Walls, steps and paths: this was my work, and so too were the lawns and fruit trees. The vegetables and soft fruit were Lesley’s, and together we shared the flowers. It was a garden in which almost everything succeeded. If anybody gave us a root or a cutting, the fear was not that it would fail but that it would rampage and swamp everything else. The merest flake of snow-on-the-mountain quickly became a blizzard that threatened to engulf the entire rock garden. A sucker of jasmine planted alongside the kitchen, soon blocked up two windows and a door so that they couldn’t be opened, and had to be forcibly restrained from lifting off the roof. How we cursed – but later blessed – its vigour.
I still pay an annual visit to Spriggs Holly. Each year on Christmas Eve Clare and I call on a friend who lives nearby. And I take the opportunity to open the garden gate (still fastened with the wooden latch I made for it) and climb the steps (still unfinished) and stand on the lawn (with its great hollow tree stump that we found washed ashore on a distant beach and towed home behind our dinghy). It is quite dark, of course, and I cannot see the details, but I know that it is much the same as when we left it, and I can see why we loved it so, and I can see, even in the darkness, why in the end we went.
The news that our field had been sold to a developer didn’t immediately fill us with alarm. It was a large field, steep at the bottom levelling off at the top. It was at the top, below Townstal Church, that they would be building – well out of sight.
Of course we could have found out. But what good would it have done us? Literally and metaphorically we refused to look at what we dreaded to see, and we continued to enjoy our last few months of peace.
The truth came slowly. First it was no more than the distant hum of a bulldozer at work. . . . Then its appearance over the brow of the hill. Then the first row of houses, still comfortingly far away. . . . Then the bulldozer at work again below the houses, its grinding and straining louder now as it wrenched at the hillside and as penetrating as a dentist’s drill on an exposed nerve. . . . Then another row of houses. . . . And still the bulldozer getting nearer. . . .
One day a man came and cut the brambles at the back of our wall, tearing away the fragile screen we had been hiding behind. Then at last we could see. We could no longer pretend. We knew.
Like the pathetic remnants of a defeated army we made a few futile attempts to stem the advance, but they were brushed aside; we offered terms, but they were treated with scorn. So we nailed a screen to the top of our wall. It was hideous and one night a gale blew half of it crashing down. And we took the jasmine away from the kitchen and drove in posts and spread it along them, as a man will spread his remaining hairs to hide his baldness; and we blessed its length and vigour as we crouched behind it.
Once it had been cows, and we had loved them. Now it was people, and we hated them. No one who has not had such an experience will know the strength of our feelings; anyone who has will understand. Shortly before we left I stood at the bedroom window, a thing I had not done for many months, and I took a photograph. It showed a wall, a screen and four houses. Because our garden was long and narrow, four plots came down to our wall, four houses surveyed us from above, four families sitting on their balconies had a bird’s eye view. The very steepness of our hillside, which once we had relied upon to halt the advancing estate, now added to its horror. For each house, as if to see the better, was perched on a brick base, a white bungalow on a brown pedestal, a tooth from which the gum had shrivelled to expose its root. A row of witch’s teeth. . . . Or was it perhaps a battery of television cameras?. . . .
Suddenly unable to bear it any longer, we fled.
Embridge Forge, like Spriggs Holly, had been built to serve the needs of the horse, and with the horse’s departure its fortunes too had declined. However, since the cart-horse had survived the coach-horse by some twenty to thirty years this decline had here come much more recently. The last blacksmith was still very much alive and Lesley and I might well have seen him at work. By 1966 however, though the house where he had lived was still habitable, the forge itself was dead and decaying and an air of sadness hung over the place.
Embridge was like Spriggs Holly in other ways. It was built into the hillside – built properly, of course, not perched uneasily on a pedestal – built as if it belonged. And as at Spriggs Holly there was much altering, adding and repairing to be done, and it wasn’t until some six months after we had bought it that we were at last able to move in.
Oh the solitariness of it! Once again there was a great hill rising above us. Once again we were overlooked only by cows. Once again in the early morning I could stand at our bedroom window and enjoy it all. Late evening, just as it was getting dark, was another of my favourite times, and I would go outside and watch the darkness come. I suppose it was because in the past, if we had spent a day in the country, the approach of darkness marked the time when we had to think about going home. Now it was others who would be going home. We would be staying. A blackbird, disturbed, flew along the hedge uttering its evening cry. A wren gave a last defiant trill, then slipped from the pear tree to its roost under the eaves. Only those of us who lived here were here now. . . . the blackbird and the wren. . . . It was our valley.
It was our valley: this sums up my feelings. It belonged to me and I belonged to it. I needed to establish my ownership, to make my mark, to rebuild Embridge; but equally I needed to feel the valley’s dominance over my life. I wanted to be both benevolent lord and loyal subject, to rule and be ruled. I suspect that in each of us there are these dual feelings, an urge to create and an urge to conform, and that the point of balance between the two determines our lives. If instead of Embridge I had been offered a level plot of land and told that I could build whatever sort of house I wanted and have flower beds and lawns and paths wherever I wished, I would have hated it. I would have felt lost, the freedom too great. And I would have hated it no less if I had been offered house and garden ready-made to my taste with nothing to do but enjoy them. I needed to build but I needed the four stone walls of an old coach house as a starting point. I needed the slopes and trees to direct and give purpose to my paths. I needed the old to govern the new. Not only does this set a much more interesting problem, but somehow it seems the proper thing to do, to fit the new to the old, to respect, not to ignore, the past.
