The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  ‘We still don’t really understand soil science. The soil is an incredibly complex organism – second only to a coral reef – and it’s very easy to mess it up. Lots of chemical fertilisers can turn the sort of clay we’ve got here into concrete as hard as a runway.’

  Like many, John had started to go easy on the fertiliser and look at organic alternatives, after a feeling that farming had lost its way in the mid twentieth century with over-intensive methods. But he had also become interested in another movement that for some farmers was, if anything, even more radical.

  For millennia, the soil has always been ploughed before planting seed. Now the new ‘zero tillage’ movement has started to question this received wisdom. In John’s view, ‘The trouble about ploughing is that you can break up and destroy topsoil just as much as aerating it. What’s more, if you’ve had a dry summer, you lose even more moisture in the ground by turning over the soil.’

  The new movement of ‘zero tillage’ – enthusiastically promulgated in parts of the world like Argentina, which has thin topsoil – suggests that the soil is left in place to do its own, more natural regeneration, and that direct drilling is used to seed fields. In the States, ‘no-till’ farming has gone from an experimental acre in 1962 in Kentucky to 90 million acres across the country and growing.

  If adopted worldwide, said John, it may also stop us ‘going to hell in a handcart’. The erosion of topsoil has been a long-term, global problem. The Oklahoma dustbowl of the 1930s was created by ploughing up too much pastureland when prices were good. David Montgomery, whose book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations is the working Bible for the ‘zero tillers’, has traced the problem of ‘soil abuse’ from the earliest human cultivation in Mesopotamia to the American push westward and the pampas of Latin America. I had seen how prehistoric man had exhausted the topsoil in Dorset.

  ‘Zero tillage’ has some attractive side effects. Ploughing is labour-intensive and costly, using cumbersome equipment. It favours larger farms, which can justify the outlay. Direct drilling can be done with much simpler equipment on farms of, say, just 500 acres, allowing a return to smaller holdings and compacting the soil less in the process.

  Despite the usual farmers’ moans, John and, earlier, Peter Roberts had shared a certain optimism about the future of farming. As John said, ‘It’s good to be feeding the world again after so many decades of having been seen as bloodsucking leeches living on subsidies.’

  *

  A country fête was taking place in a field alongside the Icknield Way and there were women everywhere: young ones gossiping with prams, older ones manning cake stalls, teenage girls hanging out with unsuitable youths.

  It was the chance to make a few observations: that while the general level of pulchritude was high, the Englishwoman’s natural, perfectly graceful and curvaceous pear shape is not always best suited to jeans; that there were probably rather an unnatural number of blondes around – almost impossible these days to spot a Range Rover or luxury 4×4 in the countryside without a flash of blonde hair at the wheel; and that one of the most attractive characteristics of them all, young or old, was that they laughed a lot.

  It would be a rash Englishman who dared generalise too much about the characteristics of the other sex sharing the island with him. Let alone if any of them are his readers. But my sister Alice, who has more licence, told me that many of her French friends had strong views on Englishwomen. One elegant Parisienne had confided to her that she couldn’t understand why Englishwomen were so obsessed by their animals and their children, and relatively uninterested in their husbands. ‘You make brilliant mothers but lousy wives,’ she had said to Alice. ‘You need to be more mysterious to your husbands and stop sitting on the toilet in front of them.’

  Another had commented on the way Englishwomen appeared to give up on sex after marriage – the theory being, apparently, that British men cheated more than their American or French counterparts because British women didn’t take marital sex seriously enough; that British women didn’t work at their married relationships in general and the sexual side in particular. A French friend of Alice’s, by contrast, ensured that she made love with her husband three times a week – ‘at an absolute minimum!’

  I wasn’t sure about all this, not having had too many locker-room discussions with either English or French women. Nor did a weekly quota system seem the best way forward; it sounded a bit pressurised. But it did seem unfair to put all the blame on Englishwomen for any lack of spark in their marriages. On my journey, I had met a lot of married men in pubs who looked as if they’d settled for a lifelong dependency on beer, belly and darts, and only ever smiled when they saw a pay cheque.

