Everyman's England (9 page)

As though it sensed it was nearing the end of its run the bus quickened speed and sang over the wet stone sets, twisting in and out and swinging heavily around corners, until we were passing up Fleet Road where, deep below the tramlines, doomed to darkness runs the River Fleet, and then at the bottom of Pond Street the bus finished its run.

There is no pond there now. A fountain marks its site. It was the last of the string of ponds that reach across Hampstead Heath and from which the Fleet had birth. Hampstead Heath was only a minute away. Very soon I could have been away from houses and streets, and the steady turmoil of traffic to where gulls wheeled above the ponds and wild duck foraged among the water-weeds. The Bank Holiday Hampstead Heath scarcely touches the real Heath. It is an alien affair which flourishes for a few days in each year, and confines itself to a small area on the edge of the Heath. For the rest of the year the Heath is more countryside than many places in Devon and Sussex. Sheep crop its pastures, birds nest in its coppices, and squirrels haunt the tall trees, and to the countryman in London it is a revelation, while to the Londoner it is a haven. Here he can be alone and lie upon his back and watch the sky and imagine London a hundred miles away… I wondered if I should walk out as far as Ken Wood House. But I had no time to go on the Heath.

The bus I had come up on was turning to go back. If I sprinted I could just catch it.

CHAPTER 10

You must go to Norfolk to see Norfolk. It is not to be passed through, like so many other counties, on the way to the Highlands or Cornwall. Beyond Norfolk there is nothing but the sea. You can stand on the promenade at Sheringham, listening to the growl of the waves over the flints on the beach and know that before you stretches a waste of water that acknowledges no land until the icy plateaux of the North Polar regions are reached.

Standing away from the main lines of communication, which have brought so many eyesores to England, Norfolk has preserved a rural, yeoman character which few other counties can equal and none excel. The oaks by the roadside, the numerous patches of heath and the sudden woods, all have an appearance of age and solidity which dwarf the efforts of civilising man, and intimidate the arrogant pylons that conduct electricity cables.

The richness of Norfolk lies, not so much in its famous Broads, nor in the saltings of the coast, or the splendours of Norwich, but in its woods and fields and in the small country towns with their red pantiled houses and quiet streets.

Its roads run, gently undulating, across the heaths and through the woods. Tall barrages of dark pines affront the skyline and the gleam of silver birches above the dying flame of bracken illumines a scene through which it is impossible to hurry since the beauty must be savoured slowly.

A crisp, frosty day greeted my entry into the county at Thetford, which must be an interesting town at the weekends.

It is becoming a residential quarter for commercial travellers and their families, so I was told by a local shopkeeper, who followed up the information with a story about a commercial traveller which was a little unkind, I thought, considering that commercial travellers' families were helping his business. If you have had much experience of the second-rate hotels which a great many commercial travellers have to frequent you find them a subject for sympathy rather than humour, and can only admire the way in which they extract service from boots, waiters and office-clerks who regard activity as a sin and politeness as a vice.

There were plenty of places which could have claimed my attention in Norfolk, birthplaces of famous men, the sites of old monasteries and unique architectural works – they were all set out in the guidebook with which I had armed myself and which I neglected to use. Most of the descriptions were about as inspiring and attractive as a Yorkshire pudding which has failed to rise. Of Earsham all it could say was:

Well, there are hundreds of pretty villages with Perp. churches containing the full complement of piscinas, sedilae, fonts and etceteras. I must admit the etc. did raise my curiosity a little, but I assuaged it by telling myself that the writer probably meant that it also contained some fine fourteenth-century brasswork, remains of old stoup and mur. painting on E. wall. I did not want to see any of it. Some of the Pop. 581 might be interesting, but they would have to be foregone. I was not going to Earsham or any of the other places which no good tourist should miss. I was not going to make a pilgrimage to Holy Walsingham, or wander around Norwich getting a stiff neck, looking upwards at towers and gargoyles; though I have a profound respect and admiration for those who like to do these things.

I was going, I decided, to see two places. One was the small town of Holt. I decided to go there because it sounded least interesting of all from the guidebook, that is judging it by guidebook standards. This is the description.

