by Bill Bryson
But enough of my disturbed ranting. Let’s go for a walk and enjoy some of this lovely countryside while we still can. Thanks to the birth of my new granddaughter (Rosie, gorgeous, thank you), I was under instructions to stay near home for a couple of days, in case anyone could think of a way to make me useful, so I decided that I would have an outing or two in my own neck of the woods, beginning with a literary stroll to the homes of our two most celebrated local authors, Gilbert White and Jane Austen. Thus it was that I stood on Noar Hill enjoying the view and thanking God that unwashed people weren’t allowed to see this.
A mile or so beyond Noar Hill is Selborne, a pretty village with two pubs and a good village store with a post office. In the middle of the high street is the house of Gilbert White, Selborne’s most famous son. Gilbert White is a person that most people seem either to know a good deal about or know nothing at all about, though I suspect that many of those who place themselves in the first category would really be more at home in the second. He was a country parson, who was born in Selborne in 1720 and died there seventy-three years later and didn’t do a great deal in between other than plant vegetables and watch the passing seasons. He lived quietly, never married, and was so unworldly that he thought the Sussex Downs ‘a mighty range of mountains’. Through most of his life he kept notes and wrote letters, which became the basis for his extraordinarily enduring book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, which Richard Mabey has called ‘one of the most perfectly realized celebrations of nature in the English language’.
The book was nearly a lifetime in the making. It was published in 1788 when White was sixty-eight and just five years from the end of his earthly run. It takes the form of letters to other naturalists, often of a discursive nature, arranged in no particular order, but it has been amazingly influential. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Constable and Virginia Woolf were among its great admirers. Charles Darwin said it inspired him to become a naturalist. In 220 years, the book has never been out of print. By one calculation, it is the fourth most published book in English.
White’s house, called the Wakes, is now a museum, and a slightly odd one in that it is also devoted to the explorers Frank and Lawrence Oates, who had no connection to Gilbert White, Selborne or even Hampshire. They are there simply because in 1955 a wealthy member of the Oates clan, Robert Washington Oates, gave money to buy the house on the understanding that some of it be used to celebrate his cousin Lawrence and uncle Frank.
It makes an improbable but surprisingly splendid package. Most of the house is given over to Gilbert White. In one of the front rooms downstairs is a life-sized, and very lifelike, model of Gilbert White himself. I was surprised to find that he was just a little guy – barely five feet tall and not more than a hundred pounds, I would guess – and of an open and amiable disposition if the model is anything to go by.
In a glass case nearby was the original manuscript copy of the Natural History, along with bound copies of almost every edition of the book ever printed (and there have been hundreds). White’s own copy, according to the caption beside it, was bound in the skin of his pet spaniel. I am guessing that the spaniel died at a convenient moment and wasn’t sacrificed specially, but the caption didn’t say.
White lived much of his life in this house, and the rooms are mostly kept as he would have known them. The visitor can, for instance, step into Gilbert’s snug study and see quills and parchment and some spectacles left on the desk, as if White has just stepped out. The far end of the house changes abruptly into Oates territory, which I thought would be a little ridiculous but was actually quite diverting. Of the two commemorated Oateses, Frank was unquestionably the lesser. He lived only from 1840 to 1875 and spent much of his short life battling ill health. He went exploring in Africa and the Americas in a curious, ultimately misguided attempt to build himself up through fresh air and adventure, but merely caught a fever and died somewhere along the upper reaches of the Zambesi River.
Far more memorable was his kinsman Captain Lawrence Oates, though he lived an even briefer life. He was one of the members of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic in 1910, which with great difficulty reached the South Pole only to find it planted with Norwegian flags, left a short while earlier by a party led by Roald Amundsen. Greatly disappointed and already physically diminished, Scott and his four men turned back, but ran into terrible weather, slowing their progress to a series of brief daily stumbles. They ran short of food and suffered wretched physical hardships. Descriptions of their frostbite are genuinely horrifying. Oates ended up in a particularly bad way and famously sacrificed himself so that the others might have a hope of living. Stepping to the flap of the tent, he said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ It was, Scott wrote in his diary, the ‘act of an English gentleman’. I have no doubt he was wearing a dinner jacket. A point not often noted is that it was Oates’s thirty-second birthday. His body was never found. Scott and the others perished soon afterwards, dying in a whiteout just a short distance from a supply drop. Oates, it later emerged, couldn’t stand Scott and blamed him for inadequate preparations.
The person I ended up most taken with, however, was not Gilbert White or an Oates, but a man named Herbert George Ponting, who was the official cameraman to the Scott expedition. Though an accomplished photographer, Ponting knew nothing about motion pictures – hardly anyone in 1910 did – but he learned through trial and error, and in the process produced some peerless footage of Scott and his team training for their epic expedition at their Antarctic base camp.
