In those days, Wash Common was still a village a good mile or more outside Newbury, up Wash Hill on the Andover Road. Its population would have been a few hundred, I suppose, and there was open country between it and Newbury. Newbury really began (conveniently for my father) at the hospital, a mile down the hill from our gate.
The first battle of Newbury, at which Lord Falkland, a leading cavalier, was killed (some say suicidally), was fought on 22 September 1643 at Wash Common and on the lower land lying between Wash Common and Newbury. In my day this was something which every Wash Commoner knew and could talk about with at least a smattering of local topographical knowledge. (‘Ah, that’s where they put the guns, see?’)
The Royalist army, under the King and his nephew Prince Rupert, had been besieging Gloucester. Gloucester was defended for the Roundheads by the gallant young Colonel Massey, and Parliament, determined to relieve him, had sent an army from London, commanded by the Earl of Essex. The siege was raised and Essex duly set out to march back to London. If he couldn’t get there his army would disintegrate for lack of supplies. Rupert was eager to outstrip Essex and put the King’s army between him and London. To this end he urged the King to push on hard, by way of Marlborough and Hungerford, to the town of Newbury on the river Kennet.
Essex, also hoping to outstrip the enemy, was moving by a more southerly route, and approached Newbury south of the Kennet, via Kintbury and Enborne. Near Enborne you can still see ‘Essex’s Cottage’, where he slept (briefly) the night before the battle.
The Royalist army reached Newbury first, and since any manoeuvre to the north was blocked by the Kennet, Essex had no alternative but to fight for his disputed course eastward. On the morning of the 22nd, the Royalist army came up Wash Hill and took position on Wash Common. Essex perforce attacked them.
Compared with other battles of the Civil War, relatively little is known about First Newbury; though everyone knows that Falkland (who was very much undecided about the rights and wrongs of the whole business) said to someone that morning that he would ‘be out of it all by nightfall’; and later rode, as it seemed deliberately, into a gap covered by a Parliament gun. He died of wounds in a house still called Falkland Lodge. (Everything’s ‘Falkland’ on Wash Common. The cricket team’s always been called Falkland, for instance - though no pub bears the name.)
Some maintain that most of the fighting must have taken place north of Wash Common, down below the plateau and south of the Kennet, on ground east of the village of Enborne and west of what is now the Comprehensive School. I don’t subscribe to this view for two reasons. First, the vital road which Essex needed, if he was going to by-pass Newbury on the south, was Monks’ Lane (Monkey Lane, as everyone calls it), which ran directly eastwards, south of our paddock and the aforementioned oak trees, to Pinchington Lane and Greenham Common. To gain access to this lane he had to fight his way across Wash Common.
Secondly, there are the grave mounds. In the middle of the village (more-or-less), there has always been an open space, something over an acre, known as ‘The Battle-Field’. This is still a public recreation ground. On it are two fair-sized tumuli, marked at the summit with rectangular stones saying ‘1643’. (The stones are later, of course: Victorian, I should think.) These are mass graves, where the locals buried the dead after the battle. Obviously they wouldn’t carry them any further than they had to, and certainly not up onto the Wash Common plateau from down below.
Of the fighting little is known, but at the end of the day the Royalists fell back into Newbury and on the following morning did not resume the battle. Essex, so the books say, ‘blew a trumpet blast’, but got no response. So on he went, down Monkey Lane, across Greenham Common and so on to Aldermaston and the London road. Rupert was so indignant at the failure of the Royalists to renew the battle that he took his cavalry to Aldermaston and fought a harassing action; but this did not avail to stop the Parliamentary army, which reached London in tolerably good shape.
Charles I was always a bungler. Perhaps he failed to appreciate that if he had put all he had into defeating Essex at Newbury, he would probably have won the war.
About two hundred yards south-west from where we lived, and in the village, as it was, stands the Falkland Memorial - quite a large affair - on a little green. Here hounds sometimes used to meet, and I would come with Constance to pat them, to stare up wonderingly at the big men in ‘pink’ and to smell the exciting smell of horses. Here, too, the village adolescents would congregate of an evening - with or without bikes - to smoke Woodbines, crack jokes, shove around and waste their time. My mother called them ‘the Idle-ees’ and I was told to have nothing to do with them. Not that I’d have dared to. To me they seemed like men; big, rough and - I must say it — smelly. People were smelly in those days. There were no anti-perspirants and they had thick shirts and few, if any, changes of clothes. Smelly was just taken for granted.
The Royalist guns, it is believed, were sited near here, and one of the two pubs hard by is called ‘The Gun’. (The other is ‘The Bell’, of which more anon.)
When I was a very little boy - about three or four - the Andover Road and Monkey Lane, which form an acute angle at the Bell corner and ran either side of our garden, were still white dust roads. In those days roads were still regarded as being primarily for horses, sheep and cattle. Cars were a minor matter. I think perhaps the Great War had retarded progress in this respect. In summer the dust was dry and powdery. You could see approaching flocks of sheep or herds of cattle a long way off, by the clouds of dust. Stirred up, it fell on the hawthorn hedges, making the leaves white until the next shower of rain. It had a pleasant, singular smell - to me the smell of high summer. Later, in adolescence, I was to be struck by King Lear’s lines, in the cornfield scene with Gloucester.
‘Why, this would make a man, a man of salt,
To use his eyes for garden water pots,
Ay, and laying autumn’s dust.’
A cottage garden beside a road needed a good deal of dust-laying to keep it green and fresh.
One of my earliest memories - as early as the rhododendrons - is of being taken by Constance, in my pushchair, down the little lane leading off the Andover Road into Sandleford Park. Sandleford Park is not a municipal park, but a tract of open country a mile square, with woods, meadows and a brook. (It was from here that Hazel and his rabbits were later to set off on their adventures.) The lane led past some rather rough cottages, in one of which lived Mrs Dolimore, the milk lady. She used to come to our back door with the milk in a great metal drum with a lid, and from this, with a metal dipper, she would dip as much milk as we wanted. The milk and the metal also had their own smells.
The lane ran on between elms and high hedges into the Park meadows themselves. I remember the smell of the dust, the smell of dried cow-dung and of nettles and woundworts in the ditches. In the Park were some old, gnarled hawthorn trees, all bent every which way. One was bent into a regular ‘S’, and formed a natural seat. This seemed wonderful, and I always used to go and sit on it. Even a light breeze would bring out a whispering from the boughs of these isolated trees.
‘Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind,
Says suum mun, hey nonny nonny.
Dolphin my boy, boy! - sessa! . . .