  What was true was that in my own relationships, now that I thought about it, I had been romantically attached to wonderful German, American, and Latin ladies – and married a proudly Welsh woman – but not been involved with an English girl since leaving university thirty years before. Why was that?

  And now I was walking out with Irena, who was Czech, albeit that she had lived here for decades. She also had strong views on Englishwomen: that they wore too much make-up, for a start, and that even if as a culture the English weren’t having much married sex, they were obsessed by it with their tabloids, high rates of teenage pregnancy and Ann Summers shops in every high street.

  She had just accompanied me on the recent journey to Peru, with a long, ambitious trek into the jungle, but had shown little interest in any walks across England, quite apart from her work commitments during the week. Like Leo, she said she couldn’t quite see the point of taking a holiday to explore the country she was living in anyway. And the weather would probably be bad.

  In fact the weather had been exceptional. I reminded her of this whenever I rang her up from some beautiful moor or wild place that had any reception (I was amazed how few did – one casual way in which the countryside was denigrated was that most mobile companies still couldn’t be bothered to supply coverage to a surprising amount of it).

  Mobile phones are constantly being denounced, for their danger to driving, wallets and the peace and tranquillity of railway carriages; but there can be few finer pleasures than talking to the person you love when gazing out on a beautiful landscape and feeling connected to them. It certainly beats talking to the sheep.

  *

  At Ickleford, ‘the ford for the Icknield Way’ across the local river, the Hiz, I stopped at the church, or rather churchyard: I wanted to find the gravestone of Henry Boswell who had been buried there. Boswell, the self-styled ‘king of the gypsies’ in the eighteenth century, was said to have walked every road in the country by his death in 1760, at the age of ninety – a fabulous achievement worth celebrating and commemorating.

  Someone had placed wooden owls in the yew trees around the churchyard. The joke was on me as I failed to find the gravestone, despite application to a kind woman helping in the church who made further enquiries, to no avail. It seemed Henry Boswell had spirited himself away, in one final, gypsy vanishing trick.

  The vicar appeared, a vague-looking man with a beard. ‘Oh, I don’t know much about the churchyard, I’m afraid. I’m only the vicar. You’ll have to ask one of the locals.’

  Maybe it was the frustration at failing to find Boswell’s grave, or the cold night I had spent sleeping out on the open on a hill the night before, but for some reason this answer reduced me to an equally cold fury. ‘I’m only the vicar.’ It encapsulated all that most irritated me about Anglicanism and its apologetic defeatism.

  The Church of England had been forged in Saxon steel and defended against the Vikings; it had built some of the finest cathedrals in Europe and, in the King James Authorised Version of the Bible, produced a prose work of unparalleled beauty and rigour; it had engaged in honourable soul-searching over the ensuing centuries, debating with thinkers from the Reformation to the Enlightenment to Darwin; and now it was sedated on tranquillisers and being put out to pasture.

  For a brief moment
when I was young, it looked as if the Church of England might be jolted out of its long, slow decline. John Robinson’s Honest to God in 1963 was a brave attempt to address contemporary doubts and recast Christianity, in the way that theology had always done through the centuries. Robinson had just been made the bishop of Woolwich, an inner-city diocese, and was aware of how remote the Church of England had become. He drew deeply on the work of Rudolf Bultmann, a brilliant German theologian whose writings had not yet reached a wider English readership.

  Bultmann had called for the Christian story to be ‘de-mythologised’ to give an authentic core engagement with its central premise and challenge, the crucifixion, without the accumulated trappings. Robinson wrote, in a lyrical sentence, that ‘it is in making himself nothing, in his utter self-surrender to others in love, that [Jesus] discloses and lays bare the ground of man’s being as love.’ The original gospel message, they both argued, had been mediated through a mythological framework of the first few centuries after Jesus that was now alien to the world-view of modern humanity, and needed reinterpreting afresh.

