Everyman's England (14 page)

If anyone still contends that man has not a good deal of the anthropoid in him he should witness such a scene. The dominant desire at such moments is to return to the trees for safety. The bathing boxes are few, and only the lucky ones find room in them during the mad scramble which follows the intrusion. Naked figures spring frantically into the rough cover of pollarded willows, others flatten themselves desperately behind tall tufts of grass, some imitate the armadillo and curl into inadequate balls, while a few with great presence of mind dive into the river and grant only their heads to the intruder. Some few lofty souls continue to read their books with grand imperturbability and mildly wonder, as they turn the pages, what all the fuss is about. Meanwhile, the unfortunate lady in the punt attempts to do the impossible, namely, to cover her eyes with her hands and negotiate her punt through the bathing place. The punt zigzags from side to side, ramming indignant bathers, shouts affront the summer air and a fine blush mantles all that is visible of the lady's face. The fiasco ends usually in the appearance of the attendant. There have been times when to restore peace to this Eden, the good lady has had to be expelled by a couple of swimmers getting behind her punt and pushing it before them. And still I do not know why it is called Parson's Pleasure.

Oxford has changed within the last fifty years. The town is acquiring a greater prominence and the University is now far from constituting its whole life. The colleges are being surrounded by a ring of ferro-concrete cinemas, office blocks and palatial garages. To the East industries are spreading, motor car works, press-steel factories and housing estates. Even the river is changing. Medley Weir is no more, and I expect the cannibal trout that once hung about the whirlpools below the weir have now gone to find other hunting grounds. Instead of swirling turbulently by the lock the river now flows quietly along, past the tall poplars and under the arched iron bridge which holds an oddity few other bridges can boast. The bridge at Medley was erected by public subscriptions, and to commemorate this fact there is placed, in the centre of its span, a plaque giving the date of its erection and an indication of the carelessness of the persons responsible for the casting of the plaque. The inscription states that the bridge was erected from ‘public subsriptions.' I wonder how that ‘c' came to be left out?

It was on Port Meadow, that wide stretch of river meadow that runs from Medley up the Thames as far as Godstow, with the Wytham heights to guard it on one side and the railway on the other, that I met the Professor. I called him the Professor to myself, for he did not offer his name, and there was something aloof and academical in his manner which forbade the urbanity of a formal enquiry.

He was standing on a raised part of the meadow watching the movements of a small herd of Shetland ponies. From under the brim of his felt hat a fringe of white hair escaped, and his face was folded and creased with loose skin that spoke of age. His eyes were young enough and he held himself very erect within his dark pepper-and-salt mixture suit.

I asked him if he knew whether the ponies had been quartered on the meadow by some circus.

‘I am afraid I do not know,' he said, and the depth and mellowness of his voice did not amaze me, for it was such a voice as I imagined he would have. From Shetland ponies the conversation went, in the way conversation does, to changing Oxford.

‘It has changed,' he admitted with a touch of sadness, ‘but I will not be so dogmatic as to say that it has changed for the worse. The men who are up now are very different from my day. There is not so much money about. I suppose that is the result of democracy in part and discretion in general. The town itself has changed, too, all these ugly new buildings and the constant traffic through the streets… It is, indeed, different from the days of horse trams and carriages. I can remember the first pneumatic-tyred bicycle in Saint Giles… Even this mound we stand upon has changed. Only a few years ago it was a corporation dump – now look at it.'

I did. It was a green, flat-topped hill from which I could catch glimpses of the river through the willows. The meadow ran away in a great desert of green, stippled with the shadows of cattle and dying into the blue haze of the distant hills. In winter it is often flooded and provides fine skating, now it was blooming into colour again with buttercups and speedwells. Behind rose the grey towers and steeples of the city, none of them so old as the meadow which had always been common land for the grazing of the cattle belonging to the freemen of the city.

‘There was a ditch,' the Professor went on, ‘around the bottom of the dump – it's filled in now – from which I have taken some very fine specimens of
Gasterosteus aculeatus
and various
Hirudinea
… sticklebacks and leeches, that is,' he explained easily, and I began to wonder just who he was. For some time he talked about fish. He was not only interested in them academically. He caught fish and he told me about the pike by the mill at Wolvercote and the roach to be found in a stream near Binsey, and then, since he seemed so well-informed, I asked him if he could enlighten me about the names in Oxford.

‘Why is the bathing place called Parson's Pleasure?' I asked. ‘I am unable to answer that question,' he replied. ‘It was so when I first came to Oxford many years ago. I was until my retirement a few years ago a college servant at Magdalen,' he added. And then, raising his hat, with the restrained gesture of a man of breeding, he walked away across the meadow, leaving me alone with the ponies and the murmur of the breeze from the river. I wondered, as I watched him go, whether he and his kind were perhaps the only people who got really at the heart of the true Oxford, who could hold the balance between Town and Gown and judge their merits impartially.

