Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Shropshire, then, already carried numerous romantic and historical associations when Housman wrote about it, and its apparent mystery was partly the result of it being comparatively unknown and unvisited, far removed from such large cities as London, Birmingham or Manchester. This isolation would begin to change at around the time Housman published his book, when Church Stretton attracted the attention of property speculators who wanted to develop the small town of around 1000 inhabitants into a spa comparable with Cheltenham or Malvern. The town was beautifully situated among what had become known as ‘The English Highlands’ or ‘Little Switzerland’ – sobriquets that were something of an exaggeration, since ranges in the Lake District and the Pennines are far loftier. Looking out of your window as you pass through this area on the road or railway line that both run along the valley, you see The Long Mynd to the west and The Lawley, Caer Caradoc and Ragleth Hill to the east. These are certainly dramatic, but they are given an intimate, human scale by the gentler and greener folds of land amongst which they rise and, as a Victorian guidebook stated, do ‘not offer any very arduous task to the ordinary mountaineer’. Indeed, although the hills had a ‘reputation for being somewhat dangerous at times in consequence of fogs and the precipitous character of the passes’, they tended to attract energetic walkers rather than people equipped with ropes and crampons.

  Hitherto, the attractions of the area were deemed to appeal ‘principally to the geologist’, although anyone interested in Britain’s ancient history would find plenty to explore, since Church Stretton is situated on Watling Street and the surrounding area is rich in ancient camps and earthworks, while The Port Way, which stretches the length of The Long Mynd, is an ancient track supposedly used by Neolithic traders. The town itself was also well known for its mineral water: the Church Stretton Aerated Water Company was founded in 1881 as ‘sole lessees of the Long Mynd Spring, the purest water in England’. This small local enterprise was soon overtaken by the Stretton Hills Mineral Water Company, which opened a factory beside the Cwm Dale Spring on the town’s outskirts in 1883. The combination of mineral water and clean air was touted as successful in ‘the treatment of neurasthenia, for the baneful effects of influenza, for sleeplessness, for delicate children, for convalescence after illness, for anaemia and general debility, for some forms of gout and rheumatism, for chronic bronchitis, for catarrh, for weak digestion, sluggishness of the liver, obesity and for the most elderly and semi-invalid people’. Developers began promoting Church Stretton as a health resort and building villas to attract summer visitors. A ‘Hydropathic Hotel’ was opened, but although railway connections had improved significantly when the line between Hereford and Shrewsbury became part of a main line connecting Wales and the north of England (which also meant that the journey there from London took only four and a half hours), the ambitious plans of the developers were unfulfilled, and this part of Shropshire remained largely unspoilt.

  Making the steep and rough ascent from Carding Mill Valley alongside a small stream, you reach The Port Way via Dr Mott’s Road, which is in reality an old path which a local physician paid to have improved in the mid-nineteenth century in order to be able to visit the more remotely situated of his rural patients. A track branching up and off The Port Way, with expanses of heather and bracken growing out of an almost black peaty soil to either side, leads to Pole Bank, which at 1696 feet above sea level is the highest point on The Long Mynd. From here, in every direction, you can see far beyond the immediate and neighbouring hills to such distant ranges as the Malverns and the Brecon Beacons. If you manage to hit that lucky moment when the tourist season has ended but the autumn weather is still holding fine, it is possible to find yourself as solitary as Housman liked to be on his own long walks. The land stretches away across this beautifully stark moorland plateau in all directions and the wind snatches at your Ordnance Survey map as you try to identify the coloured counties and innumerable landmarks that surround you. A distant vehicle might be making its way along the metalled but still treacherous Burway, and among clumps of bright yellow gorse small groups of sheep may be cropping the sparse and springy turf, but otherwise you are exhilaratingly alone in this vast expanse of hill and sky. To find yourself up here, so far removed from your fellow humans, so small and insignificant as the heavens and earth wheel around you, is both thrilling and sobering. You get a sense of how unyielding and inhospitable this ancient landscape would be in the depths of winter, with the colour leached out of the sky and not even a flicker of the sharp October sun that now intermittently flashes out from behind the clouds. This is the chill and brooding hillscape Housman writes about in his poem about the approach of the last fair of the year at Church Stretton:

  In midnights of November,

  When Dead Man’s Fair is nigh,

  And danger in the valley,

  And anger in the sky,

  Around the huddling homesteads

  The leafless timber roars,

  And the dead call the dying

  And finger at the doors.

  This traditional fair got its name from the number of people who perished while attempting to fumble their drunken way home across these forbidding hills, with their deep valleys and ravines, in the dark nights of winter.

