Next morning we got a lift. It was Mr Elton-Willis’s idea—he was just setting out for his Saturday-morning jog when the three of us got downstairs. He said he had to go into Welshpool soon after nine to pick up the newspapers and it would be the easiest thing in the world to run us on to where the Dyke starts up again.
We discussed it briefly over our farmhouse breakfast of bran and yoghurt. I wasn’t in favour. It seemed to me that if we had walked off the right path we could walk back on to it again, but Fraser said with somebody like Henry as a guide that didn’t necessarily follow. Fraser said what was he going to tell his grandchildren in years to come when they asked him about Offa’s Dyke and all he’d done was to go round and round the same hillside for days on end.
Henry said: ‘If I were you I’d blame everyone else. You usually do.’ But, he said, Offa’s Dyke was the objective, and all in all he was for getting back on to it by the quickest possible means.
So I was outvoted, and Mr Elton-Willis kindly drove us through Welshpool in his little Lancia and across the Severn, which lies just beyond, and down through the hamlet of Buttington to the point where the Dyke begins. Mark you, we knew we were coming to it quite a bit before, because of the numbers of weekend-hikers all making for the same spot.
Oh how I hate them, those weekend-hikers. You can tell the weekend-hiker a mile off by his shiny knees and his silly bobble hat and the shrill excited pitch of his voice as he rediscovers long- forgotten novelties like grass and thistles. Normally he will have a wife in tow who seems, of all loony things, to be starting a collection of dead bracken - that at least is what she appears to be pulling out of the hedgerows and burdening the rest of the family with. Then, of course, there is the child. He, in terms of character, comes out of it as the best of the group. Surly, square, and with a marked tendency to lag behind, he can’t see why he’s been hauled out on this bloody walk in the first place. His day would have been much better spent squashing beetles behind the garage at home, which is exactly what he’d planned to do before they sprang this route march on him. But that’s adults all over. You just get yourself organised to do something really interesting, and bang, the next minute you find yourself attached to some labour-gang or other.
‘Darling!’ the husband will exclaim, pausing for breath after the first seventy yards or so and peering indeterminately into the hedge. ‘Darling, do you see what I see?’
‘What, darling, what?’ cries his wife gustily as she closes in on him. ‘Oh, do hurry up, Bobby, my pet,’ she urges the child behind her. ‘Come and see what Daddy’s seen.’
‘Wotz ‘e seen then?’ says the child without quickening his pace. ‘Wotz Daddy seen then?’
‘He’s seen a ... what is it you’ve seen, darling?’
‘Look there!’
‘Where?’
‘You see that branch, darling?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘Well, follow it along with your eye and tell me if you see something surprising.’
‘Er ... let me think. Um ... is it above or below the fork?’
‘Silly darling!’ exclaims the husband in triumph. ‘It is the fork. Don’t you see. The branch forks three ways at the same time. You don’t often see that on a branch now, do you?’
Even to a wife who is prepared to get excited about some pretty low-interest-level material to keep the family enthusiasm bubbling along, this seems to be borderline stuff from the point of view of stimulating the rebellious Bobby.
‘Daddy’s seen a tree,’ she tells him, trying to keep it short, as he comes up.
‘Yeah?’ says the child. ‘Wot a load of crap.’
For this remark the child receives a series of cuffs around the head from his mother together with a torrent of motherly abuse. ‘How dare you (thwack) use such language in front of your father (thwack). You ought to be ashamed of yourself (thwack, thwack). Where do you pick up these foul expressions, that’s what I want to know (thwack). Is that the sort of guttersnipe remark they teach you at school (thwack, thwack, thwack). Now look,’ she says accusingly, ‘there’s somebody coming. Stop snivelling and pull yourself together. You’re not hurt.’
‘Iam ‘urt.’
‘No you’re not. Blow your nose and stop making an exhibition of yourself.’
‘I uvn’t gdda ‘nkerchief.’
‘Here’s mine. Now, these people are coming. Good afternoon!’ she calls desperately to the approaching party.
‘Good afternoon,’ they murmur back, giving her a wide berth. They have been studying her wrist-action for the last thirty yards or so, and each of them has decided to himself that this is certainly a severe case of child battering, probably murder. On the other hand they don’t feel it’s for them to interfere, so they’ve each taken a mental note of her description just in case the police should put out a call for witnesses later on.
‘Darling!’ rings back the little-boy-blue voice of her unbearable husband from a hundred yards up the hedgerow. ‘Darling, I think I’ve found something else now! Believe it or not I think it may be a lapwing.’
