Everyman's England

by Victor Canning

  And there we were, standing in the grey wood with tiny swirls of mist sweeping through the trees. His face was sad as he eyed the hazel sways and broatches and I felt suddenly sorry, too. To rive a broatch is as Saxon a phrase as any in our language and soon, it seems, it must sink into the limbo of libraries, to be mouthed only by antiquarians and book burrowing scholars.

  To change the subject, I said: ‘Do you believe the story of the Babes in the Wood?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said, almost shouting and completely forgetting his sorrow. ‘Don’t you believe it?’ In his hand he flourished a keen-edged slasher knife, used for splitting the wood. I nodded my head, agreeing. Of course I did. And if you go to Wayland Wood and meet him, or anywhere near it and talk to the local people, don’t even so much as hint that you do not believe the story of the Babes in the Wood.

  As I went farther north towards Holt I passed plantations of young fir trees, looking as though they were only waiting for candles and presents to be hung upon them to complete their festive effect. Already the frost had spangled them with shimmering trappings. To complete the Christmas picture came the Norfolk turkeys, flocks of them, stalking about the fields like untidy old ladies, chattering among themselves and unmindful of their awful destiny.

  Pantomime children, Christmas trees, turkeys, and a county which is typically English; long, rolling roads, bordered in places by dark green rhododendron bushes and sentinelled by tall pines; fields lying bare in the moonlight, and tiny byroads that lead away to unknown hamlets where men are still content to pass their leisure with a pipe and a glass, and the women are kindly and hard-working… this was the Norfolk that I saw.

  When you go to Norfolk don’t hurry for the Broads, but linger in the real Norfolk, the county of quiet woods, gorse-littered heaths and rich fields; walk along the salt marshes where the wild duck and gulls roost at night, and where the curlews whistle plaintively while the sheep move slowly through the mist, cropping at the fat grass; stay in the little towns, for Norfolk is a county of little towns, and talk with the men and women. If the county has definite character, so have the men and women, and perhaps you will be fortunate enough to discover such a man as I did.

  He was a sailor, though not from any modern battleship. How old he was I did not enquire, for his bearded face and figure had the noble stamp of dignity and vitality which forbade such a question. Born in Norfolk, he had left it to serve his time in the navy when sails and bare feet and a penny a week for boys made Britain mistress of the seas.

  Old George was a great talker. He stuffed me full of tales of pirate chasing in the China Seas, wild nights in Hangchow and wilder nights furling a top for gallant rounding the Horn, and sometimes I suspected that, like a good sailor, he was embellishing his stories for my benefit.

  ‘Pirates!’ His head tipped back and the remains of his beer were gone. ‘I’ve seen ’em come over the side in the night and –’ with an expressive movement of his hand across his throat the rest of the story was told.

  Old George’s sailing days were over long ago. Now he lives in the quiet town of Holt, come back to Norfolk to finish his days where he was born. He is a Norfolk man and proud of it, and a sailor who could boast that he was master of the foremast while he was hardly more than a boy. If you are interested in sailors, if you would like to hear a spirited defence of the British Navy and an impressive, slightly blasphemous, argument for sail against steam, I will give you a clue to find Old George.

  Somewhere in one of the bars of the Holt inns he sits most nights. The inn you must find, but Old George you cannot fail to recognise. He might have served as the model for the bearded sailor who figures on the cartons of a very famous brand of cigarettes.

  Old George was not the only interesting man I met in Holt. There was a young farmer who declared that he was up every morning at half past four and had for his breakfast nearly a pound of steak, and he had his own views as to how the steak should be cooked. Looking at him it was very easy to believe that his creed in life was early rising and plenty of meat, for he was large, fat, plump-cheeked and jolly; a contented meat-eater.

  On the outskirts of Holt is a well-known public school. Staying at my hotel were several of the parents of boys at the school, who had come down for an end of term concert. Two boys came in to dine with their parents and, tucked away by the fireplace at my own table, I was given a very illuminating revelation of the attitude towards one another of modern day fathers and sons.

