Afoot in England

W >> W.H. Hudson >> Afoot in England

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He took me to the church--one of the tiniest churches in the
country, just the right size for a church in a tiny village
and assured me that he had never once locked the door in his
fifty years--day and night it was open to any one to enter.
It was a refuge and shelter from the storm and the Tempest,
and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place to sleep
in that church during the last half a century. This man's
feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the
outcast and tramp, was a passion. But how strange all this
would sound in the ears of many country clergymen! How many
have told me when I have gone to the parsonage to "borrow the
key" that it had been found necessary to keep the church door
locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc. "Have you never had
anything stolen?" I asked him. Yes, once, a great many years
ago, the church plate had been taken away in the night. But
it was recovered: the thief had taken it to the top of the
hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, no doubt intending
to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time.
But it was found, and had ever since then been kept safe at
the vicarage. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was
kept in the church. He had never locked it, but once in his
fifty years it had been locked against him by the
churchwardens. This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch
agitation, when the agricultural labourer's condition was
being hotly discussed throughout the country. The vicar's
heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these
conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He
took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a
way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in
the district. The church wardens, who were farmers, then
locked him out of his church, and for two or three weeks there
was no public worship in the parish of Coombe. Doubtless
their action was applauded by all the substantial men in the
neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were
unsubstantial didn't matter. That storm blew over, but its
consequences endured, one being that the inflammatory parson
continued to be regarded with cold disapproval by the squires
and their larger tenants. But the vicar himself was
unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried in what
he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that
a quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken
that extreme course said to him, "We locked you out of your
own church, but years have brought me to another mind about
that question. I see it in a different light now and know
that you were right and we were wrong."

Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and
entertainer and continued my rural ride. From Coombe it is
five miles to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming "highland"
village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance,
struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in
Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak and
birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours
growing on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of
the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with
the low sun flaming on the "coloured shades," served to keep
out of my mind something that should have been in it. At all
events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a
visit to the very village I was approaching solely because
William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now
no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in
my mind.

Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and
Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find
good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for
me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old
woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent
it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time,
when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms
available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her:
couldn't she direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed?
No, she couldn't--it is always so; but after the third time of
asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would
take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind
widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She
made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on
the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a
cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and
wainscoting. "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the
woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have it as a cottage,
but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned.
Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This
then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay
seventy or eighty years ago," I said. She had never heard of
William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been
tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had
some curious ideas about the land.

That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and
I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to
stay. But how odd that my first thought of the man should
have come to me when sitting by the fire where Cobbett himself
had sat on many a cold evening! And this was November the
second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his
first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first
date he gives in Rural Rides. And he too had been delighted
with the place and the beauty of the surrounding country with
the trees in their late autumn colours. Writing on November
2nd, 1821, he says: "The place is commonly called Uphusband,
which is, I think, as decent a corruption of names as one
could wish to meet with. However, Uphusband the people will
have it, and Uphusband it shall be for me." That is indeed
how he names it all through his book, after explaining that
"husband" is a corruption of Hurstbourne, and that there are
two Hurstbournes, this being the upper one.

I congratulated myself on having been refused accommodation at
the "George and Dragon," and was more than satisfied to pass
an evening without a book, sitting there alone listening to an
imaginary conversation between those two curious friends.
"Lord Carnarvon," says Cobbett, "told a man, in 1820, that he
did not like my politics. But what did he mean by my
politics? I have no politics but such as he ought to like.
To be sure I labour most assiduously to destroy a system of
distress and misery; but is that any reason why a Lord should
dislike my politics? However, dislike them or like them, to
them, to those very politics, the Lords themselves must come
at last."

Undoubtedly he talked like that, just as he wrote and as he
spoke in public, his style, if style it can be called, being
the most simple, direct, and colloquial ever written. And for
this reason, when we are aweary of the style of the stylist,
where the living breathing body becomes of less consequence
than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief, and refreshment,
to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the
implicit word, sought for high and low and at last found, the
balance of every sentence and perfect harmony of the whole
work--to go from it to the simple vigorous unadorned talk of
Rural Rides. A classic, and as incongruous among classics as
a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and stout boots would
appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable dress.
The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of
the frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted
at all. Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and
bitter and spiteful at times, his conversation must yet have
seemed like a perpetual feast of honeyed sweets to his farmer
friend. Doubtless there was plenty of variety in it: now he
would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs over which he
had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious autumn
colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him
of Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that
the increase in food production did not keep pace with
increase of population; then a quieting down, a
breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the price of eggs
at Weyhill Fair, and the delights of hare coursing, until
politics would come round again and a fresh outburst from the
glorious demagogue in his tantrums.