Not all weekend-hikers are as bad as that. Some on the other hand are a good deal worse. Take for example the man who fell in with us for the first ten miles beyond Welshpool. He was alarmingly hearty and glowing with enthusiasm, of course - but all weekend-hikers over the age of little Bobby are like that. It was the mindless series of questions that wore us down. It seemed, talking to him - and it was impossible to avoid talking to him - that there was no answer that the human brain could devise that didn’t give rise to yet another fatuous question: if not to an immediate question, then at least to an exclamation of wonder and delight, which was if anything worse.
‘Tell me,’ he said to Henry about six-and-a-half seconds after he had caught up with us. ‘Tell me, what do you do for a living?’
Henry said, ‘I’m a statistician.’
‘Really?’ exclaimed our companion. ‘How very interesting.’
See what I mean? Now if he had said hew totally dull and boring an occupation being a statistician must be, one could have had some respect for the man. If he had coughed nervously and changed the subject on to growing your own courgettes one would have sympathised with his predicament. But to go around shouting ‘How interesting’ when a man tells you he’s a statistician is a sure sign that you are - to use a medical expression - soft in the head.
‘How very interesting,’ he went on. ‘I should think you’ve seen a lot of changes in statistics in the last few years, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Henry said. Well - there again - he was hardly going to say that he hadn’t, was he? He was hardly going to say that he just pulls open a drawer and gets out the statistics for 1979 and blows the dust off them and changes the date and bungs them straight in the post.
‘Ah yes,’ said the man. ‘Yes. New methods coming in too, I shouldn’t wonder. Tell me do you use computers much?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Quite a bit of the time.’
‘Quite a bit of the time, eh?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry.
‘Quite a bit of the time, but not all of the time is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ said Henry.
‘Would you say,’ said the man probingly, ‘that you use computers almost fifty per cent of the time?’
‘More than that probably,’ said Henry.
‘More than that. My word. There’s progress for you. How much more would you say - just a little bit more, or quite a lot more?’
‘It depends what the job is,’ said Henry very sensibly.
‘Ah,’ said the man, as if he had put his finger on the critical point he had been searching for, although of course there was no point to his conversation at all. ‘It depends, doesn’t it? Yes I can see that all right. Tell me now, do you really think - I mean, do you yourself really think that statistics are useful? What I mean is, do you really think that they help us out here in the modern world?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Henry dully.
‘You do? Fascinating. Now look,’ said the man. ‘Suppose I were to ask you for a set of statistics on ... on ... what shall we say?’
‘Hedgehogs,’ said Fraser quickly, trying to come to Henry’s rescue.
‘Hedgehogs - that’s an idea!’ said the man enthusiastically. ‘Hedgehogs!’ And, meandering away from his point rather like a hedgehog himself, he turned to Fraser and continued babbling. ‘Hedgehogs - what an intriguing suggestion. Tell me, why did you say hedgehogs?’ And so on.
We took him in relays, this searcher after knowledge. First Henry had him, of course. Then Fraser surged in and carried him on for the next mile. Then he was tossed to me still exclaiming and marvelling and full of pep, and after I had run with him for twenty minutes or so, Henry would close in on us and take him over again. That’s how we shared the work. We tried him on a number of topics. Not ordinary common-or-garden topics, mark you, but the pettiest, drabbest, most dismally uninteresting little topics we could lay our hands on. Things like how to patch linoleum, and the effects of the baked-bean industry on pre-war Ilford. And Fraser even went to the lengths of describing a football match he had once watched between Army Pay Corps ‘B’ and an invitation side from the Hosiery Trade where the score was nil-nil after extra time. And to all this our friend responded with ever-increasing delight and curiosity. ‘Really!’, ‘How splendid!’, ‘Tell me, what do you think would be the normal number of throw-ins in an amateur soccer match?’
We finally shook him off a mile or so south of Montgomery using a trick in which the Government or the Countryside Commission or some such body certainly had an important hand.
Now, I’m not a man normally to go around proclaiming how tricks are done. The way I see it, it isn’t fair to the conjurer. When he’s just pulled a rabbit out of the hat, I mean to say, it does rather spoil the party to dash up and lift the false bottom out of the thing, revealing three coloured handkerchiefs, a couple of pigeons and a cobra all curled up inside waiting for their chance to come on stage. But in the case of the Waymark Path Trick - that is what this particular trick is called - I think I can in confidence reveal it to you. Otherwise I don’t see how the Government is going to get the recognition it deserves when it has to spend so much of the time defending itself against malicious and usually quite misdirected abuse.