CHAPTER 15

The passion most people have for speed, that modern itch to go from one place to another so quickly that travelling demands all the concentration of a racing motorist, has saved Kent from disaster. Wide main roads have been flung across it to the sea. Yearly, thousands of cars tear across the county towards the coastal towns, and yearly thousands of men and women and children sit upon the beaches of Margate, Ramsgate and such towns, and gaze out to sea as though they resented the bar it has thrown across their wild speeding. Meanwhile Kent has begun to ignore this daily flow of traffic to and from the coast which does not touch the real county and only spoils the environs of the main roads.

Along any of the great roads that lead to the Kentish coast it is possible, after the outskirts of London have been left behind, to turn aside from the highway and in a few minutes find yourself in scenes of rural and unspoiled charm. At one moment you can, if your choice runs to that kind of pleasure, be sitting in the bright, tubular-furnitured confines of a modern roadhouse, and the next be ducking your head to avoid the centuries old, adze-marked beams of an inn that was serving drink long before the highway which sponsors the roadhouse existed. I have no doubt that the wooden furniture of these inns is often as uncomfortable as the geometrical absurdities of the roadhouse, but at least in the inn you can breathe without having the act recorded upon the arm of your chair. Wood, no matter what the modernists say, is a sensible, appropriate material for making furniture. Man has some feeling and respect for wood. Chromium plating needs neither man's affection nor his regard; it is completely satisfied with itself – and resents being sat upon.

Kent today is fighting to preserve its identity, and Kent knows how to fight. It has a heritage of struggle. In the thick forests of Anderida, which once covered the area now known as the Weald, the Britons played tag with the regiments of Claudius, and later made life so uncomfortable for the Danes that they were glad of the security of the Isle of Thanet. The Cinque Ports more than once gave men and ships to the navy when invasion was more a hard fact than a vague possibility. And Kent is still fighting to maintain its dignity, traditions, hospitality, beauties and humour.

I know few pleasures to equal the freedom of walking the downs along the old roads which lead to Canterbury. With a strong southerly wind blowing in from the channel and the cloud masses slipping across the sky like great Spanish galleons driven helplessly before a storm and with little of the marks of mankind to remind one of the present, it is not difficult to imagine the coloured company that once trooped along the old roads on their pilgrimage to the shrine at Canterbury. Below on the plain the trees and fields stand shrouded in a faint mist, and the pastures of the lower slopes change colour as the cloud shadows come and go, and in the valleys twist thin rivers, the haunt of heron, moorhen and otter.

It was in one of these valleys that I met with a typical example of Kentish humour. I was walking along the roadway by the river when, from ahead of me, I heard the sound of hammering. I came up with a labourer who was standing by a gateway. He turned as I stopped and I saw that he had just fixed to a tree a red and white notice, reading: BEWARE OF THE BULL.

I looked into the field. There was no bull there, though there were some bullocks cropping the grass.

‘And when is the bull going to be put in the field?' I asked.

He hesitated before replying, and I was conscious that he was examining me critically. I must have passed muster, for he said:

‘Der ain't goin' to be any bull.'

‘Then why the notice?'

Again he hesitated, then he grinned broadly and shook his head. ‘Well, it's like this. Der's a short cut across this li'l ole field to the road at the top. It's a public footpath, but master has got tired of folks from the town using it and forgetting to shut the gates after 'em, so that the li'l ole bullocks git out. I reckon this notice'll make 'em take the long way round in future!'

‘Except those who know the difference between a bull and a bullock and realise that there's nothing to fear in the field.'

He laughed and, lifting his cap with one hand, scratched the top of his head. ‘Folks that know that much ain't likely to leave gates open or trample down mowing-grass.'

His laughter followed me up the road, and I wondered how successful his dodge would be. Kent is like that – ready to welcome you if you treat it with respect, and readier to mislead you if you ignore its customs and affront good manners.

Every ‘Beware of a Bull' sign in Kent is not, of course, a fake, and it is advisable to treat them all with respect. If people persist in leaving gates open, or climbing them away from the hinge end and weakening them, or breaking through hedges and letting their dogs run wild through game preserves – then they must expect the consequences. Farmers in all counties are long-suffering folk and wonderfully patient. When they do become bad-tempered it lasts and it is unpleasant for someone. After all, a farm is a factory. Who would dream of walking through the Morris-Cowley motor car works, tampering with the machinery, opening the doors of drying ovens, and occasionally kicking over a pile of mudguards? Then why do we not treat the farmers' factories with the same respect? Remember, if you leave a gate open and let a ram from one field get into another full of ewes, you may have been the innocent cause of enough trouble to make all the difference between a farmer's profit and loss for the year, and perhaps for many years to come.

