by Hugh Thomson
Edward might have worked at great speed but there was always a moment when he would pause and appraise, whether a model or a landscape or his work. One thing he often talked about was how to stop and look, particularly at landscape; how easy it was to walk through a place without truly seeing it, and how the painter’s gaze could isolate the important detail and compress.
I was in my twenties, starting a fledgling film career and at first nervous of the considerable Piper charisma; Edward treated me like one of his models to put me at my ease, by talking non-stop on everything from jazz to Matisse. He had the gift of talking to everyone, young or old, as if they were equals. Kenneth Clark had described his parents John and Myfanwy as ‘two of the most completely humanised people I have ever known’; Edward inherited that. The studio house that he and Prue converted in Somerset, with a print of Picasso’s New Year on the kitchen door, was filled with light and music and very good cooking; Prue, as well as being a skilled ceramicist, was a cookery writer.
I admired Edward for bringing the Mediterranean to England; for his love of colour and women and good food; and for the sense of an ancient culture rippling under the landscape. He was never apologetic about the country, in the way that so many artists and intellectuals feel they have to be.
And then he was gone. So quickly. I only discovered his full name in the obituaries: Edward Blake Christmas Piper. His father John was devastated and died shortly afterwards.
I had a few of Edward’s paintings as a result of the filming – a magical woman’s head against the trees, like an English dryad, and some of the nudes. What should have been a friendship that continued for another twenty years had been cut short. But I could hear his light, high voice inside my head as I headed towards the Chilterns, telling me that he wasn’t sure if Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch was as good a jazz record as everyone said it was.
*
I reached Watlington, the town just under the Chilterns that marks the start of the Icknield Way’s long traverse across those hills. Several nearby farms and houses are called Icknield, as is the secondary school.
Watlington was an attractive market town that I already knew, as my sister Katie and her family lived there, with a fine medieval Town Hall at its central crossroads; lying on the Oxford coaching road from London, it used to have even more pubs than elsewhere in the county – a dozen at least. Then late in the nineteenth century, a Methodist spoilsport called George Wilkinson bought six just to close them down.
Edward Thomas passed through here not long afterwards, describing it as ‘all of a piece and rustic, but urban in its compression of house against house’. To escape the noise of a ‘pleasure fair’ that was passing through, he went into one of the surviving taprooms, ‘where the music did not penetrate and the weary were at rest. It was a most beautiful evening, and the swifts were shrieking low down along the deserted streets at nine o’clock. I should like to see them crowded with sheep from Ilsley, and the old drover wearing a thistle in his cap, or with Welsh ponies going to Stokenchurch Fair over the Chilterns.’
Like me, Thomas measured out his progress in this part of the world by pubs, from the Plough at Britwell Salome to the Shakespeare at Wallingford, and preferred the taprooms where there were ‘men, politics, crops and beer’ to the private bars where he found nothing but polished tables and trapped flies buzzing around – and nothing to smell. He had a lovely phrase for the Chilterns that lay ahead of me, ‘wooded on their crests and in the hollows, not very high, but shapely’.
There was a fair taking place in Watlington on the day I passed through. The local morris men were dancing.
Morris dancers can make real countrymen uneasy. In Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, set in a Wiltshire village, there is much mockery of the local man who dresses up in his garters and bells for the visitors on the village green.
I felt ambivalent, but also sorry for the dancers in the heat. The narrow streets of Watlington were trapping the summer sun. They were dancing in front of a barbecue on the pavement outside the local butchers, and their faces had taken on the livid hue of the roasting sausages as they hit their batons and twirled their handkerchiefs; how they must have itched to use those same handkerchiefs on their perspiring brows.
The troupe were from nearby Towersey and followed a pattern I’ve observed right around the country: all were old men except one; the older ones were built more like rugby fans than rugby players, so their white shirts were pulled tight over substantial girths that swayed ponderously as they swung around each other; the only young man was, as always, lean enough to emphasise the contrast in stomach size.
The local women were looking on more out of the historical reverence that afflicts the English than from any particular lust or admiration. Only a musician playing the squeezebox, with a jauntily tilted hat and less need to sweat, exuded the air of nomadic restlessness and allure that the morris men once brought with them: for they are no more English than the white wisteria which so gracefully adorns the more upmarket cottage walls along the High Street.
Nor is the dance quite as old as is sometimes thought. Rather than the medieval tradition people assume it must be, like a mummers’ play, the term ‘morris dancing’ derives from ‘moorish dance’ and originated in Spain in the fifteenth century, with the dancers using swords rather than sticks to tap each other as they swirled. Brought over to England at the time of Henry VII, when the costumed Spanish dancers gave an energetic presentation before the king in the Christmas celebrations of 1494, it proved a popular success.
A century later, in 1600, Shakespearean actor Will Kemp performed ‘a morris dance’ all the way from Norwich to London as a publicity stunt, although by then the dance had lost much of its Spanish associations – not surprisingly, given the hostility to Spain shown by the Tudors throughout the late sixteenth century.
