The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  He had been desperately poor when he came here with his soon-to-be wife Eileen (they married in the local church). To make ends meet, he wrote in the morning and sold groceries from the house in the afternoon. The rent was ‘extraordinarily low’, at just 7s 6d week. It was so cheap that the penniless Orwell took the cottage without viewing it beforehand. The first time he saw his new property was as its tenant, having walked the same green lane as me from Baldock, one April day in 1936.

  The cottage then had no electricity, no hot water and no indoor lavatory. The outdoor cesspool frequently blocked up unless, Orwell noted in a letter, a certain sort of Jeyes toilet paper was used. The garden was full of tin cans together with – surreal touch – a dozen buried old boots. The landlord had cut costs by replacing the thatch with corrugated-iron sheeting, which made a thunderous noise whenever it rained.

  The previous owner of the shop had been the local Manor Farm, whose owners had tried a more idealistic and cooperative way of working in the 1920s, at the time of the first Bolshevik experiments in Russia. The experiment in Wallington had failed, which was why the village store had been closed for a while before Orwell reopened it. The other farm in the village had continued to run in the more traditional ‘capitalist’ style. Orwell drew the obvious parallels and the village in Animal Farm is called Willingdon.

  I felt enormous sympathy for Orwell and his new wife, Eileen. Life must have been cold and difficult. There was not much custom for their shop, which was fitted out as basically as they came – a few shelves and some jars with sugar, flour and other basics, and a bacon slicer. His best customers were the village children who came in asking for sweets. He needed to sell thirty shillings of merchandise per week to break even – but at least, Orwell reasoned, they could get their own supplies at wholesale prices.

  The enterprise brought to mind the sad, small stores I came across in the Andes, invariably in the front room of a campesino’s house: the tins of Peruvian tuna fish, a few packets of pasta and some dry bread. A different universe from the gleaming display back at the Tesco in Baldock with its over 20,000 retail items.

  Cyril Connolly came to visit, an incongruous thought. Connolly with his more old Etonian ways had not seen Orwell since the two were at school together. Orwell told him, briskly, that it was better running a grocery store than, as he once had, a bookshop. With a grocery store, customers came in for a specific item and left fast. With a bookshop, they could chat interminably and waste a writer’s time. But it was apparent to Connolly and other visitors how thin Orwell had become since school, looking ‘more like a scarecrow’.

  Despite the privations, it was the place where Orwell enjoyed some of the happiest years of his life. Together with Eileen, he kept chickens and goats. Eileen was an intelligent, sharp child psychologist who shared Orwell’s political views and responded well to the austerity of their country living. She needed to: battalions of mice kept pushing the china off the shelves.

  It was here that he wrote his career-changing The Road to Wigan Pier, based on the journey north he had taken the year before, with its still-current message that ‘economic injustices will stop when we want them to stop’. The book made his name. His novels had sold 3,000 copies each – this sold 50,000, helped by its promotion through the Left Book Club.

  Before moving to Wallington, he had struggled to shape his material and find a style. Once in the village, encouraged by the writing of ‘Shooting an Elephant’, his short autobiographical essay about Burma, he found a simpler and more direct approach that worked well; it helped also to be writing about the injustice and poverty of the Northern working class when living in basic conditions; although unlike the family he describes in Wigan, there was no chamber pot overflowing under the breakfast table.

  Orwell uses the book to fire with both barrels: ‘This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe)’; ‘if the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed’; ‘there is at least a tinge of truth in [the Northerners’] picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards.’

  Sixty years after Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, class was still the elephant in the room. Orwell had pointed out in 1937 that it was fashionable to say class divisions no longer existed – and how wrong that was. Richard Hoggart made the same point in The Uses of Literacy a generation later.

  Class distinctions in England don’t disappear. They just change. There are as many subtle, complicated shades of class difference as there ever were – often exaggerated in the countryside, where someone in a run-down cottage lives on the estate of someone with 10,000 acres and a Palladian country house. Let alone the three Range Rovers parked on the drive.

  Here are my own problems with the English aristocracy: they wear raspberry-coloured corduroys; they’re often bone-stupid but think they’re clever; they have more money and infinitely more land than me.

  And then there’s another thing I dislike about them. They can often charm me into submission.

  Moreover, as I crossed the country I couldn’t help reflecting that there had been a time when such wealth brought more responsibility. In the past, if an aristocratic landowner was not serving the national interest, as a politician or statesman, he would be active locally, as a magistrate or promoter of local enterprise. At the very least, landowners employed many local people from the cradle to the grave: those who had been in service with them were given tied cottages.

  With a few honourable exceptions, this has changed. The wealthy in the country still have servants, but they are often Eastern European workers, to whom all responsibility ends with their contract. The landed rich feel no obligation or desire to take part in national affairs, now that they have been booted out of the House of Lords; and even in local ones, many have retreated behind their park walls. Some of the larger estates have contracted land management out to international firms that concentrate on a lucrative return (like claiming large rebates from the Common Agricultural Policy), while easing tenant farmers out.

