Monday morning 7th June: Rain. Henry snoring unpleasantly.
I write these few words in diary form, because on this particular morning I had diaries on the brain. I discovered, you see, that I was not the only member of the party who was planning to put pen to paper about our trip to Offa’s Dyke. Henry, it appeared, was keeping a notebook, and of all the stupid, self-satisfied, inaccurate entries ever to greet a man’s eyes as he emerges from the sleeping-bag. - But not too fast.
What happened was this. Henry was still pottering about the barn when I went to sleep the night before. I suppose he did this deliberately, waiting for me to drop off before he picked up his pencil and started scribbling by the light of his torch. Then, when he had finished, he probably tucked the diary under his sleeping-bag and promptly proceeded to turn and grunt and toss around so much for the rest of the night that it eventually worked free and was just sitting there wide open for me to read it when I woke up.
It said:
6th June. Sunday. Fine weather.
Then if you please, he launched straight in with:
Am getting worried about T. Beginning to show signs of cracking up. Fell behind all morning and couldn’t maintain the pace. Keeps whistling in high-pitched demented way, always same erratic notes without variation. At mid-day made wild false statements about local pub closing-times. Limped into Swan Hotel very late and looking pale, but managed to slightly improve in p.m. Must watch him closely. Lacks the sheer grit and muscle for this sort of ordeal.
Huh!
I saw that Fraser was awake and I read the extract over to him. Fraser riled me by saying he thought it was unexceptional. He said the only comment he had was that ‘to slightly improve’ was a split infinitive, but then one couldn’t really expect style from a statistician. So then I turned back in the book and found a passage about Fraser opening the tin of sardines. That made him sit up with a jolt.
‘But ... you ... what ... He can’t put down that sort of stuff!’ Fraser exclaimed scrambling out of bed and then finding out how cold it was and scrambling back in again. ‘That just isn’t true!’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said casually. ‘I suppose one could describe your tin-opening ideas as “daft as a chicken” and “doomed to disaster from the word go”. Rather telling phrases as a matter of fact.’
We looked at each other. We were both on the same wavelength.
We got up quietly and dressed, and buried our knapsacks in the straw. Then we grabbed hold of the ram’s halter and passed the end of it through the bolt-socket on the doorpost and hauled the animal in on the line till it completely blocked the only way to the yard outside. Then I wrote Henry a charming little note which I put beside his pillow, while Fraser reached Henry’s watch down from its nail and moved the hands round to eleven o’clock. And after all that we tiptoed up the ladder to the loft and lay there above his head dropping straw down on him until he woke up.
It takes quite a lot of straw to wake Henry up, so by the time he opened his eyes he was fairly covered in it. He lay there for a while wiggling his eyebrows and trying to blow it off his nose. Then he sat up and looked round.
‘Hey!’ we heard him mutter to himself when he saw the barn was empty. ‘Hey! You lot!’
There was a pause, then ‘Wazzatime?’ as he suddenly sprang out of bed and looked at his watch. ‘11.15. Hell - they haven’t gone, have they? They can’t have gone without me.’
‘Wazzat?’ - he has put his foot on my note now, and he picks it up and starts mouthing it over to himself in great gulps of anguish. ‘Couldn’t wake you ... thought we’d let you sleep on ... meet you in Kington at twelve o’clock. Oh you bastards! It’s nearly half-past eleven now. I haven’t a hope in hell of getting to Kington by ... Now, now,’ he tells himself. ‘Steady down and get moving. Shirt - ah here. Pants. Trousers.’ He goes through the whole of his laundry list as he puts them on. He seems to find it comforting. Then, when he is finally all strapped up, he sets off down the barn and comes straight up against the ram.
‘H ... Hallo,’ says Henry to the ram, jerking to an abrupt halt and looking round as though somebody is going to help him. ‘Hallo, hallo, hallo. H ... How did you get here then, old lad.’
He considers the problem, and he decides to try coaxing the ram over to one side of the door frame while he edges past on the other. ‘Now then, you come over here, there’s a good ... wooah!’ The ram gives a violent lurch towards him and pulls up short on the outstretched halter.