  The two boys were fresh, eager beings with that look of cleanliness about them which belongs so essentially to the young and happy. The fathers were business men from the Midlands, well-dressed, assured, but somehow a little conscious of the fact that they were self-made men and had not been given the opportunities which they were only too glad to afford their sons. They were of a type which is vanishing, men of worth who had gone out to work at an age when today most boys are still sitting in class. They had been successful, but their success had given them little time to acquire a mythical thing which they occasionally longingly referred to as ‘culture.’

  One scrap of conversation went something like this:

  Father: Well, son, are you going to come into the engineering works with me when you’ve finished your schooling?

  Son: Engineering, sir?

  F: Yes, son. There’s plenty of money still in engineering.

  S: I’d rather be something else. I don’t feel I want to be an engineer.

  F: What – for instance?

  S: Well, an archaeologist or perhaps do research work.

  F: There’s little money in that. You want to have plenty of money, don’t you?

  S: Of course, sir. It does seem a pity that all the things I want to do won’t make me much money. I was wondering, sir, if you would let me be an archaeologist and dig up Greek remains around the Mediterranean and subsidise me so that I didn’t have to bother about money? A man of science, sir, ought not to have to worry about money and you would be doing posterity a great service in helping me…

  A few minutes later the young man of science with such hazy monetary ideas had forgotten his career in a vigorous discussion of winter resorts and the best way of softening ski-boots.

  Never once were any of the boys disrespectful or rude, yet never once did I hear them pretend to an opinion which they did not honestly hold for the sake of pleasing their parents. Their parents, remembering perhaps their own youth, seemed undecided whether to be proud or perplexed at the enigmas which were their own sons.

  Of Holt itself I saw very little. All the time I was there a thick, icy mist was settled upon the land, dwarfing my range of vision to a radius of ten feet. I cannot even confirm that it is situated upon a hill-side, for in a mist it is difficult to tell when one is going up or down or along the level. I went for a walk in the morning, hoping that the mist would rise. It refused to move and reveal the splendours of Holt to me. In the mist I bumped into another parent from the hotel. We walked together for company, our breath hanging on the frosty air in great plumes, and the hoar from the dead grass hung a white fringe on to our trousers. Our eyes being denied their natural exercise by the cloaking fog, we talked more than we might usually have done, but of the many things we discussed and confessed I can only remember that at one point he informed me that it was his father who had invented the first gas-meter for houses and had sold his idea for a ridiculous sum, to see it make a fortune for other people. When the first meters were put into a row of houses as an experiment, the houses had to be insured for an enormous sum of money, because everyone was scared of the new idea and imagined that, at any moment, something might go wrong, and the whole block be blown into the air. I wish now that I had questioned him more closely about his father and the gas-meter, for I fancy I have missed a romance.

  The fog was unkind to me for the rest of my stay and did not lift until I was on my way back to London. Unkind as it had been, it could not damp my enthusiasm for Norfolk, and I am convinced that when the rest of Eng
land has been overrun with wide main roads and ugly suburbs and housing estates, and when men and women wonder how they ever lived without cinema and motor car, Norfolk will still be Norfolk, essentially England, and men of Norfolk will be sitting in their bars and around their fireplaces telling apocryphal tales and scorning the hurry and febrile haste of the world – the last of the real English.

  CHAPTER 11

  CARAVAN ON THE

  COTSWOLDS

  Whether you are a nominalist or a realist I can guess what the word Broadway means to you. Broadway – girls in top hats, carrying swagger sticks and doing a jerky dance across a Ziegfeld stage; electric signs across the facades of many-storied buildings, and the blare of popular songs. If you have only been inside a cinema four times you know all about it, though you may have wondered why you should have to know all about it since it is generally so infernally dull and stupid. ‘The Broadway Melody’ was a song which, by grace of some virtue and a great deal of publicity bellowed its way into the ears of thousands of listeners and it settled the meaning of the word ‘Broadway’ for most of us.