That was enough for me. ‘Ancient origin and modern appearance'; the phrase was obscure and I hoped that the guidebook was glossing over some awful unconventionality. There was no mention of Per. windows and Dec. doorways, no Norman remains and dilapidated rood screens. The commanding situation and the apparently permanent breeze which blew along its hill-slope were worth investigating, I felt.

And the other place I had found not from the guidebook, but from an illustrated map given away by the manufacturers of a commodity without which we should indeed be poor mortals. I had seen the map in the hotel where I lunched and wished I had one like it. It was full of drawings of funny men and women, comic cows and gnarled trees, all depicting little scenes from the local history of towns and villages. It would have delighted Robert Louis Stevenson and appalled Ruskin. I was going to the scene of one of the most horrible and yet the happiest crimes in history, a crime which has shocked the inhabitants of nurseries for four centuries and delighted them at Christmas pantomimes for almost as long.

Near the village of Watton is Wayland Wood, the local people call it Wailing Wood, and this is the wood which is supposed to have been the scene of the tragic wanderings of the Babes in the Wood.

There is a tendency these days to regard a statement from anyone in long trousers that he was once a Boy Scout as ludicrous. Quite why, I cannot understand, though I have met two or three people who have been nursing this awful secret of their past in dread, lest anyone should discover it. The Boy Scout movement helped my generation to find the countryside and an open-air life. Young people today scorn any such organisation and are quite capable of finding these things for themselves – and a sorry mess they make of their discovery too, at times. Boy Scouts have at least the merit of never littering places with sandwich papers and orange wrappers, and if they occasionally break out into brass bands and church parades it is a convenient form of ostentation. All this leads to my own statement that I have been a Boy Scout, and I enjoyed being a Boy Scout. (I was keen enough to be indignant when candid friends insisted that my imitation of the cry of a curlew was nothing like the real thing. I was a member of a Curlew Patrol and each member was supposed to be able to utter his patrol call – just why was never made clear, as it was so much easier to summon other members with: ‘Hi, Bill,' or ‘Come on, Jimmy.') As an old Boy Scout I pride myself upon my sense of direction. Apparently my sense of direction must be as good as my imitation of the curlew's whistle. Within ten minutes of entering Wayland Wood I was lost, completely lost.

The afternoon had turned cold and grey, and there was a light mist blowing up. The sky had a sullen look as though it were about to resent my intrusion into the land of legend.

I entered the wood from the roadway through a gap in the hedge. I never saw the gap again. I followed first one path and then another. Somewhere in the heart of the wood, I had been told, there was the stump of the old oak tree under which the children had been found. There was nothing to identify it, yet I was sure that if I came across it, I should know it. A tree with such a history must, I felt, exert an influence, an arresting spell, upon the surrounding atmosphere which would wake anyone into an awareness of its presence.

The thin branches of the hazel thickets, which covered the ground between the stout oak trees, whipped at my face. I slipped once on the mossy track and brambles caught at the turn-ups of my trousers which were slowly filling with a fine collection of dead leaves and grass seeds. It was some time before I acknowledged to myself that I was never going to find the oak stump, and much longer before I realised that I was lost… In the end I sat down upon a fallen tree and resigned myself to my fate. I was lost.

Around me crowded the thickets and the tall brown skeletons of willow herb; a pheasant burst from cover and shot away with the noise and speed of a rocket, leaving my heart thumping with sudden fright. A rabbit appeared for a moment, eyed me quizzically, its nose wrinkling, and then deciding that I was an unpleasant character, made a bolt for its hole.

My pipe got clogged up in trying to clean it with a thin hazel twig, which broke off short, effectively blocking the stem and thus withdrawing from me the consolation of tobacco. I did not mind being lost so much, but I hated being lost and not able to smoke. T o deny a man the solace of being able to suck at a pipe when he is not quite sure what to do, is almost to deny him the very means of thought.

