The Day Gone By (10 page)

‘The complete passage of the file over the scraper is usually very rapid and produces a short pulse of sound. Strictly speaking there are several pulses, one for each peg as it strikes the scraper, but these small pulses follow each other so rapidly that we can regard each passage of the file as producing a single pulse. This is the basic “song-producing” mechanism in all the stridulators, but the pattern of the song varies enormously. The pulses come in bursts, or chirps, of varying duration, caused by repeated passage of the file over the scraper. The Common Green Grasshopper,
Omocestus viridulus,
produces a continuous chirp for twenty seconds or more and the whole body quivers as the legs move up and down as much as twenty times a second. Very different is the song of the Common Field Grasshopper,
Chorthippus brunneus,
which produces a series of 6-10 half-second chirps, spread evenly over about twelve seconds. All of our grasshoppers have a fairly fixed song length at a given temperature and the song is repeated at irregular intervals. The crickets, however, have no such fixed song length and in warm weather they chirp indefinitely. Most of our stridulators are quiet in cool weather.

‘Volume and pitch also vary from species to species and one can liken the various songs, when amplified, to the sounds of motor mowers, sewing machines, motor cycles and so on. In fact, it is usually easier to identify grasshoppers, in which there is a great colour variation, by their songs than by their appearances.'

There were several kinds of grasshopper on Greenham Common, and at least I distinguished between the brown ones and the green ones. The brown ones would have been
Chorthippus brunneus,
while the green ones were, I suppose,
Omocestus viridulus,
as well, perhaps, as the stripe-winged grasshopper
(Stenobothrus lineatus)
and the mottled grasshopper (
Myrmeleotettix maculatus).

I now feel constrained to mention something that I know to be a fact, whatever any entomologist may say. Some of the brown grasshoppers I caught had rosy hind wings. I couldn't have invented this and I'm sure I'm not mistaken. Yet the only rosy-winged grasshopper given by Michael Chinery is
Oedipoda germanica,
which he says is a species not normally found in the British Isles. Also, in his illustration, it looks very large - an absolute whopper - and I don't recall that these were. I must just remain puzzled.

I used to catch the grasshoppers with a butterfly net and then transfer them to a shoe-box with ventilation holes and a small trapdoor cut in the lid. I became careful not to hold them at all tightly, for if I did so they would exude a drop of orange-coloured fluid from their mouths, and this, I felt sure, must be a reaction to distress. When I got the box home I simply put it in the middle of the paddock, took the lid off and left it.

Yet the paddock never became colonized. No grasshoppers ever appeared the following year. No doubt they pined for their heather and peaty wasteland. They must just have been the wrong sort of grasshoppers, I suppose, for the paddock was a typical enough meadow. I never asked advice, so I remain ignorant of the reason to this day.

My vivid memory of Greenham Common as a great, wide waste of heather, in parts lonely, is reinforced by another incident of quite a different kind - one obviously related to Mr Punch. One summer afternoon I fell out with my sister. This wasn't unusual, of course. Children in families are continually falling out. In fact, it's only when you're grown up and observe other families that you realize how often this occurs - virtually daily. My sister was amiable as a rule and I loved her all through my childhood because she, like my father, could be relied upon to tell you the truth; also, she was apt to produce things from an exciting bag of tricks, like Percy's
Reliques
or the poetry of T. S. Eliot. But she had a sharp tongue, which at times could be really hurtful, and both she and my brother regarded me as - and made me feel that I was - a spoilt little beast. There wasn't, really, any way in which I, at eight, could expect to keep my end up with a highly intelligent seventeen-year-old who was head girl of her school and shortly going up to Girton. If you hit her - which I more than once did, in frenzy - you were automatically in the wrong and in for a wigging. If you tried to answer back you hadn't a hope. The reply would be even more blistering than what you had tried to answer.

I can't recall, after all these years, what this particular row was about: but my sister was so scathing that I felt driven to desperation. (At least Mr Punch, at the party, had not addressed me.) It was her final remark that marshalled me the way that I was going. It was something along the lines of ‘And everyone would be only too glad if you
went
away and
stayed
away.'