‘Now I suppose,’ said Henry, clinging apprehensively to the wall, ‘if I got this old piece of corrugated iron and sort of pre ... ssed you back gently I could ...’
Be-bom, Clang! The ram seems to be in an argumentative mood this morning. Indifferent to the chances of getting a headache itself, it hurtles against the tin and bowls Henry to the ground. Henry slithers away from danger without getting up, and lying back on the straw peers out into the yard through a knothole in the boarded wall.
‘Help,’ he says feebly. The only response is from a nearby hen which, by the sound of it, lays an egg on the other side of the wall and starts cackling around the yard telling everybody about it.
Henry puts out a listless arm across the straw, and feels something bulky, and after fumbling cautiously around for a minute or two he uncovers Fraser’s knapsack. ‘The stupid clown’s left this behind,’ he mutters to himself. ‘What a fool.’ Then he finds mine, and we can practically hear him trying to work it all out.
At this point my knee suddenly crashes through the rotten floorboards of the loft and the game is up.
Henry is all wounded pride and bad language as we clamber down the ladder. He can’t pretend he wasn’t taken in - he knows Fraser and I have heard too much for that. In fact there is so much pent-up emotion in the air that we all saddle ourselves up and start off across the yard without even remembering to have breakfast.
‘I think you’ve forgotten this,’ I said to Henry as we turned out on to the road, and I handed him his notebook. He sort of breathed it into his clothing like a card-sharper palming an ace.
‘Those are my bird-watching notes,’ he said a minute later when he had had time to work out an excuse. But he didn’t fool anybody.
About four miles beyond Kington the sun came out, and at the same time Offa’s Dyke came to an abrupt halt.
Again.
There was a man standing on the bank at the end who seemed to be very knowledgable. An archaelogist most likely.
‘That’s right,’ he said when we pointed out that the Dyke had gone missing. ‘It’s eight or nine miles on to the next stretch and that runs from Mansell Gamage to Bridge Sollers. Look, you can see Mansell Copse down there in the valley. In the eighth century the woods grew so thick along the Wye that there was no way through for an invading army, so that meant there was no need for dyke building.’
The man may have been right or he may have been wrong, but at least he sounded as though he knew what he was talking about. I pointed this out to Fraser as we made our way down to the valley floor, but Fraser said I shouldn’t get carried away by it. ‘Sounding convincing is the stock-in-trade of those lads,’ he said. ‘It’s part of their training. Same thing with economists. If they can’t make it sound convincing nobody’s going to bother listening to them at all. The woollier the subject,’ Fraser said, ‘the more authoritative the so-called expert.’
Fraser said that on a good day, when it came to thinking on your feet, an archaeologist in form ought to be able to leave an economist or a politician standing. He’d seen an example of it during his last year at school when he did some work on an enormous Stone Age site in Dorset which was being excavated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Fraser said he’d never forgotten it.
Henry said: ‘Your memory goes back a long way.’
And Fraser said: ‘No. Sir Mortimer lived to a great age.’
Fraser said that the digging work on the site was done in layers, with every foot of depth representing a hundred years or so of history. You’d only got to find something on the top and let it slip through your fingers, and it would be picked up by the gang down below and attributed to the wrong millennium. This seemed to happen quite often, and in fact Fraser noticed after a while that all the old hands kept to the high ground where they could chuck things over the edge if they didn’t fancy the trudge back to the site office to report the find.
Anyway, in the midst of all this confusion, Fraser found a hole. It was about ten feet across, and the mud inside it was paler and crumblier than the mud outside it - that’s how they knew it had been a hole in the first place. It wasn’t just a shallow hole either, but it went down and along for forty or fifty feet like a burrow.
Fraser’s hole caused quite a bit of consternation. His site leader didn’t know what it was, and he went and called the site supervisor. The site supervisor said he didn’t know what it was either, and he got the area controller out of the office to come and look at it. The area controller was a tall pimply man with glasses and he nearly fell over with emotion at the sight of Fraser’s hole, but he didn’t have any more idea about what it was than any of the others.
