The Day Gone By (9 page)

Is a small child really conscious of all this, or is memory coloured with hindsight? There is a paradox, I think. In a way, the child takes such things for granted. While he is in the wood, he may very likely be talking about trivial things, or thinking about his friends or a story that has been read to him. He is not consciously observing as an older person would. And yet, on the other hand, his mind and senses are wide open in a way that they will not be in later life. He has seldom or never seen a wood full of bluebells before. Because he has not been told to regard it as wonderful - because he is not like an adult looking at the Taj Mahal - the wood makes its impression with a kind of inevitability like that of a physical law. It falls into his unheeding mind like a stone falling into water. I thought it splendid to pull an armful of bluebells to take home to my mother. Yet I had unconsciously taken away much more — impalpable feelings which were to prove more abiding and which I now try, as best I can, to express in words. No expression of an experience — whether in painting, words or music — recovers the experience itself, but can only be a separate thing. Yet the experience itself existed and was at once more and less transcendental than this subsequent expression derived from it.

There were other flowers in the Bluebell Wood, too; often, as early as February, dog's mercury, with its little green flowers on stalks, would carpet the bare ground before anything else had begun to shoot. It seems strange to me, now, that my father never warned me that it was most dangerously poisonous. Perhaps he didn't know. (Culpeper, the classic herbalist, says ‘There is not a more fatal plant, native to our country, than this.') Anyway, I don't think anyone would want to pick dog's mercury. The white wood anemones, too, I soon gave over picking. The flower, once picked, will droop and wither in ten minutes. My favourite in the Bluebell Wood in summer, when all the bluebells had gone, was the creeping jenny. Creeping jenny is a pimpernel by family. It grows in wet, shady places in woods and copses, in long strands of green leaves and yellow, bell-shaped flowers. It still grows in the Bluebell Wood.

One afternoon in April - I suppose I must have been about eight or nine - I was wandering down by the Bluebell Wood alone. On the east side there is open pasture land - a little valley - between this and the next similar but larger copse. I pottered along the eastern edge of the Bluebell Wood and there, on the bank by the south-east corner, I suddenly came upon what struck me then as an oldish man.

Now when you met men on the Sandleford estate and you weren't on the footpath that crosses it from Wash Common to the Newbury-Southampton road (A34), they weren't as a rule friendly. You were trespassing. My father, being Dr Adams and well-known in the neighbourhood, could carry this off, but an eight-year-old on his own was another matter, as I had already had cause to learn. ‘D'you know you're doin' wrong goin' across there?' I knew by sight the few men who worked in these fields and whom you were liable to encounter.

This man wasn't any of them and you could tell at once that he wasn't, by his look and bearing. He would have been old for a farm labourer and besides, he didn't appear to be working on any particular sort of job. He, like me, appeared to be at leisure. He greeted me in a friendly way - I can't remember what he said - and although I didn't really know how to talk to him, except by corroboration and general amiability, he was clearly happy enough with my company and (unlike the farm labourers) wasn't particularly conscious of my being ‘a young gentleman'. (Class distinctions were much more marked in those days.)

He was gathering twigs and lighting a fire under the bank - something I'd never seen anyone do before — and when we'd got it nicely going he proceeded to boil water in a somewhat old-looking tin can. When it boiled he made tea by throwing the tea leaves in, chatting all the time in a kindly manner about nothing in particular, quite unlike any of the Jims I had ever met. We drank the tea black, though I seem to remember he had some sugar somewhere about him. When we finally parted - and I intuitively felt no suspicion or fear of him - I left him sitting contentedly on the bank.

He remains a mystery to me. Who - and what - on earth could he have been? He was not a tramp or any sort of vagrant; I am sure of that. Even at that age I knew what a tramp was like. They had a general air of resentment and unhappiness which made you sorry for them and angry on their behalf. If they could, they begged from you. Besides, tramps stuck to the roads or to places such as ricks or sheds, close to the roads they had slunk off. They told you about their bad luck. They called you ‘sonny'. This man was happy enough, generous with his tea and enjoyed my company. He addressed me by no vocative at all. (I was sensitive to vocatives and unconsciously derived a lot from them about the speaker. ‘Sonny'; ‘young feller'; ‘young man'; ‘boy'; ‘youngster'. Each of these implied something vague but valid. The one I always hated was ‘old chap'. I still hate it and never use it myself. ‘It's time you and I had a little talk, old chap.' ‘Well, you know, old chap, that's not the sort of thing we expect.' My father would never use such a term: it was either ‘Richard' or ‘my boy' — which I was.)