I didn't have any clear intention of doing that, but I did feel, vaguely, that I wanted to go away and be alone, in solitude, for a good, long time; somewhere where I wouldn't be found. I went down through the paddock and out of the gate into Monkey Lane. Along the lane I walked - it was an empty country lane in those days - and along the next lane (Pinchington Lane) to the west side of Greenham Common. Then I set off across the Common itself.

I remember it was hot but overcast. There was distant thunder about. The meadow browns and cinnabars were perched on the heather and the grasshoppers were zipping. I went on with a feeling of abandonment — of having taken a step further than I knew what to do with. I had no idea what the outcome of this escapade was going to be. I had never done anything like this before; but I was in such a state that I didn't care. I had let go. I simply wanted to go on walking across the expanse of the Common, where you could actually
see
that there was nobody you were going to meet; where you really were alone. Walking was comforting, too: better than hiding would have been, or even smashing a window (a deed I sometimes used to have recourse to when in a temper). The walking soothed my frustration and feeling of grievance. I wasn't hiding: I was doing something.

All that afternoon I walked on across the Common. In the middle there was a lonely cottage, known as ‘Noah's Ark'. I came to Noah's Ark and passed it. I felt safe enough in the sense that I didn't feel myself in any danger, but I also felt a little scared, like a child who has ventured into the deep end for the first time. Yet the surroundings were empty and peaceful as could be, and the solitude went on suiting me. Anyway, there was nothing much to do but go on, unless I sat down, to which I didn't feel disposed.

At last I came to the further, eastern edge of the Common. I can't recall, now, exactly how far I got, but I suppose it must have been somewhere on the outskirts of Brimpton. This surprises me now, for I have the map in front of me and from my home the whole distance is certainly over five miles. It was as the Common came to an end that my strange fit - to which it had, of course, formed the setting - came to an end also. Here were houses and people again - the normal world, even though far from home. What should I do now? It was borne in upon me that there was no course - no course at all - open to me but simply to go back. This, as I have since learned over and over, is the only termination to any loss of self-control.

I turned and began tramping back, but I was tired out. My pace across the Common became slower and slower. I had a strong notion, now, that I wouldn't be up to walking the whole way.

And then an odd and lucky chance occurred. I had been vaguely aware, for some little time, of two boys on bicycles passing me, coming back and re-passing, but apart from noticing that they were a little older than myself, I had been too tired and preoccupied to give them any close attention. Finally, however, with a grating of boots on the road, they stopped beside me and asked me where I was going. When I told them that I was walking the length of the Common and further, they were, of course, surprised. ‘Cor, that's a bit of a way,' said one of them; but they didn't ask any more questions. Then, friendlily enough, the older one suggested that he should give me a lift on the bar of his bicycle.

I was only too ready. The bar was hard and uncomfortable, and with me perched in front of him the boy was horribly slow and wobbly. But we got along - perhaps as much as a mile and a half. I can't remember what we talked about, except that I asked them whether they were brothers and they said no. They weren't in the least inquisitive about what I was doing or why I was walking so far alone. They maintained a kind of detached sociability, as though they felt they might as well give me a lift as pass the time in any other way.

They took me as far as Noah's Ark. In spite of the wobbliness and the bar pressing into my not-very-well-covered buttocks, I would have liked to ask them to go further, but felt I couldn't decently do so. They dropped me. I thanked them and they set off back, in the summer twilight, towards Brimpton.

I plodded on and eventually got back home dead beat. Well, like the business at Mr Punch's party, it had worked all right. Everyone was in a fine old taking, my mother and my sister close to tears and my father half-minded to alert the police. I had been away four or five hours, if not more. They were too much relieved to scold me. I gave my mother my version of my quarrel with my sister, said I felt better now and not cross any more; had a bath and went to bed. But for several years afterwards my sister and I were never easy together on Greenham Common. She must have suffered a great deal of worry and apprehension that afternoon, and I don't really know that she deserved it. I have often felt, since, that it was a pity that this exploit did work. It would have been better if I had been blamed and punished, for as things turned out they only served to confirm the fancy-dress party behaviour pattern. The best I can plead is that my sister had been exceptionally contemptuous and cutting. My over-reaction, however, had been a general surprise, and not least to me.

