Ulverton (24 page)

LOOKING BACK ON
those days, perhaps the most peculiar and haunting instance of this occurred in the opening months of the Great War. Our Squire (he of the skidding motor-car) had taken it into his head to excavate the barrow that lies closest to Ulverton, an impressive mound perched on the rim of the high scarp that falls so gently and lovingly into the Fogbourne’s crystal course. How I was roped in to this amateur species of archaeological investigation does not matter here, but it was certainly not all port and cajolery on the part of the Manor.

Ever since my arrival I had felt a restlessness. Grief had settled to a dull and monotonous sense of longing – how tedious this human inability to accept a state of affairs, and plunge into life! I would catch myself, during the first hot days of July, calling out for the punkah-wallah, or searching for the bell to bring Abdul with lemonade on his silver tray; in the severe thunderstorms of that summer I would wonder why the rainfall was so hushed, only to remember that I had but English thatch upon the roof, that took the battering without more than an old gent’s mumble of complaint. Come the dawn, and I would wake up startled and address my wife in confused tones. Why was it so blessedly cool? Had Ali (the club-footed one) set my shoes out for the morning? Where were the windows – those three familiar shuttered rectangles of wan grey stripes that, by noon, blazed like Blake’s tiger – a fierce chaos of hot light we had dared to frame?

But alas, my wife was not there to answer. Up to the window, then, and draw the curtains: there the soft grey stone of an English church, the elms and the beech, the old gentle roofs, and beyond these, etched by the morning, shrilled by the lark, the high curved brows of our English downland.

As observed earlier, my first winter was deficient in the snow I had clothed my homecoming with, while the first weeks of spring
were
dreary with day after day of rain. In Chittagong it had, with a baleful simplicity, either blazed or poured: the consolation lay in that very certainty, where the ground at your feet puffed into clouds or splashed one’s puttees brown. Days and days of rain during the monsoon season – that was in the order of things. Weeks and weeks of blaze in the dry season – that was decreed in tablets of stone, no doubt the property of the Devil. Inside, in either season, all was shuttered gloom.

In England, all is shifting sands. The weather is mild and muddling. It is not a climate one can hammer a post into, or pin like a butterfly. Because I had expected the spring of the poets – yellow flowers underfoot and blue sky above, et cetera – it rained and rained. The month of March was bedraggled, not crisp. Ah, but then the blossom! Surely that would not disappoint! The cottage has a fine little orchard, with a venerable crab-apple whose delicately tinted flowers I awaited with all the anticipation of a little boy for his birthday; two William pear; a mossed Cox; and that queen of fruits, the damson (three of her). As for the humble whitethorn – how I had dreamed of seeing the lines of lace spread as if by maids for bleaching on the soft green hills, or woven about a small meadow, in which the wild daffodils, the violets, the cuckoo-flowers and the simple daisies are strung by glittering cobwebs each soft morning, that the most jaded and withered soul feels the sap rise, and the presence of the ineffable Oneness breathe all about him!

Alas, no sooner had my little orchard so rejoiced, and the mild spring air fluttered those tiny pale frocks, than Nature undid her finest handiwork with sharp glinting scissors and a malignant sense of timing that makes humanity’s efforts look amateurish. My first year home, and England’s fruit crops were ruined by the cruellest of late frosts. The slow ripening of apples and pears I had conjured up so often was not to be – certainly not with that glorious abundance one’s day-dreams favour under the sluggish fans of Bengal.

How much more was to be withered and changed in that year, and for ever, I could hardly have imagined when we set out up Louzy Hill to the barrow mound that July morning of 1914, the hay-stubble still sopping from the previous night’s storm: the Squire striding off in the lead, and we straggled out like Stanley’s porters
behind.
For I had come to involve myself in this local adventure, this delving back into memories safely other than my own, and decidedly older, in a spirit of retreat from more pressing demands on my soul. This is probably true of the majority of our actions, but whether this blights them in some way – well, this is not a work of moral philosophy. Instead, let the episode I am going to relate stand in at this point. Now I am not of Carlyle’s opinion, that something known can ever become ‘transparent’, and so surveyable
in toto
; but the affair of Percy Cullurne, an affair perhaps only achieving its tragic climax much more recently (all in good time, dear reader), continues to exert its uncomfortable presence upon me, like a moral truth struggling to be relieved of its opaque skin.

