“It would be as well.”
“Thank you, miss.”
Then she said it. Partly on impulse, partly out of curiosity to learn more about the subject.
“I think I shall come and see your farm, Mr Wilson.”
She went the next week.
There were many hedgerows on the high ground above the valleys-huge, untidy hedgerows, six, seven feet high or more, sometimes loaded with great tangles of ripe blackberries, bristling with nuts, elderberries, sloes – a storehouse which even the intense occupation of mice, red squirrels and visiting birds could never completely plunder. There were hedgerows enclosing fields around old Sarum and over the high ground far beyond.
She rode out over the plain, taking the old turnpike road.
The main roads were covered with tarmacadam now. But once off these, they were still often no more than dusty lanes or mere tracks and it was not long before she was passing along these more primitive, rutted ways. Then, leaving the world of close hedgerows she came out onto the bare, empty waste, and rode on, quite alone, for nearly an hour, until, coming over a ridge she saw in a dip below her the village she was looking for.
So this was Jethro Wilson’s Winterbourne. She had not been there before, but it was just as she had imagined it probably was. There were dozens of villages in Wessex with that evocative Saxon name. The stream that flows in winter, the winter bourne. Nearly always they collected an extra name, to distinguish them from their neighbours: but for Jane Shockley, this one of many such places was always to be just Winterbourne.
It lay on the very edge of the high ground, in a dip. On each side of its single little street, a line of cottages, with a mixture of brick, stone and plaster walls, and mostly thatched. There was a small stone church without a tower. Behind the houses, small fields with hedgerows extended a little way up the slope. There were two yew trees in the churchyard, a little windbreak of trees on the church’s northern side. And all around, the bareness of the chalk ridges, where the sheep were grazing.
The windswept ridges and their sheep: there were half a million sheep on Salisbury Plain.
She rode slowly down the slope and into the village street.
It was very quiet. It was as if the great harsh light of the open spaces above had been carried by the wind itself so that, in the dip where the village lay, it had been softened, filtered.
The children in the street were mostly barefoot; from their doorways, their mothers watched her curiously. It was possibly years, she realised, since this deserted hamlet on the edge of the empty plain had seen a lady riding side-saddle pass along their dusty street.
The thatched cottages, she noticed, each bore the same little decoration – a thatch pheasant, set perkily near one end, staring to the south west. This was the thatcher’s mark, his signature, and would appear in each of the villages he visited to do his wonderful work.
But the most important feature of the place lay on her left: the bourne.
It was empty. Dry as a bone. Strands of straw, twigs, husks from nut-filled hedgerows, stinging nettles and dockleaves were all the small trench contained. From the roadway, over this ditch, three little wooden bridges led to the path that passed along the front of the cottages on the left.
It had been dry all summer, for such is the nature of the winter bourne. But when the November rains began to fall upon the high ground, when snow and ice covered the rolling ridges and then the great thaws of spring set in, then the waters would descend, sometimes a steady stream, sometimes a deluge, cascading off the uplands, down slopes, down grassy ravine and chalky gulch: the waters would descend off the great bare spaces and flow joyously, carrying all before them, into the channels of the winter bourne. For six months of the year the quiet, deserted hamlet would quiver into renewed life beside its briskly running stream.
This was the ancient magic of the winter bournes round the edge of Salisbury Plain.
A child directed her to Jethro Wilson’s farm, which lay up a small track, two hundred yards from the main street. The track was overgrown and rutted; her horse picked her way up it gingerly.
“I have come to see Mr Wilson.” Why did she suddenly feel awkward?
“He’ll be back presently.” There was no invitation to enter. Obviously this was the old woman who kept the place, a thin, hard-faced, sharp-eyed creature in a red and purple shawl. She gave Jane a strange, measuring look before closing the side door.
It was – it had once been – a typical farmhouse with a low fence of wooden railings, once painted white, across the front. A narrow path led thirty feet from the little gate to the front door, hardly ever used except for a wedding or a funeral. There was a room with a window each side of the door, and three smaller windows above. On the left hand side, a wing went back another thirty feet, in which a door and a motley collection of small windows seemed to have been set at random. The walls were brick and stone. Behind the wing was a once splendid addition enclosing the vegetable garden: a long chalk wall. They were one of her favourite features of the region, these chalk walls. Quarried from the sides of ridges, solid white chalk, cut into huge blocks and stacked, two feet thick, seven or eight feet high, soft to the touch, and surmounted by a coping of thatch that jutted out with an overhang of up to a foot, to protect the soft sides from the weathering of continuous rainwater.
It could have been a fine place. But it was not.
Jethro Wilson’s farm was utterly desolate.
The paint was peeling from the window frames and the paths around were overgrown; the thatch, turned grey with age, was falling slowly apart; the two thatch pheasants that had once stood proudly on the roof of the house and on the top of the chalk were now nothing more than broken frames. She sighed. Nothing was sadder than a run-down farm.
Yet when he appeared a few minutes later, Jethro seemed in good spirits. His shirt was open at the neck and he had a day’s growth of beard; but as he came to her side, the place seemed to take on a more hopeful aspect.
He motioned towards the farmhouse, a little ruefully.
“A lot to do, miss.”
“Yes.”
“Do you Want to see round?”
She did.
He took her into the walled garden first. There were two damson trees and an old mulberry, whose soft fruit had been gathered in a basket. There was also a pear tree but it seemed to be dying. There were potatoes and carrots.