  ‘Nature meant me for a geographer,’ Housman once wrote, but much of the topographical knowledge he possessed about Shropshire was derived not from personal observation but from what he had been told about the county while out walking with W.H. Eyre during his Patent Office days. Describing Shropshire in 1934 to his young American admirer Houston Martin, Housman referred to ‘the southern half of the county, to which I have confined myself’, and this is the region that Eyre had walked and knew well. It is also notable that this southern part of Shropshire is largely rural, an England that seemed then, and seems now, unchanging. It was a very different picture if one travelled north-east from the sheep-scattered uplands of the South Shropshire Hills to Ironbridge Gorge, which is often referred to as the crucible of the Industrial Revolution. It was here that fossil fuels mined in nearby Coalbrookdale fired the furnaces in which iron ore was smelted. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a ‘major visitor attraction’, the region was not recommended to the Victorian tourist: ‘The greater part of the district between Coalbrook Dale and Wellington [some six miles to the north] is occupied by furnaces, forges, collieries, and brick-yards, brilliant enough at night-time, but black, dirty, and dusty in the day,’ an 1870 guidebook warned. ‘An additional feature of dreariness is caused by the dismantled colliery-stacks and engine-houses.’ This, both geographically and spiritually, is a long way from the ‘smooth green miles of turf’ that characterise Housman Country to the south.

  The kind of local knowledge that Housman gained from Eyre was supplemented with details he found in Murray’s Handbook for Shropshire and Cheshire (1879). It is here that he came upon what he called the ‘traditional’ quatrain (described in the guide as ‘a popular doggerel’) that prefaces ‘In valleys of springs of rivers’ (L). He wrote marginal notes in his own copy of the book, and perhaps the most striking example of the way this guide inspired his poetry is in the clear derivation of the famous concluding lines of ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’ (XXXI): ‘To-day the Roman and his troubles / Are ashes under Uricon’ more or less paraphrases the guidebook’s reference to ‘the Saxon and English Wrekin, in which the name of Vr-ikon, “City of Iconium”, whose ashes smoulder beneath its slopes, is virtually enshrined’. It was also from this guidebook that Housman got information about the Dead Man’s Fair at Church Stretton and the name Hell Gate (given to one of the entrances to some ancient British earthworks on the Wrekin), which he borrowed for the title of the long allegorical poem that so struck E.M. Forster.

  To the authors of Murray’s Handbook Shropshire seemed ideally representative of English life and landscape. ‘There is so much variety in Salop that it may be considered an epitome of England,’ they wrote. This variety could best be appreciated fr
om the summit of the Wrekin, which although rising a mere 1320 feet above sea level,

  is conspicuous far and wide, and forms an unmistakeable landmark in every phase of Shropshire scenery […] The view is remarkable, beautiful, embracing the whole of Shropshire, the ranges of Church Stretton, the Longmynd, and the Stiper Stones, the Welsh mountains, in which the Breiddens, the Berwyns, and in the far distance Snowdon, are conspicuous, the hills of N.E. Cheshire and Derbyshire, the heights of Cannock Chase, the Clent and Rowley Hills, Titterstone Clee and the Malverns, while within the radius is a wonderful panorama of Black country and Shropshire hedgerows – towns, villages, churches, ironworks, mansions, rivers, and railways.

  Housman, however, was not looking out across Shropshire from within the county; he was instead viewing its distant hills from the Worcestershire of his youth. The direction of his gaze is altogether different, and direction is all-important as far as the poems are concerned.

  Housman may have told Maurice Pollet that he had a ‘sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were our western horizon’, but he was perhaps more accurate when he told Houston Martin: ‘Shropshire was our western horizon, which made me feel romantic about it.’ There is only a word’s difference, but Housman’s romanticism rarely sank to sentimentalism. Kate Symons recorded that one of the pleasures of her brother’s early years ‘was to reach some point where he could see extensive views’: ‘Mount Pisgah’ provided the ideal vantage point for him ‘to gaze on the sunset lands of Shropshire’. For someone of Housman’s temperament, a western horizon had more affecting associations than an eastern one, for it is indeed where the sun sets and the day dies amid regrets for time lost and things done badly or not at all. The contrast between this and the more hopeful eastern horizon, from which the sun rises and each new day seems charged with possibilities, is made clear in one of the earliest of Housman’s mature poems, which was written between 1886 and 1890 but remained unpublished during his lifetime:

  How clear, how lovely bright,

  How beautiful to sight

  Those beams of morning play,

  How heaven laughs out with glee

  Where, like a bird set free,

  Up from the eastern sea

  Soars the delightful day.

  To-day I shall be strong,

  No more shall yield to wrong,

  Shall squander life no more;

  Days lost, I know not how,

  I shall retrieve them now;

  Now I shall keep the vow

  I never kept before.

  —Ensanguining the skies

  How heavily it dies

  Into the west away;

  Past touch and sight and sound,

  Not further to be found,

  How hopeless under ground

  Falls the remorseful day.