At eight o'clock Cobbett would say good night and go to bed,
and early next morning write down what he had said to his
friend, or some of it, and send it off to be printed in his
paper. That, I take it, is how Rural Rides was written, and
that is why it seems so fresh to us to this day, and that to
take it up after other books is like going out from a
luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel
the wind and rain on one's face and see the green grass.
But I very much regret that Cobbett tells us nothing of his
farmer friend. Blount, I imagine, must have been a man of a
very fine character to have won the heart and influenced such
a person. Cobbett never loses an opportunity of vilifying the
parsons and expressing his hatred of the Established Church;
and yet, albeit a Protestant, he invariably softens down when
he refers to the Roman Catholic faith and appears quite
capable of seeing the good that is in it.

It was Blount, I think, who had soothed the savage breast of
the man in this matter. The only thing I could hear about
Blount and his "queer notions" regarding the land was his idea
that the soil could be improved by taking the flints out.
"The soil to look upon," Cobbett truly says, "appears to be
more than half flint, but is a very good quality." Blount
thought to make it better, and for many years employed all the
aged poor villagers and the children in picking the flints
from the ploughed land and gathering them in vast heaps. It
does not appear that he made his land more productive, but his
hobby was a good one for the poor of the village; the stones,
too, proved useful afterwards to the road-makers, who have
been using them these many years. A few heaps almost clothed
over with a turf which had formed on them in the course of
eighty years were still to be seen on the land when I was
there.

The following day I took no ride. The weather was so
beautiful it seemed better to spend the time sitting or
basking in the warmth and brightness or strolling about.
At all events, it was a perfect day at Hurstbourne Tarrant,
though not everywhere, for on that third of November the
greatest portion of Southern England was drowned in a cold
dense white fog. In London it was dark, I heard. Early in
the morning I listened to a cirl-bunting singing merrily from
a bush close to the George and Dragon Inn. This charming bird
is quite common in the neighbourhood, although, as elsewhere
in England, the natives know it not by its book name, nor by
any other, and do not distinguish it from its less engaging
cousin, the yellowhammer.

After breakfast I strolled about the common and in Doles Wood,
on the down above the village, listening to the birds, and on
my way back encountered a tramp whose singular appearance
produced a deep impression on my mind. We have heard of a
work by some modest pressman entitled "Monarchs I have met",
and I sometimes think that one equally interesting might be
written on "Tramps I have met". As I have neither time nor
stomach for the task, I will make a present of the title to
any one of my fellow-travellers, curious in tramps, who cares
to use it. This makes two good titles I have given away in
this chapter with a borrowed one.

But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a
prominent place would be given in it to the one tramp I have
met who could be accurately described as gorgeous. I did not
cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we
separated after exchanging a few polite commonplaces, but his
big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on my mind.

At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down
the long slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me.
He was a huge man, over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting
a Scandinavian origin, with a broad blond face, good features,
and prominent blue eyes, and his hair was curly and shone like
gold in the sunlight. Had he been a mere labourer in a
workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood
still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a
magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear
and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had
the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and
that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several
bruises in three colours--blue, black, and red. Doubtless he
had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had
perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly
punished.

In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure. Bright
blue trousers much too small for his stout legs, once the
property, no doubt, of some sporting young gent of loud tastes
in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet
the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie, long black frock-coat,
shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which only covered
the topmost part of his head of golden hair.

Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late
blackberries, which were still abundant. It was a beautiful
unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the
many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-
beard.

I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it
was late to eat such fruit in November. The Devil in these
parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the
bramble bushes and spoil the fruit. It was even worse further
north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes
out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the
bushes.

He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and
then remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about
must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes
in addition to all his other important work."

