The Day Gone By Page 8

  I can’t recall, after all these years, what this particular row was about: but my sister was so scathing that I felt driven to desperation. (At least Mr Punch, at the party, had not addressed me.) It was her final remark that marshalled me the way that I was going. It was something along the lines of ‘And everyone would be only too glad if you went away and stayed away.’

  I didn’t have any clear intention of doing that, but I did feel, vaguely, that I wanted to go away and be alone, in solitude, for a good, long time; somewhere where I wouldn’t be found. I went down through the paddock and out of the gate into Monkey Lane. Along the lane I walked - it was an empty country lane in those days - and along the next lane (Pinchington Lane) to the west side of Greenham Common. Then I set off across the Common itself.

  I remember it was hot but overcast. There was distant thunder about. The meadow browns and cinnabars were perched on the heather and the grasshoppers were zipping. I went on with a feeling of abandonment — of having taken a step further than I knew what to do with. I had no idea what the outcome of this escapade was going to be. I had never done anything like this before; but I was in such a state that I didn’t care. I had let go. I simply wanted to go on walking across the expanse of the Common, where you could actually see that there was nobody you were going to meet; where you really were alone. Walking was comforting, too: better than hiding would have been, or even smashing a window (a deed I sometimes used to have recourse to when in a temper). The walking soothed my frustration and feeling of grievance. I wasn’t hiding: I was doing something.

  All that afternoon I walked on across the Common. In the middle there was a lonely cottage, known as ‘Noah’s Ark’. I came to Noah’s Ark and passed it. I felt safe enough in the sense that I didn’t feel myself in any danger, but I also felt a little scared, like a child who has ventured into the deep end for the first time. Yet the surroundings were empty and peaceful as could be, and the solitude went on suiting me. Anyway, there was nothing much to do but go on, unless I sat down, to which I didn’t feel disposed.

  At last I came to the further, eastern edge of the Common. I can’t recall, now, exactly how far I got, but I suppose it must have been somewhere on the outskirts of Brimpton. This surprises me now, for I have the map in front of me and from my home the whole distance is certainly over five miles. It was as the Common came to an end that my strange fit - to which it had, of course, formed the setting - came to an end also. Here were houses and people again - the normal world, even though far from home. What should I do now? It was borne in upon me that there was no course - no course at all - open to me but simply to go back. This, as I have since learned over and over, is the only termination to any loss of self-control.

  I turned and began tramping back, but I was tired out. My pace across the Common became slower and slower. I had a strong notion, now, that I wouldn’t be up to walking the whole way.

  And then an odd and lucky chance occurred. I had been vaguely aware, for some little time, of two boys on bicycles passing me, coming back and re-passing, but apart from noticing that they were a little older than myself, I had been too tired and preoccupied to give them any close attention. Finally, however, with a grating of boots on the road, they stopped beside me and asked me where I was going. When I told them that I was walking the length of the Common and further, they were, of course, surprised. ‘Cor, that’s a bit of a way,’ said one of them; but they didn’t ask any more questions. Then, friendlily enough, the older one suggested that he should give me a lift on the bar of his bicycle.

  I was only too ready. The bar was hard and uncomfortable, and with me perched in front of him the boy was horribly slow and wobbly. But we got along - perhaps as much as a mile and a half. I can’t remember what we talked about, except that I asked them whether they were brothers and they said no. They weren’t in the least inquisitive about what I was doing or why I was walking so far alone. They maintained a kind of detached sociability, as though they felt they might as well give me a lift as pass the time in any other way.

  They took me as far as Noah’s Ark. In spite of the wobbliness and the bar pressing into my not-very-well-covered buttocks, I would have liked to ask them to go further, but felt I couldn’t decently do so. They dropped me. I thanked them and they set off back, in the summer twilight, towards Brimpton.

  I plodded on and eventually got back home dead beat. Well, like the business at Mr Punch’s party, it had worked all right. Everyone was in a fine old taking, my mother and my sister close to tears and my father half-minded to alert the police. I had been away four or five hours, if not more. They were too much relieved to scold me. I gave my mother my version of my quarrel with my sister, said I felt better now and not cross any more; had a bath and went to bed. But for several years afterwards my sister and I were never easy together on Greenham Common. She must have suffered a great deal of worry and apprehension that afternoon, and I don’t really know that she deserved it. I have often felt, since, that it was a pity that this exploit did work. It would have been better if I had been blamed and punished, for as things turned out they only served to confirm the fancy-dress party behaviour pattern. The best I can plead is that my sister had been exceptionally contemptuous and cutting. My over-reaction, however, had been a general surprise, and not least to me.

