The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  What would Orwell have made of Britain today? The Britain in which inequalities of wealth were if anything as pronounced as in the 1930s? There might not be the same bone-crunching malnutrition and absolute poverty – although there were more people who fell through the gap than was often acknowledged – but there was still an almost obscene disparity between the few ‘Masters of the Universe’ operating out of a gilded circle in London, the bankers, technocrats and media lords on six-figure salaries, and the families I saw counting the pennies in the village Co-ops.

  He would have been appalled, above all, by the way his ‘Newspeak’ had been adopted, the blandness of policy directives, the talk of ‘moving on’, ‘planning initiatives’, of anaemic politicians whose leaders could be told apart only by the colour of their ties.

  The country was changing and many of the people I had met on my journey were disenfranchised, stuck in jobs and places they didn’t want to be. With the privilege of a traveller, I could pass through and observe. But at some stage I would have to face up to my own reckoning.

  Chapter 4

  Homeleaving

  ‘You think you’re so clever and classless and free but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.’

  John Lennon, ‘Working Class Hero’

  I PACKED MY sleeping bag and kit, and finally headed on up the Icknield Way and towards the Chilterns.

  Did the colours look fresher, the green after the rain more succulent, the dark lanes into the beech trees more inviting, now that I was leaving my home not just for a journey but for good? Thirty years before, I had motorbiked through these lanes at dawn, on my way to college, the steam rising from the tarmac filtering and softening even further the colours of the leaves.

  The names on the signposts as I headed inland from the river were like a roll-call from different eras of my life: South Stoke where one of my sisters had got married; Checkendon where my other sister had; Catsbrain Hill; Stoke Row; the road up Berins Hill past an old eccentric zoo that was kept at Wellplace Farm, now long closed, and up into Ipsden and the heart of the woods.

  I went to see Elizabeth Chatwin, who had continued living at her house at Homer End since her husband, the writer Bruce Chatwin, died in 1989. Elizabeth had been kind to me since I moved back to Oxfordshire after my separation; she had invited me, among other things, to several Thanksgiving meals, which, as an expatriate American, she celebrated with due pomp, ceremony and cranberry sauce.

  As I came up the drive to her house, I surprised a muntjac deer, which bolted away into the woods; muntjac had proliferated over the past few years, helped by their fertility cycle. They can breed all year, unlike other animals restricted to set seasons. Some landowners disliked them as pests; I enjoyed the beauty of their startled, exaggerated high kicks, like cheerleaders.

  Elizabeth had a direct countrywoman’s approach, which I valued. She was a good person to see when you needed cheering up. It was clear why she had always been such a good traveller – to Afghanistan, with Bruce and Peter Levi, and to India with Penelope Betjeman: her resilience was infectious. Now in her late seventies and suffering from arthritis, she still undertook arduous journeys.

  There were some dead pheasants outside the door waiting to be plucked. On one of my first visits, a neighbour had dropped by with some rabbits which she had asked me to help skin – if not quite as a test, then certainly as a rite of passage.

  But the animals that Elizabeth most favoured were sheep. On coming to Homer End in 1981, she had brought ten of them from the Chatwins’ previous house near Stow on the Wold. Growing up in America, Elizabeth had been surrounded by animals and she had once wanted to be a vet. In the Cotswolds, she had helped neighbours with their flocks, and they had presented her with a few ewes in return. Over the years at Homer End, she had grown the herd to some thirty ewes, and borrowed a ram from a neighbour each year to produce more.

  While the sheep ‘rooted her’, as she put it, and gave her purpose, she complained that the new rules concerning abattoirs made it hard for sheep farmers. Once, local butchers used local abattoirs. Now the five local butchers in the nearby market town had closed, and the supermarkets’ domination of the business had centralised abattoirs at just a few locations in the country, meaning that livestock had to travel an inhumane – and uneconomic – distance to be slaughtered.

  For a while, Elizabeth had employed a licensed slaughterer to come to her own premises.

