a waving wonder. Everywhere the leaves were bursting their bud cases; blackthorn, sycamore and hazel were all alive again and hiding the dark tracery of their boughs with the brightness of their foliage. Only the beech and ash still lay wrapped tightly in their close buds. In the hedge at the bottom of the garden were stippled the tiny white faces of whitlow grass and faintly on the breeze came the scent of violets, which I knew were hiding under their dark leaves in the ditch by the roadside… spring had come.

The chestnuts flaunted a thousand tiny green cloaks, the arum pushed its fleshy finger towards the light, and in the straw and fur-lined burrows young rabbits were moving in sightless struggles. The chaffinches sang while the busier hedge-sparrow already had found its nesting site and was building. The moorhens by the river clucked about the reeds on the same errand, the fantails on the roof rumbled in their crops about the spring and the good lady by my side sat eyeing her garden, looking at the purple glory of her violas, and in her eyes was a light which seemed not to have been there a moment before…

I shall always remember Rutland for that moment. It is a county of hidden villages and cottages, full of drowsiness and peace, of fields so vast that it has been said that the smallest county has the largest fields, and everywhere there is an atmosphere that is English, solid and sincere. Nowhere was there any bustle or hurry. I saw no theatres, no cinemas, and only one train puffing quietly up an incline. Even the Great North Road, which cuts across a corner of the county, alters its character for a while and plays at being a country road, and the cars which whizz up and down it slacken speed as though the drivers sensed the peace and were anxious not to disturb it with their haste.

The most noise I heard in Rutland came from a group of schoolchildren outside a hall in Oakham, the capital of the county. They were excited and dancing with impatience, and I learnt that they had come in from the surrounding villages for a musical festival.

At the inn, where I lunched in Oakham, the talk in the bar was not of government and politics, but of racecourses, of crops and the ways of hounds and horses. It was the day of the Grand National, and there were few people in the bar.

‘This is always a quiet day for us,' said the landlord. ‘I wish I could have gone, but a man must look after his business these days.'

‘You mean you would have gone if you could have left your wife at home,' said a horsey-looking man who was drinking his beer by the window. ‘She wouldn't trust you alone on a racecourse.'

The landlord laughed good-humouredly. ‘It's the train fare – not the wife.'

‘You should do the same as Billy, then,' came the reply.

‘Who is Billy?' I asked and was told.

Billy is a groom and for years he has never missed a Grand National. Never having enough money to pay for his railway fare, or perhaps not wishing to waste on railway fare what he can put on a horse, Billy leaves Rutland on his bicycle every year on the day before the Grand National and cycles towards Liverpool. Whether he spends his night under a hedge or in a cheap lodging depends upon his finances. He leaves his bicycle at a cottage a few miles from the course, and then finishes his journey on foot. He sees the races, loses or wins money, and cycles back home. His homeward journey is cheerfully erratic, or monotonously virtuous according to his luck at the races. Yet, no matter what his fortune, he always arrives back at Oakham with empty pockets. I should like to have met Billy – he seems to have a philosophy which is not too common these days.

Yes, the modern world has passed Rutland by. At any moment packs of tail-waving hounds crowd the roadway and the thud of hunters is heard across the pastures, while along the crests of the fields there is always the eternal silhouette of men behind ploughs. The quality, which Rutland possesses more than any other county, of peace and contentment is enduring and unassailable. Rutland will be Rutland whatever happens, and there will always be somewhere a cottage like mine where hospitality is not a forgotten word, but a real, vital thing which breaks down all barriers and keeps alive a spirit which is all kindness and humanity.

Someday I am going back to that cottage to drink tea again – if I can find it in the maze of grey villages with their short-spired churches and the spread of fields and valleys.

CHAPTER 8

From Charles Kingsley I know all about Hereward the Wake and the Fens. Is there anyone who does not? Is there anybody who has read that saga of the last stand of the Saxons against the invading Normans, who has not felt in his heart a thrill of pride and a feeling of gratitude towards that corner of the land where dauntless men and women resisted the invaders, resisted and finally triumphed?

William the Conqueror made an honourable peace with the last Saxons; but it was not the Saxons who had worn down his sallies and disheartened his armies – it was the fens, those grim, treacherous, sedgy wastes, which had conquered.

And today the fens themselves have been conquered and enslaved. If you go to the district expecting to see acres of marshes tufted with spikes of reed, cut into deep waterways where monstrous pike lie in the shadows and squadrons of wildfowl nest – you will be disappointed.

Except for a few patches the real fens have disappeared. Beet, corn, potatoes and peas have ousted the reeds and water-flowers, and the meres and swamps have been schooled into drains and dykes where the fish and wildfowl, their numbers diminished by time, still linger.