Close by the Falkland Memorial lay the Pond. There were actually two sizeable ponds on Wash Common (for watering passing horses, flocks and herds), but this was the better known and more used. It lay between The Gun and Mr Jessop’s house. I remember the herds of cows - huge beasts to me - on their way to Newbury market, wading knee-deep (hence the thrush’s song) in the brown water, lowing and splashing, and the dogs holding them there while the drovers went into The Gun for a well-earned pint. (4d.: that is, a bit less than 2p today.) Being shallow, the pond often froze hard in winter. I used to go sliding with the village boys (the ban on Idle-ees was somehow lifted) and had a lot of fun. I don’t recall a single person ever skating on the pond, though.
The upper pond, at the west end of the village, was lonelier and different. It was overhung with trees on the further side, and it was bigger, greener and more rural. There were rushes and reeds, including the Great Reed Mace; coots and moorhens and, in summer, reed warblers. Here, too, I sometimes slid and also learned how to throw ‘ducks and drakes’. This pond, in winter, I associate now in my mind with T.S. Eliot’s lines in ‘Little Gidding’.
‘When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.’
This pond was all of half a mile from our home. Constance and I didn’t go there much, unless we were doing the Cope Hall walk, or else, perhaps, going to Nutworth’s (that is not its true name), the village shop and post office. There were exciting things on sale at Nutworth’s. One of these was windmills - so-called. A windmill consisted of four vanes of curved, brightly-coloured, mottled celluloid, pierced and held together by a central pin at the top of a stick. You held it up like a sceptre in your right hand and ran along, and the vanes, catching the wind through their curvature, would rotate in a medley of colours - red and blue making purple, blue and yellow making green - and a light clattering and justling of crisp celluloid.
Almost better, however, was the bluebird. He worked on the same principle: a model blue bird, about four inches long, held to a stick by some nine inches of string in the middle of his back. He had a long blue tail of three or four ‘feathers’ - strips secured by a central nail - and similar wings. You waved the stick round your head and he ‘flew’.
These were cheap German toys, which in those days were imported and sold in numbers. All sorts of cheap clockwork toys, too, were stamped ‘Made in Germany’. On account of the war, I suppose, and on account of their cheapness and fragility, the phrase ‘Made in Germany’ was used as a derisory taunt. ‘Yah! Mide in Germany!’ the village children would shout at some egregious victim: to which there was, really, no effective retort. Best ignored.
There were also, of course, sweets on sale at Nutworth’s, but my brother had somehow put it into my head that they were not nice, and I generally went elsewhere. There was no ice-cream - not yet by eight or nine years, which were to see refrigeration introduced. (My mother never possessed a ‘fridge in her life, which ended in 1957.) Ginger beer and fizzy ‘lemonade’ in bottles, un-iced, were the best to be had in hot weather.
The real reason, as I now understand, for people feeling that there was something wrong with Nutworth’s was the Nutworths. They were unsmiling, disobliging and down on life: with good reason; they had an only son who was hideously deformed. Mrs Nutworth was a little, sharp, black-eyed woman whom you always felt was waiting for a pretext to snap at you. Mr N. was a quiet, rather surly man who never bantered, or called you ‘young doctor’, like the other grown-up villagers.
But Cecil, the son, was the frightening one. Poor Cecil! He was a hunchback - a really bad one, with a great hump, a pigeon chest and his head, with no perceptible neck, sunk between them. He had a good enough face, but he wore his straight, black hair long, which made him appear even more sinister. Small children, of course, feel no pity for deformity - only curiosity if it’s slight and fear if it’s severe. The very possibility that Cecil might be going to serve you was enough to make you think twice before going into Nutworth’s - certainly if you were alone.
However, you couldn’t entirely avoid Cecil, because of Mavis. Mavis was a private ’bus - very rattly, and bottom gear up Wash Hill. (I suppose Mavis may have been Mrs Nutworth’s name.) It was painted in yellow, in a flowing script, down each side of the ‘bus, which was brown and held perhaps twenty-five people when (and if) full. It went down into Newbury and back twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon - 2d. for an adult and 1d. for a child. (Rather less than 1p and rather less than ½p.) Mr N. drove and Cecil was the conductor, with a ping-ping ticket-punch at his belt. There were no official stops. You just held up your hand anywhere along the road and Mavis would stop. Once aboard, it was tensile to be aware, not daring to look behind, of Cecil ping-pinging his way up the ’bus until he was standing over you. He never spoke. Later on, as I grew up, Boris Karloff got few shivers out of me: I’d been inoculated by Cecil.
I feel so sorry for them, now. I never used to see Mrs Nutworth at the Women’s Institute gatherings, where I sometimes went with my mother {competitions, amateur dramatics, concerts, whist drives - not half bad fun, actually), and I never saw Mr N. in The Bell either. (Perhaps he went to The Gun, though.) They were not liked. A damned shame, I reckon.
The other shop was Leader’s. This was nearer home - only about half the distance to Nutworth’s. Leader’s really was Ginger and Pickles - or Sally Henny Penny’s, perhaps. Mrs Leader, a warm, genial woman with a beautiful voice, certainly sold bootlaces and hairpins, if not mutton chops. Again, sweets and ginger beer were about my range. Mr Leader was moustached and loquacious - sententious, even. Later on, however, as a young adult in The Bell, I came to enjoy his company. They were childless, I rather think. Mrs Leader played golf, which was unusual for a village woman in those days. It rather raised her standing.
Another early memory, going back to when I was perhaps four or five, is of the tarmac being laid in the Andover Road and in Essex Street. Essex Street was the principal street in Wash Common, leading from the pond and the Falkland Memorial about half a mile west, past Nutworth’s and the upper pond to Wash Common Farm. (Cotterell’s, it was called then, and a Cotterell farms it now.)
The men on the laying - and all workmen in general - my mother used to call ‘Jims’. (‘There’ll be some Jims coming tomorrow, Dicky, to do the front gate. You can help them if you like.’ The ‘helping’, of course, consisted of standing about and chatting - picking their brains, really, for like all children I wanted to learn what it was like to be grown-up. You acquired ideas from things let fall rather than from direct instruction. E.g., ‘You wants t’ang on to that there box, ‘Arry. See ’im Friday, old Jack’ll give you threepence for ‘e.’) A whole army of Jims, of course, turned up to tarmacadam the Andover Road, equipped with wonderful things - tar-boilers, tar-spreaders, broad rakes and a real steam-roller. Nearer and nearer to the house they came, day by day, up Wash Hill, until they were actually outside, great men with walrus moustaches, thick braces and string round the knees of their trousers, calling out things like ‘Couple o’ foot, then, Fred’ and ‘Take ’er steady, Joe.’
One of these Jims I remember clearly. He had come into our garage yard for some reason or other, and had been talking to Thorn, our gardener, about a screwdriver or some such. I was around and he began talking to me. He told me, seriously and earnestly, about soldiering on the western front during the Great War, addressing me as ‘Boy’. I liked this. It seemed more grownup than ‘Master Richard’ or ‘Young doctor’. Jim Hawkins to the life! ‘And when we come out o’ them there trenches, boy,’ he said, ‘we was proper lousy. Yer, proper lousy we was!’ I could sense all right how nasty this must have been.
