The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  And yet, as David points out, the next door village may have a thriving pub, allotments, cricket team, well-attended school and that ultimate rosette for the community-minded, a small shop run by local volunteers. The difference can be minimal – a few energetic and strong-minded individuals, a village layout that is more than just a strip alongside a road and something more intangible, which if I were less agnostic I would describe as its soul.

  As for the farmers and their continual complaints, David, who at times has lived in tied cottages on their land, takes a blunt view: ‘At the end of the day, you never see a poor farmer. Do you?’

  After the initial training at his falconry, I head over with David and two of the Harris hawks to a twenty-acre bank that comes down from the Berkshire Downs towards the Thames. Given that pheasant is ideal prey for any self-respecting raptor, gamekeepers don’t welcome David to their estates where there is shooting, so he chooses his hunting ground carefully. This bank is combed with rabbit holes and has some light scrub as cover. As countryside, it’s not prepossessing, but an attractive aspect of falconry is that the birds lead you to parts of the country you might otherwise ignore.

  During the hours we spend hunting I begin to understand the Anglo-Saxon obsession. It’s precisely because the birds are only partly biddable. You can suggest but they will lead. The popular notion that the bird flies off, attacks prey and then lands again on an outstretched regal arm is laughable. I spend far more time even with an expert like David chasing the birds than using the birds to chase.

  The hawks will take you either deep into the wood or across the water. For the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy – and the Norman kings that followed them – the appeal was not only of the hunt but also of the fierce independence the birds showed them, far more than any subject or vassal dared. These are not animals that you can command.

  They provided as well an opportunity to display your place in the pecking order. According to the medieval Book of St Albans, only kings were allowed peregrine falcons, barons could have buzzards, while humble yeomen aspired to a kestrel; priests could use sparrowhawks; while women were assigned the small but effective merlin falcon. The cost, time and apparatus – the cages, called ‘mews’, the hoods, jesses, bells and lures – made it a rich person’s sport, or at least an aspirational one for the lower orders.

  David has plenty of hunting birds to choose from: a peregrine-saker hybrid, which combines the speed of the peregrine – up to 180 mph on the stoop – with the strength of the saker, so esteemed by the Arab world; or the goshawk (‘a psychopath of a bird’), much used by cooks in medieval times as a cheap but effective killing machine. The birds that he has brought this time, two Harris hawks, can hunt mercilessly for hours.

  Harris hawks have been imported from their native America since the late 1970s and are much valued by British falconers for their ability, in David’s words, ‘to twist and turn in the air like running dogs as they chase a rabbit down’. They are also relatively cheap: hundreds rather than thousands of pounds, compared to sakers or gyr falcons. In captivity they can live for twenty years.

  A wild buzzard and a kestrel are already patrolling the skies, so we know we’re in good company. David has ferrets and dogs to help flush the rabbits.

  He quickly points out that any ‘throwing’ of the bird is strictly for the movies – you don’t cast your hawk off with a princely command: it chooses when it flies and if there is a glimmer of prey, that will be faster than any possible human reaction. Quite often the Harris hawks choose to perch on hawthorn shrubs to get a better vantage point as the dogs and ferrets go about their business below. But my bird sometimes returns to my arm, a feeling I find reassuring: an extension of a more primeval element of yourself. There’s no illusion that it is a tame bird – more like an ally that for reasons of mutual convenience is choosing to work with you.

  The rabbits are smart enough to head upwind when pursued and know the intricate lair of their burrows like the back of their paws, so the chase is by no means one-sided: most get away. When a hawk does hit a rabbit the impact is bone crunching. But David is not doing it for the kill. There is an honesty and directness about a relationship with a hunting bird that is unlike any other in the animal kingdom. It is that which so attracted the Anglo-Saxons.

  *

  The Saxons were also obsessive law-makers. This might seem axiomatic. Of course they were. Wasn’t everybody?

  Well, no. Elsewhere in Europe at the time, there was little other law-making ‘west of Byzantium’, according to the expert on the subject, Patrick Wormald. The English were unusual in having an evolving legal system.

  Despite Alfred’s self-appointed billing as the creator of that law, the Anglo-Saxons had developed and refined a judicial code for centuries and continued to do so after his death. Moreover, after their conversion to Christianity, the law was developed in parallel with Mosaic law. Wormald suggests that ‘the logic of the evident parallels between Israelite and English custom was that the English could and should themselves be a Holy People, answerable for their shortcomings to God.’

  The law centred around the notion of wergild, ‘man-payment’, the value set upon a person’s life and extracted if they were killed in a feud. As these values were laid down in a hierarchical way, depending on the victim’s status, we can tell much about how those hierarchies changed over time.

  In early seventh-century laws, when the Anglo-Saxons were still ‘a band of brothers’ who had travelled across the seas to a hostile country, the wergild of a nobleman was roughly only three times that of a freeman, a relatively equitable ratio. Over the ensuing centuries, as society became more stratified, the ratio increased to about 6:1 and the wergild became payable not just to kinsmen but to the Crown. It also became the basis for fines of other sorts, from theft to military desertion, acting as a form of ‘tax banding’.