The point about the Waymark Path Trick is this. The Government takes a perfectly ordinary path which people may want to walk along like the Lyke Wake Walk (which we’ve mentioned before) or Offa’s Dyke, and it thinks to itself how it can preserve that path for people of culture and distinction like you and me, while sending all the weekend-hikers and the dreadful vanilla-flavoured-crisp-packet crew off on some quite different excursion without feeling they’ve been hard done by. The answer they’ve come up with goes as follows: along the general direction of the proper Dyke or Walk, but running, say, a mile or two off to one side they create a new and quite spurious track which they call the Waymark Path. They call it the Waymark Path because as soon as they’ve worked out where it’s going to go they send lots of little men off with brushes and pots who mark the way for everybody with attractive green acorns which are stuck on to fences and the trunks of trees. Then they ring up the printers and rush out a whole series of booklets telling people how much better it is than the real thing, and finally just for good measure they install a resting area or a forest toilet, every twenty miles or so so that the public feels it’s got something to aim for. Of course these Waymark Paths are no easy thing to plan, and from time to time they do have to run them where the real Dyke actually goes; and it was just at the point where the two routes separate that we managed to work ourselves free from our companion.
‘Do you think you’re allowed to go that way?’ he said as he watched us crossing the barbed-wire fence to the freedom of the continuing Dyke.
‘No,’ we told him cheerfully. ‘We’re trespassing. It’s got to be illegal.’
‘But what if you’re caught?’
‘We’ll be run in,’ I said.
‘Run in,’ said Fraser, ‘or shot.’
‘Shot,’ said Henry, as he unsnagged his trouser-leg from the wire. ‘That’s the likeliest thing.’
‘Amazing,’ said our friend. ‘What’ll you say to that?’
‘Now that,’ said Henry, ‘depends on how many of us are left to tell the tale.’
When we last looked back at him he was still standing there two hundred yards or so away. He had the appearance of a man who feels that there are a lot of questions left unanswered.
As far as the business of trespassing goes there are two kinds of trespassing: honest trespassing, as I call it, and the other kind. From the honest trespasser’s point of view there is very little that can’t be achieved provided he is prepared to resort to manly apology where necessary and the occasional bolt for cover behind a gorse bush. This sort of trespassing is nothing more than the plain man’s way of getting his own back on all the farmers who fill in the time they have left over after claiming their government grants by ploughing up the Rights of Way across their land. Fair game, if you ask me. Che Woofera obviously thought so too, because - seeing that lunchtime was coming on - he suddenly joined us by scampering down the bank and then proceeded to trip all three of us up in as many minutes by way of a hint that it was time to take a break.
We have now reached the point in our story where we came closest to crossing paths directly with the original Three Men in a Boat. I refer to the matter of opening tins. You remember in Three Men in a Boat how J. and Harris and George decided to treat themselves to a tin of pineapple chunks and then they found that they hadn’t got a tin-opener. They bashed and banged that tin about, and they attacked it with the boat-hook, and all they succeeded in doing was knocking it into a shape so leering and ghostly that they eventually took fright and tossed the tin - pineapple and all - into the river.
Well, we had our incident with a tin now, although since it was a sardine tin a tin-opener, of course, didn’t come into it. You’ve probably noticed that sardine tins have changed quite a lot in the last few years. Gone are the days of the old roll-back-the-lid- with-a-key model where you used traditionally to cut your finger with the first attempt and then found you’d put the key in the wrong way round and couldn’t get it off, and finally you finished the job with a pair of pliers. Our tin - jumbo size of course - was the new insert-finger-in-ring-and-simply-pull-back variety.
Fraser was doing the pulling, and Henry and Che and I were sitting watching him casually on the top of the bank, not forseeing any difficulties, if you know what I mean.
Then it went:
Pull!... nothing happened.
Pull!... nothing happened.
A-one, a-two, a-three-Pu...ll!
Suddenly to our mild surprise Fraser was no longer with us, although from the sound of his voice coming up from below we understood that he was alive and well and living in the bottom of a ditch.
Henry, who is remarkably quick in an emergency, managed to catch hold of the tin, and began to study it closely to make sure it was still intact. From down below Fraser clearly felt that Henry had got his priorities wrong and that it was he we ought to be checking over for cuts and abrasions; but then as Henry pointed out he wasn’t qualified to check Fraser over - wouldn’t know a broken bone if you showed him one - whereas he gave ground to no one in his ability to pass judgment on a sardine tin.
What had happened of course was that the ring had come off, leaving an absolutely regular tin with no means of getting inside it. Round the top face we could distinctly see the line where the pullaway section joined on to the rest. The only thing was, there wasn’t anything left to pull at.