  The Enborne brook, two miles or so east of the ruined Falkland mill, winds along the southern edge of what used to be Greenham Common - or below it. There were woods and copses all along the left bank, and one of these was known in our family as ‘Miss Tull’s Wood’. I don’t really know who Miss Tull was, but one of my father’s patients - and later, a good friend to me - was Mr Bertie Tull, a wealthy landowner with a big house on the northern side of the Common; so I suppose there was some connection. Miss Tull’s Wood was the place for primroses. We used to go there with my father in the car - bringing a picnic if the day was warm enough - down the rather steep and narrow lane leading off the Common to the ford. (There were several fords along the length of the Enborne then, and fewer bridges.) The wood was full of primroses. A hundred people could have picked them for an hour and there would still have been masses. We would pick a flat basketful, so that the top was a cushion of primroses packed tight, and then dip the bottom in the shallow river to keep them fresh. I can remember pressing my face into them. Today, their cool softness and scent always recall Miss Tull’s Wood. When we were tired of picking primroses we would sit on the bank and watch the stream go by.

  One April afternoon my sister and I had been sitting silent and more or less motionless for some time, when from the field beyond a rabbit came loping up to the opposite bank of the river and without hesitation, as though it were in the habit of it, plunged in and swam across, shook itself and disappeared along our bank downstream. I know that all wild animals can swim if they’re put to it, but I have never since seen a rabbit swimming.

  One day in June, when I was about five or six, my father took me out in the car, through Newbury and westward along the Bath Road -Jane Austen’s Bath Road (the A4). There wasn’t a great deal of traffic in those days of the ‘twenties. It must be borne in mind, too, how much slower cars went and how relatively limited their range was. My father seldom drove much over thirty m.p.h., and when, later, my sister drove at forty, it seemed frighteningly fast. From our Newbury home, Winchester, Pangbourne or Reading were virtually our limit: never London.

  Along the Bath Road we went, a matter of a good five miles. Here there is a pub. called The Halfway (halfway between Newbury and Hungerford), and opposite the pub. a little lane. This lane runs for perhaps three or four hundred yards between hedges covered with honeysuckle and dog rose, and at its foot lies the broad Kennet, spanned by a plank footbridge. We had come to what is still known as The Wilderness.

  The reaction of a simple creature - or a child - on first seeing a true river has already been unforgettably expressed by Kenneth Grahame at the opening of The Wind in the Willows. I certainly felt everything that
the Mole felt and was carried away with delight as I held my father’s hand across the plank bridge. What Kenneth Grahame’s description doesn’t include, however, is any birds or animals (except, of course, the Water Rat). As we stepped off the plank bridge and began strolling up the right bank, almost the first thing I saw was a kingfisher flying past us fast and low on the other side of the river.

  This certainly was - and still is - a true wilderness, of a kind almost as different from Greenham Common as the Amazon from the Oklahoma plains. All along its course, from Marlborough to Reading, the Kennet flows in several beds and has innumerable side-streams and carriers. In places the valley is the best part of half a mile wide. But nowhere, I think, is it wider than in the Wilderness between Halfway and Kintbury, which is a mile long and perhaps 600 yards broad. It is thick woodland, virtually pathless, and marshy at all times of the year; the haunt of herons, grebes, water rails, teal, shelduck in season, spotted woodpeckers, reed warblers and grasshopper warblers. Otters there certainly were, but there wasn’t much chance of coming on one, for it is simply not practicable to penetrate or wander about in that dense, boggy place.

  I was still too little to do much in the way of specialized bird-watching, though I enjoyed seeing the moorhens, coots and swans on the open water. What struck me most forcibly on that first visit - the first of many - was watching the trout rising to the mayfly: and I’m pretty certain that that was what my father had brought me down to see. I saw my first trout for myself, without prompting. It was close in under the bank that we were walking up, and I had hardly noticed it before it startled and shot away into deep water.

  My father pointed silently to a hawthorn bush overhanging the opposite bank of the river. I watched for perhaps half a minute, and was beginning to wonder what I was supposed to be looking at when the surface was broken, with a kind of unhurried intentness, by a rising trout. I saw the rings go radiating outwards and the whole circle of the rise float downstream until, diminishing little by little, it died away on the flow.

  ‘Isn’t he a splendid chap?’ said my father. ‘He’ll do it again in a minute, I expect.’

  He did, and this time I watched the mayfly drifting down on the surface, and anticipated the moment when the trout would rise to gulp it down. We remained sitting on the bank for perhaps ten minutes or more, and I found a point of vantage from which I could actually see the trout beneath the water, veering from side to side with flickering of its tail, sometimes allowing itself to be carried down a few feet before recovering its old position, yet always on the watch for the next mayfly. When it rose I could see the dark spots along its side, and once the dorsal fin broke surface as it turned to follow a fly a couple of feet downstream before taking it.

  There were other footbridges - a bit out of repair and precarious, some of them — and on these we stood and looked down into the weed and the bed of the stream. My father showed me the difference between a grayling and a trout, and I learnt to recognize the chequered pattern of the grayling’s high, long-based dorsal fin and the characteristic look of a grayling rise, different from that of a trout — or of a chub, for that matter. I remember I had a little, white, two-bladed penknife which someone had recently given me, and that while standing on one of the bridges I unluckily happened to drop it into the river. It must be down there still.