The Enborne brook, two miles or so east of the ruined Falkland mill, winds along the southern edge of what used to be Greenham Common - or below it. There were woods and copses all along the left bank, and one of these was known in our family as ‘Miss Tull's Wood'. I don't really know who Miss Tull was, but one of my father's patients - and later, a good friend to me - was Mr Bertie Tull, a wealthy landowner with a big house on the northern side of the Common; so I suppose there was some connection. Miss Tull's Wood was the place for primroses. We used to go there with my father in the car - bringing a picnic if the day was warm enough - down the rather steep and narrow lane leading off the Common to the ford. (There were several fords along the length of the Enborne then, and fewer bridges.) The wood was full of primroses. A hundred people could have picked them for an hour and there would still have been masses. We would pick a flat basketful, so that the top was a cushion of primroses packed tight, and then dip the bottom in the shallow river to keep them fresh. I can remember pressing my face into them. Today, their cool softness and scent always recall Miss Tull's Wood. When we were tired of picking primroses we would sit on the bank and watch the stream go by.

One April afternoon my sister and I had been sitting silent and more or less motionless for some time, when from the field beyond a rabbit came loping up to the opposite bank of the river and without hesitation, as though it were in the habit of it, plunged in and swam across, shook itself and disappeared along our bank downstream. I know that all wild animals can swim if they're put to it, but I have never since seen a rabbit swimming.

One day in June, when I was about five or six, my father took me out in the car, through Newbury and westward along the Bath Road -Jane Austen's Bath Road (the A4). There wasn't a great deal of traffic in those days of the ‘twenties. It must be borne in mind, too, how much slower cars went and how relatively limited their range was. My father seldom drove much over thirty m.p.h., and when, later, my sister drove at forty, it seemed frighteningly fast. From our Newbury home, Winchester, Pangbourne or Reading were virtually our limit: never London.

Along the Bath Road we went, a matter of a good five miles. Here there is a pub. called The Halfway (halfway between Newbury and Hungerford), and opposite the pub. a little lane. This lane runs for perhaps three or four hundred yards between hedges covered with honeysuckle and dog rose, and at its foot lies the broad Kennet, spanned by a plank footbridge. We had come to what is still known as The Wilderness.

The reaction of a simple creature - or a child - on first seeing a true river has already been unforgettably expressed by Kenneth Grahame at the opening of
The Wind in the Willows.
I certainly felt everything that the Mole felt and was carried away with delight as I held my father's hand across the plank bridge. What Kenneth Grahame's description doesn't include, however, is any birds or animals (except, of course, the Water Rat). As we stepped off the plank bridge and began strolling up the right bank, almost the first thing I saw was a kingfisher flying past us fast and low on the other side of the river.

This certainly was - and still is - a true wilderness, of a kind almost as different from Greenham Common as the Amazon from the Oklahoma plains. All along its course, from Marlborough to Reading, the Kennet flows in several beds and has innumerable side-streams and carriers. In places the valley is the best part of half a mile wide. But nowhere, I think, is it wider than in the Wilderness between Halfway and Kintbury, which is a mile long and perhaps 600 yards broad. It is thick woodland, virtually pathless, and marshy at all times of the year; the haunt of herons, grebes, water rails, teal, shelduck in season, spotted woodpeckers, reed warblers and grasshopper warblers. Otters there certainly were, but there wasn't much chance of coming on one, for it is simply not practicable to penetrate or wander about in that dense, boggy place.

I was still too little to do much in the way of specialized bird-watching, though I enjoyed seeing the moorhens, coots and swans on the open water. What struck me most forcibly on that first visit - the first of many - was watching the trout rising to the mayfly: and I'm pretty certain that that was what my father had brought me down to see. I saw my first trout for myself, without prompting. It was close in under the bank that we were walking up, and I had hardly noticed it before it startled and shot away into deep water.