Читать книгу A Traveller’s Life - Eric Newby - Страница 11

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.

A. H. Clough, Say Not the Struggle

Naught Availeth

In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and me on the memorable visit to Godshill)and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Blériot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the Gaumont British Film News. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals.

The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy pekinese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common.

‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im,’ was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she’ being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady’s gravelly voice, having put off doing so until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings.

Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life.

The morning of our departure from Three Ther Mansions was a fine one. We were seen off by the head porter of the flats – gratuity – and by Ellen, the cook/housekeeper, who had taken Mrs George’s place in a resident capacity. At that time Ellen was probably in her late forties. She had smooth black hair parted down the middle with some white strands in it, a pale face and a rather forbidding, if not sinister, appearance – perhaps secretive is more appropriate; in retrospect I think what she most resembled was a female poisoner – and she was stiff, and starchy, or at least her aprons were starchy. In spite of her apparent grimness or strangeness or secretiveness Ellen was always very kind to me, especially when my parents were away, and I think that when they returned she resented their presence.

I found Ellen disturbing in a way which I could not have explained to her or to anyone else, not even to myself. Sometimes I used to ask her to take me in her lap and cuddle me. If she did, and sometimes I would have to ask her several times before she agreed, she would fondle me in a detached, offhand way that made me all the more determined to make her love me, although I did not really love her; but I was never successful.

Whether it was the Napier with the gleaming brass-framed windscreen, or the much more modest Citroën which succeeded it at about this time, whatever we were travelling in was a pretty close fit for the five of us, even with the picnic baskets and our overnight suitcases strapped on the carrier at the back. (I can’t remember which it was and anyone else who would know, or care, is dead.)

There was Mr Lewington, the chauffeur from around the corner in Fanny Road, who was driving us down to Devonshire and then bringing the car back to London – all attempts by my father and mother to learn to drive themselves had been attended by what might quite easily have been fatal results (my father had demolished the façade of a garage; my mother had left the road on Barnes Common and travelled some distance overland before coming to a halt). There was my father who sat next to him, from which position he was better able to keep an eye on the behaviour of other road users, pedestrian or otherwise, and if necessary stand up and rebuke them for some actual or imagined infringement of the rules of the road; and in the back, besides myself, there was my mother and Kathleen, usually known as Kathy, a sweet girl of fifteen or so with long auburn hair down to her waist who had replaced Lily and now ‘helped out’ with such chores as taking me to school. Kathy wore ordinary clothes. My mother had given up any high-falutin’ ideas about uniforms when Lily left and anyway I was now much too old to have a real nurse. Kathy was as excited about the trip as I was, never having been out of London before. There we sat with a travelling rug over our knees made from what looked like a leopard skin but was really a very costly length of woollen material from Paris, bought by my father with the intention of making from it a model coat, but pinched by my mother who had it made into a rug. In front of us was a second windscreen, a sheet of metal-framed glass, that would be as lethal if shattered in an accident as the front one would be, that could be folded down to form a picnic table when the machine was at rest. There was no such thing as safety glass in common use. In winter it was jolly cold in our open motors, even with the ‘lid’ up, and then everyone except the driver and me, because my legs were too short, was provided with what were known as Glastonbury Muffs, huge boots lined with sheepskin, each holding two feet. If it was really cold these boots had a sort of pocket in them which could be used as a receptacle for a hot water bottle; but I do not believe we ever went motoring with hot water bottles.

Branscombe was just over a hundred and fifty miles from Barnes by the direct route. Usually, when travelling with my father, we did not follow the direct route, he being as curious about what lay on either side of the direct route to anywhere as I myself was to be, years later. At Staines, we got down to admire the river and talk to a waterman of my father’s acquaintance at one of the boathouses. (He knew every waterman of any consequence between Putney and Henley.) At a place called Virginia Water we visited some exciting ruins brought all the way from Leptis Magna in Tripoli, and an even more exciting waterfall full of enormous rocks.

Then we drove on between miles of rhododendrons and across commons (over which, years later, in 1940, I would crawl on all fours armed to the teeth with ‘token’ wooden weapons because all the real ones had been taken away to give to the ‘real’ army after Dunkirk), my father with his quarter-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey ‘Touring’ Map at the ready to deal with any navigational problems and, as a member of the Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Association, with both badges on the front of his motor car (the RAC’s was grander), returning the salutes of the patrolmen of both organizations (according to whose area we were passing through), men with wind-battered faces, wearing breeches and leather gaiters, who were either mounted on motor-cycle combinations or, in some more rural parts, on pedal cycles. If they failed to salute, members were advised to stop them and ask the reason why.

