by Norman Lewis
Yet although the social displacement was a gradual process, the environmental disruption was more sudden and absolute, causing me to toy with the theory that wars are the greatest promoters of change. The determination to survive and to conquer in war provokes resourcefulness and ingenuity superfluous to the needs of society in times of peace. The post-war years witnessed a deterioration of flora and fauna which accelerated with the introduction of defoliants developed during the Vietnam War. The Americans had created these products to remove the jungle which sheltered their enemies. Once hostilities were at an end, fairly simple variations of the formulae employed (which in early versions simply destroyed all vegetable matter) allowed selectivity to be achieved and developed. Farmers could annihilate the weeds growing among crops. Wild plants of any kind rate as weeds for some farmers, even in the case of orchids of great rarity. Publicity has been given to instances where government protection has been extended to ‘areas of special interest’ only resulting in their immediate treatment with lethal spray.
Such sprays protected crops from both the competition of weeds and attack by insects of various kinds. Mortality was spread indiscriminately, claiming not only thrips and weevils, but also butterflies, moths and bees. Gardens and fields were then littered with small poisoned corpses which proved a deadly diet to birds and hedgehogs that fed on them. Owls were among the first to go, and a succession of brown owls inheriting a hole left repeatedly vacant in our horse-chestnut died in most cases within weeks of beginning their tenancy. Death by poisoning was followed by death from starvation. Suddenly the swallows ceased to nest under village eaves. The year of our arrival the swifts had practically to queue to pass through the gap giving access to their nests in the attic. Three years later none remained. Worst of all, the skies of Essex emptied of their larks. My children, born within yards of a river and a pond in the garden that supplied the village with water in times of drought, reached their teens before sighting a frog. It seems almost incredible that in the heart of the English countryside a whole summer can pass, as sometimes it does now, without the cuckoo being heard.
Oliver Myers arrived on leave from the Sudan where he was now teaching at the University of Khartoum. This was the latest in a long series of appointments in an Islamic environment, and by this time he had admitted to spending more than half his adult life within hearing of the call to prayer. The tropical years that seemed to have faded the blue eyes had also calmed the defiant tan of a young Westerner who challenged the sun. Instead there was a pastiness in his appearance of the kind to be observed in desert Arabs who are careful to cover all they can of their skin. When he had occasion to remove his tie, a talisman in a tiny ornamental satchel dangled in the opening of his shirt and he wore a silver bracelet like a hand-cuff engraved with runic scratchings. His habit of dropping a word or two of Arabic into a sentence caused him to be taken for a foreigner by those who did not know him. Although for me these small exaggerations only served to underscore the basic Englishry of his personality.
He listened with hardly concealed excitement to the Arundel story and the account of the banished countess who treated local distempers with potions and salves, and left a legacy of exotic herbs in the village hedgerows. I waited for him to assure me that I had been drawn to this house by the intricate contrivances of fate, but to my disappointment he failed to do so.
I mentioned that an old gardener, who still did a little work for me had removed an unwanted gate-post in the thirties and in so doing had uncovered a cache of undamaged but empty Roman vessels, subsequently sent to the Colchester museum. There was something strange about this story, for why should the Romans have bothered to bury empty pots? When I had put this question to the old man, something closed in his memory like a door. It had all been a long time ago, he had said, although in other areas his power of recall proved acute. Standing roughly where the gate-post had been, the gardener and I looked down on the vestiges of a moat, now perhaps only eighteen inches deep, although in his boyhood he had watched the struggles of a cow that drowned at this spot. There had been one other find in the course of his digging, a Roman toga pin, only the second one of its kind recorded. This had been on show in the village museum, as I confirmed, until stolen during the war. It was clear, I told Oliver, that there had been a substantial Roman presence in the area, for a Mr Coverington, an amateur archaeologist who had previously lived in the house, had carried out a cursory investigation of a sizable Roman villa two hundred yards away, which still remained largely undisturbed under a farmer’s field upon which potatoes grew. By custom and temperament the villagers preferred to avoid disturbance by those in search of souvenirs of the distant past. When a mosaic floor was unexpectedly revealed under the floor of a neighbour’s kitchen, the tiles covering it were hastily and silently replaced.
Having listened to these stories, Oliver called for a spade and we dug deep into the nettles of the herbaceous border, recovering a large number of pottery fragments at varying depths. These were duly confirmed as being of Roman production, although none was otherwise of the faintest interest and, having been piled up respectfully out of sight, they were ultimately forgotten.
Oliver insisted that pre-historic artefacts, if any, would be found down by the river. This flooded in both spring and autumn, and with the subsidence of the floods little islands of gravel and pebbles appeared in the bed. Oliver found these a rich hunting ground, assuring me that worked flints of a vigorous tool-making industry were scattered everywhere. The best of these brought cries of astonishment and delight in Arabic—a language remarkably suited to outbursts of emotion. Several shoe-boxes were eventually filled with the collection, although not a single one corresponded so far as I was concerned with anything recognisable as a stone-age tool. Oliver explained this as due to the large number of rejects involved in the production of an acceptable result, which as a valuable possession would not have been left lying about.
