A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (27 page)

When I said I would walk from Nether Stowey to Lynton, I didn’t promise to myself that I would walk
all the way
. I would cheat a little. I am not as young as I was, and although much given to rambling around the countryside on foot in an unprotected situation, I have never had quite the stamina of the Wordsworths, of Coleridge, of Hazlitt, of Tom Poole. No, I would take my car, and book myself into bed and breakfast places, and spend my days in circular exploration. I would commune with the dead, and maybe with the living. In Northam one does not speak to strangers much these days, but in the countryside one may take greater risks. I am not, I hope, unduly loquacious – in fact I am rather shy – but occasionally, when walking, strange fits of boldness overcome me, and although I do not cross-question each child and beast I meet, I do enter into conversations that I would never embark upon indoors. Even the cheerful greeting of another walker – ‘Good morning!’ – ‘Pleasant evening!’ – ‘Fine day for a walk!’ – can lift the heart. The lonely communion of walkers, this I have valued.

Yes, you are right. I fear retirement. I shall miss 5B.

There is no obvious way to get from Northam to Nether Stowey, but I thought it was proper to pass by the gateway of Stonehenge. I had set off early and was driving quite fast along the A303 – it may surprise you to learn that my car is red and sporting – when I began to feel Stonehenge coming upon me through the great militarized and pig-rearing spaces
of Wiltshire, and I made a detour. It was not really very pleasant. Somebody should feel a little guilt and sorrow about the state of the bunkerlike ladies lavatories. English Heritage again, I suppose. English this, National that. I love England, rather more, I suspect, than our ex-prime minister loved poetry, however fervently she asserted that she did, but I do sometimes think we set about our patriotism the wrong way. My hobbyhorse again. Shut up, Mogg. I suppose there is no
harm
in a café selling Megalithic Rock Cakes and Solstice savouries, or offers of free Parker pens, but it is a bit sad that most people seem to spend most of their time in the shop. There were some Japanese children playing tag, and two young men meditating on the grass, but most of my fellow tourists were busy buying dishcloths or taking photographs. And in the car park a car alarum bleaped insistently. People watched it with suspicion. We are so nervous of one another these days. You can see pickpocket warnings in the most desolate corners of the British Isles, and once I saw a Neighbourhood Watch sign nailed to a tree in a remote field miles from human habitation.

I made my way westward, tritely pondering the effect of the growth of cities on human trust, and my next stop was no more reassuring. I’d decided not to brave Bristol, as I would be sure to get lost, but thought I’d try Shirehampton, where William and Dorothy stayed with the invalid lawyer James Losh on their way from Alfoxden towards the Wye. This was a mistake. I took the wrong exit off the M5, and was arrested by a policeman who thought I was trying to invade the docks. He redirected me in a friendly enough fashion and I retraced my route, but there was no sign of Losh or Wordsworth in Shirehampton. It was all Boots, Bingo, Spar, and Iceland. I could not bring myself to seek its ancient core. I regained the motorway, and drove on,
ignoring Clevedon, and on to the Bridgwater exit. I had resolved to make my evening’s walk to that little-known spot, Shurton Bars, in preparation for a more serious walk the next day. I checked in at my B and B, and set out again. My landlady had never heard of Shurton Bars or of Shurton, but I had my maps.

A little-known spot, and hard to find. This was where Coleridge, in September 1795, wrote ‘Lines written at Shurton Bars’, in the early days of his love for Sara Fricker. In that summer forty years ago we had visited Kilve, which I could see was slightly to the west, but I could also see that the place marked Shurton was inland, with no obvious route to the sea. I drove on, through the maze of little high-hedged country lanes, pausing to admire two rosy pink piglets in a field of blue cabbages, and an immobile heron standing on one leg in a pond, but I could not find Shurton. What I did come upon was the nuclear power station of Hinkley Point, which suddenly rose upon me, its regular hygienic blue and white boxes standing like a giant refrigerator, a palace of ice. It flew a thin flag of clean white smoke. I drove towards it, and was again arrested – the Visitors’ Centre was shut for the day. I was informed I’d have to come back tomorrow if I wanted a guided tour.