That first morning, with mist still on the river and dreams hardly banished, we walked slowly up the scarp in single file – and the last of us reached the base of the mound as the church clock rang the quarter of some balefully early hour. The Squire, however, was already clambering up the barrow’s side. We remained at the base as instructed, while he stood on the top and ceremonially swung his pick into the wet grass. This decisive action did not have the outcome he had intended. The rain had been of a heavy type that merely rolls away without penetrating parched soil beyond the first inch or so. The Squire’s wide frame jolted, and there was a dull thud. A second attack, and this time the fine early-morning air vibrated to a sharp report which elicited a single word, ‘flint’, from one of the more rueful amongst us. The Squire was dressed in his Homburg hat and a snappy knee-length twill which flapped and muddied itself as he tore at the turf: a sight I will not easily forget, as of some giant underworld God eager to return to his dismal mansion – or of a dwarf scalping and braining some huge submerged Divinity, stuck fast in immemorial sleep.

Its flesh impacted by thousands of generations of grasses and flowers, by the sheer peaceable weight of undisturbed being, it took time for the metal to loosen it sufficiently to dig, but eventually the barrow began to appear on the spade in small chunks bristling with tussocks, irreverently reminding me of the military moustaches sported by colonels in Chittagong. We stood around the base a little sheepishly while the ‘Chief’ (as I liked to think of him) grunted and groaned, cursing every now and again
in
his own intimate fashion, and adjusting his pince-nez with a delicacy not suited to the occasion. We were, I have to say, a motley crew, consisting of ‘Marlers’ Trevick, the strapping head gardener at the Manor; Ernest, the pale schoolteacher; Allun, the chauffeur from Cardiff; Terence Brinn, a small lad with big ears; Tom Sedgwick, the leathery forester; and Dart, the blacksmith’s assistant with flared nostrils and decidedly undarting intelligence. One could hope for no better at the approach of harvest.

When the Squire had made sufficient disorder of the smooth grassy crown, he gave us a thumbs-up and the excavation began in earnest. It was very slippery and there was barely room for all of us and our hacking picks and spades. I would go so far as to say it was dangerous – but danger was what I had wanted all along. For a whole morning I thought of nothing but how to avoid flying metal and the discomfort of aching arms. After lunch it began to rain again in slanting gusts across the downs, and it was my duty to hold two umbrellas up, in a feeble attempt to keep the diggers dry. I am not the first to notice how much more difficult it is to hold an umbrella when stationary, than when scurrying across a city.

But loud, dirty Chittagong was far from my thoughts. I was in the midst of a rolling ocean of chalk, the rain had unstoppered all the secreted perfumes of summer, my legs were sodden at the backs of the knees, and I was happy in my task. For task it was. I was as far from any desk and the vile clatter of an office, as from caring whether we flung up gold or rabbits. The point was to work with limbs and an empty mind. Or a mind full only of the great immediacies: the sun and the wind and the earth.

To breathe, to breathe deep of the biscuit scent of rain-swept barley, shuddering reluctantly at every gust! Or of the sweet richness of the vast hay-stack, thatched golden against the shadowy trees! What other sensations more likely to bring a fever of longing to the far-flung servant in some foul and sweaty imperial post, than these reminders of home, and of gentler seasons? For England is so very gentle, compared to the rest of her Empire. That is, the England of forest and stream, of meadow and vale and rolling downland. There her soft breath wafts over us, along with the tinkles of sheep and the high thudding bells of the ancient churches, marking a slower time than that of the outer world of power and striving: a slow pulse which seemed to me then, standing on that high place, eternally beating.

Alas, that we were not more vigilant!