In the end the momentous decision was taken to summon Sir Mortimer Wheeler from a completely different part of the dig to tell them what it could be. Sir Mortimer, being a very experienced hand indeed and a master of timing, did absolutely nothing at all for the next hour and a half, so that by the time his Land Rover cruised into view across the earthworks the party round Fraser’s hole was near to collapse from nervous exhaustion and excitement.
‘Ah yes,’ Sir Mortimer announced in his grandest manner as he inspected the object of everyone’s attention. ‘No problems there, Blathering. That’s nothing more nor less than an early flint-mine. Dug by the Stone Age inhabitants to provide themselves with implements.’ And so saying he turned stylishly on his heel and started ambling back towards the car.
There was a breathless, emphatic silence.
‘B ... but, Sir Mortimer!’ exclaimed the area controller, suddenly pulling himself together and running after the archaeologist almost triumphantly. ‘Sir Mortimer. “You say it’s a Stone Age flint mine. B ... but Sir! There isn’t any flint - within twenty miles of this spot!’
Sir Mortimer gave Blathering a wan smile as he settled himself down in his seat. ‘Of course there isn’t, dear boy,’ he said. ‘Of course there isn’t. But they weren’t to know that, were they?’
Nice one, Mort. That’s the sort of fast thinking that gets you the job.
The valley of the Wye has been completely spoiled for later generations by the diaries of the Reverend Francis Kilvert, who was curate of Clyro some two miles from Hay from 1865 to 1872. Kilvert, a noted jogger - and, believe it or not, a grown man - was capable of writing such things as:
Sunday 14th April
The beauty of the view, the first view of the village, coming down by the Brooms this evening was indescribable. The brilliant golden poplar spires shone in the evening light like flames against the dark hillside of the Old Forest and the blossoming fruit trees, the torch trees of Paradise, blazed with a transparent green and white lustre up the dingle in the setting sunlight. The village is in a blaze of fruit blossom. Clyro at its loveliest. What more can be said?
Several acres more, unfortunately. Not that I blame Kilvert. A man can write what he likes in a diary unless - like Henry’s - the thing is a blatant distortion. No, and you can’t really blame his widow either. She did her best, poor dear - burned as much of the stuff as she could. But either a couple of wardrobes-full managed to slip her notice, or, more likely, she just didn’t have the modern incinerating equipment which you need to tackle this size of assignment. Anyway the upshot is that the whole valley is dotted through these days with Kilvert buffs gasping and wondering and generally holding up the flow of traffic.
We saw this quite literally at first hand when we got down to the A 4112 early in the afternoon. The traffic on the main road was down to a crawl, and as we strode into the next village we saw the reason for it, namely that a Country Fayre was in progress. You notice that I spell ‘Country Fayre’ in the Elizabethan way to distinguish it from the proper old-fashioned style of the thing with honest amusements like Bowling for a Pig and Guessing the Weight of the Vicar.
This was the modern version. Round Tablers, Skydivers, Traction Engine Rallies, Town Crier Competitions, Real Ale Tents, and - for no Country Fayre can ever be completely bogus without it - the Dancing of the Morris. Morris Dancing (I say this for the benefit of my numberless foreign readers) is a practice of seeming antiquity which in fact was invented towards the end of the last century by a man with the unlikely name of C. Sharp. In it some sixteen or twenty men - large ones usually with black beards - are required to leap around with string tied below the knee to the accompaniment of a concertina. Then they all drink pints of beer and reassure their audience that there will be more of the same horrendous material later on.
Now, I’m not saying that Kilvert Buffs and Morris Men are the same thing. Of course not. Kilvert Buffs don’t usually carry concertinas for a start; and as for a Morris Man, he would probably have to have had several pints too many before you found him lurching along a hedgerow looking for voles. What I do say is that the two types blend into each other, and what is worse they tend to blend across important main roads like the A 4112, just when all the right-thinking members of the population are trying to get to a race-meeting.
What is needed on these occasions, I always think, is some form of extra support for the police. The single rozzer, with his magenta face and blue uniform beneath the pitiless sun, is an admirable sight as he allows first a Kentish hop-dance, next two Belgian juggernauts and a removal van to pass along the narrow High Street. But I couldn’t help wondering as I watched the timeless gyrations of the quaintly-clad dancing figures whether the moment hadn’t come to shunt them off to a disused railway siding somewhere to carry on their folklore experiments in relative seclusion.