Then he began explaining to me how a pistol worked. ‘That’s what they calls the mechanicism, see, boy,’ he said, demonstrating with his left fore-finger crooked in the palm of his right hand. ‘The mechanicism of the trigger.’ I was impressed. No stranger grownup had ever talked to me like this before - seriously setting out to communicate grown-up matters, without banter. Tobacco, sweat, an old waistcoat all ragged, rough hands ingrained with tar. He was majestic: I’d have done anything for him.
But as a matter of fact it was he who did anything for me. A few days later Constance and I were going up the village to Leader’s, when by the pond we came upon a whole squad of Jims gathered round the steam-roller. They had laid the tar and raked it and now it was to be rolled. My friend was among them, and he began chatting up Constance. After a bit he said ‘You wants get up in there, boy, ’ave a look. That’s steam-powered, that is.’ He lifted me up bodily and the man who was driving the roller took me from him. Inside the roller the fire was flaming before my very face, roaring in its iron boiler. The steam blew back at us out of the funnel in front. Then the driver, leaving me to myself, set to and spun the control-wheel by its projecting handle. There was a tremendous, accelerating crescendo of puffs and heavy rumblings as with a crunching and a shaking, we began to go backwards! Forward and back we went, forward and back, Constance watching half-afraid. (‘Whatever’ll the mistress -’) I held on tight. When at last they lifted me down I was far too much over-awed to say Thank you. This was something like an experience! I suppose my feelings were more or less equivalent to those of an adult witnessing a volcanic eruption.
The Jims, day by day, moved on until they were far off. No more summer dust on the hawthorn - for ever. But at least they’d compensated me as handsomely as they could.
They built a bridge, too, did those Jims — or some Jims did. The nearest water to our home which you could call a river was the little Enborne brook — still, as then, the county boundary between Berkshire and Hampshire. As a child, I was familiar with two crossings. One, a little over a mile away to the south of and below the Wash Common plateau, was Wash Water, on the Andover Road (the A343, as it now is). This had had a road bridge since before I was born. The other, about a mile to the east, was Newtown Water, where the A34, the main Southampton to Birmingham road, crosses the Enborne. When I was a very small boy, in the early ‘twenties, this was just a ford with a footbridge, and I remember being driven through it in the car. As part of the job of tarring and modernizing that road, the bridge which is there today was built. Whenever I join the volume of traffic which almost continuously crosses Newtown Water now, it really brings home to me how greatly times have changed in sixty years.
Our nearest friends on Wash Common — apart from Dr Leggatt, Jean’s father, who lived directly opposite — were the Jessops. Mr Jessop was a stockbroker, and they had an only son, Hugh, who was about ten years older than I (grown-up, in fact, to me). Hugh was one of the first pupils at Stowe, the brand-new and rather revolutionary public school which was beginning to make its name under its famous headmaster, Roxburgh. (Hugh later had a distinguished and gallant naval career in the war and then became a silver dealer in London.)
There were two things that fascinated me about ‘Uncle’ Jessop’s house. The first were the lions. As you went through the front door into the porch, you were confronted (head on, if you were only five) by a pair of jet-black lions carved in ebony. (They were oriental, as I now suppose.) They were each about as big as a big dog, and sitting on their haunches, snarling with open mouths and bared white teeth. Each carried in its front paws an ivory tusk. Although to an adult they would appear very much stylized, they were far and away the biggest and most realistic works of visual art that I had yet seen. I was terrified of them, and always had to be led past, with reassurance. Uncle Jessop, though always kind, was an imposing person with a big moustache and a growly voice, and it occurs to me now that subconsciously I may have rather lumped him and the lions together.
The other thing was the fountain. Although, as I have said, our own garden was big and delightful, it had no water. Uncle Jessop had a lily pond with a fountain. The fountain could be controlled by a foot-high, upright iron tap in the gravel, and to me this was a source of great pleasure and excitement. You could turn the jet into a circular fan of water, its thin streams, like rain, falling all around to transform the surface of the pool into winking, plopping coruscation. You could then bring it up higher, into the faint semblance, perhaps, of a standing figure, an ondine made all of ascending water. And then, finally - if they’d let you, for you weren’t allowed long; it was too much indulgence of a little boy with mechanism that was not considered a toy — you could turn it into a single, immensely tall spout, which shot up into the air as high as the first-floor windows and fell back onto the surface with a most satisfying smack and splash. I always felt a little guilty about going all the way with the fountain, because you had to plead for it to get a grudging ‘Well, all right, but only for a minute, mind.’ I was not to know that fountains are among the oldest and favourite toys of mankind, and that kings and emperors have played with and delighted in them. (My brother, good pianist as he was, was not quite up to Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. I was about nineteen when I first heard that; it evoked an immediate response of recognition.)
Another neighbour, with whom I was to become well acquainted as the years went by, was Captain Cornwallis. (That is not his true name.) He attracted me - as he attracted many - by his generosity, high spirits and enjoyment of life. Captain Cornwallis (I learned all this much later, of course) had originated God knows where, and before the First World War had been a strolling, needy adventurer - a sort of figure from the pages of ‘Sapper’ - with nothing much for ammunition except a pleasing geniality and a great ability for things like golf and bridge, which he played for money. Wounded in the war, he found himself in hospital, being tended by an ugly little V.A.D. nurse called Sally. From gossip he learned that Sally came from a wealthy family and had a lot of money. As soon as he was convalescent he set about courting her, and was successful.
Sally Cornwallis was very small — tiny — with no physical attractions (to say the least) and so little intellect that even a child could perceive the lack. It was hard to tell whether she liked you or not, because her manner and brief speech, unsmiling and flat, were the same to everyone - except servants, to whom she was a tyrant and a bully. (When first married, the Cornwallises had spent some time in India.) Nevertheless, she and the Captain were happy enough on her money (though the Captain went in for brief absences now and then, which earned contemptuous inferences from my father - probably justified, I now think; though I personally can’t say I blame him or see that they did any harm).
The Cornwallises arrived on Wash Common during my early childhood. The Captain bought a farm, its fields comprising the stony, unproductive upland of the plateau above the Enborne. It was about half a mile from our home. He employed two men, but the place was not a true farm; not a going, commercial concern. When not playing bridge or golf, though, he could shoot rabbits on the land. They had two sons; the elder, Duncan, was about my age and a cripple, his speech badly defective and his legs in irons. He could barely walk and used to get about the place on a tricycle. The younger, Arthur, was a year or two younger than myself, and as the years went by became my close associate, for I grew up fairly proficient at swimming and at hitting various kinds of ball, and the Captain thought it good for Arthur to have a slightly older friend who could extend him a little. During our ‘teens our friendship became more limited, since Arthur grew up a straightforward, practical, outdoor fellow, while I became a swot who went the length of liking poetry and classical music. We remained friends, however, right up till after Hitler’s war, when Arthur (‘Can’t farm here: it’s nothing but damn’ pioneering on gravel’) emigrated to Canada, where he has done well.