  I admired the work of Bultmann and John Robinson, and had gone to meet Robinson in the early 1980s, in his final years. He had welcomed me to his cold, austere rooms in Cambridge, and made a bachelor lunch of soup and bread, which he shared with me. By then it was already clear that the Church of England had turned its back on even the modest reappraisal he had suggested; Archbishop Runcie had more or less said that the Church would not address such issues of theology. ‘Steady as she goes,’ was the cry.

  Instead, he and his successors moved to a more evangelical style, in the belief that if you kept repeating in an ever louder voice what previous generations had believed, this would somehow convince any doubters. Any reinterpretive theology became ring-fenced, as if contagious. Rowan Williams, the most recent archbishop, while admirable for his progressive social views, had still promoted a return to doctrine and liturgy, seeing Honest to God as ‘a museum piece’ and ‘a transient phenomenon’ of those turbulent times, the 1960s.

  The only hope for the Church now lay in the welcome arrival of women priests. Perhaps they, with the energy and compassion they brought, and their capacity for awkward questions, would demand more honesty to God, and less fudging of the issues.

  I remember Robinson looking at me with infinite sadness at the end of that lunch – a man who had battled courageously and who had been treated in the way the English establishment does so well with visionaries, by sidelining and ignoring them. The shadow of the cancer that was soon to kill him was already in his eyes.

  He had written:

  It will doubtless seem to some that I have by implication abandoned the Christian faith and practice altogether. On the contrary, I believe that unless we are prepared for the kind of revolution of which I have spoken it will come to be abandoned. And that will be because it is moulded, in the form we know it, by a cast of thought that belongs to a past age – the cast of thought which Bultmann describes as ‘mythological’.

  *

  The old Kayser Bonder building in Baldock, so familiar to drivers along the A505 with its striking Art Deco façade, could be a symbol of the country’s changing fortunes in the twentieth century. First built by a film processing company, it later became a ladies’ stocking factory (the ‘Full-Fashioned Hosiery Company from Halifax’) and was later diverted to producing parachutes during the Second World War. I remember passing it when it stood empty during the early years of recession under Thatcher. Then it was turned into a giant Tesco, one of the first hyper-stores. As such, it attracted much opprobrium locally as a symbol of retail glitz. Nearby landowners of the more conservative sort still insist on calling it ‘the Kayser Bonder’, rather than ‘Tesco’s’ like everybody else. But I’ve always enjoyed the Tesco – a large, cheap and democratic store in a beautiful landmark building.

  That said, I’m hesitant at choosing a pie from the in-store café, which was built before the current wave of Starbucks clones, with their faux-leather armchairs; this café still has the plastic, more infantile architecture of the 1980s service station – spill-proof tables and chairs, with a tray system for clearing. The pie also seems far too cheap; the old rule of thumb used to be that if the pie was cheaper than a pint of beer, there must be something wrong with it.

  But this ham and mushroom pie has a surprising delicacy. The pie is remarkably fine in every sense – slender and textured.

  I leave with the agreeable sense of surprise that has accompanied me for much of the walk. And with a bumper pack of boxer shorts for less than a tenner. My written instructions to the groups joining me for long trekking expeditions in South America have always included the suggestion, ‘Remember, a man, or woman, can do anything if they have clean underwear every day.’ And I’ve been on the move constantly since Oxfordshire.

  The Icknield Way begins remarkably soon out of Baldock. Or at least one tendril of it does. The old low road, for dry weather, has been converted into a busy dual carriageway, the A505, thundering up and around Royston on its way to East Anglia. But the high road for wet weather, keeping to the chalk, still exists as a quite beautiful green lane, threading its way through a series of medieval villages.

  The wide trackway curled and contoured intuitively over and around the slopes of the hills. Now that I had travelled the Icknield for hundreds of miles, I thought of the sheer number of travellers that must have journeyed along here over the last 5,000 years, their cattle carving a path through the landscape that had endured since Neolithic times: a monument in itself.