  ‘Then that was stopped for health and safety reasons. Worse still, when I used one abattoir, I wasn’t sure if the shrink-wrapped cuts I got back at the end were from my own sheep. The whole point is that you want to sell – and eat – your own animals.’

  Hygiene regulations now prevented sheep farmers from being present when their sheep were slaughtered. The layman might think this a blessing, but as farmers point out, if you’ve brought sheep into the world, you want to see with your own eyes that they have been despatched as humanely as possible.

  Sheep were one of the few subjects on which I had ever heard Elizabeth get emotional. She had stuck with the black Welsh mountain breed that she had started with in Stow, although it was clear her fancy had sometimes strayed elsewhere. ‘I fell in love with Gotland ewes in Scotland. Cloud grey with glossy curly wool, for sheepskin coats. So polite and aristocratic – compared to my grumpy black Welsh sheep who growl and grind their teeth.’ She demonstrated.

  I told her that she sounded like one of those men who could have any girl they wanted, but settled for the plain one rather than the gorgeous blonde. ‘Well, it is a bit like that.’

  The sheep had been a solitary passion. Bruce had often been away travelling and was anyway not much interested. ‘He didn’t like to touch the sheep. But he would let himself be used as a post. So he stood stock-still in a field and let the sheep be herded round him.’

  ‘Michael Ignatieff used to come and stay, and I made him help as well. So that once he complained that all he ever did when he saw us was “sheep business”.’

  Ignatieff gave a live and impromptu elegy for Chatwin on the day of his death in the cold January of 1989, on The Late Show. It was a bravura and moving bit of television, not now accessible on YouTube or the Internet, but I remember it vividly at the time of transmission. He described how he had visited the Chatwins several times in Bruce’s last months, when he was dying from AIDS and being nursed by Elizabeth. How Chatwin had lain down outside on the grass wearing a pair of Vuarnet glacier sunglasses with side pieces to stop reflected glare, and the sky and clouds had been mirrored in them. It was an image I had always remembered, and thought of whenever I came back to the house and garden.

  Ignatieff had also written perceptively about his friend. His claim, in The New York Review of Books, that ‘his own character was one of his greatest inventions’, is often repeated. Less well known is how he ended that same sentence: that he was ‘at the same time the most restlessly cosmopolitan English writer of his generation’.

  Chatwin died in 1989 just when the world was changing: the Iron Curtain coming down; the Internet beginning. He wrote when there were still secrets to be found in libraries – when knowledge could be more compartmentalised, hidden, like the rare artefacts he collected; Elizabeth had showed me the Peruvian pre-Columbian cloak of hummingbird feathers they had always kept above their bed.

  Knowledge had now become more democratic. It was all ‘out there’, somewhere, on a server. The more arcane settings of Utz in communist Prague, or the isolation of Patagonia, let alone of the Black Hill on the Welsh borders, had passed. We were all connected now. But perhaps, as a result, we had lost his furious urge to talk.

  *

  ‘Aewelm’ means ‘the spring or well source’ in Anglo-Saxon. Ewelme lay just off the Icknield Way a few miles on from Elizabeth, a perfectly formed small village in a dip between the Thames and the Chilterns that had retained much of its ancient Saxon and medieval shape. The chalk stream that flowed through it – and attracted the Saxons, who loved c
lear water rising – once made the village prosperous from trout and watercress. The watercress beds had been recently restored, although much to local frustration the perfectly good cress could not be sold, due to EU regulations.

  The village was small and out of the way, protected in its dip; perhaps the reason that Cromwell’s men failed to rip apart the church in the way they did the rest of royalist Oxfordshire. It was the extraordinarily well preserved flint and stone church I had come back to see, as I had many times in the past.

  I am not a great churchgoer or indeed church visitor. But there was something about Ewelme church that would lure in even a devout apostate like Philip Larkin. It sits by a medieval almshouse and the oldest occupied school in the country, a medieval complex made homely by the wood and the scale. Even so, the richness of the interior belies the plain front. In the fifteenth century the church enjoyed aristocratic patronage by the powerful Dukes of Suffolk, the de la Poles, one of whom married Chaucer’s granddaughter, Alice.