  That is America’s Broadway, or so the films would have us believe. The English Broadway is a very different place. It is a little village, nestling under the scarp of the Cotswolds, with its back to the hills and facing the broad vale of Evesham.

  It has a long, wide main street, bordered by broad stretches of grass, running gently from the foot of the hills into the plain, a main street decorated by houses built of grey Cotswold stone, which is a mature yellow when it comes from the local quarries but takes that quiet, mellow grey tone as the air dries the moisture from it.

  The houses are almost all beautiful and the wide grass verges that separate them from the road and the occasional trees make a setting which enhances that beauty. These houses have been built to last, built honestly and from the material at hand. Timbered cottages, the almost ecclesiastical Tudor dwellings, and the austere charm of the Georgian houses: they reflect the spirit of the master craftsman who made them and portray the ages in which they came into being. Here, in the Cotswolds, rests a village which has resisted the attacks of jerry builders with a resolution which is admirable, and it may well claim to be one of the most beautiful villages in England.

  It is a glorious example of the creation of beauty from the things close at hand, grey stones that glow with a refulgence which comes from age, roofs that are covered, not by dark slates, but with thin flakes of Cotswold stone and softened by a patina of lichen and moss, and well-formed doorways that in summer are overhung by wistaria sprays that rival the spreading bounty of the yellow stone-crop and arabis.

  I would not belittle the appeal of ecclesiastical architecture. One would be lethargic not to respond to the effort which has thrown up tall towers, outspanned flying buttresses and fashioned lofty naves, in order that man might have a fitting place to worship. For all that, I like domestic architecture better. The houses where people have lived, quarrelled, made love and passed through all the turbulence and joys of living stir me more than the places where they have solemnly worshipped.

  I stood in Broadway and looked at the houses, and I could sense the pride the builders must have taken in their finished work, and the celebrations which marked the opening of a house. Today there is little house-warming done. Before the plaster has dried on the lathes, the furniture is in and the doors have slowly started upon their warping. If there is any celebration it probably takes the form of a cocktail party or a high tea and the house is forgotten in the congratulations passed upon its owner by his friends – the builders have passed away, to be remembered only by bills. In my pocket, as I looked at the noble houses of Broadway, was a letter from a friend in South America telling me that he had just had a cottage built near the coast at Montevideo. There, if not in England, the completion of a house is still a matter for jubilation among the workers. When the roof is completed it is the custom for the owner to give an asado to all the workmen. An asado consists of a lamb or ox roasted whole on a sort of grid placed sideways at an angle over a fire. The celebration takes place out of doors and, so he wrote, is one of the most typical of Uruguayan customs. There is singing, feasting and a great deal of laughter, and much more of sweet Maldonado wine to celebrate the birth of the house.

  When I saw Broadway and the Cotswolds, there was so hard a frost that the ground was white with a covering which it would have been easy to mistake for snow. The dazzling white of the frost produced some astonishing effects in a district which is famous for its peculiar intensity of light.

  The sky was a hard pearl grey that shaded away into a pale wash of blue, while the barren whiteness of the fields took the colour and reflected it over a landscape that was chequered by long stone walls and marked by dark plantations of firs and crests of distant woods. The thin strips of plantations and woods gave me a quite misleading impression of heavily-wooded country; actually the Cotswolds are largely open and bare, giving little shelter except in the valleys. I put up a hare from the long grass at the roadside and it was in sight for several minutes as it raced away across the bare fields.

  I stopped on the roadway which leads up the twisting hill from the village of Stanway to the ridge of the Cotswold scarp, and looked back on what must be the most interesting view in England.

  With the frost there was the slightest mist that hung above the fields in moving scarves and veils, swaying and changing shape in the breeze as though some invisible body moved within them. Out in the wide valley, divorced from the earth by mist, floated the hazy outlines of the hills of Bredon, Oxenton and Alderton. They had the appearance of enchanted, floating islands and in my imagination I peopled them with a host of fairy folk until the rattle of a train in the valley bearing a dark plume of smoke brought me back to earth. It was too cold to stand still and indulge in fairy fancies. The trees were laden with a white foliage of frost and in a fold of the hills a frozen pond glistened like polished ebony.