  By the eleventh century and the time of the Norman invasion, there was a lot you could be fined for. Sexual ethics were particularly severe. It was one of the only periods in our history – the other was Cromwell’s Commonwealth – when adultery was a civil as well as a religious offence. So was marrying a widow within a year of her husband’s death, particularly if you had killed him yourself.

  One revelation in particular fascinated me – that by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, so narrow was canonical law that you were forbidden from marrying any relative closer than a fourth cousin. I would be hard pressed to name any fourth cousin; the risk of marrying one by accident must have been as constant a concern as the risks of premarital sex. ‘Do we share the same great-great-great-grandfather?’ It must have promoted social mobility and a sharing of the gene pool; young men needed to travel away from their village to find a wife who wasn’t a distant relation.

  Just to complicate matters further, a woman’s wergild was determined not by the man she married, but by the class into which she was born. This must have given rise to some nice judgements of social distinction that would have delighted Jane Austen. Today’s English class-system is just that – an English one, with its roots in the Anglo-Saxon world. After all, given your place in the hierarchy was a monetary one based on the value placed on your dead body, and tax, status and marriage prospects all stemmed from that, then you were naturally as obsessed with class in the ninth century as in the nineteenth, or for that matter in the twenty-first.

  *

  If my home at Little Stoke had been Mole’s down by the riverbank, then lying on the slopes of the Chilterns above was the Wild Wood. This was where I had wandered at the start of my journey, near Berins Hill, with its beech trees as wild as the Amazon and old West Saxon history.

  And at the heart of the Ipsden woods, Norman Cox was the spitting image of Badger.

  He had been abrasive on the phone, when I had asked for directions to reach his house in the notoriously confusing network of small lanes that laced the woods and adjoining valleys together.

  ‘Are you stupid? Can’t you take directions p
roperly! I said not Braziers Lane, but the next left.’

  But he didn’t cuff me when we met, and came down to the gate to let me in. The ‘man from the Council’ who had visited him recently had received much shorter shrift.

  ‘He wanted me to plant a hedge to screen the house from the lane. A hedge. I told him, “I’m not planting a hedge.” He said, “You are.” I said, “I’m far too busy to plant and keep trimming a hedge. I’ve got a business to run. I’m not sitting on my fucking arse like you lot in the Council.” He wasn’t very happy with me.’

  This was said with some satisfaction. Norman was now eighty. He had left school at fourteen – ‘I never graded on to the grammar school in Henley’ – and had worked in the woods ever since: first for some of the local estates and then setting up his own timber and scrap business, clearing out the forest for firewood that the estates didn’t have the time or manpower to do themselves.

  He was acknowledged as the most experienced gamekeeper in the area, an impression he liked to reinforce himself, having managed the shooting for several estates before he retired. He gave a wry shake of the head as he reflected on how poorly some of the estates were now run: ‘They’re only getting some 10 per cent of the pheasants and partridges they put down. They don’t know how to manage them.’ Another gamekeeper, now long dead, he described as ‘a twisted bastard’ who used to pretend to his estate manager that he had put down far more birds than he had.

  Both his scrap and firewood business had brought him into contact with some of the gypsy families along the Chilterns. ‘In the old days, the gypsies could burn my cars down for the scrap – not any more.’ For Norman, regulations had been squeezing the life and enjoyment out of the countryside. ‘I used to keep pigs out at the back – Gloucester Old Spot. But then it got too complicated selling them. At least we can still eat muntjac liver. Now that’s lovely fried on a bit of toast.’

  Gamekeeping suited Norman for other reasons. He was a phenomenally good shot and not shy of telling me so. A typical Norman story involved birds flying over, but not past, him at a shoot (forty-one pheasants falling from his forty-two shots), and the titled sportsman further down the line looking disgruntled but congratulating Norman.

  I asked him cautiously about poachers, without mentioning that I had talked to Simon, who had given me so much advice on my initial return to England from South America. Norman became a little circumspect. ‘Well, let’s just say that the local policeman gave me some advice when I started gamekeeping. He told me that if I got wind of anyone about near the breeding pens, “to put on a mask, take a pick handle and have a go at them – and then just walk away”.’

  Despite his gruffness, most of Norman’s stories were about kindness: about farmers who let him live on their margins, or gave him good deals in return for the odd brace of pheasant or a day’s shooting. He talked of an old gentleman farmer we both knew, a gentleman in every sense, Stephen Hart, who said to Norman that he could borrow any of his farming equipment at any time, as long as Stephen was able to do the same with his – ‘knowing full well that I didn’t have anything he could possibly want. It was his way of making it easy for me.’ In the end, Stephen had sadly lost his own farm; as a tenant farmer, he could no longer afford the rent increases, so it reverted to the owners.