Among the interesting things we saw on this early June morning was a nasty accident, with splintered windscreens and lots of blood, which, although Lewington slowed down so that we could have a better view, I was not allowed to see properly, my head being turned the other way by Kathy, much to my disappointment. We also saw traction engines and enormous machines called Foden lorries, fuelled with coal and belching steam and smoke and red hot cinders; and a ‘police trap’, set up by a couple of constables armed with stop-watches, one of whom had emerged from a hedgerow in which he had been lurking to flag down a luckless motorist for ‘speeding’. Until November 1931, the speed limit in Britain for all motor vehicles was officially twenty miles an hour. And we saw lots of tramps, most of them, like us, heading west, one of them a diminutive elderly man wearing a bowler hat and a wing collar, who was helping his equally elderly wife to push a very old-fashioned, high-wheeled perambulator with all their possessions in it along the road. And once we saw a team of huge English carthorses pulling a wagon with an enormous tree trunk on it.

At one point we came to a magic place where a road forked away from the one on which we were travelling, a place that I never forgot and was therefore subsequently able to identify, although it was years later. There, sheltered by trees was a grass-grown open space, with a number of low, barn-like buildings disposed about it. Some had slate roofs; some were thatched; some of the more important-looking ones – that might have been part of a farm – were built of cob, a mixture of clay and straw, and had enclosing walls of the same material, which were also thatched or tiled, as they had to be, otherwise they would have melted away in the rain, something I had never seen before.

And it was here, at this moment, as if to set a seal on my memory of it, a memory that would endure for the rest of my life, and embody so many feelings that I could never express, that my father half stood up in the front of the car and shouted over the top of our windscreen, ‘Hilda! Look at those buildings! How they’re built! That means we’re in the West.’ And he was right. For this was Weyhill, the Werdon Priors of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, famous for its ancient six days’ fair beginning on old Michaelmas Eve (10 October), one of the most ancient in Britain, to which a line in The Vision of Piers Ploughman, c.1360, ‘To Wy and Wynchestre I went to the fayre’, perhaps refers. Horses, sheep, cheese and hops were the principal things sold at the fair and as many as 150,000 sheep once changed hands here in a day. The second day of the fair (old Michaelmas Day) was the great hiring-day for farm servants and labourers in this part of Hampshire and the adjoining districts of Wiltshire, the carters appearing with a piece of plaited whipcord fastened in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool. For many years now I have watched the at first gradual and later the accelerated decay of these strangely beautiful buildings and, recently, I have witnessed the final destruction of the best of them.

We continued our journey across Salisbury Plain. There were sheep on every horizon now, and from time to time we passed clumps of ugly buildings. (My mother said they were military buildings left over from the war.)

There were more sheep around Stonehenge and I remember hearing the skylarks overhead, so high that I could barely see them, and running my hands over the surfaces of stones so huge that I could scarcely apprehend them. The only other visitor was a vicar in a dog-collar who had driven there with a pony and trap, and I remember thinking how much funnier we looked with our smart clothes and our shiny motor car in such a place than he did with his old suit and his rather yellow dog-collar, and his pony and trap.

A little further on we turned off the main road and followed a track that led past a number of grassy mounds, and there we had our picnic, not in the motor car using the collapsed windscreen as a picnic table but as we always did, unless it was raining, on rugs on the grass.

It was a memorable picnic, even though picnics arranged by my mother and father were always memorable. It is not just family pride that makes me say so. They really had a flair for picnics. Everyone said so.

There was a big pie, whether it was veal and ham with eggs embedded in it (not extruded through it as they are today) or pork is of no importance. I only know that like every other pie at every other picnic for which my father provided pies it had a design embossed on the crust (acorns and thistles were popular), and was the most delicious sort of juicy pie imaginable. And there was a ham, which my father had bought in case the meals at the pub at Branscombe were not always up to scratch, and an ox tongue and Stilton cheese, and lettuce, tomatoes and spring onions, and loaves of bread like cannon balls and Huntley and Palmer’s Oval Water Biscuits, and home-made mayonnaise, and Ventachellum’s Sweet Sliced Mango Chutney, and fresh fruit salad, and to drink there was Whiteway’s Dry Devonshire Cider for the grown-ups, and for me lemonade, made at home by Ellen. After which everyone except myself had ‘forty winks’.