I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more
berries, he resumed in the same tone: "Very fine, very
beautiful all this"--waving his hand to indicate the hedge,
its rich tangle of purple-red stems and coloured leaves, and
scarlet fruit and silvery oldman's-beard. "An artist enjoys
seeing this sort of thing, and it's nice for all those who go
about just for the pleasure of seeing things. But when it
comes to a man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an
empty belly, looking for work which he can't find, he doesn't
see it quite in the same way."

"True," I returned, with indifference.

But he was not to be put off by my sudden coldness, and he
proceeded to inform me that he had just returned from
Salisbury Plain, that it had been noised abroad that ten
thousand men were wanted by the War Office to work in forming
new camps. On arrival he found it was not so--it was all a
lie--men were not wanted--and he was now on his way to
Andover, penniless and hungry and--

By the time he had got to that part of his story we were some
distance apart, as I had remained standing still while he,
thinking me still close behind, had gone on picking
blackberries and talking. He was soon out of sight.

At noon the following day, the weather still being bright and
genial, I went to Crux Easton, a hilltop village consisting of
some low farm buildings, cottages, and a church not much
bigger than a cottage. A great house probably once existed
here, as the hill has a noble avenue of limes, which it wears
like a comb or crest. On the lower slope of the hill, the old
unkept hedges were richer in colour than in most places, owing
to the abundance of the spindle-wood tree, laden with its
loose clusters of flame-bright, purple-pink and orange
berries.

Here I saw a pretty thing: a cock cirl-bunting, his yellow
breast towards me, sitting quietly on a large bush of these
same brilliant berries, set amidst a mass of splendidly
coloured hazel leaves, mixed with bramble and tangled with ivy
and silver-grey traveller's-joy. An artist's heart would have
leaped with joy at the sight, but all his skill and oriental
colours would have made nothing of it, for all visible nature
was part of the picture, the wide wooded earth and the blue
sky beyond and above the bird, and the sunshine that glorified
all.

On the other side of the hedge there were groups of fine old
beech trees and, strange to see, just beyond the green slope
and coloured trees, was the great whiteness of the fog which
had advanced thus far and now appeared motionless. I went
down and walked by the side of the bank of mist, feeling its
clammy coldness on one cheek while the other was fanned by the
warm bright air. Seen at a distance of a couple of hundred
yards, the appearance was that of a beautiful pearly-white
cloud resting upon the earth. Many fogs had I seen, but never
one like this, so substantial-looking, so sharply defined,
standing like a vast white wall or flat-topped hill at the
foot of the green sunlit slope! I had the fancy that if I had
been an artist in sculpture, and rapid modeller, by using the
edge of my hand as a knife I could have roughly carved out a
human figure, then drawing it gently out of the mass proceeded
to press and work it to a better shape, the shape, let us say,
of a beautiful woman. Then, if it were done excellently, and
some man-mocking deity, or power of the air, happened to be
looking on, he would breathe life and intelligence into it,
and send it, or her, abroad to mix with human kind and
complicate their affairs. For she would seem a woman and
would be like some women we have known, beautiful with blue
flower-like eyes, pale gold or honey-coloured hair; very white
of skin, Leightonian, almost diaphanous, so delicate as to
make all other skins appear coarse and made of clay. And with
her beauty and a mysterious sweetness not of the heart, since
no heart there would be in that mist-cold body, she would draw
all hearts, ever inspiring, but never satisfying passion, her
beauty and alluring smiles being but the brightness of a cloud
on which the sun is shining.

Birds, driven by the fog to that sunlit spot, were all about
me in incredible numbers. Rooks and daws were congregating on
the bushes, where their black figures served to intensify the
red-gold tints of the foliage. At intervals the entire vast
cawing multitude simultaneously rose up with a sound as
of many waters, and appeared now at last about to mount up
into the blue heavens, to float circling there far above the
world as they are accustomed to do on warm windless days in
autumn. But in a little while their brave note would change
to one of trouble; the sight of that immeasurable whiteness
covering so much of the earth would scare them, and led by
hundreds of clamouring daws they would come down again to
settle once more in black masses on the shining yellow trees.

