The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

I ask him if everyone is friendly when he meets them; he is cautious in his reply. ‘Well, only some. When we were travelling through Suffolk, which was hard, we found that they liked us to stay for one night only, on the village green, because it looks good with the caravan. Any more and they’re not interested. They start getting worried. And if you’re going to work, you need to stay for more than a night.’

  He’s been travelling since he was a teenager, but does not come from a travelling family. He was adopted in Newbury (‘by a kind couple who are now dead’), and brought up there but felt he had failed at school and left at sixteen for the open road – ‘and I haven’t looked back’. He too had known Jeremy Sandford, and had read his book about the horse fairs of Yorkshire.

  The caravan is a throwback, a conscious and artificial homage to a previous travelling age. In many places the old drovers’ tracks no longer serve their original function – they can be too rutted to travel along or, worse, some local councils have put up bollards, more to stop four-wheel-drive vehicles than caravans, although few councils welcome travellers of any sort.

  This is borne out later that evening when a farmer in the local pub overhears me talking about Danny’s caravan on the Ridgeway.

  ‘Fucking pikeys,’ he says. ‘I hate them. That guy’s horses have been eating my grass. They’ll take anything if it isn’t nailed down, and then some.’

  ‘Tractors are the worst. They’ll take them in the middle of the night, drive them up onto a container vehicle and be in Felixstowe by dawn before you know anything has happened. Then ship them to Poland. There are a lot of shiny new British tractors in Poland.’

  His face darkens. He is already well tanned after what transpires has been a fortnight’s skiing in Courchevel. He is in his fifties, lean and saturnine.

  Someone else asks him what he’d do if he caught any thieves or poachers. ‘Ram the vehicle,’ he says unhesitatingly. ‘And if any pikeys were trying to get out at the time, so much the better. The police won’t do a thing against them. Particularly if there’s any colour involved. Just don’t want to go there. A lot of those pikey camps are “no-go zones”,’ he snorts. ‘No-fucking-go zones. What’s that about?’

  It doesn’t seem the right time to mention my appreciation of Danny’s hand-tooled wooden caravan, or his magnificent shire horses.

  ‘I’m getting some concrete blocks put on the drovers’ road. That’ll stop the bastards.’

  And sure enough, concrete posts appear shortly afterwards on the Watlington stretch of the Icknield Way. I remember when bollards started appearing around Bristol in the 1980s to stop travellers parking up under flyovers or on lay-bys. Now you get them around even motorway service stations.

  Like the good burghers of Suffolk, we like the idea that there are still some romantic souls travelling the highways and byways of old England in the traditional manner. We just don’t want them to come our way.

  *

  When I was eighteen, I used to ride a motorbike across this stretch of southern Oxfordshire to Henley Sixth Form College where I was briefly a student.

  The Sex Pistols were at full throttle around then. One day I made the mistake of listening to Never Mind the Bollocks before getting on my motorbike and was more hyped up than I should have been, with Steve Jones’s incendiary guitar riffs running through me like too much coffee or amphetamine. This would not have mattered – I knew the route like the back of my leather glove – if a farmer hadn’t decided to put loose gravel down on the corner of a country lane that had done perfectly well without it for the previous year.

  The bike skidded and I landed in the corner of a nearby field. The bike came off worse than I did, with bent forks. A farmworker was leaning over a gate, watching me. He had a drawl so slow you could play an entire punk song by the time he had finished one of his sentences.

  ‘Sorry about that … I only jus’ put that gravel down.’

  I was too winded by the fall to say anything. As so often in life, a suitable riposte came to me only in retrospect. Nor was it something The Archers could have broadcast.

  It was a cold winter and I got in the habit of stopping off for a ‘whisky mac’ (ginger wine and cheap whisky) at one of the many small country pubs that still lay along the old coaching route from London to Oxford. At one, the Crooked Billet in Stoke Row, there was no beer pump at the bar. The elderly landlord went down to the cellar for each pint, drawn directly from the barrel. The only food was a packet of pork scratchings. A dog was in permanent occupation of a battered old sofa in front of the fire. There were two rooms, or ‘snugs’, both so small and close together that you could hear every conversation in the pub. Most of the time there was just one group conversation going on anyway.