Its popularity was ensured when Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans banned the dance; its subsequent re-establishment by Charles II could be seen as a return to a ‘Merrie England’ of ales and dancing on the village green, although in fact it was about as authentically English as a paella.
*
One of the onlookers at the morris dancing told me about a funeral that had recently been held in Watlington for Nathan Buckland, the patriarch of the local travelling showmen community. A horse-drawn cortège had gone down the high street and 600 people had packed the church.
His widow Julie told me what had made her husband so remarkable and well loved. Any hesitancy about intruding on her grief, after a forty-two-year marriage, she removed by reassuring me that, far from it, she wanted to talk both about him and about the secretive showmen community. Secretive because over the years they have often experienced prejudice. Villages that quite like the excitement of an annual fair are often less enthusiastic about the travelling showmen who accompany them, with their caravans and supposed ‘loose morals’. They get tarred with the same brush as other travelling communities.
‘Some people put showmen down as gypsies – and there’s good and bad in them, like all of us,’ said Julie.
I was impressed that Watlington, which Edward Thomas remembered as hosting a pleasure fair when he passed, had always gone out of its way to offer the travelling showmen ‘winter quarters’, a plot where more than twenty large families put up their mobile homes in the months when traditionally they rested. Nathan, born in 1945 to one of those families, had grown up in these winter quarters and at the local school, Icknield College. It had left him with a deep attachment to Watlington.
He married Julie when she was just eighteen. She showed me an old black-and-white photo of the two of them emerging from the same church he had just been buried in. They were covered in confetti and looked impossibly young; around them were the smiling faces of the travelling showmen community.
Julie came from a travelling family too, of fourteen children, and had grown up in a fairground atmosphere, travelling for the better part of the year: ‘I remember the small villages being ve
ry friendly. It was often cold when we arrived and they’d always bring you a cuppa tea. The fair was a big thing in those times. Light up a place for a few days.’
After marriage, Nathan and she had toured the country with his fairground attractions: ‘kiddie rides’, as Julie put it, with octopuses and double-decker buses on floats, coconut shies, darts win-a-prize stalls and just about anything that worked with the punters.
Later, Watlington Council gave Nathan permission to buy up the disused watercress beds on the edge of town and for his family and friends to put mobile homes there more permanently. Compared to the aggravation at Dale Farm that was filling the papers – Basildon Council had spent £18 million to evict travellers from land that had previously been derelict anyway – Watlington’s more enlightened attitude had paid dividends.
For the showmen community had helped energise Watlington. Nathan had extended the town social centre, the Memorial Club, and organised local fairs. ‘Showmen are born organisers,’ said Julie: ‘it’s what they’re good at. And they have to be.’
Not that travelling showmen were finding things easy. Government legislation on sites where they could stay, and the indiscriminate hostility of some councils to all travellers, meant that fairs had been cancelled in parts of the country. However, councils had not had it all their own way, because of ancient legislation that guaranteed ‘charter fairs’.
Between 1199 and 1350 over fifteen hundred charters were issued, granting the right to hold markets or fairs. The Crown had realised that fairs were an excellent way of raising tax, and so created new ones and brought existing ones under their jurisdiction. The majority of English fairs were granted royal charters and reorganised to fall in line with their European counterparts.
For that reason Thame near by, almost a sister town to Watlington, found that when at one point noises were made about closing down their ancient fair, on grounds of the collateral damage it caused, they couldn’t. Nathan had been involved in that dispute, pointing out to the town worthies and the police that the incidents they complained of – drinking in the town centre, youths getting out of control – happened all year round. The fair was too convenient and easy a target to blame.
There is still a puritan mindset at work in England. We like our ‘keep out’ notices. Villages have got better at installing playgrounds for children; yet facilities for teenagers are often non-existent, and most of the local bus services that took them to anywhere more exciting have folded. If you could bottle the teenage boredom of Saturday night in a country town, where the only place to meet is the disused bus shelter, then you would understand why the coming of an annual fair is still a cause for real excitement and pleasure.
*
In Peru I usually travelled with a mule – so that it could carry my kit as well as be company of a limited sort – but that wasn’t so feasible in southern England.
I had toyed with the idea of taking a dog along with me for the second half of the walk. Not that I’ve got one. But occasionally I walked my neighbours’ sleek and beautiful rottweiler when at the barn. And my sister’s family had a parson’s terrier. Both were fine dogs. John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, when he crossed the States with his large poodle, was one of my favourite books and an inspiration for this journey; I grew up to John Noakes’s television programmes about walking the Cornish coast path with his border collie, Shep. And I was aware, not least because my children kept telling me, that a book with a dog in it would be commercially attractive.
But there were disadvantages. For a start, both candidate dogs had names I didn’t feel like shouting across a crowded field of walkers: the rottweiler was called Portia (like naming a gladiator Phyllis); the terrier, even more improbably, was called Spartacus. More seriously, the way I was walking would not work with a dog – too many impromptu stops and starts and stays with friends. I met a lot of dogs along the way anyway – particularly at Iron Age hill-forts, where dog walkers were often the only other visitors. It made for a perfect constitutional circuit: once round the earthworks of a fort and no need to scoop.