Close by a ploughed field of about forty acres was the
camping-ground of an army of peewits; they were travellers
from the north perhaps, and were quietly resting, sprinkled
over the whole area. More abundant were the small birds in
mixed flocks or hordes--finches, buntings, and larks in
thousands on thousands, with a sprinkling of pipits and pied
and grey wagtails, all busily feeding on the stubble and fresh
ploughed land. Thickly and evenly distributed, they appeared
to the vision ranging over the brown level expanse as minute
animated and variously coloured clods--black and brown and
grey and yellow and olive-green.

It was a rare pleasure to be in this company, to revel in
their astonishing numbers, to feast my soul on them as it
were--little birds in such multitudes that ten thousand
Frenchmen and Italians might have gorged to repletion on their
small succulent bodies--and to reflect that they were safe
from persecution so long as they remained here in England.
This is something for an Englishman to be proud of.

After spending two hours at Crux Easton, with that dense
immovable fog close by, I at length took the plunge to get to
Highclere. What a change! I was at once where all form and
colour and melody had been blotted out. My clothes were hoary
with clinging mist, my fingers numb with cold, and Highclere,
its scattered cottages appearing like dim smudges through the
whiteness, was the dreariest village on earth. I fled on to
Newbury in quest of warmth and light, and found it indoors,
but the town was deep in the fog.

The next day I ventured out again to look for the sun, and
found it not, but my ramble was not without its reward. In a
pine wood three miles from the town I stood awhile to listen
to the sound as of copious rain of the moisture dropping from
the trees, when a sudden tempest of loud, sharp metallic
notes--a sound dear to the ornithologist's ears--made me jump;
and down into the very tree before which I was standing
dropped a flock of about twenty crossbills. So excited and
noisy when coming down, the instant they touched the tree they
became perfectly silent and motionless. Seven of their number
had settled on the outside shoots, and sat there within forty
feet of me, looking like painted wooden images of small green
and greenish-yellow parrots; for a space of fifteen minutes
not the slightest movement did they make, and at length,
before going, I waved my arms about and shouted to frighten
them, and still they refused to stir.

Next morning that memorable fog lifted, to England's joy, and
quitting my refuge I went out once more into the region of
high sheep-walks, adorned with beechen woods and
traveller's-joy in the hedges, rambling by Highclere,
Burghclere, and Kingsclere. The last--Hampshire's little
Cuzco--is a small and village-like old red brick town,
unapproached by a railroad and unimproved, therefore still
beautiful, as were all places in other, better, less civilized
days. Here in the late afternoon a chilly grey haze crept
over the country and set me wishing for a fireside and the
sound of friendly voices, and I turned my face towards beloved
Silchester. Leaving the hills behind me I got away from the
haze and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a
beautiful, wooded, undulating country. And I wish that for a
hundred, nay, for a thousand years to come, I could on each
recurring November have such an afternoon ride, with that
autumnal glory in the trees. Sometimes, seeing the road
before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I
am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold
before me I knew it was overhung by beeches. But the oak is
the common tree in this place, and from every high point on
the road I saw far before me and on either hand the woods and
copses all a tawny yellow gold--the hue of the dying oak leaf.
The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among
tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it
where beeches grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left
hand shining through the wood gave the coloured translucent
leaves an unimaginable splendour. This was the very effect
which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had sought to
reproduce in their noblest work--the Gothic cathedral and
church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass.
The only choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and
the small lyrical wren; but on passing through the rustic
village of Wolverton I stopped for a couple of minutes to
listen to the lively strains of a cirl-bunting among some farm
buildings.

Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village
and the vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and
thorn, of ancient Roman Calleva. Inside the walls, at one
spot, a dozen men were still at work in the fading light; they
were just finishing--shovelling earth in to obliterate all
that had been opened out during the year. The old flint
foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches
and corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the
winter room with its wide beautiful floor--red and black and
white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist
and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and
beast and bird--all to be covered up with earth so that the
plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and
ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead
city for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls
had a reddish cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red
tile and tessera mixed with it. Larks and finches were busily
searching for seeds in the reddish-brown soil. They would
soon be gone to their roosting-places and the tired men to
their cottages, and the white owl coming from his hiding-place
in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he has
had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into
silence so long ago.

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