  Today the Crooked Billet is a gastro-pub of the fanciest sort: tuna carpaccio; seared diver-caught scallops; Moroccan spiced rump of local lamb, harissa, chargrilled Mediterranean vegetables and barley couscous. No ploughman’s lunch, but there is always the ‘sticky-glazed pink-carved duck breast with foie gras mash’.

  A large conservatory extension has been built out from the bar, in which candles are lit at each table for dinner. Worst of all, there is no bar.

  Not far away on the Thames, the Leatherne Bottel has suffered a similar fate. This was once a favourite for boating folk messing around on the river; it was where the ‘Three Men in a Boat’ stopped to hear the famous fishing story in which every visitor to the pub – and the barman – claimed to have caught the large perch stuffed and hanging over the bar, only for it to turn out to be plaster of Paris.

  The whole pub is now made out of plaster of Paris. The interior has been gutted and replaced with Los Angeles faux gilt and naked cherubs. The waitresses wear black. There is a maître d’. On a recent visit I made by boat, when there was no alternative place to stop, we found that the chef and some of his staff had thrown ‘a hissy fit’, as they say in Pinewood, and trashed the toilets in true rock-star fashion, before leaving.

  But deep in the woods between the two, I now came to a pub that had changed not at all. At the Black Horse near Checkendon, the beer was still fetched from kegs. For food the choice was between a pickled egg or a pickled onion. When I asked the pub landlady if she could describe the difference between the bitters they stocked, she said, briskly: ‘Well, it’s all beer.’ Then she went back to watch the television in the kitchen. In the old days, Norman had told me, he usually paid for his pint here with a brace of pheasants.

  Higher up on the Chilterns, I ended the day at another pub I liked, the Fox and Hounds at Christmas Common. The landlord there had occasional music nights when locals turned up and busked – a group of Irish musicians or, the night that I arrived, a lad called Alex in a woolly hat singing ‘Cocaine Blues’ and then the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. His voice had the right rasp to it, as if he were still smoking in the now smoke-free pub – a change, incidentally, that no amount of nostalgia for the old pubs causes me any regret. Under the bar lay the landlord’s enormous grey Irish wolfhound, the noblest of dogs, and one with a fine Celtic pedigree – the Celts used them to attack the Ancient Greeks at Delphi. I always trust a pub with a dog.

  Alex started up on a cover of the Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’, and the man at the bar beside me told me he used to hear the song being played at Basra on British Services Radio when he was in the army. He said it reminded him of driving out into the Iraqi streets in the sunlight, when you didn’t quite know what was going to happen next.

  *

  The next morning, I made a small detour to St Peter’s at Easington. Compared to Ewelme, it would have been hard to find a plainer, more bare medieval church, or a more out of the way one, down a tiny lane in a hamlet of just a few houses. I later discovered that many inhabitants of nearby Watlington were unaware of its existence. A rare historical report of the fourteenth-century church described it as ‘very ordinary’, but it was the austerity that attracted me: there was no steeple, it backed onto a farmyard and lo
oked like a barn; inside, there was a plain, battered Norman font and whitewashed walls. It was the sort of chapel to which Malory sent his Grail knights.

  The church had a record of one Roger Quartermaine, who in 1683 ‘desired to be buried in Easington churchyard. I bequeath to my son, Roger, my wearing apparel and my Bible; to my daughter, Martha Shepherd, my table and form, my brass porridge pot, and my little brass kettle.’ That detail about the porridge pot caught my eye; if you don’t have much, it matters to whom you bequeath your few possessions.

  The reason for searching out the old church was a fine painting by John Piper, which had piqued my curiosity; he had used the long grass in the overgrown cemetery to make St Peter’s look even more as if it were in the middle of a meadow.