  Her tomb is quite remarkable. On top, the marble effigy lies in repose, clothed in the habit of a vowess (a widow who has taken a vow not to remarry), a ring on the third finger of her right hand, her hands clasped in prayer in a conventional way. Less commonly, she has the order of the Garter tied around her left arm; Alice was an influential woman for her time, thrice married (so her final vow wasn’t that hard to make), owner of the estates of those three dead husbands and deeply enmeshed in the Wars of the Roses.

  Around the tomb’s canopy and on the ceiling of the chapel to the side are multiple angels: some of the earliest wooden carvings in the country and similar in style to those in Suffolk churches like Blythburgh, as you would expect for the Duchess of Suffolk. Attendant angels hold heraldic shields along the side of the tomb. More sinuous angels, like lizards, cling to the marble pillow on which Alice lies, their wings folded back to meet its curves.

  But it is what lies beneath her tomb that always draws me back. Bend down to the floor, look through the marble grille and there is a second effigy, directly parallel to the one above. Again it is the Duchess. But this time Alice has been carved in the rictus of death, naked in a winding sheet, in direct parallel to the calm poise of the statue above. Her back is bent up, arched in pain, her teeth bared, her ribs protruding. It is a shocking image.

  Moreover, it is an image commissioned by her son, John, the next Duke of Suffolk. What strange mixture of filial piety and horror at his mother’s death prompted him? He had experienced a disturbed childhood. The de la Poles were regarded as upstarts by the nobility, merchant stock who were derided for adding the Norman affectation of ‘de la’ to the plebeian name of Pole. His father William, Alice’s third husband, had been on the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses, supporting Henry VI and alienating the Yorkist clique who arranged for him to be exiled. When he boarded a ship to escape, he was seized, beheaded and left as a corpse on the beach at Dover. Before he died, William was just able to write a moving letter to his son hoping that he would ‘pass all the great tempests and troubles of this wretched world’. Yet on reaching his majority, John himself became a strong supporter of those rival Yorkists and Richard III – and then of Henry VII when he triumphed over the House of York at Bosworth; no wonder that John was known as ‘the trimmer Duke’. His mother Alice had similarly twisted and turned between factions in the Wars of the Roses.

  Such ‘cadaver tombs’ were not unknown across Europe in the fifteenth century when John had this one of his mother carved after her death in 1475. Similar tombs had been erected for Henry II of France by his wife Catherine de Medici, and for various clerics in England. Masaccio had illustrated one in Florence in his celebrated Trinity of 1428, the first painting that many visitors see when they arrive at the city, as it stands in Santa Maria Novella just opposite the railway station. Beneath the fresco of the Trinity lies a painted corpse with a stark message: ‘I once was what now you are and what I am, you shall yet be.’

  But this tomb for Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, is unusual and far more than just a memento mori. For a start, it is one of the very few known of a single woman; her son John could hardly have carved a tomb to his father as well, given that he had married into the assassins’ family. The sculpted skeleton too is brutally lifelike: the toes curling up, the ribs pressing through the skin, the arms emaciated as one would expect in an old woman of seventy.

  There are few other places in England that bring home so well the psychotic disturbance of the Wars of the Roses, a period that has always fascinated me: perhaps Tewkesbury Abbey, where the Yorkists barricaded in the last of the Lancastrians before butchering them; Towton, where 28,000 people died on the battle-field, more casualties in a single day than in any other battle fought on British soil; or the walls of York where the heads of Richard Plantagenet and his son Edmund were skewered.

  But Alice’s tomb has a peculiar horror all of its own. It is the Munch Scream of the fifteenth century. It belies the placid face of England as smooth in repose as the marble effigy on top of the tomb; underneath, buried by the weight of centuries, is a twisting and turning effigy that will not rest.