Nor was this man a keeper. I knew about keepers, too. They were - and still are - authoritative in a deferential way (like warrant officers). They were usually dressed with a certain degree of neatness and propriety - I suppose, partly to reinforce their authority and partly as befitting the standing of their employer. As a rule they were crisp and sharp. They certainly didn't make stick fires and brew tea in cans. This man, whatever he was doing, was in no hurry and very much relaxed. He was wearing old, worn clothes, yet not the come-by garments of a tramp. Most striking of all was his manner, which was unusually gentle. He didn't seem to regard our meeting as in any way odd. He made - he initiated - mild, trivial conversation. I never met him again - on the Sandleford land or anywhere else.

I have decided - or the best I can come up with after all these years is — that he was in some way connected with felling in the Sandleford copses. These - especially the Bluebell Wood -contained a lot of hazel, and it was the practice to cut this to the ground every few years - to harvest it, in fact - and then let it grow up again. The business, I rather think, was not carried out by the estate but ‘sold' to people who specialized in it. I am inclined to guess that this unhurrying, kindly old fellow, taking his time on a pleasant afternoon, who had half an hour to brew tea and wasn't in the least bothered about who I was or whether I was trespassing, was engaged in some sort of examination or reconnaissance of the copses on behalf of what Americans would call ‘his outfit', the hazel cutters, who may have been based well beyond Newbury. That would explain this rather Edward Thomasesque encounter.

As I have explained, Wash Common is a plateau south of Newbury, between the Kennet and the little Enborne brook. We lived at the north end of the plateau, at the top of Wash Hill. The Newbury-Andover road runs across the plateau and drops down the other side — known as Sandpit Hill — to the Enborne crossing called Wash Water. This was the first stream I ever knew; and here my father used to take me to paddle. It was - and still is - as pretty a brook as could be imagined, in places roofed over with alder in summer, all the air heavy with the scent of meadowsweet, the shallows full of blue brooklime. I remember big, green dragonflies hovering and darting over the water. (I suppose now that they were
Calopteryx splendens.)
The bed is mostly clean gravel, and to paddle I used to wear slip-on rubber sand-shoes. I felt full of excitement as I rather gingerly stepped into the water, pushing my way through the purple loosestrife and great willow-herb, step by step until I was in the middle of the shady stream, which is about eight feet wide and two or three feet deep (if as much). My father, a little way off, strolled about the bank, pretending inattention. I stood for a while, listening to the noise of the water, and then began slowly paddling downstream. After a few yards I entered the tunnel of alders, so thick that the bank on either side became invisible. I startled a fish - a dace, I expect - and watched it shoot away, disappearing into brown gloom. As I went on, until the mouth of the alder tunnel seemed a long way behind, the water became deeper, until it was over my waist. I called out to my father, who answered quietly and reassuringly from somewhere outside the screen of trees.

At length I emerged into the open and stopped for a minute or two to recover myself, hanging on to a plant of ragwort growing on the further bank. (I already knew that my full weight wasn't going to pull that up.) Then I waded on in bright sunshine, following the stream round a bend to the left. And here I came to an unforeseeable marvel. Suddenly I found bricks under my feet and passed under a big, square, rusty iron-bound beam. On either side rose walls of old, crumbling brick. I was among the ruins of a long-abandoned mill, from which the brook, with a little, splashing fall, dropped into a wide, deep pool. My father's composed voice called ‘Shouldn't go any further, my boy, I think.' I felt I had gone further alone than ever in my life, and experienced a venture I could never have imagined.

It's all there still, for the time being unchanged. The distance I paddled is about sixty yards.