The great attraction and benefit to me of the Captain was his easy-going generosity. What was his was yours, in effect. He built a swimming-pool and a squash court, and these our family were free to use whenever we liked. The summer holidays of the ‘thirties, when I was in my ‘teens, to a considerable degree revolved round the Cornwallises - sauntering up there in the hot mornings, along the verge of the big cornfield, to swim; tennis in the afternoon and perhaps a bridge lesson from the Captain in the evening. The Captain was most articulate and liked to talk gaily and freely, and this always seemed strange to me - almost unnatural - for my own father, of whom I was so fond, spoke little and smiled hardly at all. I have never forgotten that when my sister Katharine was about twenty-two, she and a friend called Dorothea Rowand decided to enter for an amateur tennis tournament at Hunstanton in north Norfolk and have a bit of fun at the seaside into the bargain. Captain Cornwallis, unasked, lent them his own Bugatti - a superb car - to drive up there and back and to use as their own for the holiday.
My father detested the Captain for a jumped-up cad and a bounder, though he never tried to stop us going up there and mostly kept his feelings to himself. Now and then, however, he would come out with brief and contemptuous references to patent lies that the Captain had told, or ill-bred boasts which he had made at the South Berks Club in Newbury, or with a scornful mention of his ‘farm’, which was no farm at all. I liked the Captain and I liked my father, and sometimes I would try to mediate. ‘But, Daddy, even if he is a bounder, you must agree he’s very generous.’ ‘Yes,’ replied my father, ‘with other people’s money.’
Another time, when I was older - perhaps sixteen - and presumably to be relied upon not to repeat things, he and I were talking about the Captain when I asked some question or other about how he had come to be where he was.
‘Why, he married that woman for her money, of course,’ answered my father. ‘You couldn’t marry her for anything else, could you?’
I realize now that to my father, who had endured disapprobation and family hostility to marry my mother without a penny, for love, this would seem the ultimate in caddishness. And yet I myself am not so sure. Mrs C. lived as happily as she could well have hoped to. She liked and respected her husband, who was always genial and friendly to her. She had two sons and, under his dispensation, more fun than, with her looks and disposition, she could possibly have had otherwise. Whatever infidelities he went in for he kept well away from his own doorstep, and I never heard the least trace of a cross word between them. Yes, he was a sharp scamp (he could always spot in a moment how any card trick was done), but one of Falstaffian charm. I wonder, might my father’s resentment have had in it an ingredient of jealousy? He himself had always been a shy, correct and upright man. ‘Lo, these many years have I served thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandments. Yet thou never gavest me a kid . . .
We never had quite enough money for our establishment. Throughout the eighteen years of my childhood the servants gradually grew fewer and fewer, until at last there was none. My father suffered much financial anxiety, I know. But I think I perceive, now, another factor also. He himself, as he always used to say, was a poor mixer; except for my elder sister’s and brother’s tennis parties in the summer, we didn’t entertain much, and we never went away for holidays. My father, celibate for forty years, had for all I know lived a rather restricted life, working at home with my grandfather. His reward was his sense of his own correctness. But then he had torn up the rule-book and married my mother. Mightn’t an uncharitable person possibly have compared her to Captain Cornwallis? (Though she played her social part admirably and had adapted very well: I doubt whether anyone round Newbury thought her socially below my father.) The Captain, coming from nowhere, could handle people and had got what he was after by means of cheek and an outgoing temperament. My father’s style, on the other hand, was based on reticence and propriety. How aware was he that this was because, when put to it, he had little real force of character? There is nothing in Christian doctrine which forbids marrying for money. It was, rather, the Captain’s style which my father disliked. Yet my childhood would have been far less enjoyable without the Captain.
Another neighbour, whom my father did like, was ‘Uncle’ Urling. Uncle Urling was also a stockbroker. I remember him as a portly, ruddy-faced, genial man, who enjoyed spending money. He had two daughters, Mary and Sheila. Mary was my own age and a friend and playmate - my best friend, I think, next to Jean Leggatt and Ann Lester. (Ann was the daughter of the manager of the Newbury Waterworks.) I would dispute any idea that I preferred the company of girls to that of boys. It was just the way things fell out. Mary played the piano well and my mother wanted me to do the same; but somehow I never could take to it. (More of this anon.) The Urlings had a hard tennis court, the very latest thing, with a loose, green-granulated surface, not an asphalt red one. (The early hard courts were quite smooth and had a surface like maroon asphalt.) Mary was a kind-hearted, slightly nervous little girl, who never said a cross word and made me feel protective. (‘Am I doing it right, Richard?’) She had a wind-up gramophone, and by its means I became acquainted with ‘Coal Black Mammy’, ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, No More’, ‘All By Yourself in the Moonlight’ and other hits of the ‘twenties.
When I was about ten a tremendous thing happened. Uncle Urling was hammered on the Stock Exchange. I didn’t in the least know what this meant, and I was carefully not told, but it was plain enough that the Urlings were in trouble. My father was sympathetic and did all he could to help. Uncle Urling arranged with him that we should, by private arrangement, ‘borrow’ his (Mary’s) beautiful grand piano - a Steinway - to save it from being sequestered (or whatever it’s called). So our good old upright - the pianola - was put away and the Steinway, which seemed to fill half the drawing-room, was installed. My brother, of course, was delighted, and used to play even more. I felt almost in awe of the instrument, which was mostly kept closed and covered with a thick, heavy, brown cloth embroidered in gold braid with elephants and lions. It stayed with us for about five years, I think, before Uncle Urling was in a position to take it back. When, ten years later, I read Emma for the first time, I was able to respond exactly as Jane Austen would have wished to the moment when Jane Fairfax receives the mysterious piano.
It was a bit of a limitation in one way, though. From my earliest days (well, say four or five) I had loved playing the pianola. When I first began to play it I was so small and light that someone had to hold my chair firm; otherwise my feet, pressing the pedals, slid me bodily backwards. The rolls were what you would expect: Cavalleria Rusticana, Chopin’s Valse Brillante, The Russian Church Parade, Pagliacci, ‘Where My Caravan Has Rested’, ‘Lilac Time’ and many more. I realize now how lucky I was to have this sort of introduction to instrumental music.
I responded to music all right; almost over-sensitively, as a matter of fact. My brother, too, had a wind-up gramophone, and I recall that one day, when I was about six, he played me the Unfinished Symphony. The quality of the reproduction, of course, would today be beneath contempt, but it was more than enough for me. The opening theme, in the ‘cellos and basses, at once seemed to me to convey menace and dread. It frightened me. Something terrible was going to happen. I think now that this was perfectly valid. It does. The second movement was no better. The pizzicato opening seemed grim and dire. I felt (although, of course, it hadn’t yet been written) like Simon, in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, confronted by the pig’s head on a stick. It assured him that life was a bad business. But Schubert seemed not to be trying to frighten me as a bully would. ‘I know this is frightening,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I can’t help it. It frightens me, too.’ I have gone on finding a lot of Schubert frightening from that day to this - the Octet, the A minor Quartet, the big piano sonatas: so frightening that I prefer not to try to think it out further. Let’s drop it.