Ponting spent years refining the footage into a movie, called Ninety Degrees South. A ten-minute extract is shown continuously on a television in an upstairs room. I sat down out of mild curiosity and was instantly absorbed. Suddenly the people I had been reading about in the nearby displays were animate and real. They waved and smiled and moved about, albeit jerkily, cheerful in their preparations and obviously unaware that soon they would be dead. Ponting cut and recut the film for so long that by the time he was ready to share it with the world, the world had rather lost interest and the film was a commercial failure. Ponting was wiped out both physically and financially, and died more or less a pauper. The Gilbert White museum seems to be the only place in the world where he is remembered.
I left Selborne by way of Gracious Street, which is not only prettily named but prettily arrayed with cottages, most of them wearing a comely cap of thatch. Then it was a long tramp up a steep slope and on to farmland, with yet another expansive outlook. Here, however, the view was dominated by a chain gang of electricity pylons marching dolefully across the foreground. I still have an old cutting from The Economist – I know I was just railing about The Economist, but this is different – from the time when Mrs Thatcher was privatizing electrical distribution, observing that if the power companies were required to devote just 0.5 per cent of their turnover to burying cables, that would provide sufficient funds to bury one thousand miles of cable a year. If the government had done that then, the cables would all be under ground now.
But we have had enough bitching about assaults on the landscape for one chapter already, so let’s just shield our eyes here and hurry down the slope to the pleasant village of Farringdon. There isn’t a great deal to Farringdon, but I saw more of it than I expected to because I lost my way and ended up exploring a number of its lanes. This meant, happily, that I stumbled on an extraordinary building that I now know is called Massey’s Folly. Large, ornate and built of brick, it is a building of great charm and no evident purpose. From some angles it looks grandly domestic, but from others it is more seemingly industrial, as if it might be an old mill or pumping station.
I passed two ladies walking dogs and asked them about it. They only knew a little, so I looked into it a bit more later, and found that it was built by a rich, eccentric local clergyman, Thomas Hackett Massey, who lived in Farringdon for sixty-two years, from 1857 to 1919. Massey apparently intended the building as a ki
nd of village hall and nursery school, but just kept adding to it in a random and piecemeal manner. Massey’s other notable feature – rather an unexpected one in a clergyman – was that he was a recluse. He erected a screen in the village church so that his congregation could hear his sermons but not look at him. In February 2014 Massey’s Folly was put up for sale. At the time this book went to press, there were plans to convert it into flats.
Although the ladies didn’t know too much about the folly, they did know the way to Chawton and they escorted me to the edge of the village to show me a path through a housing estate and up into some woods, and with a cheery wave we parted and I continued on.
Soon afterwards I crossed a narrow but excitingly busy highway, and made my way on to an old disused railway line. This was the route of the old Meon Valley Railway, which connected the market town of Alton in north Hampshire to Gosport in the south. Since not many people have ever wanted to travel between Alton and Gosport, the line was not a success and it closed to passenger traffic in 1955, only a little more than half a century after it was built. The track passed beneath some lovely brick bridges, now so overgrown as to be effectively part of the natural landscape. They were decorated with bands of bricks in contrasting hues – a touch of attractiveness that would never have been visible to anyone but engine drivers and track workers. It is amazing the trouble Victorian engineers took to make things special.
Thanks to its obscurity, the Meon Valley line did have one special moment of glory. Four days before D-Day, the principal Allied leaders – Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jan Smuts of South Africa and William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada – met on the Royal Train, just south of where I now was, to discuss the final details of the invasion. The Meon line was chosen because it was so safely obscure, which I quite liked. Perhaps they should make that the motto for the region: ‘Welcome to East Hampshire. We’re Safely Obscure.’
Consulting my map, I discovered that I was getting a lot more history on this walk than I ever expected, for I was now on something called St Swithun’s Way. This is part of the Pilgrim’s Way running from Winchester to Canterbury across the North Downs, and this in turn is part of the far more ancient track leading on to Stonehenge and Avebury. For at least a thousand years this route was the M4 of the pedestrian world. St Swithun himself may actually have walked where I was walking now.
It occurred to me that I had no idea who St Swithun was, so when I got home I looked him up. He was Bishop of Winchester in about 850. One day he came across a woman who was distraught because the eggs in her basket had broken. With a pious wave, Swithun made them whole again. It was a good trick, I grant you, but I believe it would take more than egg-fixing to get me to hike 130 miles from Canterbury to Winchester to venerate a bishop, yet that is what people did throughout the Middle Ages. Swithun became a cult. Cathedrals across England competed to get a piece of him. His head ended up in Canterbury, an arm went to Peterborough, and other parts of him were distributed hither and yon. It is a little ironic that the man who could put eggs back together couldn’t keep himself in one piece.
In 971 Swithun’s remaining bones were moved from one spot to another within Winchester Cathedral, and this coincided with a mighty storm. The date, 15 July, became known as St Swithun’s Day, and spawned a legend commemorated in verse:
St Swithun’s Day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain:
St Swithun’s Day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair.