At Embridge there was a lot of past to respect. The hills had been there for a million years; the house and the oak trees for a hundred or more; the apple trees for perhaps fifty. And around the place still hung the memory of the days when saw and hammer and working men’s voices could be heard. In the forge I found the old bellows. They were vast and so heavy I could scarcely drag them. The ironwork was all rusted away, the leather was black and stiff, the wood dented and stained and charred. What should we do with them? No one would ever want them as bellows again. Should we restore them? But for what purpose? Or just keep them? But where put them? or make them into something else? But into what? Or sell them? For shame! Or throw them away? But how could we when there was so much in them that was still good. I don’t like a house to be a museum where things are kept for what they once were. I like my house to live in the present, and it was hard to see what use we could find in our new house for an old, broken down pair of bellows. Oh sadly familiar problem: what use are the elderly when their working days are over? For ten years they waited for an answer.
Everywhere at Embridge there is this problem. What once served a small farming community serves now only the needs of leisure. Should the tools of the past be left to rot? Should the millwheel down the valley have been left undisturbed under its canopy of brambles? Or was it better that it became a rich man’s diversion to restore it and set it spinning again but spinning idly with no millstone to turn, no corn to grind? I don’t know. Both seem wrong, the one sad, the other a little undignified. It is a feeling that has two separate origins: nostalgia for the past and reverence for work. The one is something that afflicts the middle-aged, the other the self-employ
ed. Put them together and a middle-aged, self-employed man will obviously consider his valley’s working past greatly superior to its leisured present. What can he do about it? Not much. Lesley is toiling away in her vegetable garden, doing things to tomatoes and runner beans. ‘Who dares stand idle in the harvest field?’ as I used to sing in the chapel at Stowe. Not she, evidently. Nor I, come to that. So I take my scythe – what more appropriate tool? – and climb the hill.
It is mid-August and nettles and bracken are at their height, brambles have sent out their annual tentacles of new growth, and the tall grasses have bowed their heads to the wind. Altogether there is a wildly exuberant tangle of vegetation up here that only Devon can produce. It will be good when it is all cleared away and I can once again admire the trees I planted last winter. But it is slow work, and when the sun is shining it is wearyingly hot and the flies are a curse. Yet I enjoy it. Lesley thinks it is a bit unproductive, that there are more useful things I might be doing and that it’s time I found a man or a machine to lend me a hand. I did try a machine once, but it was unmanageable on our steep slope. To my delight the old fashioned scythe is still the most efficient and much the pleasantest tool to use. And as for a man: no, I’d rather be on my own.
If one makes this distinction between work and idleness, should one continue it to work that is ‘useful’ and work that is not, contrasting Lesley’s plate of beans with my pile of grass? Perhaps one should, but happily I don’t. If I can look at what I have done and say ‘That looks good,’ or ‘That looks better,’ this is enough. Good for what or good for whom are not questions I bother about.
At Embridge as at Spriggs Holly we have both a vegetable and a flower garden, the one already in existence when we arrived, the other needing to be designed and made. At Embridge we have something else as well, the bit at the top that is wild. So the labour is divided a little differently. Lesley still rules over her vegetables and soft fruit, and I still look after the fruit trees. But she does more and I do less for the flowers and the lawns. And the wilderness is all mine.
You can contrast wild with cultivated, and that is to see it from the point of view of the ground. If you think of it from the point of view of what grows there the contrast is between natives and foreigners, and a garden becomes a place where the natives – impolitely referred to as ‘weeds’ – have been ruthlessly exterminated to make way for an immigrant population of foreigners that arrive neatly labelled in pots and packets. As time goes by some of these foreigners make it clear that they dislike their new home and hang their heads and look sad. At the same time some of the natives fight to return. So then starts a war that never ends. It is fought initially with conventional weapons – the hoe and the fork – but later, as the battle becomes fiercer, chemical weapons are used, bottles of this and cartons of that. ‘You can’t win!’ says the despairing gardener after an exhausting session with the snails or the hairy bittercress. And this is very true; and it is partly to escape to more peaceful surroundings that I so often retreat to my wilderness.
Up here the philosophy is different. Foreigners are brought in but only on a very limited scale, mostly trees, some being seedlings that I have dug up from elsewhere, others coming from the nurseryman, and all being specimens that will look at home among my native oaks and hazels and will be able to fend for themselves. The natives are mostly allowed to remain though naturally some are given more encouragement than others. Blackthorn and elm suckers are cut down annually. Thistles, docks, ragwort and cocksfoot grass are periodically uprooted; and in August the summer tangle is cleared away. But if anything is determined to stay, I let it and make the best of it; and if anything is unhappy, it goes. I offer water to the thirsty but nothing more.