We examined the problem. Che was for taking it away and having the thing opened by experts who knew what they were doing. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll have the thing sorted out before you can say “fish”. I’ve got a bunch of lads in the woods back there who can eat this sort of problem for breakfast.’
We said No. We said eating it for breakfast was just what we were afraid of. Henry suggested a tin-opener, but I pointed out that it wouldn’t go round the corners. I said that if we took that route we’d be left with a leaky tin, but not a tin we could open and eat.
At this point Fraser thrust his head back over the bank and came up with one of his rare ideas. At least it seemed like an idea until we tried it out and saw what actually happened. He said that if the lid was designed to lift off it followed logically that it must also be capable of being pressed in. At first glance, he said, you might think that this would squash the fish inside, but in practice he calculated there would be little damage. ‘With any luck,’ he told us, ‘we’ll get away with a slight displacement of fluid, nothing more. The important thing is to apply a steady even pressure.’
Henry and Che and I retired to one side and watched him from a distance. ‘If there’s going to be any displacement of fluid,’ we said to each other, ‘we’d rather it didn’t displace itself over us.’
Fraser faced the ditch this time. A man can roll over backwards easily enough, but with his feet spread out in front of him he is not going to topple over forwards.
It went like this:
Press! ... nothing happened.
Press! ... nothing happened.
A-one, a-two, a-three-Pre ... ss!
With a long even phlumph, twelve sardines and what seemed to be a surprising amount of tomato ketchup spurted up into the air, over the edge of the parapet, and sploshed down into the Dyke beyond, with Che Woofera about three seconds behind them in pursuit. I think the dog had some idea that they might swim away.
We got out some biscuits and cheese, and while we were eating them we waved au revoir to Che who saluted us in a preoccupied way from the opposite bank before galloping off over the western skyline. As far as I know he caught all twelve sardines, because when we’d finished our alternative lunch some twenty minutes later we went down and looked for them, but not one of those sardines could we see.
The stretch of Dyke from south of Montgomery to the Clun Hills where we spent the night is a brave and exciting ten miles or so, full of stiff slopes up and down. Mostly - from the walker’s point of view - it seems to be up, of course, because for the greater part of the time you are struggling around the side of Edenhope Hill (1,350 ft). Oxygen seems scarce up there for the plain man like myself whose normal idea of exercise is the steady even stroll across the carpet to the television set. One gets to thinking deep thoughts, like what the hell am I doing on this jaunt in the first place, and how am I going to describe all these acres of solid scenery to my readers without getting them to flip over the next five pages with cries of ‘Boring, boring!’ In fact, come to think of it, what deep moral stance ought I to take up over the question of descriptions in the first place?
When I first started out on this book Widget took a strong line with me on the subject of description. She said: ‘Cut it out.’ She said nobody ever read Jerome K. Jerome’s descriptions. She said life is too short nowadays for all that stuff about the piper at the gates of dawn and the perfume of the beech nuts wafting across to you from the small island in the stream - or was she getting mixed up with The Wind in the Willows’? Anyway, I know what she means. Besides, when dawn breaks over you in a three-man tent, the only perfume likely to come wafting across is from Henry’s socks, which he insists on keeping on in bed and then pushing through the hole in the bottom of his sleeping-bag and wiggling around in front of your face when you’ve woken up too early and are trying to get back to sleep again.
On the other hand that’s just Widget’s point of view. There may be people, in fact I hope there are, who would give their eye teeth for a nice meaty description: the sort of people who like to have it roll over them in chunks. And, of course, one must consider the author, who has the problem - if you look at it from my angle for a moment - of indicating the passage of time on a long afternoon’s slog without distasteful resort to talking about Henry’s breathing habits or Fraser’s strange choice of words when he trips up and falls in a puddle.
So what we shall do is this. We shall turn, dear reader, and look back from our vantage point on the hillside across the Vale of Severn, and we shall assume for the purposes of the exercise that the twin towns of Welshpool and Montgomery are both in our sights and we shall give a reasonably brief and imaginative description of them, and then we shall sort of pan the thing round and bring it back to where we are standing.
In point of fact our description of Welshpool and Montgomery has got to be brief and imaginative because I don’t know the first thing about either of ‘em. You will recall that the only sidelong glance we got at Welshpool was when Mr Elton-Willis very nicely nipped through it with us in the back of his car. And as far as Montgomery is concerned, we would almost certainly have slipped into that for a cup that cheers round about eleven o’clock, if it hadn’t been for the fact that we had that talkative idiot with us at the time, and we needed his pubside prattle like we needed concrete boots. All this is to your advantage, however, gentle reader, because it means we can launch into a full flood of soul on the subject of Welshpool and Montgomery without having our minds cluttered by any preconceived ideas.