The lonely figure that bends to the dark earth, taking his living from the fields, had ancestors who moved about the wild fens with their long jumping poles, living on the duck and fish; and the fat-bellied monk who stood beside the Ouse at Ely watching the grain-boats being poled towards the landing stages, has given way to an aesthetic-looking cleric who steps from his train on to the railway platform at Ely, holding a heavy, illustrated edition of
Ecclesiastes
under his arm.

March means to you a month which comes in like a lion and generally does its best to go out like one, despite the old adage. March used to mean that to me until I went to the fens and discovered another; the town of March.

It lies in the heart of the fen country, not far from the tip of the Wash, and it was to March that I went on a day in early spring, when that season was trying to emulate the royal colours of summer, handicapped by a less plentiful palette and an unaccustomed hand. The sky was a pale, washed blue, with a fluffy fringe of clouds circling the horizon in a faint, untidy halo.

I walked along a road bordered by a deep drain, as the fen people prosaically name the rivers and dykes that cut the country into angular islands. Why a waterway, which is as good as a river in this district, should be called ‘Sixteen Foot Drain' or ‘Twenty Foot Drain' instead of having a name which is no more than a mathematical index to its size, is a mystery which has a solution in the minds of those able, but obviously unromantic persons who first reclaimed the fen country into arable land. To see the words ‘Main Drain' running alongside a tempting stream of blue on a map is enough to make any walker unused to the names of the district, draw quite wrong conclusions and give it a miss.

The drain that ran by the road was confined within banks as steep as a railway cutting, and brown with the dead litter of hogweeds. It flowed with a steady, purposeful motion towards the far meeting of sky and fields. The countryside might have been formed by some geometric titan. All straightness and sharp angles, an endless vista of flatness, broken now and again by a few elms or poplars, it is an area which forces you into an awareness of the sky, for there is little to hold the eye to the earth.

To walk along the flat fen roads is agony, since you can see your destination an hour before you come to it. I could see the tower of March's town hall long before I reached the town. To cycle along the roads in a head wind is a heart-breaking task, and to drive is to invite an insidious monotony which, if unrepulsed, will have you in a ditch before you know where you are. Even the men who made the roads and drains must have tired of the eternal straightness. There are at times unaccountable twists and curves that merely emphasise the monotony.

A plough moved across the hedgeless field at my side and a cloud of gulls hung behind it in a noisy worrying wake, fighting over the leather jackets and grubs turned up in the tilth. The gulls come inland from the Norfolk coast and the Wash, following the ploughs and searching the furrows by day, and quartering in restless squadrons on the dykes and open meres by night.

As far as I could see there was chocolate-coloured earth lying ready for the seed or already showing faint lines of young green. Only the occasional belts of trees, black filigrees against the sky, broke the flatness, and on a tiny mound in the middle distance stood a disused windmill, like a fantastic pepper-pot.

And so I came to March, an oasis in the flatness. March has grown since those early days when the fen-men settled, for safety from the floods and for companionship, on the slight rise by the muddy shores of the River Nene. Some people have said that it is more a museum piece than a town, but they were modernists, who are never happy unless a town has a traffic problem and enough cinemas to provide a different bill for each of the seven nights of the week. March is modern enough; it has its chain stores, its cinemas and banks, but over all there is the still, deep spirit of the fens. The town offers security from the lonely vistas and dark monotony of the huge fields. The houses, inns and churches cluster about the long main street as though the men who built them were moved by the thought that to be denied companionship in this flat, bleak country was almost to be denied life.

A middle-aged man whom I talked to on the town bridge explained his feeling to me.

‘Maybe it's not a beautiful town,' he admitted, ‘but it's clean and friendly. That's more than you could say for a lot of other bigger places. And you'll find no slums here.' He shook his head sagely and looked over into the green river.

The river at March is an outcast. In most towns which are fortunate enough to be placed on a river, the position is used to advantage and the river performs a score of useful functions. In March there is no good word to be said for the river. There is no boating on it, little fishing and less bathing, it drives no mill, and helps no laundry. In the wintertime it is a dark brown, turgid stream, overhung by the wan skeletons of a few willows, while in the summer it loses what little current it possesses and although the willows drop cascades of feathery branches towards the water, they find there no answering loveliness, for the lack of current lets a green scum coat the top of the stream, and in midsummer an unpleasant odour arises from this stagnation which affronts a stranger crossing the bridge and disgusts the inhabitants.

With a little effort on the part of the town council, or the river authorities, March could be graced by a stream which might be her greatest beauty. As it is, she is not only disgraced by it, but often literally put out of countenance.

Architecturally the main buildings are not distinguished. The town hall is a sorry red-brick creation from which the bronze Britannia, who surmounts its tower, averts her eyes with certain justice. Opposite the town hall is the creeper-clad length of the Griffin Inn, one of the most comfortable and pleasant inns in England. Elsewhere, as I passed about the town, I came across glimpses of pleasant Queen Anne and Georgian houses, though March cannot rival its near neighbour Wisbech for eighteenth-century houses. March is growing and has its sporadic outbursts of new houses, but the real March clusters about the river where are the thatched roofs of the old cottages, and the blackened timbers of the Ship Inn, one of the oldest inns in Cambridgeshire.