Surely a good teacher could have made a player out of a child as sensitive as this? I’ll always maintain that it was as a result of hidebound, insensitive teaching and regime that I never could make a go of learning to play the piano. I think this is worth mentioning here, not in order to excuse me, but because it may possibly help other parents. My first teacher, at my kindergarten, was a decent but distinctly limited woman, who also turned an honest penny by driving her car for hire. Her teaching was boring and uninspired and as far as I remember she never played any music for my enjoyment or praised me for anything I did. I was with her for about two years or thereabouts. Then I went on to prep. school (boarding school), and here I came under the tuition of a lady who was, even at that date (1929), an anachronism. Miss Jarvis (not her name) was the archetypal Victorian governess: a maiden lady in later middle age, grave and admonitory in manner, she taught French and Arithmetic to the smaller boys and the piano to all those who were ‘put down’ for it. She seldom smiled and never made a joke. The two essentials for a teacher are warmth and humour, but Miss Jarvis possessed neither. Her best quality was her sense of duty. Upon her death (which occurred when I was about twelve and still at the school), the headmaster made a moving speech about the long and honourable service she had given, including, during the First World War, extra duty, for which she had refused to take a penny. She was certainly a worthy and, I suppose, rather a sad lady; she made you work, but one thing she could not communicate (I doubt now whether she really possessed it herself) was the joy or magic of music. I see her clearly in memory, her slightly aquiline features fixed severely upon a pupil as she reproved him for his own good, looking out from under the broad-brimmed, dark-blue straw hat which she always wore indoors. She wore it quite straight, of course, and it was fastened by a big hat-pin which was so low that you would have sworn that it must go through her head and not just through her white hair. I have a memory of her at the school concert. Three boys were to play a trio on one piano. They sat down to play, and Miss Jarvis stood behind them throughout, tapping their shoulders and whispering (you could see her lips moving) ‘One two three four, One two three four.’
During all the six years that I learned the piano, no one ever told me anything about the great composers, no one played any great piece of music and explained it or invited me to love it as they did, no one ever represented the piano to me as a wonderful, glorious accomplishment which would one day be mine; no one ever took me to a recital. At my prep. school, practices and lessons with Miss Jarvis were all conducted in what was, for other boys, play time. The pianos were situated in the different classrooms, and it wasn’t always easy for a junior boy to make his way into a relatively senior classroom, where there might be ten or twelve bigger boys none too pleased that he was come to play the piano badly. Nor was it any fun coming in on a fine summer half-holiday afternoon, when others were out of doors, to sit in a queue and wait, perhaps for nearly an hour, while Miss Jarvis took each in turn. No wonder that when I was eleven I persuaded my mother, with tears, to let me give up the piano. It was nothing but drudgery without reward even held out in prospect.
Years later, I saw to it that none of this took place with my elder daughter. Everything was done to encourage her, help her to love music, build up her morale and convince her that she was doing better all the time. She finished school a Grade 8 pianist.
Although I liked ‘having a friend to tea’ (usually Jean, Ann or Mary) and playing in the garden for the afternoon, big children’s parties were another matter. There was no lack of fairly wealthy (and some really wealthy) families round Newbury. Several of these regularly gave children’s parties, and naturally the family doctor’s children were invited. As I was so much younger than my sister and brother, I used to get asked to different parties, for smaller children - alone. Of course, my father didn’t like the invitations to be refused. If it was Ann’s or Mary’s party this wasn’t so bad, but some of the big parties at wealthy houses, among a crowd of rich children who were mostly strangers, were unnerving - quite as bad as a parachute jump was to prove later. I was socially timid, used to solitary play, and nervously uneasy among the rather reserved and self-possessed boys and girls, well equipped to fulfil the roles expected of upper middle-class children in those days. For the most part I got on badly.
One of these parties was for me the occasion of a genuine Freudian trauma, the origin of a behaviour pattern of cracking under stress which has remained with me all my life: I know it well and can spot it whenever it turns up. This was a big party, given by the parents of a boy I hardly knew (he later kept wicket for Eton), and it was fancy-dress. I went as a Red Indian, though you could hardly have guessed it. The costume, such as it was, was old and shabby and had been lying in some cupboard since before I was born. It did fit, but what it amounted to was a crumpled jacket and trousers of thin, brown cloth, edged with strips of red and blue canvas. You couldn’t wear it with any swank, which is surely the whole point of fancy dress. I could just about get by in it — and perhaps not even quite that. We hadn’t the money for smart fancy dress.
I knew hardly anybody at the party. Most of the children were a little older than I. There were some splendid costumes. I remember a fairy, with wings and starry wand, to take your breath away. There was also another Red Indian, finely attired, with a tomahawk and a head-dress of coloured feathers half-way down his back. He didn’t speak to me.
After a while we were assembled to watch the Punch and Judy show. I had never seen this before and had no idea what I was in for — a series of brutal and savage murders. I watched in mounting panic. Surely there must be some way out of this? Eventually Punch took the baby, Judy exited and Punch began banging the baby’s head against the side of the box.
That did it. I was quite near the back. I got up and slipped out of the room. I didn’t care where I went, as long as it was away from Mr Punch. No one seemed to have noticed me go, and in the hall there was no one about. I went upstairs, into a long, cool, empty corridor with closed doors on either side. It seemed to me that one would be as good as another. By this time I was in such a state of horror that I had the fancy that it was quite likely that Mr Punch would come and get me. Credo quia impossibile est. I could, of course, have been reasoned out of this, but there was no one to do it. Since then I have seen grown-up people give way to fears as absurd.
I opened a door at random. It was a bedroom, with the bed, head to the wall, aligned just to the left of the hinge side of the door. I got between the bed and the door, and then pulled the door wide, to an obtuse angle, till it touched the bed, thus forming a thin, hollow triangle - door, bed, wall. Here I felt myself in a place of refuge, a place of hiding and protection - a womb, of course, as we have all learned to think since then.
‘Aha!’ I kept murmuring silently to myself. ‘Mr Punch can’t get me here! Mr Punch can’t get me here!’ I had no idea of consequences: I mean, any idea that obviously this couldn’t continue indefinitely. I just felt that where I was, I was safe from Mr Punch. That was enough.
After a while - I don’t know how long - the search began. I heard footsteps, and voices calling ‘Richard!’ Some passed by the open door. Then a grown-up - I couldn’t see who - actually came into the room, looked round and went out, saying to someone else ‘No, he’s not in there’.