About a mile to the east of our house lay the public open space of Greenham Common, and here, too, my father would take me to wander and explore. In those days, believe it or not, Greenham was a big, lonely place, a gravelly, heathery waste three miles long and a mile wide. We would leave the car and stray off into this wilderness. Our ostensible purpose was to pick heather — not ling, but purple bell heather
(Erica cinerea).
However, anything was liable to happen. I might become fascinated by an anthill, and lie prone for ten minutes or more, watching the ants dragging their burdens — twigs, leaves, dead insects. I remember the first time I came, in a marshy place, upon sundews
(Drosera rotundifolia),
each with its tall stem of little, white flowers rising from the centre of the ring of orange, crinite, droplet-covered leaves. My father showed me how these plants attracted and closed upon tiny flies and insects. I felt sorry for the flies and wanted to try to release them, but this he deprecated. ‘It's nature, my boy. If you don't like it, come on.'

I saw my first stoat on Greenham Common; and it saw me. My father was some little way off and I was lying on my stomach, watching a spider spinning a web in the bracken. The stoat appeared suddenly out of the heather, about fourteen or fifteen feet away. From pictures in books I knew what it must be, but I was startled by the richness of its colouring - the chestnut back and cream-yellow breast and belly. The stoat was also startled. It remained quite still, its back slightly arched, staring at me for several seconds. Then, apparently less alarmed than with an air of deciding to let well alone, it turned and trotted away.

In those days, grass snakes and slow worms were by no means rare on Greenham Common. They were however, very shy. If you came upon one basking, it would be off in a flash into the heather. No doubt there were adders, too, although I can't remember to have seen one. My father certainly wasn't worried about them. What I did see, one day - and it's the only time - was a smooth snake. It was not in the open, but among the heather. I think it must have been injured in some way - although I don't recall seeing any injury — because its attempts to be off were not very effectual. I could tell that it wasn't a grass snake: it was lighter in colour, with dark spots along the top of its back. (A grass snake's spots - or bars - are along the sides.) As I'd never seen an adder I thought it must be one, and ran back to tell my father, but when we both returned to the place, the snake had, of course, gone. It may, I suppose, have been an adder after all, but all I can say is that I got a very good look at it and I'm satisfied in my own mind that it was a smooth snake. The reason why I am writing thus carefully is that smooth snakes, whatever their habitat and numerosity sixty years ago, are now very rare. (See, e.g.,
The Reader's Digest Field Guide to the Animals of Britain.)
The reason, as for most declining creatures all over the world, is destruction of natural habitat. Smooth snakes frequent - or used to frequent - lowland heath in the south country. During the past half-century, more and more of this unproductive heath has been ‘taken in' by agriculture. As for Greenham Common, when one reflects what's happened to that, my childhood encounter with the smooth snake might be taken almost as a morality tale. Why can't Greenham Common now be restored as a public open space?

For several childhood summers my principal motive for going there was to catch grasshoppers. I wanted to colonize the paddock at home, which had none, although there was a fine colony of crickets (Wood Crickets, I rather think:
Nemobius sylvestris)
occupying a dense, round, yellow-leaved holly bush growing between the paddock and the Wild Wood. Grasshoppers abounded on Greenham Common. On a hot summer's day the sound of their zipping was everywhere, and as you walked through the heather they would leap away, gliding for yards in curving flight. I used to like to get up close to one and watch it stridulating, but you had to be stealthy, for they were easily alarmed. Since no less a work than Michael Chinery's
Field Guide to the Insects of Britain and Northern Europe
speaks of the stridulation as ‘song', perhaps I may be acquitted of sentimentality when I say that I still love to listen to them. As a little boy, I sometimes wondered whether it mightn't be possible to put together a sort of grasshopper band, for I had noticed that the songs differed in pitch, while seeming to remain in harmony. I can't do better here than to quote Michael Chinery:

‘The “song” of these insects is undoubtedly the most fascinating thing about them. It is produced by a process called stridulation, which involves the rubbing of one part of the body (the “file”) over another part (the “scraper”). The file is provided with a series of pegs or ridges that strike the scraper in turn and set up vibrations. You can imitate the action by drawing a comb over the edge of a card. The scraper is always on the wing but the file may be on the leg (grasshoppers) or on the opposite wing (crickets).