I needn’t have worried. Help was at hand. The dog Woofera had obviously got this stretched of Dykeland pretty well sussed out. You can imagine the scene. Far back in his mountain HQ, where a paw-picked team of planner-dogs are putting their final touches to the scheme for general re-volution, Vord comes in from the field that the Morris Dancers are staging a show of force at Little Ditteridge in the Neap. Around the darkened walls of the cave a score of battle-hardened muzzles crack open into grins of disbelief. This one is going to be easy.
The team is picked, the orders are given - brief, barked commands, no fancy stuff needed for these veterans. Then comes the swoop down the hill, the quick rendezvous with the local unit, and half an hour later a thin line of curly tails can be seen making its way along the back lane into the village. Once they get to the High Street they split up. Most of them slouch indolently down by ones and twos towards the Dancers, while the hit squad work over a small child behind an ice-cream van and run off along the back streets with his balloon, leaving him grizzling. Just as the dance is reaching its climax the hit squad bound back into the High Street out of an alleyway and start doing a balloon dance of their own in amongst the Morris Men’s feet. Now the others join in. Professional, efficient, not a movement wasted, they’ve got five of the Morris Men down before the front end of the dance has even noticed what is happening. Those who are still dancing start treading on the fingers of those who are getting up, and cries of rage are punctuated from time to time by the fresh thump of falling bodies. Then Che Woofera takes a mouthful out of the concertina and the whole performance wheezes to a stop.
The policeman, who has been talking to an anxious motorist, now turns round and decides that it is time to call a halt. The dogs all stroll off into shop doorways and sit there impassively watching the Morris Dancers packing up their equipment.
Che comes up to me and offers me a slice of concertina. ‘Have it, if you like,’ he says. ‘It’s up to you. I’ve got plenty of this sort of thing back at base, so I’ll be leaving it here in any case.’
Che decided to walk on with us to Mansell Gamage and the Dyke. ‘I might as well,’ he said. ‘There are a couple of things I’ve got to check out down there in any case. It’s not often I find the time to get this far south.’
Mansell Gamage was a pleasant little place. It was also quite a peaceful little place until we arrived at about four o’clock in the afternoon. As we turned into the main street we found a youngish but distinctly hard-muscled lady trying to reverse a horsebox into a gateway.
Fraser volunteered his help.
‘How frightfully nice of you,’ she screamed.
Fraser and Che Woofera walked round the car and weighed the situation up.
‘No problems there,’ said Che.
‘None at all,’ said Fraser.
‘Sure you don’t want my help?’ said Che. ‘Well, in that case I’ll leave it to you.’
While this short exchange had been going on between Fraser and the dog, the lady had started the car up and Fraser made her bring it forward a few yards on to the edge of the road.
‘Stop!’ he said, when he’d got her into the right starting position. ‘Now then, left hand down and into reverse. Right - back you come. Come on, back you come. More. More.’
‘I’m not going to hit the wall, am I?’ said the lady.
‘You’re not,’ said Fraser, ‘because I’m going to stop you before you do.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’ve got a couple of yards yet. Back. Back. Bac ... ck. What the hell’s that dog doing?’ said Fraser suddenly.
‘Where?’ I said from across the street.
‘There in that garden. It’s starting to dig its way into a chicken run.’
‘Which garden?’
‘That garden.’
‘Oh yes. But that isn’t our dog.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it’s not. Henry,’ I said, ‘take a look at that dog. It doesn’t look a bit like ours, does it?’
‘Dunno,’ said Henry with all the commitment of the true bystander. ‘Could be. On the other hand, possibly not.’
‘Grief!’ exclaimed Fraser looking skywards for support. ‘We’ve got a couple of lunatics here! We’ve only been walking with the thing for the last two hours, not to mention the greater part of the last week, and you stand there and say that it isn’t the same dog. Look, I was talking to it a moment ago. Any fool can see that it’s...’
Crash!