It was clear that it was the house itself that impressed Oliver most. He preceded a tour of inspection with a rough sketch in his notebook showing the relation of the building to the points of the compass. In the visit that followed, the placement and dimensions of the rooms were studied with the kind of professionalism he probably devoted to an Egyptian tomb, and I noticed that when he entered a bedroom he hushed his voice slightly, as if unwilling to disturb the sleep of an important person. ‘Very much of an atmosphere,’ he said at one point, and I gathered that this was not intended as a reference to the faintly stagnant odour of antiquity lingering in corners upon which very little sunlight fell.
‘So many generations have come and gone,’ he said. ‘There’s something I can’t quite define about the place. The feeling it gives me. Do you know what I mean?’
‘It’s old and it’s rather dark,’ I said, ‘and it has got a history.’
‘I’m not sure that it’s entirely that,’ he said. ‘Do you ever experience happenings you can’t account for?’
‘Not personally,’ I said. ‘The bedroom doors burst open once in a while at night. It’s supposed to be a poltergeist thing but I put it down to the fact that nothing fits very well in the house.’
‘Poltergeists,’ he said. ‘Interesting. I wanted to talk about that.’
‘This is the heartland of the poltergeist,’ I said, ‘and from what I’m told they seem to be practically everywhere. It’s not only the villagers. Even the commuters suffer from them. Two of my friends who write bestsellers and one who’s an RA called in priests to have their houses exorcised. They don’t do anything very exciting. Just bang doors and throw the furniture about. Once in a while someone reports seeing a woman in what they always call an outdated costume who promptly vanishes.’
‘Ah yes, but they’re ghosts.’
‘Of course, but they’re around by the dozen, too. The lady who comes in once a week ran into three at the same time in a local pub when she was seventeen, and our post-lady tells me she sees them once in a while on her rounds, but not often
.’
‘So it’s an everyday thing in this part of the world? They take it for granted.’
‘Just about that.’
‘And you never have any inexplicable experiences in this house?’
‘None at all.’
‘Nor even in your friends’ houses either?’
‘No,’ I told him, firmly, ‘there aren’t any poltergeists when I’m about.’
‘And what do you put that down to?’ Oliver asked.
‘The people of my father’s spiritualist circle used to say that where the spirits were concerned I weakened the power. Perhaps that goes for all the poltergeists, too.’
‘I forgot he was a medium.’
‘It was an environment I spent some years in as a child. It wore out my capacity for belief.’
‘I suppose it’s to be expected,’ he said sadly.
‘The members of the circle used to talk to their loved ones on the other side—as we called it—and sometimes they got a message back. When they did it reminded me of a couple of lines scribbled on a holiday postcard and sent home by someone who is bored with the place he finds himself in.’
‘And did you ever receive a message from the other side?’ Oliver asked.
‘Yes, once only, from my brother. We were very close and we always had a lot to say to each other. He was a brilliant musician. At the age of seventeen he was in an orchestra and I asked him if he still played Bach sometimes on his violin. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. All he could say was, “It’s quite nice here. I read a bit sometimes and go for walks.” I asked him if they rode bicycles where he was, but he didn’t reply, and the medium said the power had given out. This was all about what my mother used to call heaven, but they made it sound like Broadstairs out of season.’
Oliver shook his head. ‘I’m afraid a certain amount of chicanery tends to come into these things. More’s the pity. It tends to discourage genuine investigation.’
He spent a disappointingly peaceful night in the bedroom in which Anne Arundel probably slept during her enforced occupation. I should much have liked to have been the means of a confrontation with what was evidently a speciality of the neighbourhood but not a door burst open and not even a bird scuffled in the rafters. Next day I made enquiries as to the possibility of tracking down a phenomenon that would have made his holiday memorable, but alas, like the Morris dancers who turned up without warning on the village green, poltergeists gave no advance notice of a performance. My three affected friends had dealt with their disturbances as they might have an attack of dry-rot, and now all was silent. Queer things were rumoured to go on in two or three of the other larger establishments but their owners preferred to keep quiet about it in case their houses were ever put on the market. Poltergeists, I learned at this time, showed a preference for spacious surroundings, and no case was known of one taking up residence in a council house, or a red-brick terrace dwelling dating from the last century, of which there were a number to choose from.
Oliver was due to return to the Sudan in a few days, and with so little time to spare I was only able to locate a single case of a poltergeist in the area. This was a small, basically equipped country cottage rented by a young couple of my acquaintance while in the process of looking round for more convenient accommodation. They were quite agreeable to our inspection of this, but it would have been pointless, for poltergeist activity is notoriously unaccountable and sporadic, and there is very little hope of arriving at a location precisely at the hour when one happens to be active. In this case the girl’s father was more than happy to speak of his experiences while staying with the couple in their house. The poltergeist did all the trivial and pointless things that poltergeists do: shunting the furniture around at night, messing with the pots and pans in the cupboards, and even—some poltergeists have moved with the times—fiddling with the house’s electrics, and switching the television on and off. Having paid some months in advance for the tenancy, the young pair looked round for ways of abating if not putting an end to the nuisance and succeeded at least in improving the situation by giving their poltergeist the name Fred. Under this down-to-earth appellation it could be appealed to, and remonstrated with, at least to some extent. This may well be a commonly used device, for in an article on the subject in the January 1995 edition of Essex Countryside magazine, the author mentions that the poltergeist in The Rose and Crown Inn at Thaxted is called George, while the Greyhound in the same town has more or less domesticated a ghostly presence under the name of Tich.