  We took to going to the Halfway Wilderness quite often, for my father, though not himself a particularly keen fisherman (I expect he could have fished it if he had wanted to), saw that I was elated by the river and wished for nothing better than to walk the mile up its length to Wawcott and back on a sunny afternoon. One hot, still evening of high summer, we came upon a fisherman throwing a fly. This turned out to be a friend of my father, a celebrated fisherman named Dr Mottram. I watched fascinated as he splashlessly shot the light, delicate line and leader straight out to what seemed to me an incredible distance, let them drift down, recovered and re-cast. My father showed me the best place to stand when someone is casting - just behind his left shoulder. While we were there Dr Mottram rose, played and landed a trout, which he insisted on giving to us. He showed me how to pass reeds through the gills and carry it by them.

  ‘Is he a very good fisherman?’ I asked my father, as we went on.

  ‘Dr Mottram?’ he replied. ‘He’d catch a fish where no fish was.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Not really?’

  ‘No; but you see, the thing is to find a fish and induce him to rise.’

  Well, he induced me to rise all right. From that time on I knew I wanted to be a fly fisherman and bring home trout for supper.

  But if I had lost my heart to the Kennet, with its great reed maces, its crowfoot and arrowhead and yellow water lilies (brandy-bottles) in the still pools, I still had another one to lose to the Downs. There are two ranges of Downs, one on each side of the Berkshire-North Hampshire area, the Kennet and Enborne valleys: the northerly, White Horse downs, which run westward from Streatley, south of Harwell and Wantage and on to Astbury and Liddington; and the southerly, Basingstoke-Winchester downs. It was to these latter that I always went with my father; or sometimes all five of the family would go. I can’t remember ever to have done anything - anything at all - more delightful than walking on the crest of the downs, looking away into the purple, heat-rimmed edge of the horizon.

  The downs, like Greenham Common, were a different country: different soil, grass, flowers, birds, and the land put to a different use. In those days, before the coming of the tractor, they were still mainly a place to graze sheep and train race-horses. Hardly anybody used to go up there except the shepherds, the race-horse trainers and their lads. The sunlight, the breeze and the stillness seemed intensified rather than interrupted by a grazing flock. Leisurely and unhurriedly they moved on across the grass, and every now and then would come the unresonant, cloppering tinkle of the bell round the neck of the bell-wether - the true sound of the downs on a hot afternoon - intermittent and unaltering as bird-song. Once, I remember, a shepherd greeted my father, ‘’Aft’noon, Doctor,’ and then, after a few exchanges, rather tentatively, ‘D’you like t’ave a look at this ‘ere arm o’ mine? ’E don’t seem just right yet.’ My father did so. I was well aware of standing orders - never show curiosity about patients or try to overhear consultations - and went to find another interest some way off.

  God knows there were enough. The chalk itself always attracted me. The topsoil was shallow and friable, and the chalk subsoil was always breaking through, with or without the help of rabbits. You really could write - on a beech tree, for instance - with a lump of this chalk, although it was more scratchy than the sticks of chalk you bought in shops. Sometimes, though rarely, you might come upon a ‘shepherd’s crown’; a fossil sea-urchin. I still have three of these from those days long ago. One is a real beauty: about two and a half inches in diameter and an inch and a quarter thick; regularly shaped liked a heart, with the five lines of tubes clearly marked on top, as is the vent on the bottom. I. O. Evans, in The Observer’s Book of British Geology, says of these, ‘In the Chalk, they are so plentiful as to have been given folk names; the peasantry call the more pointed sea-urchins “shepherds’ crowns” or ‘‘shepherds’ mitres”, and the flatter, broader type, shaped like a playing-card heart, “fairy hearts” or “fairy loaves”.’

  I soon found out that the chalk had its own flowers. The most beautiful were the wild orchids, which still bloom on the northward slope of Cottington’s Hill almost as though in a terraced garden bed. Lady’s slipper, too, flowered everywhere, as did the purple thyme. In season the cowslips grew thickly. I don’t know anything nicer in the way of wild flowers than a big bunch of cowslips, and I rather think Shakespeare was of the same opinion, e.g., A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II, 1, lines 10-16.

  ‘The cowslips tall her pensioners be

  In their gold coats spots you see:

  Those be rubies, fairy favours:

  In those freckles live their savours:

&nb
sp; I must go seek some dewdrops here,

  And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’

  Another flower I liked was the salad burnet. Since it was called the salad burnet I used to eat the leaves, supposing that you were meant to; but I’ve never really taken to them. They taste oily and rather hot. Milkwort there was, the flowers of which can vary with the soil from pure blue to almost white: and wild gentians, yellow wort, horseshoe vetch, dropwort, scabious, yellow rockrose and the beautiful purple-pink sainfoin: and everywhere, of course, the ragwort, covered with the yellow-and-black caterpillars of the cinnabar moth.

  Downland woods, too, were different from those in the vale below. The beech hangers of the downs - dry, open-growing and airy, with no grass underfoot and the sunlight falling dappled and quick-moving through the patulous leaves - were quite unlike the damp Bluebell Wood, or the Sandleford copses of oak and hawthorn. The smooth-trunked, grey beeches, so thick about and standing so wide apart, pleased me simply by their huge size, even though they were no good for climbing. (You couldn’t scramble up into them.)