Chawton is another sweet little village – this part of the world is full of them – tucked away down a side lane and not on the face of it a great deal changed from Jane Austen’s day. Chawton Cottage, where Jane lived with her mother and sister, is built of mellow brick and sits close to the road. The interior is furnished simply, with a few good pieces of furniture but with a curious air of emptiness enhanced by the bare floors and empty grates. Knick-knacks and personal effects are conspicuously absent from tabletops and mantelpieces, presumably because anything left out would be filched. The result, as with so many homes of famous people, is that you get a good notion of the walls and windows but not so much of the life of the person who lived there. That’s not a bitter complaint, just an observation. It’s the way it has to be.
Jane Austen lived in the house for eight years, from 1809 till 1817, and during that time did most of her most lasting work: wrote Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park, and revised and prepared for publication Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions – surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement – in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly. I followed them from room to room, enthralled by their conversation, until I realized that I was becoming part of it, and that they were casting glances at me with something like unease, so I bowed apologetically and left them to admire an old fireplace with low moans of expressive rapture.
When Jane Austen left the house, in the summer of 1817, it was to go to Winchester, sixteen miles to the west, to die. She was only forty-one, and the cause of her death is unknown. It may have been Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma or a form of typhus or possibly arsenic poisoning, which was surprisingly common in those days as arsenic was routinely used in making wallpapers and for colouring fabrics. It has been suggested that the general air of ennui and frailty that seemed so characteristic of the age may simply have been generations of women spending too much time indoors taking in gently toxic vapours. In any case, three days after St Swithun’s Day 1817 she breathed her last.
I was very pleased I went, though not quite so pleased to discover on emerging that the skies had darkened significantly and that I was about to walk home eight miles in the rain.
II
The National Trust is a wonderful organization. There can be no doubt about that. It safeguards 160 historic houses, 40,000 archaeological sites, 775 miles of coastline and 250,000 hectares of countryside. It even owns and manages 59 villages. The world is unquestionably a better place for having the National Trust in it. So here is my question: why does it have to be so very annoying?
I mention this because my next port of call was the ancient Trust-owned village and megalithic site of Avebury, which manages to be both fabulous and exasperating in about equal measure. Avebury village is an attractive place with a post office, shop, some pleasant cottages, a manor house, a thatch-roofed pub. It’s an entirely conventional village except that scattered through and around it are great, angular standing stones. Some are quite massive and clearly took huge effort to manoeuvre into place. The largest of them weigh up to a hundred tonnes.
The stones at Avebury are not smooth and picturesquely grouped as at Stonehenge but rough-edged and of varying sizes, which gives them a more primitive and sinister air. The scale of Avebury, rather than the beauty of it, is what takes your breath away. The outer circle of stones covers 28 acres, and that is only part of a much greater pageant of antiquity. The immediate environs also include two other fragmentary stone circles, a giant bank and ditch, processional avenues, and barrows by the, well, barrowload. Yet Avebury is only a shadow of what it once was. Today it has seventy-six standing stones. Once there were over six hundred. Even so, it remains the largest stone circle in Europe, fourteen times bigger than Stonehenge.
The size and complexity of Avebury and the fact that a village stands in its midst make it awfully hard to get your bearings, and the National Trust does precious little to help. There are no information boards or usefully site
d maps to help you get oriented, absolutely no boards providing interpretation. If you want to know what you are looking at, you have to buy a guidebook. The directional signs pointed only to places where you could spend money – the shop, the museum, the café. It would be a kindness if they gave you a map of the site when you paid for parking and admission, but that is not the National Trust way. They like to charge for every individual thing. The day cannot be too far off when you have to pay for toilet paper by the sheet in a little booth manned by a volunteer.
Within minutes of arriving, I had paid out £7 for parking, £10 for a ticket to the manor house and garden and £4.90 for the small museum, and I still couldn’t find my way around the stones, so I went into the gift shop and bought a big handsome map for £9.99, which meant that I had spent £31.89 at Avebury without even having had a cup of tea. So I went and had a cup of tea (£2.50) and studied my map. Then, feeling ever so slightly grumpy, I went and wandered among the stones and everything was suddenly fine, for Avebury is both awesome and entrancing.
Modern Avebury is almost entirely to the credit of an extraordinary man named Alexander Keiller. Keiller was born in 1889 into marmalade, as it were. His family made the famous Keiller marmalade in Dundee, but his parents died young and Keiller grew up as a very rich orphan. When he came of age, he left the running of the business to an uncle and devoted his own energies to fast cars, skiing, a breathtakingly active sex life, and several hare-brained business pursuits. His investments included a ‘wind-wagon’, a car powered by an aeroplane propeller mounted on its back. The only problem was that the propeller was liable to slice unsuspecting passers-by into salami-sized pieces and so the business failed. Keiller then invested in a car with seats that folded down to become a bed, but unfortunately the business folded before very many seats did.