Meanwhile I climbed one of the mounds, and looked out over an endless, undulating stretch of grass that looked like a heaving sea and reminded me, perhaps because I had eaten too much, of the real sea, also under a cloudless sky, the time we had gone to Sark by ship and my mother and I had been dreadfully sick, partly because of the heavy swell that was running, partly because we had eaten something called haricot mutton in the dining-saloon. Then, below deck, we had been ministered to by terrible-looking women dressed in black, called stewardesses, who handed us earthenware vessels a bit like chamber pots to throw up in, and who called me ‘ducks’.

While we were having the picnic, in answer to my question my father told me that the mounds, on one of which I was now standing, were really tombs and there were dead people under them and probably treasure, too. And as the one on which I was standing was already eroded on one side so that the chalk showed through I got a bit of stick and tried to dig my way into it with the intention of looking at one of my ancestors, and perhaps finding a crock of gold. However, in spite of these incentives, I soon gave up and simply sat on top of the tumulus, listening to the larks’ song rising and falling, looking out at the sheep lying close together, like white rugs on the green grass, until it was time to take to the road again.

On to Salisbury (one of my father’s detours), where we visited the cathedral, and we were taken over it by an extraordinarily enthusiastic white-haired guide. At one moment we were up under the roof with him among enormous timbers that made it seem like a forest of leaning trees; the next he was lining us up, numbering us off from right to left, and teaching us bell ringing with handbells in the vestry.

We had tea in Dorchester, then drove on into the eye of the now declining sun, with occasional entrancing views, ahead and away to the left, of the shimmering sea, in Lyme Bay. At Morecombelake we visited what looked to me like a very old factory in which local women were rolling out what looked like huge musket balls of dough on wooden tables. Put in the oven they emerged later as what are called Dorset Knobs; and my mother bought a large tin with a lovely red, white and blue label on it ornamented with towers and castles.

Not long afterwards we descended a very steep and winding road with a notice reading ‘Engage first gear’ at the top of it, and entered a pretty little seaside town at the mouth of a deep valley. This was Lyme Regis and here we were to spend the night at an inn where my father had taken rooms. Why he had chosen to do so when Branscombe was only about twelve miles away was a bit of a mystery. He may have thought we would arrive much later, allowing for punctures and mechanical breakdowns. Whatever the reason it was quite an expensive decision, but it might have been worse. I was half price and did not qualify for dinner, having eaten a large tea. I would be content with a hot drink and some Bovril sandwiches. And Lewington and Kathy would both qualify for the special terms offered for chauffeurs and servants, which included supper, bed and breakfast. Only my parents paid the full rate for their double room, dinner and breakfast.

But our arrival at Lyme Regis did not mean that it was the end of the day for me. Before it was time for bed I had already ‘done’ Lyme Regis. I had seen the studded door of the old lockup with its inadequate airholes, now incorporated in a picturesque but more modern building; I had visited a museum full of fossils and what called itself a ‘fossil depot’, where one could actually buy them, except that they were very expensive. Nevertheless, in the course of the evening, thanks to Lewington, I acquired a collection of my own. Walking along the beach after the abortive visit to the fossil depot and climbing over a number of groynes, we eventually came to some dark and crumbling cliffs. By this time of the evening they were already in shadow and made a striking contrast with the enfilade of great sandstone cliffs which stretched away beyond them towards Portland (one of them the highest of its kind in southern England), the summits of which were glowing like golden castles in the evening sunlight and would continue to do so for some time after it had departed from the remainder of the landscape. That evening, by some strange chance, perhaps because there had recently been a heavy rainstorm, fossil ammonites could be seen protruding from the stiff clay of the cliff, and by dint of some energetic scrambling, prodding with long bits of driftwood, and some stone throwing Lewington, who was young and active, managed to dislodge several fine specimens, making his blue serge chauffeur’s suit rather muddy in the process. Altogether, apart from not having been allowed to bathe when we reached Lyme Regis, from my point of view it had been a thoroughly successful day.¹

(The inn at which we stayed that night, or another very similar inn, was the scene, more than thirty years later, of a disgraceful incident in which I was myself involved. Not long after the Second World War, while on a walking holiday with a great friend along the coasts of Dorset and Devon in the depths of winter, the two of us arrived at Lyme Regis where we put up at one or other of the inns. It happened to be New Year’s Eve and, in the course of the evening, having fulfilled a lunatic ambition to visit every pub in the town, and previously weakened by having walked some twenty-five miles, we became stupendously drunk. It was as a result of this that in the early hours of the morning, being incapable of finding the light switches, we both peed down the bend in the staircase from an upper floor on to what I recall to have been the visitors’ book on the reception desk, under the impression that we were in some sort of lavatory. How we escaped detection is a miracle and a mystery only explicable by the fact that the staff of the hotel must have been revelling too.)