  The only responsibility felt by today’s aristocracy seems to be to themselves. They concentrate on their holidays, their children and their hunting, shooting and fishing; or, for the more esoterically inclined, they go to find themselves in Bhutan or Benares or Bali.

  At the other end of the scale, unemployment is still as endemic as when Orwell wrote in the 1930s. Then, some 2 million people were out of work in a population of just under 50 million. Today there are 2.5 million, and rising fast, unemployed out of a population of just over 62 million. So the percentage of unemployed has, if anything, gone up since the worst days of the 1930s depression. Yet it is no longer such a pressing national concern. We are complacent with it, comfortable with it. There is a brief flurry every year or so when new, rising figures are released. But nothing like 1972, when unemployment rose over the 1 million mark again and Edmund Heath’s government declared a virtual national emergency.

  Of course a welfare state ensures that the absolute poverty of Orwell’s day is avoided. But what endures is what he identified so accurately as ‘the deaden, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it.’ There are too many people looking at walls and counting out the hours over dead cups of coffee. Quite apart from the dead weight of their claims upon the State. Mass unemployment is the geological fault line under England: a malign slab, largely unseen, which one day may sheer off under us.

  *

  From Wallington, it was a fine swoop of just a few miles across the chalk hills to Kelshall. At the centre of this village stood the water-filled base of an ancient stone cross; and a very modern one beside it, put up as a Millennium project. Both marked Kelshall’s position as a staging post along the Icknield Way.

  In my j
ourney east across England, the village marked another change – a reminder that, coming out of Hertfordshire and into East Anglia, I was crossing the historical boundary into the lands the Vikings colonised. The name Kelsall was one the Vikings had given, meaning ‘cold stream’.

  In the fourteenth-century church, there was a memorial to one of the figures from Anglo-Saxon history who interested me most: King – and St – Edmund the Martyr, who ruled East Anglia before the arrival of the ‘great army’ of Danish Vikings in 869. Edmund was then still a young man of just twenty-nine, having been king since a boy of thirteen.

  He was killed by the Vikings – which in itself was not unusual. Kings of Northumbria and Wessex had been slain or fatally injured in battle with the invaders. But a legend attached itself to Edmund: that he had chosen martyrdom at the Vikings’ hands; that, in the words of his later biographer, Abbo of Fleury, he had let himself be taunted by the Vikings, shot full of arrows, like St Sebastian, and then brutally beheaded.

  As a legend, it plays to two dominant themes in late Anglo-Saxon history as they tried to withstand the Viking raids. One is the more familiar, that of the Vikings as brutal and merciless thugs, the ‘slaughter-wolves’ as they are described in The Battle of Maldon.

  In recent years, there has been much wringing of hands and soft shoe shuffling by historians about this traditional portrayal of the Vikings as storm troopers in longships. ‘We need to understand,’ they intone from the academic pulpit, ‘that they were traders as well as raiders – that history, written by their opponents, has been one-sided in its portrayal – it is far too easy to talk of invasions – we should be talking about assimilation – any large-scale “Migration Theory” is seductive but implausible.’

  Well, up to a point. Certainly there is recent archaeological evidence from York, among other places, of Viking trading after they had conquered half the country and held it under Danelaw. But no amount of sophistry and revisionist history can disguise the brutality of the Viking raids – nor the length over which they were sustained. From the devastating attack on Lindisfarne in 793, when, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded, ‘the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God’s church’, right through to the Norman conquest of 1066, which the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada did so much to facilitate, the Vikings were an intermittent, anarchic presence that was about as subtle as an axe in the face.

  What interests me most about the story of St Edmund is not the familiar tale of Viking brutality, but the Anglo-Saxon response. At times, the English reacted to the Viking threat with force themselves – as Alfred and his successors did, or the heroic warriors at the battle of Maldon a century later. But more often than not, they responded with that trademark English emotion: guilt.

  The Viking raids, wrote Alcuin at the time of Lindisfarne, were God’s punishment of England for its sins. The martyrdom of Edmund, the way in which King Ethelred insisted on hearing mass before the battle of Ashdown, the increasing insistence on ever tighter canonical laws – like not marrying your fourth cousin – all came from a deep sense of Anglo-Saxon guilt, a guilt that had to be extirpated before the Vikings could be defeated.

  We think of the Anglo-Saxons – if we think of them at all, which is rare, despite their 500-year control of the country at a crucial and formative time – as licentious immigrants from northern Europe with a fondness for mead. But after their conversion to Christianity, they became some of our most austere rulers: far more so, say, than the Victorians, perhaps yet one more reason why Alfred the Great was so revered in the nineteenth century.

  That the Saxons should understand the Viking invasions as in some way their own fault, a judgement on their loose moral behaviour, was only compounded later when it really did become their fault: for paying the Vikings to go away, the Danegeld that kept them coming back for more.