I was able to borrow a dog of my own just for a day though, as I passed Watlington, where my sister lived. Spartacus could come with me.
‘You can let him off the lead,’ said Alex, my brother-in-law, an incurable optimist, ‘but he may not stay with you.’
Within the next hour I had dragged Spartacus out of willow ponds, hedges and just about any cover that conceivably contained a rabbit. Dog-walking was the modern equivalent of medieval falconry – it required the owner to be led into unknown territory that they would otherwise not investigate. This was fine if it was a local landscape that you were happy to explore; not if you had a whole country waiting for you to cross.
I sat down on a bench outside a pub when I got to the next village along the Icknield Way, Chinnor, exhausted by having detoured past so many rabbit burrows. A man joined me and we got talking, mainly about Spartacus, as an easy and obvious point of conversation. It took all of a minute before he made the usual joke about ‘I am Spartacus’. I guessed he was about thirty-five, dressed eccentrically for the country, in pale tracksuit and trainers – more an urban look – and with an iPod looped to ostentatiously large and white Sennheiser headphones. He was very tanned. He said he had just been on holiday to Tunisia, where the clubbing was better than Ibiza.
I explained that the dog wasn’t mine and that my travelling lifestyle made it difficult for me to have one. He was sympathetic.
‘I know what you mean. And to be honest, I always think, “who needs a pet when you’ve already got a penis to look after.”’
It was unanswerable.
*
I arrived at Whiteleaf Cross at dusk, a late-summer dusk, alone after a happily weary Spartacus had been repatriated. There were two horses with their riders on the hilltop. A long bench had been erected above the Cross, which was fine for looking out into the valley but hopeless for seeing the Cross. The only way to get a decent view of it was to walk all the way down the hill to Princes Risborough; to be honest, at this time of evening, I couldn’t be bothered, given that I would also have to walk back. I was already thinking about where I wanted to sleep, and if there was a discreet place in the woods to put up a small tent. So my view of the Cross was a bizarre, foreshortened one, looking down from the top-point.
The Cross was a much more recent carving in the chalk than the White Horse at Uffington, but still of great antiquity. The first historical reference occurs in 1742, but that does not help date it. Many antiquities were first recorded only in the eighteenth century; no one had yet used Optical Stimulated Luminescence dating to check further.
It takes the form of a small cross atop a very large pyramidal base. The entire chalk figure is some 250 feet high, visible for miles, not least because the base of the pyramid – known locally as the ‘globe’ – is also very wide, at over 400 feet. From early measurements taken when the Cross was first recorded in the eighteenth century, it has been growing over the years, particularly at its base, which has more than doubled in width during its regular scourings.
There have been many explanations for the Cross: that it marks a Saxon victory over the Vikings, as it was once supposed the Uffington White Horse did; that like the Cerne Abbas giant it was a phallic symbol, later bowdlerised; that it was a wayside cross for travellers along the Icknield Way, put up at any point since the West Saxons adopted Christianity in the seventh century; that soldiers in the Civil War, which raged around here while Charles I took refuge in nearby Oxford, carved the cross when they were bored (an idea that has the virtue of both ingenuity and implausibility).
More arresting is the curious fact that there are so few other chalk crosses along the Downs or elsewhere in Britain – I could think of only one, a much smaller cross at Bledlow. Given the prevalence of ‘pagan symbols’, you might expect the Church to counter them with symbols of its own. Then there could have been more outbursts of the sort provided by the Reverend A Baker in 1
855, who rhapsodised when approaching Whiteleaf Cross:
Bursting for the first time on the eye of the traveller from the northern direction, it presents an awful and almost spectral apparition of the Sign of the Son of Man looming heavenward above the peaceful Valley, beside the ancient and everlasting hills.
My own idle thought was that because the pyramidal base on which the Cross stands is so grossly out of scale with the Cross, it may have originated as a straightforward triangle on the hill, guiding travellers, to which a cross was later added by the local monastery or church – a cross that due to the toponymy had to be much smaller as, put simply, they ran out of space at the top of the slope.
I had also just passed a more recent example of a figure in the chalk, just where the M40 slices across the Icknield Way. A giant :-) had been carved on the side of the hill, to help or irritate commuters heading down to London each day, particularly if they happened to be archaeologists. One can imagine the thesis that will be produced in fifty years time: ‘The emoticon as landscape art-form; early twenty-first-century predictive text’.
During the Second World War, so that the Cross did not guide enemy bombers to Oxford, it was covered with brushwood; on VE Day, this was ceremoniously burned on the top of the hill.
There were lovers sprawled over the grass above the Cross. A young Asian couple had set up what looked like a photographic studio so that the man could take pictures of his girlfriend with the meadow and hills behind her. He had reflector boards, parabolic lights and enough camera kit for a full Pirelli calendar, not that there was anything unchaste about the pictures he was taking of his girlfriend, if that is what she was. She tossed her hair and gazed at the sun so as to take advantage of its soft modelling light.