The show places of Kent are easy to find. Canterbury and Reculver, Sandwich and Maidstone, Chilham Castle and Romney Marsh (and remember it is pronounced Rumney)… these do not hide themselves away. Their beauties are worthy of the interest of the thousands who visit them. Yet Kent has other, not so well known, places of simpler charm. This little-known Kent is off the main roads, tucked away in little valleys and folds of the downs. Here you may discover beauties amid isolation which you might have imagined the twentieth century had banished from the earth.

I know a hamlet, within ten miles of Canterbury, which is four miles from an omnibus route and farther from a station, which has no main drainage or electric lighting, where no newsboy considers it worth his while to carry a morning paper, where it is only with great difficulty that a grocer is persuaded to make weekly deliveries, and where, because the local farms do not keep dairy cattle, the residents have to drink goat's milk. This may sound terrible to you; actually, there are few finer spots in the whole of England, and from what I know of the people there they are healthy and happy despite the goat's milk and lack of a paper.

If you want to find such places you must leave the main roads – and often abandon your car. The next time you are in Kent and tired of the pleasures of Canterbury and the coast, try to find this valley where time is a loosely observed convention and life a neighbourly affair. I will give you some clues to it, but not many, for I am, with others, jealous of my secret and do not intend to provide too easy a guide to beauty which is worth hunting for.

The valley is reached by turning off the main road that runs between Ashford and Canterbury, and the turning is close to an old country house where Jane Austen once spent some time. The valley itself lies off the edge of the downs that curve away to the South Foreland and is almost in the Weald. The road that runs down into the valley is rough and rutted and just wide enough for a car, though even with the smallest car the hazel boughs beat at the mudguards and the blood-red leaves of the dogwood flick at the windows. Along the crest of the valley stands a dark fir wood, brightened by patches of beech and sycamore. Wood pigeons and hawks nest in the tall trees and woodpeckers skirt around it, their colours vying with the occasional flash of jays' wings. At evening the hawks come sailing down from the tall firs to quarter the rough pastures and from the depths of the wood the dog fox barks.

In spring the ground is covered with bluebells and windflowers, and young rabbits scuttle for safety from under the spreading wood sage. Across the mouth of the valley stands a row of tall elms, forming a break against the north wind. Along the other ridge of the valley runs a series of shaves, as the natives call the spinneys and copses.

The fields, in spring and summer, are a wilderness of flowers, tall mulleins, primroses, centaury, rock roses, early orchis, prim yellow-worts and ox-eyed daisies, and the air is filled with the scent of thyme and marjoram clumps. Even in winter the valley has a sad, barren beauty that lingers in the mind.

And, as though to complete the natural beauty of the valley, there stands in its midst a sixteenth-century farmhouse. Its cream walls and dark framework of beams face the hills as they were facing them when De Ruyter sailed up the Medway in 1667 to destroy the shipping at Chatham. Even then the craftsmen who fashioned the wide rooms and carved the open fireplaces and cut the date 1595 over the porch way, were probably all dead. Under the barge boards of the gables and about the diamond-paned windows, some of which still retain their original horn glass, fly sparrows and starlings, and owls hunt through the huge barns at night. By the side of the house, and spreading half over it, is an enormous walnut tree which was no more than a sapling when Catharine Carter, the first tenant and probable builder of the house, had her initials carved over the doorway.

Kate Carter must have been a remarkable woman. She was an old lady when she went there to live. She wanted to be alone and have a house of her own where she could be truly mistress. So she gave up being the unconsidered dowager in a wealthy family and built herself what came to be known as ‘Kate's Folly.' And Kate's Folly stands today, though it carries a different name now, just as she built it, and it is said that at night in the large room in the front of the house, where the family crest is cut over the beam of the fireplace, she can be heard counting out her gold, piece by piece and sighing. Sighing, perhaps, that she was too old to enjoy the spending of it. Sighing, perhaps, because she was loved not for herself, but for her gold – sighing – who knows why?

Beyond the farmhouse there is no road up the valley, though against the hillside can be traced the mark of an old track. By the roadside on the hill above the valley is a dark church, hedged about by yews and beeches in which jackdaws and woodpeckers nest. It is a church which is far too large for the tiny village which it serves. If you go down into the village you will find good company at the
Man of Kent
and, maybe, get directions to find your way over into the valley and the old farmhouse. You may hear also the story of the beech which was blown over one stormy night outside the churchyard and of the skeleton which was found tangled in its roots.

The skeleton belonged to a murderer buried in unconsecrated ground outside the church. He had been the servant of the village rector, but his master's extreme meanness and cruelty had at last driven him to wild revenge. One night he murdered him and dropped his body down a well. Although I feel I should not, I cannot repress a certain sympathy for the murderer. If you find the village, please do not take any credence of the village sceptic's story that the skeleton was not that of a man but belonged to a sheep. There are always sceptics, even in the heart of Kent.

If you want to see the true Kent, find that valley. It will be difficult to find. The reward is worthy of the trouble. And even if you do not find the valley, in your wanderings you may come across another as beautiful.