  The Pipers had lived not far from here, in Fawley Bottom. John Piper worked with another local, John Betjeman, to produce The Shell Guide to Oxfordshire, as well as to other counties. His ‘romantic modernist’ sensibility had helped bring landscape painting back into the fold of modern art in England when abstract work was sweeping all before it: Piper’s early studies of prehistoric monuments, which he, like Paul Nash, appreciated, were followed by paintings of old churches, washed in bleak, monochrome colours to preserve them from any charge of sentimentality.

  I admired John Piper greatly. But it was his son Edward, also an artist, whom I had known and whom I thought of as I walked on from the church along the high lanes, with the wide curl of the Chilterns ahead revealed by the slight ridge I was traversing and the sunshine that had accompanied me for most of my journey.

  Many ghosts had already joined me on my walk. You can’t get to fifty without having a fair amount of friends who have died. Jeremy Sandford, Roger Deakin, and my old mentor from film school, George Brandt, all had jostled around my thoughts. I had met most of them when they were themselves in their fifties, and I was younger. Now I was their contemporary, so to speak.

  But of those who had died, Edward was perhaps the one for whom I felt the most affinity. I had got to know him in the late 1980s. His art was selling well both here and in the States; his dealer wanted to commission a film about him, as none had ever been made. Knowing that I admired his work, and had been unable to afford to buy any, he approached me with an offer made attractive because I would be part-paid in paintings.

  I went to see Edward at his studio in Somerset. He began by saying that he was hopelessly shy and reticent, particularly when discussing his art. Then he never stopped talking.

  Edward had grown up in the shadow of the reputation of his father John, to whom he was close, but he reacted in the best possible way – by taking the essence of his father’s work and steering it in a completely new direction. While John’s English landscapes were drenched in a subdued drizzle, Edward’s looked as if they might have been painted in the South of France. He brought the colour and light back into English landscape. A child of the ‘Here Comes the Sun’ sixties – a child growing up in these same Oxfordshire hills – he took the saturated colours of Pop Art, a movement he briefly dallied with, and poured them over his landscapes.

  His pictures reminded me of how long England had been under the clouds artistically. From Turner through to John Piper and Lowry, painters had loved to portray the country as one of clouds, mists and rain, with a brooding black sky behind. No wonder the English had become so convinced that we had such bad weather, as our artists were always telling us so – fallaciously. If my travels abroad had taught me anything, it was that we had a fabulous climate: temperate and mild, with a surprising amount of sunshine. Five minutes in the Andes, or the barren plateau of Tibet, or India before the monsoon – let alone Washington’s humid summer – would have had most of the moaners in bus shelters throughout the country scurrying back to this ‘green and pleasant land’, as Blake described it just before the artistic weather-front closed in.

  With the odd exception – like Eric Ravilious, whose clear planes of colour needed light, or foreign visitors like Raoul Dufy – you had to go back to Constable to find much sunshine around in English artistic skies. And it was Constable who started the move to grey. His cloud studies persuaded fellow artists that bad weather was more interesting.

  As I looked at the hills where Edward had grown up, bathed in sunlight, I thought that he was well suited temperamentally to flood the colour back. As I got to know him during the intensity of filming, I found him both energetic and vital. He had inherited the striking looks of his father, who even in his eighties was described as one of Britain’s most handsome men: they both had deep-set, piercing eyes, a high domed forehead and sculpted cheekbones. But whereas this look suited John’s more melancholy temperament, it didn’t quite match Edward’s more extrovert character. His face didn’t fit him, somehow; perhaps why he didn’t like to be photographed or filmed.

  He engaged with life: with jazz, which he played constantly, either himself or on record; with the fireworks show he organised annually for the Chelsea Arts Club; with his art, of course; but above all with women, or rather the female form. While I liked his landscapes for their colour and vibrancy, it was his nudes for which he was best known. Perhaps because his father had not really ‘gone there’, and certainly because of his own sexual energy, Edward was obsessively drawn to paint nudes.