  *

  I carried on up the outlying hills of the Chilterns. As many as nine red kites were wheeling overhead and searching the skies – or rather searching from the sky, as they peered down for dead prey. It was near here on the Getty estate, in 1989, that the species were reintroduced to England after their extinction. At first welcomed as a triumph, locals were now murmuring that the release programme had been all too successful. Both the local countryside and towns were patrolled by fleets of the birds, their distinctive pronged tail and slightly heavy flight making them instantly identifiable even by the worst birdwatcher.

  Kites are primarily scavengers, although if I had a fiver for every countryman or woman like Sarah Phipps who had told me they had lost livestock to them, I could stand a round of drinks at a farmers’ market. I wasn’t too worried about the tales of guinea pigs snatched from village gardens, or chicks for that matter – but I did find their cry oppressive: a thin shriek that died away on the wind. With the nine circling above me as I climbed the hill – and with a certain amount of the weight of the world on my shoulders after my eviction – I felt for a moment like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, with the Nazgul circling in for the kill, an idea so laughable that I instantly felt better.

  The kites would have been a familiar sight back in Ewelme during the Wars of the Roses. Medieval towns encouraged them as unpaid street cleaners, although they were not much loved, any more than vultures in India: Shakespeare was still using ‘you kite’ as an insult, or the more satisfying nickname for them, ‘you puttock’. Hollinshed includes them as ‘fowls which we repute unclean’ along with ravens, crows and choughs.

  Perhaps their unpopularity was as much to do with the battlefield. Kites would have competed with crows to strip the flesh from the dead after the battles of the Wars of the Roses.

  I thought of Malory again and his attempt to create a lost Arthurian world to put against what must have seemed the complete anarchy of that time. A recent biography suggests that he visited Ewelme and Alice, Duchess of Suffolk. She was precisely the sort of powerful yet pious woman who figures in his chronicle.

  Malory’s work has stayed so centrally in the English imagination because it tells of loss. There is an undercurrent of regret running through our history. What could have been. The unicorn disappearing into the trees. The loss of Roman Britain. The loss of Albion. The loss of Empire. We are forever constructing narratives in which a golden sunlit time – the Pax Romana, the Elizabethan golden age, that Edwardian summer before the First World War, a brief moment in the mid-sixties with the Beatles – prefigure anarchy and decay.

  I remembered how as a teenager in the 1970s, there was a sense of disappointment: that this was a failed decade, the hangover after the sixties dream. The Beatles had split up. Altamont had driven a nail into the idea of free festivals and peace ’n love. Terrorism was rife from the Muni
ch Olympics to Northern Ireland. Industrial dispute had led to bitter winters of strikes and discontent. England was a tribal place of factions and class with divisions hammered out as surely as the wall put up between the Falls and Shankill roads in Belfast. I wished then that I had been born ten years earlier.

  In retrospect, the seventies were a fabulous decade that produced far better music, film and attitude than the sixties ever had. Punk was an ethos of self-invention and do-it-yourself, and openness to the unexpected, that has always stayed with me. But I’m not sure I realised that at the time.

  Are we bad at living in the present? Always yearning for a past peace that is more perceived than real, wanting to turn the clock back as well as forward. Or is it because the future is always so uncertain? The pace of change in England has often been so ferocious that we cling on to the past, like shipwrecked sailors to a plank of wood.

  *

  The light is coming low through the trees when I turn the corner and see Danny sitting up ahead beside his caravan. He is tall, with shaved hair, heavily tattooed, maybe in his thirties. His four large shire horses are grazing along the verges of the Icknield Way, and in the field beyond the fence. Danny is on a mobile phone (a gift, it occurs to me, to travellers), while the most beautiful wooden caravan stands on the path, a saucepan of coffee still smoking on a fire near by.

  We ease into conversation – it’s too beautiful a caravan to pass without saying something – and it emerges that Danny built it with his wife in Norfolk a few years back and is now very slowly winding his way towards the west, perhaps branching up to Herefordshire – so, rather like Edward Thomas, is doing the same journey that I am, but in reverse. It may take him years rather than months to complete, as he tries to get work as he goes.