I stayed put and never made a sound. I don’t know why, since the calling voices were kind enough. I suppose my fear had somehow extended to include all the strangers in the house. Also, as I think we all recognize, panics and escapades possess a kind of in-built impetus. It is like being on a roller-coaster. You can’t get off. Someone else has to stop it.
Eventually someone - a lady - came into the room again, swung back the door and found me. They were all far too much relieved to be cross, and also, of course, I was their guest. I can’t remember the rest of the affair, though I remember trying to explain my fear. I think I just rejoined the party, which by now had got on to ‘Nuts in May’, ‘Hunt the Slipper’ and similar harmless activities.
But although I was not to realize it consciously for years, something fundamental and seminal had occurred. A behaviour pattern had formed. It might be described like this. First, I knew and accepted that it was possible for me to be genuinely and in all truth driven beyond the point of endurance by something that evidently didn’t bother other people at all (or perhaps something that they could endure). Secondly, I could get out of this by taking solitary action, involving some sort of retreat into hiding; possibly an actual, physical refuge or else an infantile state (illness, breakdown, etc.). Thirdly, if only I could keep it up, heedless of its effect on my standing or reputation, it would get me out of the situation, whatever it might be.
This, however, didn’t turn into a really bad neurosis. My home was much too supportive for that, my family too kind and understanding and the world too full of exciting, happy things. But it had come to stay; and under any relatively heavy strain, up it has been popping ever since; sometimes controlled and pushed back into its cage, sometimes not. Also, the notion of the enclosed refuge has remained as a permanent fantasy. ‘I’m all right: I’m hiding in here.’
Not all the big, rich parties, however, were frightening. One I always looked forward to and enjoyed was Mr Behrend’s annual firework party. Mr Behrend was a wealthy man who lived out at Burghclere, a village a few miles away, and he and his family were patients of my father. Mrs Behrend had been a Miss Sandham, and had lost her brother, Harry Sandham, in Mesopotamia in the First World War. It was at this time that the Sandham Memorial Chapel was built by the Behrends at Burghclere - where, under their patronage, Stanley Spencer was executing his big mural paintings and smaller canvases depicting scenes from the First World War in the Near East. We - my brother, sister and I - were sometimes taken to watch him at work on the murals.
I don’t remember ever feeling nervous or in deep water at the Behrends’ parties. If I recall rightly, Julie Behrend was a little older than I and Georgie about the same age. There always seemed to me to be a great crowd of children — far more than the modest parties for twelve or fourteen which were the form for Jean, Ann, me and our friends. Although, naturally, there were a lot of strangers, the children were not formal or stiff with each other, because of the common bond of excitement and expectation about the fireworks. There would be a few games before tea, the preliminaries being spun out by the adults long enough to ensure that it had grown properly dark. Then we would all crowd into the big bay windows - there were at least three, if not four - and get comfortably settled. We were looking out onto the terrace - a gravel path as broad as twelve feet, with a low stone wall about three or four feet high on its opposite side. Here stout poles had been driven into the ground, rockets set up and all other preparations completed.
The reason why we were kept behind glass and not invited out into the garden — as at many firework parties I have been to since — was that the fireworks themselves were so large, noisy and, in some cases, unpredictable. (I have played Mr Behrend’s part myself since then, and if I find myself with a circle of six cardboard cylinders conjoined by light strips of wood and instructions to affix to a stout pole or fence, light the blue touch paper and stand clear, I want to feel sure that there aren’t any five-year-olds loose in the vicinity.) Mr Behrend’s fireworks were spectacular and he presented them really well, with one thing following another in ascending order (or orders) of effect. The vocal response of his audience was what might be expected. I remember one or two children becoming so much excited that they had to be calmed by being embraced by adults or sitting on their knees. I suppose the whole thing probably didn’t take more than half an hour, but it wound the children up to fever-pitch with its sudden outbursts of coloured fire, gushing spouts of sparks interspersed with the ‘Pouf!’ of red or green or purple globules of light, and the hissing uprush of rockets which seemed to disappear into the sky for seconds before exploding into screaming tadpoles or pendent, incandescent parasols hanging motionless, going out only as they at last began to fall.
At the end Mr Behrend, a shadowy figure in the dark, would take off his hat and bow to us - a convenient signal, I suppose, to the grown-ups, who now had on their hands about fifty children wrought to the highest pitch of excitement. I can remember feeling exhausted, although I’d done nothing but watch.
What has been said so far of my father, that silent, reticent, undemonstrative man, who was fifty when I was born and whose life bore a heavy burden of bereavement (of which I knew nothing) may have left a reader wondering how on earth he and I came to be so close. The first characteristic of our relationship - and of this I was unconsciously aware before I could formulate thoughts at all — was that my father spoke to me and treated me to a large extent as though I were grown up and an equal. He didn’t go in for stories of the past or for memories, but he would answer questions truthfully and impassively, even to the point where a lot of people nowadays, I suppose, might hesitate or take refuge in euphemism. For example, I remember once asking him by what means the Philistines ‘put out’ Samson’s eyes. ‘I expect they burnt them out with red-hot irons,’ replied my father, in the straightforward and emotionless tone in which he answered all questions, whether from the servants, my mother or us children. I cried out in horror and began to weep; but my father let this run its course, until after a little a natural opportunity arose to change the subject. I knew that my father could always be relied upon to tell me the truth.
A second characteristic was that he genuinely enjoyed my company and would seek it out, with the suggestion that we might go for a walk (usually with a specific object - always a sensible idea with a child), play cards, or that he might read to me. Sometimes he would ask me to come with him to look at some particular shrub or group of flowers in the garden which had just come into bloom. In this way I learned by degrees the names of all the trees and flowers we grew, and would speak of them unselfconsciously. Eschscholzia, convallaria and coreopsis presented no difficulty to me, because it had never occurred to me that they might. I learned, too, the names of all the roses - not only the ones along the verandah posts - and, as I grew older, was sometimes able to steal a march on my father by coming and asking him whether he knew that the ipomoea on the kitchen garden pergola had put out its first bloom, or that the collinsia was coming out?
My father would not allow you, without mockery of some kind or another, to talk about a ‘bird’. If you did, he would put on the falsetto voice of a silly woman, and say ‘Oh, Dr Adams, do look at that funny bird!’ You had to refer to the bird by name. So the Marguerite bird became a song-thrush, and soon I could identify the wren I couldn’t see in the bushes by its characteristic, long, sustained trill.