  We have always been a restless, travelling nation. If Bruce Chatwin had taken a walk out of his front door along the Icknield Way, rather than travelling to the other side of the world to trace aboriginal paths in Australia, he could have hymned our own, English songlines.

  One of the many ways we belittle the past is to assume that our ancestors were less mobile than we are today. Of course in some ways this is true: there were no EasyJets lifting off from Luton airport. But it would be wrong to think that they were sedentary. If anything, travel had a greater importance, for the movement of goods and ideas. It may have taken far longer to cross the country along such trackways as the Icknield; but this meant the experience was richer and more resonant than today’s quick swing and away around the M25.

  One common denominator to the archaeological investigations I’ve witnessed worldwide over the past few years has been the evidence of how far prehistoric man travelled: the pilgrims found buried in Maya cities who had crossed thousands of miles of Mesoamerica to get there; the grave goods in Andean tombs that had come from the Amazon or the Pacific Coast; the Viking longboats at Constantinople. Let alone the original migration by Homo sapiens out of Africa and along the South Asian continent to China and the Bering Strait, a migration confirmed recently by mitochondrial DNA tests.

  When the bones of the ‘Amesbury Archer’, who lived around 2300 BC and was buried near Stonehenge, were found and analysed in 2002, they showed that he had originally come from the Alps. Moreover, along with the arrowheads that gave him his name, he was buried with artefacts from France and Spain. He might well have walked along the Icknield Way to get to the Stonehenge area, having crossed the North Sea from Europe to East Anglia.

  I was approaching East Anglia now. Much of that ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom may be flat, but it does at least mean that when you get to a hill, you can see for miles.

  The East Anglians are sensitive about their lack of hills. I once had to interview Brian Eno, a task that should have been both pleasant and intriguing, but was made less so by his insistence that the interview took place at eight o’clock in the morning. He was in a filthy mood. So were my film crew, who had been forced to get up even earlier to prepare. A special rider had been added to the interview that we should not use footage of Eno when he was in Roxy Music and had long flowing hair and glitter costumes, now that he was more follicularly challenged and wore sober suits.

  We began
at the beginning, his family home near Woodbridge. ‘Ah yes, quite flat around that bit of Suffolk, isn’t it,’ I murmured. Before breakfast, my line in warm-up repartee was not as assured as it should have been.

  Eno went ballistic: ‘It’s not flat. Why does everyone think it’s flat? There are plenty of hills in Suffolk. I hate it when people say that Suffolk’s flat.’

  He was just warming up. Later we got to the reaction of critics when he put out his first, more conceptual, ambient albums. ‘They called me an old hippie fart. All those critics who had got punk so wrong and then had to jump on its bandwagon. I can name every one of the bastards [he did, in detail]. And now they call my work classic.’

  I admired the last of the hills, knowing that they would soon give way to the flat lands. A large flock of deer ran up the other side of the valley. Few people walked this way any more; it was not on the ‘pretty list’ of British countryside.

  Certainly Wallington, the first village I came to, was largely uncelebrated. English villages are as varied as lamb chops: some are lustrous, thick cut and gleaming, inviting the pan; others are shrunken miserable affairs, where the meat has already congealed from lack of interest. Such was Wallington. There was no pub. Two large and cheerless farms dominated the place. Under normal circumstances I would have pressed on to the more attractive villages just over the hills: Therfield in particular, which promised a pub with a singing landlord, sounded more my sort of place.

  But Wallington had one single lure. George Orwell had owned a house here for the last ten years of his life, when producing some of his best work.

  My heart sank when I saw it. It was not a house, but a mean little cottage, of the sort that people find picturesque if they do not have to live there. It was shallow, just eleven feet deep, with small windows and an unusual sunken door that was under four feet high. I thought of the lanky Orwell stooping to get inside.