Ahem.
The towns of Welshpool and Montgomery are both much of a muchness. Oh, yes. It is quite common for citizens of Welshpool to walk into Montgomery and vice-versa and ask to see the Bank Manager or something like that and then find out that they are in the wrong town and say, ‘Is this Montgomery? Well, stack me! I thought it was Welshpool.’ Both boroughs were of early foundation, but that needn’t bother us because they were smashed up so frequently and systematically in the border wars that it wasn’t till Tudor times that people started putting cement in between the bricks in the hope that the houses might actually be allowed to stand up. In the late sixteenth century they petitioned the Crown for a royal charter, an event which gave rise to Queen Elizabeth’s much publicised ‘You’ve got to be joking’ remark, and after that they settled down into a sort of sedate decorum and gradually filled up with firms of Chartered Accountants and Solicitors with names like Orle, Mowth, and Trosiers, and Bickerstaff and Poss. So much for history.
Culture is a particular forte in these border boroughs. Each town has successfully stumbled into a twinning arrangement with a different continental municipiality, and once a year they astonish the visiting burgemeester with the quality of the British sherry at council receptions. Then they entertain him to a Mendelssohn selection arranged for harmonica ensemble, and put him back on the plane at Birmingham clutching a Caerphilly cheese.
The view from the south west is possibly the most striking in both cases. Tourists exclaim at the prospect of Balaclava Villas from across the tennis courts, but there is nothing much the Council can do about it because the disused gasworks is on private land and although the metalwork may have a scrap value, what’s it going to cost to take it all down and store it somewhere? The excursion to the Alderman Gladbag Municipal Reservoir high up in the hinterland between the two towns is much favoured by taxi drivers.
Increased supermarket penetration is currently being installed, and a particularly complex rnulti-storey carpark complex is promised to be completed by the end of next year. The work at the moment is seven months ahead of schedule. Both places boast a small and expanding industrial estate. At least the estate is expanding and if anybody can find any industry that wants to go to it they should ring the Town Hall direct and reverse the charges.
As we leave these two little towns nestling refulgently amid the verdant pasturage of the placid borders, we continue our search for adjectives in a southerly direction until we reach the first slopes of the little foothills that beckon us onwards towards Clun Peak and the distant Black Mountains. Oh, what a wealth of interest surrounds us here! Here famed Offa, Saxon warlord, constructed one of the sections of his famed Dyke through the grounds of the famed Mellington Hall Hotel. Here Alwyn Morfa, genius before his time, gave birth in 1643 to the brilliant but never-recognised Morfe Code, only he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory buzzer. Nor can we forget Lloyd George, though we may try. Who would not linger here amid these grassy slopes listening to the call of the lark far up in the puff-ball sky, or watching the effortless flight of the medium-sized brown curlew as, carolling to her lover, she wheels in dizzy spirals towards the sunset and her craggy nest? Nature is all around us. Far off from out his woodland hollow the grey form of the shaggy badger lumbers blinking into the dusk and bumps into a stoat that happens to be passing which in turns rolls over and slightly squashes a dormouse. Then they all apologise. And amid all this harmony and burgeoning of nature, how small, how infinitely small does man appear.
Ah man, man! The wrecker and destroyer. The scourge of animals and of the green things of the earth. There is no place for you in such tranquillity. What right have you to break the peace with which Nature herself has bound the temples of her children? You with your engines and your noise and your busy empty bustle - get you gone. Turn you aside and leave the earth to nurture her own. Away, away to some other place - and there take you what rest you may from troubled thoughts and from vain and futile activities, and let the down of sweet slumber touch the eyelids of the innocent ones.
As a matter of fact Henry and Fraser and I were more or less following that advice just as the sun was beginning to show signs of packing it in for the evening. Fraser had been walking along the top of the bank - he was finding the bottom a bit damp underfoot - and being a sharp-eyed lad he noticed six or seven tents in a paddock off to our right. Some small camp-site, we surmised. Nor were we wrong. It was the Cwm Mawr Farm Campsite. ‘Hot water, eggs, bread, and milk available indoors.’ And a few minutes later, after the traditionally vindictive haggle over whether we were paying four pounds or four pounds twenty-five, we found ourselves a spot under a tree, got the tent up, and settled down to prepare the evening meal.