  If there is sentimentality here, it is deliberate and strategically placed in the first stanza, which bubbles with an optimism proved false by the stock images Housman employs. We somehow know that the self-reforming zeal of the second stanza will last no longer than the life of a mayfly, and the poem’s final lines beautifully embody and perform the dying fall of eternal disappointment: hopes and resolutions sink irretrievably with the sun beyond the horizon. The stoical Housman can withstand this, but he does not recommend it to others, and in the very first of his Last Poems warns:

  Comrade, look not on the west:

  ’Twill have the heart out of your breast;

  ’Twill take your thoughts and sink them far,

  Leagues beyond the sunset bar.

  The first poem of A Shropshire Lad that Housman wrote (XL) is also about something lost and out of reach, both geographically and emotionally. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, Shropshire is the coldest of all the English counties, and this makes the first two lines of this poem all the more effective, combining the meteorological and emotional into one unforgettable image:

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows …

  Air traditionally gives life, but this air, blowing in from an irrecoverable past, kills, stopping the heart of both the poet and the reader. The terrain of the poem is seen from such a distance that only vague landmarks are visible: hills, farms, spires, highways – no human figures. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ L.P. Hartley famously observed: here it is all too recognisably English, a place for which one yearns in vain. Nostalgia has become debased in recent years through too much careless handling, transformed into a kind of comfort blanket for adults in which they can wrap themselves against the chill winds of the present. No such cosy consolations are found on Housman’s horizon: true nostalgia is deadly. The land across which the poet is looking is at first barely recognisable: ‘What are those blue remembered hills,’ the poet asks, ‘What spires, what farms are those?’ The moment when this landscape comes into focus and can be identified is precisely the same moment that it is gone for ever:

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  That is what true nostalgia comes down to: you may be able to recognise past happiness, but you cannot regain it.

  Though apparently placed in no particularly significant position in the sequence of lyrics that make up A Shropshire Lad, this poem stands as the triangulation point from which Housman Country can be surveyed and mapped out. The preferred view of Housman Country is indeed from a distance, both in time and geography – and distance distorts. It is when the Lad is furthest away from his country, looking back at it from exile in London, that he finds it most appealing, and this reflects the nostalgia not only of Housman himself, obliged to abandon the rural scenes of his youth in order to earn a living in the capital, but of a large swathe of the English population.

  The Town Built Ill

  When the Shropshire Lad set out on his train journey ‘through the wild green hills of Wyre’ to London (XXXVII), he was following a pattern that had become familiar by 1896. A series of agricultural depressions during the second half of the nineteenth century had led to a huge population shift from the countryside to the large cities. One of the causes of these depressions was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Corn Laws imposed tariffs on imported cereals with the intention of keeping prices artificially high and so giving British landowners an advantage in the domestic market. Arguments over the Corn Laws set the countryside against the city. Landowners were keen to maximise profits by keeping the price of corn high, but this meant that the price of bread went up. Industrialists needed to keep wages low, but if the price of bread went up, then wages had to increase as well in order to keep the workforce fed. As landowners had feared, once the Corn Laws were repealed, Britain was gradually flooded with imported grain, grown more cheaply on larger landmasses such as North America and Russia than at home, and now easily transported thanks to developments in steam navigation.

  In addition to falling prices, English weather played its part, with a run of particularly poor summers between 1875 and 1882 wrecking the corn harvests. Britain’s reliance on imported grain had risen from a tiny 2 percent in the 1830s to a huge 45 percent in the 1880s, and by the middle of the latter decade, land used to grow corn in Britain had shrunk by over one million acres. People began leaving the land partly because of the continuing depression, but also because the increasing mechanisation of farming made large numbers of them redundant, and city jobs that did not rely so heavily upon the vagaries of the English climate promised more security. During the second half of the nineteenth century the agricultural workforce shrank by almost a half, and by the beginning of the twentieth century 77 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in towns and cities, leaving a mere 23 percent in rural districts.

  Statistical facts do not, however, accurately reflect how people feel. Britain may have become the world’s first urban industrial soci
ety, but for many of its inhabitants in 1896 ‘England’ still meant a tranquil pastoral landscape of small villages, ancient parish churches, picturesquely thatched cottages and teams of horses ploughing the fields. This dream of England has proved highly resilient, remaining part of the nation’s iconography long after the last working horses were put out to pasture. Many of those who had left their often dilapidated and insanitary cottages behind them when they went in search of better pay and prospects found themselves crammed into urban slums and tenements. Gazing out of their dismal city dwellings onto cheerless back yards, the new urban population might well have felt a pang for the rural lives they had left behind them. However squalid and impoverished these lives might have been, people did at least have access to fresh air among fields and woods. Walter Southgate in That’s the Way It Was, a classic autobiography of urban working-class life at the turn of the twentieth century, recalled that ‘If a tuft of grass appeared in the crevices of stones and clinker’ in his family’s sunless East End back yard, his mother ‘would tend it as if it was a lily […] It reminded her, she said, “of the country”.’