  As a gamekeeper, Norman had rented a cottage from a more benevolent landlord, Michael Reade – the Reades being an old Ipsden family – who had charged him a peppercorn rent of just £1 a week. ‘He was a lovely man. I’d do anything for him. He would have done anything for me.’

  It’s the end of our conversation. Norman’s anger and energy have wound down. The shadows have crept along from the Ipsden woods and into the valley.

  *

  I recognised that I was staying too long at home before moving on. I should have been following the advice of the old Ray Charles song: ‘Hit the road, Jack / and don’t you come back / no more, no more, no more.’ The rest of the Icknield Way was awaiting me.

  But the old thatched barn was such a comforting presence. It had a long room open to the rafters in which I could write. I enjoyed waking up and seeing the woodpeckers and those goldfinches and the blue tits from my bedroom window, or sleeping out in the sheds. My hammock was swinging between its two silver birches. I was swimming in the river each day. It was the height of summer. The glory days in England do not last long and need to be taken.

  My only excuse – a lame one – was that travellers on the Icknield Way doubtless stopped here in earlier days. The Thames was a natural crossroads, from which they could strike south-east downriver along the Goring Gap, one of the few passageways through the hills that surround what is now London, or follow the river upstream to Oxford and the north country beyond. It was a natural meeting and market place from Neolithic to Anglo-Saxon times.

  In the distance, the Chilterns rose up as the route I should be taking towards the North Sea and distant Norfolk. But I felt a continuing reluctance. I’ve often had it in the middle of a journey. A moment when you wonder if the restlessness of travelling could be commuted into the savouring of one place – in this case my home. And again I’m Mole, when he comes back to his home after adventures in the Wild Wood and is suddenly struck by his desertion:

  He let his eyes wander round his old room … He saw clearly how plain and simple – how narrow, even – it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence … He knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

  Any such sentimentality/heimatliebe was rudely awakened early one morning when I was having breakfast. It was a beautiful day. I was eating a bacon sandwich and the sun was shining. My landlord rang.

  ‘Hugh, you know we said that it was fine for you to stay in the barn for the next few years and the foreseeable future?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we’ve changed our minds. You need to leave by September.’

  I had the rest of the summer to find a new home.

  I found it difficult to absorb. I went to each of my writing sheds in turn and tried to write about it in my diary. Nothing came. I stared out of the window at the circle of fourteen silver birches we had planted by the river, one for each of my parents’ grandchildren; at the shadows lengthening under the chestnut boughs along the riverbank. Then I swam as far upriver as I could and let the current drift me back.

  No summer looks as beautiful as the last one you spend in a place. The cow parsley was higher and with a whiter intensity than I could ever remember; the dog roses in the hedges more prolific; in the dark shadows under the chestnuts, old hosta plants spread their silvery blue leaves, as big as saucers.

  Leaving somewhere that you’ve known all your adult life as a home is both hard and easy. Hard in that I’d known it longer than I had been writing books, or making films, or been married, or had children, so that I had decades of identity pinned to the place. Easy, I tried to tell myself, because wherever I now went, I would still always be carrying the essence of Little Stoke within me. A Quechua woman in Peru called Nilda Callañaupa once told me that the reason to make pilgrimages was that ‘it makes you more comfortable as a human being to have different parts of the landscape within you’. It is possible to absorb a place.

  At the best of times travel can be a sublimation of whatever troubles may be brewing at home. Now, more than ever, I wanted to follow the Icknield Way up the coast to Norfolk, to get to the other side of the country, in every sense. A journey that had begun out of curiosity about England – what sort of a country it was becoming, what sort of a country it had been right from its early prehistory – was now a more urgent search. If I was shortly to become homeless, I needed to know what it was I wanted; what were the essential ingredients of the England I was looking for? And where, more practically,
did I now want to live myself?

  *

  George Orwell’s grave lay a few miles away from me, at Sutton Courtenay, where his plain tombstone says ‘Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born 25 June 1903, died 21 January 1950’. People associate him with East Anglia, because of the adopted name he took from the Suffolk river and the virulence with which he wrote about Southwold, where the family later moved; but his earlier formative years were all in the Thames Valley.

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Winston and Julia escape to the countryside for an illicit rendezvous, the image of ‘the Golden Country’ may draw on Orwell’s own childhood experiences of Shiplake beside the Thames:

  They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women’s hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming?

  ‘Isn’t there a stream somewhere near here?’ he whispered.

  ‘That’s right, there is a stream. It’s at the edge of the next field, actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them lying in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.’

  ‘It’s the Golden Country – almost,’ he murmured.

  ‘The Golden Country?’

  ‘It’s nothing, really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.’

  Recent revisionist biographies have questioned the old image of Orwell as the conscientious man of the left who fought in Spain and believed in austere Tribune values. They have suggested instead a man with a tougher, womanising side, quite often brutal in his treatment of people. But for me he was still a hero, who had not allowed the constraints of class to blinker him, and who had taken the road to Wigan Pier with his eyes wide open.