All that week we chopped and sliced, flinging up nothing more enticing than sleek flints of purely natural ancestry. Butterflies, as if dazed by the sudden removal of a favourite haunt, dallied above our heads and Ernest, the schoolteacher, his little moustache wet with exertion, managed to net an Admiral that blazed in his chloroform bottle like a blown coal. The breezes were cool, and the bread and cheese were as fine as the finest dish up there on that scarp, flavoured by hunger and fresh air. I cannot pretend to have contributed much – my arthritis saw to that – but I did my utmost. I think it was that week, or perhaps the week after, that Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Anyway, it did not matter. We had penetrated five feet, the barrow appeared to have sagged in the middle, we had scoured every inch of spill: I was exhausted, but happy. A liveliness had entered my life; the clouds had begun to disperse; I walked, I might say, with the hint of a spring in my step.

In case the reader feels this to be an unwarranted banishment of melancholy, coming as it did on the eve of wider catastrophe, then let me say that I have noticed eves of great things to be often so lineated. We all expected war. The whole village was buzzing with the expectation of it. But it was still not upon us, and none of us had any idea what form it would take. The world demands things of us, it exacts from us its daily toll of fret and grief, but when it takes it upon itself to swagger, to swell into a grander key, to thrust our petty wants aside and make us chorus War, then we sit and wait: we are suspended for a minute; we are unburdened and happy.

And let me say as well that this was the first time since I was a boy that the crack of a book’s spine had not interrupted the day’s pleasures. Up there on that high mound, I saw nothing but fields and copses stretching away to infinity under the graze of sheep and sun; heard nothing but the murmur of voices, the odd grunt, the wood pigeons purring in the nearby copse, the satisfying splice of the spades keeping their own natural rhythm; felt nothing but the smooth wood handle of my trowel vibrating to the ceaselessly changing resistances of the chalk beneath me. Now I understood that calm certitude the farm-labourer must feel when the job in hand is immediate and clear and devoid of words, that intimate contact with the ancient practices of our race, derided by
the
city dweller with his insatiable hunger for the new. Never mind that we were seeking treasure, seeking to embody the old village legend of lost riches, searched for still, so it was said, by the ghost of a long-dead shepherd swinging his lantern: for myself, it was a task related to the immemorial tasks of the fields about us, some filled with harvesters and loaded wains, others flecked only with sheep and their lonely flesh-and-blood masters.

No doubt we were microscopic in the great order of things: the soil changed colour on the day the Germans violated Belgian neutrality. It was a sign, apparently, that something, perhaps wooden, had rotted there. The Squire stood and wiped his pince-nez on a bright red ’kerchief, and cautioned us to proceed carefully. He replaced the spectacles on his nose with a great sigh of satisfaction, looking up at the cloudless August sky as if something had been answered from that quarter.

Then a moment of absolute peace ensued, a pause in which everyone present settled into stillness, our trowels and spades motionless, our heads bowed. Over the scarps and vales came the tinkle of sheep-bells, the far shouts of thistle-pulling labourers, the delirious trill of a high lark. The Cabbage Whites and Common Blues fluttered about our heads so close we could almost hear their papery wings. Even Dart, slow, blunt Dart, wiping his nose, appeared aware of the moment’s portentousness. Only the odd creak of a leather boot and young Tom Sedgwick’s wheezes served to remind us of our corporeal reality.

That evening the Vicar came round (the Rectory dwarfs my cottage) and over a glass of sherry stressed the teleological nature of ‘this Slav business’, looking upon it as some kind of cod-liver oil for the moral order. He bestowed himself in my old rocking-chair, squeaking it frightfully as he consumed at least a quarter of my sherry, and all but flung himself to the floor at the peak of his oration. It was only on the following morning, joining the others on the barrow, that I heard the inevitable – we started earlier than the newspaper boy, and in those days before the wireless Ulverton was still a refuge from the world of affairs. It was said jovially that a certain old shepherd by the name of Flower, living in a far-flung hut to the north of the village, and only coming in once a week for his provisions, was the last man in England to know we were at war. I felt envious of the fellow.

That morning, then, there was a curious mixture of the
subdued
and the excited amongst us. It seemed only fitting that this was the day of the first find. ‘Marlers’ Trevick suddenly yelped just before dusk in a manner that set the rooks off cawing in the nearby clump of elms. The Squire scrambled down (we had by now a fairly impressive depression) and bent over the spot at which Marlers was jabbing a thick forefinger. A small edge of something glinted in the sun.