I was lost. I said it to myself aloud and it did not make the fact any pleasanter. To cheer myself up I tried to imagine what the wood looked like in the spring and summer. Anemones would sprinkle it with shaking white at first, with pads of primroses pushing through the dead drift of leaves, and then as the primroses began to pass there would be a carpet of bluebells, a hyacinthine spread to fill the air with a faint perfume, tantalising and unforgettable. Perhaps among the bluebells would be early orchis and the pushing, lettuce-green hoods of the cuckoo-pint. Pheasants would be nesting, blackbirds would call from the coverts and… there would certainly be robins, the direct descendants of the pair which had covered the Babes. I was reminded that I was lost. I looked around. There were no robins, and I was in no mood to be given a blanket of leaves. The air was cold and I thought of a warm fire.

Luckily I was spared a death by leaves. From the pathway came the sound of dragging and scuffling. For a moment my mind was full of thoughts of murderous uncles and assassins. Then a man appeared carrying a bundle of ash poles. When I explained my plight he nodded with a smile that expressed his woodman's contempt for my misfortune, and he led me through the wood to a little clearing near the roadside.

From him I learned of the other, and more utilitarian, side of Wayland Wood. The clearing was covered with lengths of hazel, ash and other wood, and piles of split sticks.

‘What do you do with all this?' I asked.

He soon told me, and as he spoke I was not long in recognising that he was a man who loved trees. To him a tree was a creation of character and soul. He spoke of the hazel woods of the county as a man might speak of old friends.

Wayland Wood is about seventy acres in size, and each year a ‘fell' is cut. The acreage of a ‘fell' varies according to the size of the wood, so that by cutting a different fell each year a strict rotation is observed, and by the time the end of the wood is reached the thickets have grown again where cutting first began and the wood can be cut through once more.

‘In the old days,' he said, in his flat Norfolk dialect, ‘when the Estate wanted more hurdles and thatching for corn stacks than it does today, all the wood was taken from here. We used to fell about ten acres every year. But some years we've had to fell and use the wood for little else than pea sticks.'

I could see that using hazel sways, as he called the hazel branches, for pea sticks was abhorrent to him.

‘And are these pea sticks?' I questioned, pointing to the lengths of wood in the clearing.

‘No,' he replied. ‘Things are a bit better now. Some of the sways which are not straight will be used for pea sticks, some for screen hurdles and some for stakes. The thin, top end of the sway is cut off and used for making fish baskets at Yarmouth and other places. The thick bottom piece we call a broatch. The broatches are split, we call it riving. Not many men can rive broatches properly, it's an art. When the broatches have been riven the strips are used for binding down thatching on roofs and hayricks. But thatching is dying out these days and when it goes so will the art of riving. It's a pity – but there you are.'

And there we were, standing in the grey wood with tiny swirls of mist sweeping through the trees. His face was sad as he eyed the hazel sways and broatches and I felt suddenly sorry, too. To rive a broatch is as Saxon a phrase as any in our language and soon, it seems, it must sink into the limbo of libraries, to be mouthed only by antiquarians and book burrowing scholars.

To change the subject, I said: ‘Do you believe the story of the Babes in the Wood?'

‘Why not?' he said, almost shouting and completely forgetting his sorrow. ‘Don't you believe it?' In his hand he flourished a keen-edged slasher knife, used for splitting the wood. I nodded my head, agreeing. Of course I did. And if you go to Wayland Wood and meet him, or anywhere near it and talk to the local people, don't even so much as hint that you do not believe the story of the Babes in the Wood.

As I went farther north towards Holt I passed plantations of young fir trees, looking as though they were only waiting for candles and presents to be hung upon them to complete their festive effect. Already the frost had spangled them with shimmering trappings. To complete the Christmas picture came the Norfolk turkeys, flocks of them, stalking about the fields like untidy old ladies, chattering among themselves and unmindful of their awful destiny.

Pantomime children, Christmas trees, turkeys, and a county which is typically English; long, rolling roads, bordered in places by dark green rhododendron bushes and sentinelled by tall pines; fields lying bare in the moonlight, and tiny byroads that lead away to unknown hamlets where men are still content to pass their leisure with a pipe and a glass, and the women are kindly and hard-working… this was the Norfolk that I saw.