I enquired about Shurton Bars. He looked foxed. He’d never heard of them. He wasn’t local, he said; he thought there was a village called Shurton over towards Stogursey. If I asked those ladies just getting into their car to go home, they might know.

There were three ladies, attendants at the centre, wearing identical print summer dresses. Two of them shook their heads at my query, but the third smiled and said I was very near. I had to go back to a place called Knighton, not Shurton, and walk down the track to the sea. It wasn’t far.

And I found Knighton, and parked my car in a farmyard, and with further help of a friendly lecturer from Bristol I found the right track. My spirits rose as they always do when I start to walk. The smell was delicious, of honey and of tansy. The grass-bordered track was wide and empty, and it rose gently through open farmland, waving with ripening wheat, or carved into ploughed blocks of glinting earth. I fell into a happy plodding rhythm, as I thought of Coleridge, and his friend Tom Poole, and of Tom Poole’s brother who had lived at Shurton Court. In those days ferries crossed the River Parrett above Bridgwater, and plied their way along the coast: trading vessels brought coal and lime across the Bristol Channel from Wales to the lime kilns of the Somerset coast. What had the coastline looked like then? And then there was the sea before me, and the far sublime industrial shore of Port Talbot, and the island of Flat Holm to the east, and a little yacht, and a tanker, and the banks of lias and fossil. The turf was short and studded with flowers and flat thistles and the edge of the cliff crumbled, as I walked towards the flatter stretch I knew to be the Bars. It was a beautiful midsummer evening, and the points and promontories stretched on and on to the west in a dim blue-grey hazy hot light. I was all alone – or so I thought until I saw a man approaching. I had not yet cast off my city ways, for I felt a slight frisson of dismay at the prospect of an encounter with a stranger on so remote a spot, but it was only an old man with his dog, who greeted me civilly. And on the way back I met a boy on a bike who shouted ‘Hi!’ at me, in holiday mood, as he charged and bounced along the ruts.

The shingle had been covered in litter. Old wire, cans, plastic bottles, strands of orange plastic rope. And a flattened, rusted, battered car chassis.

I will not tell you where I spent the night for it was not
much of a success. My landlady was not from the neighbourhood, she assured me many times, she was from Sheffield. This should have endeared her to me, as I like Sheffield, but she was the moaning type of Yorkshire person who speaks in double negatives. An artist in litotes. (Sometimes I think I’m a bit like that myself.) She started to tell me her story as soon as I arrived, and continued when I returned from my pub supper – I had slipped out to the Plough at Holford. It was a sad story and I was not in the mood for it. It was marked by many deaths and illnesses. Her husband had been made redundant in the decline of the steel industry, and they had decided to leave the north and have a go at running this little business, but, perversely, as soon as they had settled in he had spitefully developed a fatal illness and died on her, leaving her alone amongst strangers. She didn’t like the people round her and she didn’t like her guests. They stole soap and towels and sometimes wet the bed. On and on she went as my eyes drooped, for it had been a long day, and I was exhausted, but her story was in many cantos and she had to tell it all. As I fell asleep between the flounced and furry hot pink nylon sheets I wondered if she told this tale to every guest. I bet she told it to one in one, but not one in three. I felt sorry for her, but I am less patient than Wordsworth. Her lament lacked dignity, or so it seemed to me.

The morning cheered me. I planned to walk from Nether Stowey, up Dowsborough, round the Iron Age fort, and on towards Crowcombe Park Gate, where I would hope to find the pool which inspired Wordsworth to write ‘The Thorn’. Then I would walk along the ridge towards Triscombe, and back down through the woods to Nether Stowey. Ambitious, but not impossible, and I could always cut it short if I was tired. As I set off with my map and sandwiches and my battered little Oxford green canvas
Lyrical Ballads
, I wondered if I
would have the courage to stop one in three and ask about Wordsworth. ‘Have you ever read him, have you ever
heard
of him?’ Such would be my questions.