Although he was so familiar with the inland birds of the south country, my father had never gone out of his way to seek out birds of other terrains. I have often wondered why. For example, on his own admission he knew little or nothing of sea-birds - one of the most rewarding of all branches of ornithology - though he knew a certain amount about birds of bog and moorland from younger days in Somerset, when he used to go shooting; and he had sometimes been to Scotland as a shooting and fishing guest. The snipe and the wheatear he certainly knew, but I wonder whether he would have recognized a greenshank: not, I am virtually certain, a red-throated diver. I suppose he simply observed the birds that came in his way. Well, it was no matter. Through him I learned to admire and respect birds and to want to know more about them. Years after his death I was to find the Isle of Man a maritime bird Utopia, watching the fulmars gliding up to the cliff-face and turning away without a single beat of the wing, the guillemots racing out across the sea, and the kittiwakes, marble-white heads and shoulders, feeding their young on the ledges. I wish my father could have sailed with me through the Antarctic, to see the Wilson’s petrels, the skuas, sheathbills, king penguins and the great albatrosses. Well, it all started in the garden at Oakdene. ‘Look at that splendid chap!’ he would say, as the spotted flycatcher darted from its nest to its hunting-post on the tennis netting. And in time I became able, now and then, to anticipate him, pointing out a blackcap or a bullfinch.
My father, although he did not play bridge (or cribbage), enjoyed a light-hearted game of cards and I believe now, in retrospect, that he considered cards a good way of sharpening children’s wits. (He taught me draughts, halma and chess, too.) Cards began when I was still quite small, by playing two-handed, five-card German whist with my mother. From this I at least learned what a trick was, what a trump was and about following suit. Soon afterwards my father introduced me to bézique. Two-handed bézique is a dull enough game for adults, but I can still remember its excitement and fascination for me as a child. In the first place, it was all new. I was entering upon a novel form of experience and learning and practising a hitherto unexperienced kind of skill. The game seemed so romantic and colourful, with its strange oddities. Why should the tens be worth more than everything but the aces? Why should you get forty for the queen of spades and the jack of diamonds? What did ‘bézique’ mean, anyway? I can still recall the excitement of realizing that I held four kings or four aces, and the splendid moment when you won a trick, laid them down on the table and clocked up the score on your marker.
But there was a degree of strain in bézique, too. An adult naturally sees so simple a game as a mere way of passing the time, and also knows how much luck there is in it. A child takes it seriously, for to him it is something not yet rooted in experience. It involves decisions. Bézique was for me the first business in which I had to make decisions — decisions which would affect the outcome of the game. ‘I’m holding two kings and three queens. They can’t all stay. Shall I discard the queens, four of which score only sixty, and trust to getting four kings (eighty)? Or on the other hand, would it be better to play safe and go for the queens?’ And you could be disastrously wrong, as I learned in good time. You could spend the whole hand saving for a sequence, only to find that your opponent had been craftily holding both the queens of trumps all the time. Then there was the agony of having acquired something really good — a sequence or even double bézique — when there were only two or three tricks left to play, none of which you could win. I used to get tense and very much involved with the game, occasionally to the point of tears. I think my father sometimes pulled his punches to avoid upsetting me. In his position, I would have done the same. To a seven-year-old, to hold double bézique and be prevented from declaring it is a mortifying experience. But you had to learn to lose with a good grace. (I was yet to see the Australians, in the test series of 1932-33, going virtually berserk over Larwood and Voce.)
Later on came picquet. Since becoming grown-up it has surprised me that, in a country where bridge is widely played and people take it almost for granted that they will be able to make up at least some sort of a table, very few people, by comparison, play picquet. It is by far the best card game for two — elegant and skilful — and during my life I must have had hours of enjoyment from it. I remember reading somewhere that Richelieu used to play picquet, and it amuses me to think of the game being devised at the sophisticated French court of the seventeenth century at more or less the same time as Sir John Suckling (so Aubrey says) was inventing cribbage. Sir Toby Belch (in old age) might have played the latter. Somehow I can’t see him playing picquet (although Prince Rupert might very well have played it, I dare say).
Picquet was pretty fast bowling for an eight-year-old. I remember how I began it with no more experience behind me than that of bézique, with the idea that it consisted of virtually no more than collecting honours in the hand. Two things which took me a long time to learn were the importance of planning and playing to win the majority of (or at least to split) the tricks, and the necessity, for the younger hand, of ‘guarding’ or ‘covering’ kings or queens, to stop your opponent running through the suit. My father had given my sister a beautiful picquet set - a gilt-lettered red box with two packs and two pads of score sheets — and she was often ready to play. As she was more than nine years older, unless I got very good cards she could wipe the floor with me. My sister held the view that I was spoiled and over-indulged — which was true — and that it would be good for me to take a few sound hidings. I think it was. Most people who have taken up learning a skill, a game or an accomplishment, know the infuriating frustration of watching someone else perform something which you want to be able to do and cannot. For a long time I simply could not get the hang of prudent discarding and of keeping ‘stops’. Tears and temper were not uncommon, for I took the business seriously and wanted to master it.
One day I had an idea — an idea not altogether unconnected, perhaps, with Mr Punch. Without consciously formulating the notion in so many words, I realized that picquet was a self-contained business, having no links with anything outside itself. (Unlike, say, dancing, which had all sorts of tedious tie-ups with things like hostesses, partners and conversation.) If I could really master picquet, it would become indestructibly mine, like an object in my pocket. I set myself to do it and since the game is not bottomless, like chess or bridge, in due course, and after a good deal of rather taxing application, I succeeded. That is to say, I could play anyone - any grown-up — without needing indulgence and without doing anything silly. I had it on board, right down to the pleasure to be derived from making something of a rotten hand. (Many years later I was to teach the game, on board ship at literally the other end of the world, to Mike McDowell, the young cruise director of the Lindblad Explorer. Mike became adept at making the best of a bad hand, and many a time would save his score with four tens or a quint to the jack.)
I have come to see that there are two perfectly valid ways of feeling about games in general. My wife doesn’t really care for - or about - games. If she consents to play, it is to pass time and she doesn’t particularly want to win: an admirable approach. ‘Games,’ she says, ‘are a waste of time. They are parenthetical. They are nothing to do with life, with which it’s far more fun to be getting on.’ (What she gets on with are English ceramics. She is an F.S.A. and an acknowledged expert.) My own view is that any idea of succeeding at Life is futile (as I think George Orwell remarked). But you can hope to become proficient at and sometimes succeed at a game, and this gives a lot of satisfaction. My personal view is that no game should be played professionally, though I’ve no objection to it being taught professionally.
In the course of succeeding years I was to take on board one self-contained thing after another, from wild flowers to Brahms to Parliamentary Questions, but I still remained unable to deal with Mr Punch, in whatever guise he came.