  Danegeld was first paid after Maldon in 991, a century after Edmund’s death and another battle at which the Vikings were victorious. The poem The Battle of Maldon initially celebrates the fighting quality of Earl Byrhtnoth and his men, as they try to withstand the invaders at the end of a narrow causeway on the Essex coast; this is when one of the men lets his hawk fly to the wood.

  But someone has blundered – in this case Earl Byrhtnoth who, whether from naivety or hubris, allows the Vikings the free passage they ask for across the easily defended causeway and onto the more open mainland: an early example of the English playing cricket when their opponents are playing hardball.

  Then the battle,

  with its chance of glory, was about to begin.

  The time had come for all the doomed men

  to fall in the fight. The clamour began;

  the ravens wheeled and the eagles circled overhead,

  craving for carrion; there was shouting on earth.

  (The Battle of Maldon, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland)

  In the ensuing mêlée, Byrhtnoth is killed, as are many of his men. But while the poem celebrates their heroism, it is also self-lacerating about an English shame – the cowardly desertion from the front of Godric and his brothers, compounded by Godric’s use of his dead commander’s horse, which makes the English foot soldiers, unaware their leader is dead, think that Byrhtnoth himself is abandoning the fight. Godric and his brothers ‘flee for the woods/ Fled to the fastness, and saved their lives’. What is more, this treachery, or at least failure, has been predicted by one of their number before the battle, Offa, when he foresees that the English may not live up to their fine words when it comes to the crunch.

  In many ways, the Anglo-Saxon reaction to the Viking violence was the classic one of a victim: hatred and dislike of a brutal antagonist, but also a confused culpability in which they blamed themselves as well as their attacker.

  St Edmund the Martyr’s death exemplifies this. No wonder that his burial place should become ‘Bury St Edmunds’ and be so visited as a shrine; or that a culture of guilt and of an obscure sense of failure should reside deep in the English psyche even after seemingly confident periods of expansion and Empire.

  A woman in Kelshall church, of the kind and thoughtful sort who have kept the Church of England going, had come in to arrange the flowers. She told me that a few years previously there had been a local campaign in East Anglia to get St Edmund adopted as England’s patron saint in place of St George – or more correctly, readopted, as George had usurped him at the time of the Crusades.

  The idea was attractive: St Edmund’s brave and gentle sacrifice as opposed to George charging after dragons. Moreover, Edmund had the advantage of being English (you can’t be more English than an Angle), unlike the Middle Eastern George, and sported a subtler and more attractive flag, of three gold crowns on a field of azure blue. But I knew that such a campaign was ultimately doomed to failure. George with his flag is as red-faced and bold as we would like to be, even though, in our heart of hearts, we know that we are not.

  Chapter 5

  A Circle in the Sand

  ‘The Sun Machine is coming down And we’re gonna to have a party, uh, huh, huh.’

  David Bowie, ‘Memory of a Free Festival’

  THE WALK ON towards Royston and Cambridgeshire beyond was delightful, helped by a lengthy stopover at the Fox and Duck in Therfield. I was sorry to find that the singing landlord performed only in the evening, so could not regale me over a lunchtime pint. A fellow walker stopped by who had so much ground to cover that he drank his meagre half-pint at the bar and went straight out again. I felt quite spoiled for time as I lingered over a generous burger in front of the fire, washed down with equally generous quantities of Theakston’s Old Peculier, and rolled over the last of the hills towards Therfield Heath. I passed two memorial benches in a quiet grove of birches with views out over the plain beyond. Both had inscriptions: one said, ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think’; the other, ‘Above the clouds it’s always sunny’.

  Therfield Heath was littered with Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows and had been an important musterin
g point for tournaments and armies in the Middle Ages. In 1455, right at the start of the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist party gathered here together with Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’, before going on to fight the first battle of the campaign at St Albans. It is probable that Sir Thomas Malory, a known supporter of Warwick, was part of that group, with the reckless, heady excitement that must have come at the start of hostilities; that is if he wasn’t in prison at the time on one of his numerous charges.

  The battle took place in May. Did Malory remember that feeling of a war beginning in the spring when he wrote his final book about the collapse of the Round Table?

  In May, when every lusty heart flourisheth and bourgeoneth, for as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoice and gladden of summer coming with his fresh flowers; for winter with his rough winds and blasts causeth a lusty man and woman to cower and sit fast by the fire. So in this season, in the month of May, it befell a great anger and unhap that stinted not till the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed and slain.

  Past Ickleton I approached the outskirts of Cambridge and the curiously named Gog Magog Hills, which would have given Brian Eno much pleasure. Although they are only about 250 feet high, Daniel Defoe referred to them as ‘mountains’. Here the Icknield Way crosses a Roman road, the Street, probably built to control the troublesome Iceni after their insurrection under Boudica.

  When the land is ploughed and the light is right, you can see numerous dark lines on the soil, all converging on Mutlow Hill [a Bronze Age barrow]. These are the old hollow ways of the Icknield Way and the Street. At the point where they meet the Fleam Dyke, the vallum of the earthwork has been ‘slighted’ in ancient times. Part of it has been thrown back into the ditch. But the hollow ways pass both under and over the slighted bank.