But the characters I met were unpromising, and interrogation died on my lips, to be replaced by ‘Lovely day!’ There was a woman walking her Dalmatian dog to Stowey letterbox, and a girl on a pony, and two men on mountain bikes, and then, as the hill steepened, nobody. I got happily lost wandering round and round the twisted oaks and giant hemlock of Dowsborough, before striking off to Crowcombe – which Dorothy called Crookham. I was sure, from the map and from a description given by a Wordsworthian friend of mine (yes, I do have
some
friends) that the place marked as Wilmot’s Pool must be the ‘little muddy pond of water never dry’ of the poem, and I resolved to eat my sandwiches there. I toiled up Frog Hill, leaving the dense vegetation of wood and combe, to the high ground of the Quantocks and its long views over the Channel. Here grew yellow tormentil, and pale silver yellow straggling cow-wheat, and early ripe bilberries, and wild strawberries. I passed a couple of ponies, which stared at me as the donkey had once stared at Wordsworth.

And here on the top were two men sitting in a Land-Rover, staring through binoculars at the opposite hillside. They lowered their glasses to greet me, and I asked them if they knew Wilmot’s Pool – more for the sake of conversation than information, you understand. The younger, a ranger type dressed in army camouflage, shook his head, but the older said, ‘Now what you call Wilmot’s Pool is what we call Withyman’s Pool. You’re on the right course. See that hummock? That marks the pool.’

‘Why do you call it Withyman’s Pool?’ I enquired. But he did not know. He knew neither Wilmot nor Withyman. I asked
him what they looked for, through their binoculars. He said they were looking for deer with calf. It was the season, and if I kept my eyes open I might see them too.

With further exchange of courtesies, I moved on. And there indeed was the pool, hard by the hilltop path. Wordsworth’s measurement seemed on the conservative side, for this pool, as I paced it, was more like three yards long and three yards wide than three feet by two, and this was in a dry season. In wet weather it must have been far larger. Yet muddy indeed it was: he was right there. It was not mantled, or standing: it was just plain muddy. Rushes and tufted reeds grew in its marges (is the word
marge
an example of poetic diction, I wonder?) and there were little semi-succulent water plants of green and reddish hue growing from the dried whitened trampled mud. And there, too, was a hollow mossy circle of a tumulus that might well have been the grave of a baby – or indeed of a giant. The setting was on a grander scale than I had imagined, but then Wordsworth was not a one for hyperbole. More a meoisis or a litotes man. (We don’t teach figures of speech these days.)

I sat on the tumulus above the pool and ate my cheese and chutney sandwich, as I reread ‘The Thorn’ for the hundredth time and more. I looked around for a thorn, but the nearest I could see was a good thirty yards away. When I had finished my bottle of water I went over to inspect it. This thorn, like Wordsworth’s, was lichen encrusted, though not as extravagantly as Wordsworth had claimed – you could hardly call this ‘a melancholy crop’.

Up from the earth these mosses creep

And this poor thorn they clasp it round

So close, you’d say that they were bent

With plain and manifest intent

To drag it to the ground

And all had joined in one endeavour

To bury this poor thorn for ever.

And there I sat, alone, and recalled that lost summer, and its lost aspirations, and wondered what it was that had driven poor Dorothy to an old age of infirmity and obscenity. Perhaps you are waiting for me to say that I became pregnant that summer, and lost the baby, or had it aborted, or adopted. No, it was not so. The tale of Martha Ray is not the tale of Mary Mogg. I had no right to cry ‘Oh misery! Oh misery!’ This is a plain tale. The moving accident is not my trade. Yet tears rose to my eyes as I sat there and thought of the past. I had been young, and I had been happy, and my happiness was imprinted on these hills. Maybe I had seen this very thorn before. Thorns live long. The coppiced stools of oaks in the ancient woodland I had walked through had been there hundreds of years before Wordsworth, and he like me had seen the very hollies that still tower in Alfoxden Park.

Was I happy, was I sad? Who is to say? Old age, ill health, solitude – these lay before me. Wordsworth had written that poem, or so he claimed, to fix the thorn in his memory, to preserve forever its terrible aspect. He too feared to grow into ‘a toothless thorn with knotted joints’, and we know that Dorothy lost her teeth young. I have been saved from that by some fancy bridgework, but my mother, who died last year, had severe arthritis.