But to return to my father. It was the places he took me to which had the strongest formative influence upon me and gave me, in childhood, the most delight. If we went out through the gate at the bottom of the paddock, across the lane (Monkey Lane) and into the big ploughed field, it was a matter of a few hundred yards to a copse of silver birch, oak, ash and hazel bushes. This was damp most of the year, with a rivulet running through it. We called it the Bluebell Wood: in April the bluebells flowered so thickly that the ground was blue as a field is green. To me the density of colour was not, however, their most poignant quality. The blue was composed of myriads of individual blooms, tall, narrow and moving slightly in the breeze. This gave the receding distance of blue a penetrable quality, so that you looked from the flowers at your feet into a near distance where they blended into a less broken, multifoliate blue: and from these into a further distance of a single, hazy blue — single as a cloud is single, a soft mass full of recesses, shadows and dim, dissolving rifts and cavities. To look into that receding infinity of bluebells was to become more lost to all else, more teased out of thought, than when looking up into a clear blue sky and trying to imagine what lay beyond. There couldn’t possibly be so many bluebells; yet there they were. Examine a single one: it was perfect. Each one in that infinity was similarly perfect. To grasp this inspired awe as well as delight. Throughout the wood lay the faint but clear scent of the flowers, and somewhere on the edge, in a birch tree, a blackbird would let fall its pausing, unhurried phrases.
Is a small child really conscious of all this, or is memory coloured with hindsight? There is a paradox, I think. In a way, the child takes such things for granted. While he is in the wood, he may very likely be talking about trivial things, or thinking about his friends or a story that has been read to him. He is not consciously observing as an older person would. And yet, on the other hand, his mind and senses are wide open in a way that they will not be in later life. He has seldom or never seen a wood full of bluebells before. Because he has not been told to regard it as wonderful - because he is not like an adult looking at the Taj Mahal - the wood makes its impression with a kind of inevitability like that of a physical law. It falls into his unheeding mind like a stone falling into water. I thought it splendid to pull an armful of bluebells to take home to my mother. Yet I had unconsciously taken away much more — impalpable feelings which were to prove more abiding and which I now try, as best I can, to express in words. No expression of an experience — whether in painting, words or music — recovers the experience itself, but can only be a separate thing. Yet the experience itself existed and was at once more and less transcendental than this subsequent expression derived from it.
There were other flowers in the Bluebell Wood, too; often, as early as February, dog’s mercury, with its little green flowers on stalks, would carpet the bare ground before anything else had begun to shoot. It seems strange to me, now, that my father never warned me that it was most dangerously poisonous. Perhaps he didn’t know. (Culpeper, the classic herbalist, says ‘There is not a more fatal plant, native to our country, than this.’) Anyway, I don’t think anyone would want to pick dog’s mercury. The white wood anemones, too, I soon gave over picking. The flower, once picked, will droop and wither in ten minutes. My favourite in the Bluebell Wood in summer, when all the bluebells had gone, was the creeping jenny. Creeping jenny is a pimpernel by family. It grows in wet, shady places in woods and copses, in long strands of green leaves and yellow, bell-shaped flowers. It still grows in the Bluebell Wood.
One afternoon in April - I suppose I must have been about eight or nine - I was wandering down by the Bluebell Wood alone. On the east side there is open pasture land - a little valley - between this and the next similar but larger copse. I pottered along the eastern edge of the Bluebell Wood and there, on the bank by the south-east corner, I suddenly came upon what struck me then as an oldish man.
Now when you met men on the Sandleford estate and you weren’t on the footpath that crosses it from Wash Common to the Newbury-Southampton road (A34), they weren’t as a rule friendly. You were trespassing. My father, being Dr Adams and well-known in the neighbourhood, could carry this off, but an eight-year-old on his own was another matter, as I had already had cause to learn. ‘D’you know you’re doin’ wrong goin’ across there?’ I knew by sight the few men who worked in these fields and whom you were liable to encounter.
This man wasn’t any of them and you could tell at once that he wasn’t, by his look and bearing. He would have been old for a farm labourer and besides, he didn’t appear to be working on any particular sort of job. He, like me, appeared to be at leisure. He greeted me in a friendly way - I can’t remember what he said - and although I didn’t really know how to talk to him, except by corroboration and general amiability, he was clearly happy enough with my company and (unlike the farm labourers) wasn’t particularly conscious of my being ‘a young gentleman’. (Class distinctions were much more marked in those days.)
He was gathering twigs and lighting a fire under the bank - something I’d never seen anyone do before — and when we’d got it nicely going he proceeded to boil water in a somewhat old-looking tin can. When it boiled he made tea by throwing the tea leaves in, chatting all the time in a kindly manner about nothing in particular, quite unlike any of the Jims I had ever met. We drank the tea black, though I seem to remember he had some sugar somewhere about him. When we finally parted - and I intuitively felt no suspicion or fear of him - I left him sitting contentedly on the bank.
He remains a mystery to me. Who - and what - on earth could he have been? He was not a tramp or any sort of vagrant; I am sure of that. Even at that age I knew what a tramp was like. They had a general air of resentment and unhappiness which made you sorry for them and angry on their behalf. If they could, they begged from you. Besides, tramps stuck to the roads or to places such as ricks or sheds, close to the roads they had slunk off. They told you about their bad luck. They called you ‘sonny’. This man was happy enough, generous with his tea and enjoyed my company. He addressed me by no vocative at all. (I was sensitive to vocatives and unconsciously derived a lot from them about the speaker. ‘Sonny’; ‘young feller’; ‘young man’; ‘boy’; ‘youngster’. Each of these implied something vague but valid. The one I always hated was ‘old chap’. I still hate it and never use it myself. ‘It’s time you and I had a little talk, old chap.’ ‘Well, you know, old chap, that’s not the sort of thing we expect.’ My father would never use such a term: it was either ‘Richard’ or ‘my boy’ — which I was.)
Nor was this man a keeper. I knew about keepers, too. They were - and still are - authoritative in a deferential way (like warrant officers). They were usually dressed with a certain degree of neatness and propriety - I suppose, partly to reinforce their authority and partly as befitting the standing of their employer. As a rule they were crisp and sharp. They certainly didn’t make stick fires and brew tea in cans. This man, whatever he was doing, was in no hurry and very much relaxed. He was wearing old, worn clothes, yet not the come-by garments of a tramp. Most striking of all was his manner, which was unusually gentle. He didn’t seem to regard our meeting as in any way odd. He made - he initiated - mild, trivial conversation. I never met him again - on the Sandleford land or anywhere else.
I have decided - or the best I can come up with after all these years is — that he was in some way connected with felling in the Sandleford copses. These - especially the Bluebell Wood -contained a lot of hazel, and it was the practice to cut this to the ground every few years - to harvest it, in fact - and then let it grow up again. The business, I rather think, was not carried out by the estate but ‘sold’ to people who specialized in it. I am inclined to guess that this unhurrying, kindly old fellow, taking his time on a pleasant afternoon, who had half an hour to brew tea and wasn’t in the least bothered about who I was or whether I was trespassing, was engaged in some sort of examination or reconnaissance of the copses on behalf of what Americans would call ‘his outfit’, the hazel cutters, who may have been based well beyond Newbury. That would explain this rather Edward Thomasesque encounter.