Most readers will remain unimpressed by the accounts of such goings on that appear with a fair degree of regularity—particularly in the Essex press. Yet social standing, education and intellect seem to offer little protection in encounters with what some accept as the supernatural. Friends who had been at public schools and universities were even more ready than the average intelligent villager to fall back on exorcists when the furniture began to move of its own accord. I could think of no more striking example of this appetite for belief than the case of Oliver, who had devoted his life to the exact science of archaeology yet was prepared to believe that the desert sites in which he worked were haunted by afreets appearing among the sand dunes as capering points of red light.
In addition to his qualifications as an archaeologist, Oliver had put in a year at an agricultural college and was knowledgeable about gardens, so part of his leave before returning to Africa was devoted to helping me re-plan certain areas of mine. His hope was to be able to introduce formal aspects, including flower-beds laid out in classical style, a little topiary, a fountain with nereids, and possibly a piece of damaged Greek statuary the Museum might be induced to let go at a reasonable price. Nothing, alas, came of these possibilities, for this was the last time we worked or shared such fantasies together. He had complained of mildly disturbing symptoms in the chest, and soon after this, while I was out of the country, he died of a heart attack. Oliver was as close in my affections as a member of the family, and his loss was a sad one indeed.
Formal gardens are anathema to birds and wildlife in general, so what remained—although in dilapidated condition—of the tidiness of close-sheared hedges and trim arboreal shapes, had to go. The impossible ideal at the back of my mind was the environment in which the various species have adapted themselves over the millennia. From this point of view, the least successful habitats were the shrubberies of suburbia.
Fortunately, my distaste for regimentation was encouraged by the grounds of the large and pleasantly forlorn-looking vicarage, with which I suspected no-one had bothered much since Stephen Marshall philosophised on religious topics by the side of his pond. The evidence was that no member of the current vicar’s household ever ventured as far as the magnificently overgrown area down by the river, and I was not surprised when the vicar himself admitted that he had not even realised that this was included in the area under his control. At first sight this was chiefly notable in early spring for the thousands of snowdrops and aconites carpeting the ground under the yews. Later I took an interest in the great variety of birds crammed into thickets from which one year two Canada geese emerged with their young. The trees, the dense undergrowth and the immediate proximity of the river offered irresistible attraction to birds, and in the year of Oliver’s visit a German ornithologist at work in the neighbourhood reported the presence of a long-eared owl and—a great rarity—a grasshopper warbler, which I sighted once or twice: a tiny olive-green bird slipping as inconspicuously as possible through the tangled undercover.
The time had come when it was clear that all the remaining unexplored spaces in Finchingfield would sooner or later attract the fatal attention of a developer, and that even the vicarage garden itself might not escape. With this prospect in mind it was Oliver’s suggestion that the best hope of protecting the habitat of rare birds would be in an approach to the Diocese of Chelmsford with all the support of prominent church members and the vicar himself. This was done and an agreement was reached by
which I took over the area, which would always remain a bird sanctuary.
The river was bordered by water-meadows upon which the village sheep had been grazed since before the Conquest, yet these meadows were under attack. My first view of the village had been from the footpath leading to the Norman church over this spread of green fields. It provided a stunning insight into the grace, even the spirituality, of mediaeval planning at its best. Nothing here distracted the eye from the purity of a scene which never failed to inspire its moment of delighted surprise.
The council had decided that this was to become a vast car park surfaced with thousands of square yards of concrete, which in deference to aesthetic considerations would be coloured green. The river, curling gently through its sedges, was to be girdled in cement, and widened at one point to form a balloon of water surrounding a cement-bound artificial island with pinioned ducks by way of further decoration.
The council had announced that this was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. Nevertheless, a meeting was called in the village hall with a function merely to approve. There followed an extraordinary confrontation which convinced me that I had grossly underestimated the powers of discrimination of village people as well as the spirit and tenacity with which they would defend their opinions in a contest of this kind.
The fury aroused by the ugly pasquinade of the water-meadows was extraordinary. Up until this moment I had believed these people to be sapped by resignation. Now suddenly, when things had gone too far even in a rural situation where dissenting voices are heard only in the last extreme, there was a rare outburst of fury. I learned on this occasion how excellent village taste could be. It had clearly been assumed they would be delighted by the Disneyish fantasy to be imposed upon them. Instead they yelled their detestation in an uproar I would never have believed possible in this traditional ‘God bless the squire and his relations’ setting. It is to be remembered that this was a rebellion. There was still a whiff of feudalism in this village where back in the twenties the Lord of the Manor’s steward stood at the church door to note the name of any farm servant who skipped attendance, and who would lose a day’s wages from his weekly pay packet as a result.