‘Stop!’ said Fraser to the muscular lady as she leaped out of the car to inspect the damage.
‘I’m going to get my husband,’ she said in a voice which had risen by an augmented fifth since we heard it last.
The three of us stood still and waited. It was quite a long wait, and that made us uncomfortable.
Now, I must admit the lady hadn’t said what her husband was like. She’d just said that she was going to get him. But, on the other hand, when a woman who looks as though she’s training for the Modern Pentathlon herself goes to get succour from her mate, one has reason to expect the worst. One imagines him, does one not, as well-built and powerful. Swarthy too, I shouldn’t wonder - the sort of man who may be tearing up telephone directories indoors and won’t take kindly to being disturbed.
When he appeared we thought it was some sort of joke. We thought the real husband was going to come vaulting over the wall the next moment and startle us into settling his insurance claim.
The man was small and pale, and by the look of him he collected butterflies. He said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ Then, when he caught sight of the three of us - and, come to think of it, we were no sight for the faint-hearted after a week in the hills - he sort of shied away and took up a defensive position at the corner of the horsebox.
Fraser said he was sorry, terribly sorry; and the man said, ‘Oh, thank you.’ And the lady said that what her husband wanted to know was what were we going to do about it. And the man said, Yes - that’s what he wanted to know. And Fraser said he was going to offer him his sincere apologies. And the lady said that her husband didn’t think that was good enough. And the man said, Quite, he rather wondered whether that was good enough. And Fraser said had he got any better ideas. And the lady said her husband had got lots of ideas: he wasn’t a man to be fobbed off. And the man said up to a point that was true.
Fortunately at that moment the horse, which up to now had remained off-stage chewing the cud, suddenly took it into its head to play the scene for laughs. It stuck its face out of the back of the horsebox and, grinning toothily, started to do a tap-dance inside with its back feet. This diverted the lady’s attention, and she became preoccupied with browbands and bridles and the like.
We bowed deeply and took a hasty leave. On the way past the neighbouring garden we collected the dog Woofera - needless to say it had been Woofera that had been tunnelling into that chicken-run. The householder ran out and abused us, but we told him that he ought to be thankful to have fallow ground so throughly dug over. So we continued our charitable way out of the village and up the wooded slopes of Mansell Hill to make contact with Offa’s Dyke once more.
Contact we made, and we followed the Dyke along, and it came down the far end of Mansell Hill and across a field and up to a main road and then it fizzled out. Marvellous piece of work this stretch - every bit of two miles long. Just the job for keeping out ten thousand Welshmen, provided you can persuade them to aim straight for it.
Then I sprained my ankle. I wasn’t even walking. I just put one foot backwards to steady myself and stepped straight into a rabbit hole.
We got my boot off and we got my sock off, and we all had a good look at it to see how the swelling was coming along. Che Woofera put his nose up against it in a sympathetic sort of way and Fraser gave it a squeeze and said it looked as if it could be serious.
‘Pretty bad, do you think?’ said Che.
“Fraid so,’ said Fraser.
‘Broken probably?’
‘I should say so.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Che. ‘If you’d only consulted me instead of barging about all over the place this accident needn’t have happened at all. It’s a dangerous little thing is a rabbit hole. I had an aunt who got stuck in one once. We couldn’t get her in or out, and after she’d been there a couple of days we had to make a deal with the inhabitants. A team of rabbits pushing at one end, and a team of dogs pulling her tail at the other. Remind me to tell you the story some time. Now, let me see, have we got a clean break?’
‘Hard to tell,’ said Henry.
‘Patient seems dazed.’
‘Yes. That’s congenital.’
(You notice the way they consult the stretcher-case, these medical experts.)
They got me to my feet.
‘Right my lad,’ Henry said. ‘We’ll have to get you out of here.’
‘I would have thought that was pretty obvious,’ I said with a wince. But I said it nicely, if you know what I mean. It doesn’t pay to antagonise the male nurses when you’re wounded on the front line.
So we hobbled to the roadside fence, and politely declining a lift over, I crawled through beneath the bottom rail with Che Woofera going ahead to show me how to do it. And from there they dragged me the last twelve feet or so to the edge of the tarmac.