  There were a lot of them. All round his studio were paintings of nude women in mirrors, in stockings, in washes of purple and green like Matisse (whom Edward admired, with a twist: his Red Knickers was a sixties tribute to the master’s Red Studio). We filmed him in the studio drawing a model called Diane, with my cousin Rachel Bell as a female camera operator so that it would not feel voyeuristic or intrusive; Edward himself often undressed when he painted his models.

  Diane was unusual in that Edward had got to know her when she bought some of his paintings. Edward engaged all of his models with a light banter, a mixture of running commentary on his work – ‘That line’s wrong, I’m bored with that – let’s start again’ – and discussions about how they might want to rearrange themselves on a chair or sofa. His wife and first model, Prue, had taught him, he said, to make the model feel that she was the subject and not the object of any painting.

  His nude women were very English – pale skinned, either brunettes or with flames of auburn hair. One was the mother of some children at the same school as his own. Edward told me how nervous he had been, going round to her house, knocking on the door and asking her to pose – to which, like most of the women he asked, she agreed.

  Anyone who ever thought that Englishwomen might be less inherently sensual than their European counterparts should take a crash course in Edward’s nudes. He encouraged his models, as one of them put it, to be relaxed with their own sexuality, and they were. This was not nudity of a classical purity but of a bedroom directness, in which genitalia were displayed and celebrated (Edward complained that while classical art taught the student much about ways of painting a nose, or an eye, there were few antecedents for how to paint a vulva). The poses were often chosen by the models themselves.

  Another reason that models liked Edward was that he worked incredibly fast. At art school he had hated the Slade’s insistence on meticulous observation and draughtsmanship, going instead for the quick, intuitive line. Edward had given up Pop Art because he couldn’t be bothered to spend so much time filling in the big, solid blocks of colour that the style required. As he had grown into his mature period, his drawing got faster and faster, like one of the straightahead, hard-bop Art Blakey standards he listened to while working. I watched him do one painting where the ink was still wet on the first line he’d drawn as he came to the last.

  This approach ran a high risk of failure and the paintings could jack-knife. But when his line ran true, there was a fluidity to his nudes and portraits that I found entrancing.

  Edward was restless with his disciplines too, picking up photography along with the painting. He journeyed from Dartmoor to the Orkneys to photograph Rings of Stone: The Prehistoric Circles
of Britain and Ireland, written by Aubrey Burl and still the standard gazetteer on the subject. He photographed Stonehenge under snow and intuitively showed how stone circles reflected the landscape around them, as at Balquhain, in north-eastern Scotland, which Keats described as ‘a dismal cirque of Druids’ stones, upon a forlorn moor’. It was seeing Edward’s pictures of the circles around the country that had first got me interested in the Neolithic culture that produced them.

  Like his father, he travelled England for the Shell Guides, covering some thirty counties at great speed. Being Edward, he took the opportunity to photograph not only the landscapes but also plenty of nudes in the landscape, often treating their flesh very texturally, as Bill Brandt did.

  Needless to say, the nudes didn’t get into the Shell Guides and have rarely been seen. Edward showed them to me in portfolio. One was of a nude woman lying face down among seaweed, so the curves and texture of her back contrasted with the black, sinuous folds of the water and the plants. At about the only ever exhibition of his photos – in the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock – the National Trust thought some prints too explicit and asked that they be withdrawn.

  The process of filming together was intense because Edward was an intense person. But it acquired a further urgency. The exhibition Edward was preparing, and at which the film was to be shown, had already been billed as ‘Edward Piper: The First 50 Years’. Halfway through the filming, Edward discovered that he had terminal cancer. Understandably, he told no one but his close family. What I thought of as a film marking a staging post in Edward’s evolving career – his father John was still alive and very much working at eighty-five – was suddenly, for him, a final testament and the only film of him painting that would ever be made; but I did not know that.

  I struggled to contain and absorb everything that he poured into the documentary, and could not understand his exigency. As well as filming him at work in the studio – a joy, because he worked so fast – we followed as he rushed around Bristol at equally great speed to complete a landscape painting, and then back home drew one of his favourite models, Christine, sitting in the garden with a blaze of flowers around her auburn hair.