  As I moved up the hill a strange company came downwards towards me. In front there was a horse and cart, piled high with a sorry collection of household goods, among which an old sewing machine was prominent. This cart was driven by a small and very dirty boy who, unmindful of the reins, was whittling a stick. Behind came another cart, a roughly covered caravan that might have started life as a baker’s van. The reins of the caravan disappeared through the open doorway and there was no sign of the driver, though through the black square of the van doorway came the sound of a woman singing and the petulant crying of a child. After the caravan came a very stout lady wheeling a perambulator that needed tyres on two of its wheels and, instead of a baby, held a gramophone and a bundle done up in a red cloth.

  As the procession passed me I saw that the hood of the perambulator, the crown of the black hat worn by the stout lady and the covering of the van, carried a thick coating of rime, and I wondered where these wanderers had quartered for the night. Probably, I decided, in the lee of some plantation, and they had been up and moving while the frost was still forming.

  As I was wondering how these people made a living and endured the discomforts of an English winter in the open, there were footsteps on the road and a man came into sight. From his rough dress, the greasy knot at his throat and his unshaven face, and more especially by the two rabbits he carried in his hand, I guessed that he was a member of the gypsy troupe.

  He saw me, smiled, and asked for a light. He had a careless, easy manner, as though he cared neither for approval nor rebuff. His life had taught him a calm indifference to the ways of the conventional world, and he was the possessor of a philosophy whose chief principle was tolerance.

  He told me how they lived; making clothes-pegs with sticks from the hedges, binding them with thin strips cut from old cocoa tins picked up here and there, selling daffodils, blackberries, mushrooms and cress in the seasons and – though he would not directly admit it nor deny it because of the rabbits in his hand – hinting that there were other ways.

  �
��There’s pickin’s here and there,’ he said, ‘and is it my fault if a rabbit sometimes puts its head through a looking-glass without a back?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a settled job and live in a house in some town?’ I asked.

  He was silent for a moment before he answered, as though he were carefully considering the question.

  ‘That’s something that isn’t likely to happen, mister. If it should come along I’d take it like a shot, if it weren’t for my wife.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ ‘She wouldn’t agree. Her family have been on the road for ever since they can remember. They don’t like houses. I lived in a house once, until I became a showman. We travel with fairs sometimes now. No, she wouldn’t live in a house. It would be the end of her.’

  He spoke with conviction and nodding goodbye swung off down the hill. As he went his dog came down from the copse above the road and joined him. I could not help thinking that, if I had asked his wife the same question, she might have defended her love of the road with the excuse that her husband was unable to leave it because of the gypsy strain in his blood, though she would be quite willing to live in a house. He was not the first person I had met who had produced a perverse argument to disguise a perfectly good reason for following his own particular way of life.

  Economically there is no reason why we should tolerate gypsies. They would rather beg than sell and prefer poaching to work. Few countrymen have a good word to say for them and in towns they scare any housewife who opens the door to them. They get from the community far more than they give. Yet, despite their obvious vagrancy, there are few people who would not feel that the countryside had lost an essential part of its character if there were no more gypsies, if they were spirited away from waste lots by the roadside to languish in and abuse the hygienic amenities of council houses. We should miss them at fairs, we should miss the dark-skinned lady who suddenly appears in drab February streets with a blazoning basket of wild daffodils to turn life into joy again, and we should miss the warm signal of their fires, sending up thin drifts of blue smoke on summer evenings, as the family sits around the black stew-pot. Perhaps George Borrow is to blame for this soft sentimentalising of the gypsies. Ethnologically, perhaps, they are the Peter Pans of the world, a race which has never grown up. Merry, mischievous children, sullen and generous by mood, content to wander and wishing only to be left alone – what does it matter if they are uneconomic units in a complex social order? There is too much insistence upon economics these days, and if the gypsies like to flout the maxims of Adam Smith and Professor Keynes – more power to their arms!