At first I did not imagine that March had little to distinguish it from a hundred other small country towns. I was wrong. I had not been there long before I became aware that mixed among the ordinary people in the street was a surprising number of men in blue overalls, wearing black peaked caps and carrying dinner-pails. They were, I discovered, railwaymen.

March was, I was told with a great deal of pride, an important railway junction, and possessed the largest marshalling yard in Europe.

‘What,' I asked, ‘is a marshalling yard?'

The railway official I was speaking to winced and then said quietly: ‘Perhaps you had better come and see for yourself. It is rather difficult to explain in words to anyone who doesn't know much about railways.'

I rather resented the imputation that I knew nothing about railways. I covered my feelings and followed him. It was growing dusk when we came to the yards. Before me were what seemed to be miles and miles of railway lines, as though all the sidings in the country had gathered together for a conference. Here and there were strings of trucks, clanging behind panting engines; a searchlight poked its long finger through the dusk at us, and inside a square tower in the centre of the yards lights suddenly sprang into being.

‘Come with me,' I was told, and I followed, stumbling across the dim lines and climbed into the tower. The room at the top was walled with glass so that a view of the whole yards swept before me as I turned round. It reminded me of a ship's bridge and the inside of a signal box. There were shining levers, wheels, a loudspeaker that bellowed orders, and winking red and green lights. I listened while the mechanism was explained to me. I have not a mechanical mind. When my car goes wrong, if cleaning the plugs and tickling the carburettor does not remedy the trouble, I call in the garage man. The technical account which was given to me of the mechanism of the marshalling yard was remarkable for the recurrence of the words ‘automatic' and ‘Westinghouse brakes.'

You are still probably wondering what a marshalling yard is; or wondering why I am taking so much time to describe something which is common knowledge to everyone of intelligence. For the sake of the few who do not know, and in order to clarify my own information I will try to explain – but not in technical language.

Have you ever wondered how a truck of coal from Durham finally reaches a coal merchant's siding in Dorchester? I never had until I went to March. And it is March which is mainly responsible for the truck getting to Dorchester and not Doncaster. A goods train comes puffing down from Durham with trucks consigned to various towns. It reaches March and there the trucks, with hundreds of others, are shunted up on to a high embankment in ‘runs' of about fifty trucks. The end of the embankment slopes towards the yards and splits into a number of separate lines. Imagine your arm to be the high embankment with a railway line running along it towards your wrist and then imagine your fingers to be the duplication of that one line into many others. The truck from Durham for Dorchester runs down the arm, bumps across the points at the wrist, which are controlled by the men in the tower, and glides away down your little finger into the bay for all Dorchester trucks. Behind it is a truck for Bath which shoots down into your thumb, which is the bay for Bath traffic. And so the shunting goes on all day and all night at March, hundreds of trucks passing down the incline and into their respective bays. The bays are not always for separate towns. Sometimes they are for districts, like the West of England, or London; but all goods traffic coming from the North for the South passes through a sifting process at March. It is a keen railway brain that controls goods traffic. Loudspeakers boom instructions over the yards to the brake men (and sometimes send out unofficial information about the winner of the four-thirty), arc-lights pick out the thin weft of steel lines, signals clank up and down, and the passing furnace of an engine shows driver and stoker like a couple of unfortunates in a tiny hell of their own… Wherever you go in March you cannot escape the sound of hissing steam from locomotives and the distant clank of trucks, and after a time you forget the noise and are surprised when someone draws your attention to it.

I stood beside the controller in the tower; before him was a little map of the yard with red and green lights that twinkled as the running trucks passed over points. There was a crackling of atmospherics from the loudspeaker and a voice boomed out:

‘Ready to take the strawberry run, Dick?'

‘OK,' shouted the controller into his mouth-piece and, as he turned round, he saw the mystified look on my face. It was still winter almost and strawberries were a long way off.

‘Strawberries?' I asked.

He laughed. ‘Not real ones. You see we have nicknames for the regular loads that come in, and we always get a trainful of trucks about five each evening from the brickworks up Peterborough way. We call the bricks strawberries.'

As I left the tower the trucks of bricks were thundering down the incline, automatically being braked as they passed over the points, and then sliding away into the dusk where the waiting truck-men jump upon them as they pass and, sitting precariously on the long brake-handles, ride with them for a while braking the speed to prevent one truck from bumping too violently into its fellows in the bay.

I met an old friend in March, an old friend of many of us. I wonder how long it is since you have seen him? You may never see him again, and I shall always remember March for the pleasure it gave me in that meeting with the past.