“If you don’t repair the thatch on that wall, the chalk will wear away. Worse, the water will seep inside and then crack the wall when it freezes.”
He nodded. “Have to mend the house too.”
“Can you do it?”
He shrugged.
“I dunno, miss.”
“Show me the rest,” she ordered.
It was a pitiful farm, though there were many others like it. His sheep were out on the ridge above and they walked slowly up there together. She inspected them.
“All Southdowns? No Hampshires?”
“They’re less trouble.”
“And they give less in return too,” she said briskly.
In the last few years, a great change had taken place in the vast population of sheep above Sarum, and Jane knew all about it. The hornless Southdowns which had replaced the old long-horned Wiltshire stock in the last century were now being replaced themselves with another, even more productive breed, the Hampshires.
The Hampshires produced lambs which fattened earlier: they gave a better return; but they were, as Jethro said, more trouble, and certainly more expense, to feed.
“I don’t like hurdle sheep,” he added. “Have to feed them root crops in a field instead of just turning them loose on the downs like a grass sheep.”
“Even so, all the best farmers are changing to Hampshires,” she reminded him.
He did not seem to be very impressed, but strode on before turning.
“I can’t afford the investment,” he said quietly.
It was very likely true.
“But what about the agricultural societies?” she suggested. “Can they help? And what about your landlord?”
Many farmers had found the machinery and investment needed in the new age too much for their individual purses; but for more than a generation now, clubs had been formed of small farmers who banded together to buy machinery and make capital investments. In a similar spirit, Mr Rawlence had recently set up a loan company for improving landlords.
“Landlord’s an old man. Won’t spend anything,” Jethro replied. “As for the societies,” he gestured towards the little hamlet and the bare downs above: “we’re cut off here, you see.” She noticed that when he said it, there was a faint glint of satisfaction in his eye, and she understood. There were many in those quiet, desolate regions, miles away from the bustle of the city and its market, who had no longing for change.
They began to walk down the slope again.
“Have you any relations who could help?” she asked.
He laughed softly.
“Relations? I’ve relations over the five rivers. Hundreds of them – down south to Christchurch, and north to Swindon, I’spect. Hundreds of us Wilsons.” He gave her a slow smile. “I don’t know them; they don’t know me. It’s that sort of family.” She nodded. She thought she could see them: fishermen, small farmers, quiet people who had lived in the area since who knew when. “The ones down at Christchurch are smugglers, so they say.” He chuckled. “More money in that.”
“No doubt.”
Away from the city, on his own ground, where he seemed to move with such ease, there was something strangely attractive about his tall, strong figure and his gentle, half-mocking humour.
It was just before they reached the farmhouse again that he remarked:
“Over there,” he pointed to an overgrown area along the edge of an old ditch, “is where you can find pigs.”
“Pigs?”
He grinned.
“Hedgehogs. They call them pigs up here.” He moved over to the brambles and showed her the ground, which was a mass of roots and fallen leaves. “You follow along here. Then you break down the ground and you find them.”
“How do you know where to look?”
“You know. Sometimes,” he said simply. “They taste better’n rabbits; that’s what all the folk up here say.”
She had never thought of such a thing before. How strangely simple, how primitive it was: harsh nature at the edge of the chalk ridges as it had been, she supposed, for thousands of years. A world on her very own doorstep that she had sometimes ridden past, but never known.
“I fear we don’t know much about hedgehog hunting in the close,” she said wryly.
“No.”
He was observing her quietly: she was aware of it. And how strange it was, she thought, that here in this poor hamlet, on the edge of the open wilderness, this half-reformed drunkard farmer with his simple life should make her feel uncomfortably as if he knew something about her that she did not know herself. He said nothing: he remained inscrutable and distant.
“I don’t drink now,” he said gently.
“That is good.” She smiled. “Thank you for letting me see your farm.”
“Will you come in, miss?”
“Thank you, no. I must return.”
He conducted her to her horse, and with an ease she found almost disconcerting, he stooped, offered his hand for her to rest her foot upon and then lifted her coolly into the saddle.
His side whiskers, she noticed as she was lifted, were a little longer and there was a hint of grey in them that, if he had not been little more than a peasant, would, she thought, have made him look distinguished.
She turned her horse, and began to move away.
It was only as she turned to look back at him, where he was still standing, that she noticed the figure of an old woman, standing by the back door, gazing after her with a kind of scorn.
She rode slowly, meditatively back over the high ground. In the distance there was a line of smoke, and a faint red glow along the ground of fire, where some farmer was burning the stubble rather late.
Jethro Wilson’s children were with a good Methodist farmer at the village of Barford St Martin by Grovely Wood. They gave little trouble, Mason reported, except that sometimes they were rather wild, “and absolute pagans, you know, Miss Shockley. Pagans.” He would shake his large round head. But the money for their keep came regularly from Jethro and the system seemed to be working well.
In the month of November, she almost forgot him; for Uncle Stephen had one of his afflictions – namely a heavy cold which, he assured her, might at any time develop into pneumonia. Even the doctor expressed mild concern on one occasion, so it was necessary for her to be with him continuously when she was not teaching. But by the start of December, both the doctor and her uncle could at last agree that he was recovered.
It was at the start of December that she met Daniel Mason by the entrance to the close.