The next morning when I looked out of the window, Lyme Regis was more or less obliterated, filled with a chill mist that was funnelling up into it from the sea, and in spite of various local prognostications it failed to disperse before we set off.

Sitting in the back, in spite of having our own windscreen and the travelling rug, we were glad of one another’s proximity as the car groaned in bottom gear up the hill which seemed almost as steep as the one by which we had entered the previous evening, past bow-fronted buildings and more classical edifices. As we climbed above the town I had fleeting glimpses of rustic houses, partially hidden by flint walls and foliage, some of them with pretty verandahs. One house, which had a steep pitched, thatched roof that came down so low that it had to be supported by posts, looked as if it was sheltering under an over-size umbrella, and was so minute that it seemed impossible that any grown-up could enter it, let alone live in it; this was Umbrella Cottage, Lyme Regis, which still stands.

Then we left Dorset for Devon (a sign told us so), crawling along in high, open country with the headlights on, alone in the sea mist, as if we were the only living creatures in the world, apart from an occasional cluster of cattle at a hedgerow gate, or a couple of horses, their breath steaming; seeing not much else but an occasional tree, the telegraph poles as they came looming up one after the other through the mist, or the vague outline of some building, the mist clouding the windscreen so that several times Lewington had to stop, get down and clean the glass. It was mysterious and exciting. It was the kind of weather, I heard my mother tell Kathy, that one expected in ‘the West’.

We descended steeply to the River Axe, crossed it by a narrow bridge, then waited for some time at a level-crossing for what looked like a toy train when it finally appeared to emerge from the mist and chug across our path, whistling mournfully, before being swallowed up once more; then climbed to another upland where, if anything, the mist was thicker, my father busy with the map now, until suddenly he told Lewington to turn into a lane on the left that was almost invisible in such conditions.

At first it ran between hedges through the same flat, upland country, then after a little while it began to descend and all at once we were out of the mist and before us was an enchanting, arcadian prospect, so enchanting that my father ordered Lewington, who although perfectly happy to stop for a motor accident was singularly obtuse when it came to such phenomena as views, to stop, so that we might admire it further.

There was no more wind and the mist was now above us on the high ground. Far below in the bottom of a narrow, sheltered valley and in the mouths of a couple of lesser combes which contributed to it, was a long, straggling village of thatched houses from the chimneys of which smoke was rising in tall, unruffled columns. The steep sides of the valley were decked with woods that seemed to hang above it and from the trees came the sound of a thousand disputing rooks. Even as we looked the mist began to dispel from the high tops, revealing long ridges running inland.

By the time we reached the village square, if the conjunction of three small roads at the point where a general shop and a butcher’s stood could be dignified with such a description, the sun was shining from a clear sky. We had arrived at Branscombe and it was going to be a lovely day.

¹ It was in these cliffs at Black Ven, or Vein, on a coast that is the epitome of Victorian romanticism in the West, that Mary Anning, then aged twelve, the daughter of a vendor of curiosities, known as the Curi-man, in 1811 discovered in the Lower Lias (the lowest series of rocks of the Jurassic system) the first known skeleton of an ichthyosaurus, a marine reptile twenty-one feet long with a porpoise-like body, dorsal and tail fins and paddle-like limbs of the Mesozoic era that began 225,000,000 years ago and lasted for about 155,000,000 years. It took ten years to remove it from the cliff and it was acquired by the British Museum for the sum of £23. Mary Anning subsequently discovered the first known specimen of the plesiosaurus, a creature with a long neck, short tail and paddle-like limbs, and of the pterodactyl, a flying reptile having membranous wings supported by an elongated fourth digit and, if reconstructions are anything to go by, of a terrifying aspect. A painted window in her memory was put up in the church at Lyme Regis, partly subscribed for by the Geological Society of London who described her in an obituary address as ‘the handmaid of geological science’ on her untimely death at the age of forty-seven.