Summer is the least pleasant season here. There are too many flies. Hemp nettle has monopolized any bare earth it can find. Hogweed towers over me; and the smell of phallus impudicus sours the air. So I prefer the bottom where Lesley’s snapdragons and marigolds, cosmos and phlox, roses and fuchsias are now at their best. It is in the spring that the top is unrivalled. Daffodils and primroses lead on to violets, bluebells, wild arum, campions, alkanet, pennywort and foxgloves. Each year they come a little differently, now one and now another being particularly prolific. Each year too adds its own speciality: trefoil one year, common vetch another. This year it was corydalis. In the summer scythe and sickle are my tools; in the autumn saw and secateurs to remove unwanted branches; in winter and spring spade and mattock to continue the work of planting and shaping. And of course a lot of time is spent just sitting and dreaming. . . .
Here we are, natives and foreigners, living together happily on a rather steep, rather rocky, rather dry slope. It is by no means a place that would suit everybody, but it suits us. It suits the oaks and hazels that were always here. It suits the spring flowers. It suits the ashes, beeches, rowans, maples, birches and hawthorns that I have planted. And – a foreigner like them – it suits me.
So if I am asked why, it is perhaps only natural that I should give a botanical reason, explaining that Lesley and I were like seeds blown here by chance, landing lucky, finding soil, climate and situation exactly to our liking, putting down our roots and thriving. And if I were then asked for a rather more detailed explanation, I might well, continuing the analogy, see the problem as one of a particular organism in a particular environment – a problem, in other words, in ecology.
That being so, let us start with the environment.
Embridge is three miles from Dartmouth as the crow flies. Surprisingly – for there are scarcely fifty yards of road without a bend – you find on looking at the map that it is very little more as the human walks. Even so this was too far for working booksellers with much to be done in the shop after the doors were shut and much waiting to be done at home. So mostly we drove, and this was four miles, but for good measure it included a view of the sea and of Start Point. It is only now that I am no longer a bookseller that more and more often I find myself doing the journey home on foot. If it takes a little longer and means starting perhaps a little earlier I can reassure myself that it is not only a great deal cheaper but that while I am walking I am indeed working.
Dartmouth, as I have said, is backed by a steep hill. On the other side of this hill is our valley; so my route is up one side, down the other and then along the valley bottom for about a mile. It starts with a long flight of steps. Then comes a road flanked by a terrace of houses. It is steep – one in three – and narrow – eight feet: one of the oldest roads out of the town. At a certain point the houses stop and the hedges start. In an instant you have left the town and are in the country. But the road takes no notice of this: it carries on up the hill as if nothing had happened and thus provides a perfect transition from town to country, as perfect as is the transition from river to town at the Lower Ferry. I wish I could say it was as invulnerable.
Walking home this way not long ago I found myself wondering what were the essential differences between the urban I had just left and the rural I was just entering. I could think of only two: the country was greener and contained fewer people. The difference that perhaps springs to mind, that towns are man-made while country is natural, is of course mistaken. Certain tracts of Devon – much of our coastline and much of Dartmoor – are entirely wild; but what lies in between is no more wild than our garden. For it was man who cleared the primeval forests, man who laid out the fields, surrounding them by hedges and deciding what each was to grow, man who planted copses, windbreaks and woodlands, man who tramped out the tracks he needed and later widened them into roads. The beech avenue that I walk beneath is there because someone put it there. The giant oak by the gate is there because someone allowed it to grow. So if we bless our long-dead builders for their instinct for good townscape, we must also bless our long dead farmers for their instinct for good landscape. Townscape and landscape: the two have a great deal in common; and it is odd that though we in this country have consciously enjoyed, consciously studied and consciou
sly practised the one ever since the eighteenth century, it was not until a few years ago that we even acknowledged the existence of the other. Here in this corner of Devon the two go very much hand in hand with more than a chance resemblance between them. For they spring from a common parentage: our hills.
These hills have influenced everything that has ever happened here, and they will continue to influence everything that is ever likely to happen, hack at them with bulldozers though we may. They gave us the Dart, and that was countless years ago. They gave us Dartmouth, shaping it the way it is, making it small and compact. They gave us our farmlands – small farms, small fields, woodlands along coombe sides where the ground was too steep to plough. They kept both town and country that way, so that Dartmouth is still small, and farms and fields are today little bigger than they were a hundred years ago. They gave us roads that were narrow and winding and that have remained narrow and winding ever since. They and the river have been our rampart against the assault of the holiday trade that has overwhelmed Torbay. Our hills have shaped everything we find around us. Is it surprising that they shape our lives as well? ‘Stay small and go slow,’ is their command, and only those who are willing to obey are happy here.
Of the others. . . . Well, I remember one in particular who tried to revolutionize the pleasure-boat business; and I remember a meeting of the Dartmouth Chamber of Trade at which his iniquities were on the agenda for discussion; and I remember the one and only comment that we felt it necessary to pass.
The Path Through the Trees Page 26
