Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 3

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In this island there are certain localities predestined by Providence for the permanent habitation of birds, beasts and men, since the life of all three is conditioned by the neighbourhood of water. Chaddesbourne D’Abitot, in the county of Worcester, is one of these. Here the Roman, pushing his conquest through primeval Arden to the West, where his wild foe hid, found his progress checked by the marshy confluence of Stour and Severn. Beyond either stream formidable hills looked down on the matted forest through which he had hacked and consolidated his way; between him and these a network of clear rivulets, gushing from the gravel-beds of the Clents, dispersed themselves in impenetrable morasses; and there, on a shelf of higher ground (since the water was sweet and his front immune from surprise) he felled a wide clearing in the wood of scrub oak, established a post, and paused to consider the planning of bridge-head and causeway.

Of the Roman’s earthworks, if such were made, no traces remain: those hills catch the south-west rain; and the falling streams (to this day) are subject to sudden floods. Even the causeway which doubtless gave passage dry-shod to the shallows (at the place now called Stourford) lies sunk beneath fathom on fathom of tawny alluvium. Yet one block of hewn stone, foreign in texture, which the legionaries proudly erected to mark one more dogged mile on the road to Wroxeter, survived—who knows how?—the assaults of flood and the slow teeth of time. It lay there still—like those other alien boulders shed from the track of the Arenig glacier—five hundred years later, when another wave of invasion broke and was checked on the same obstinate barrier. Long-haired Saxons, men of the Hwiccans, found it and came to stare in ignorance at its legend. These people were forest-folk; the woods held no fears for them; the red loam from which the woods sprung was not too stiff for their ploughs; and a thane whose name is forgotten (though that of his sovereign Offa has clung to the hill called Uffdown) found the soil and the water to his liking, and set up a long stockade on the brink of the stream in the clearing the Romans had made. Chad, the Mercian bishop, on a journey from Lichfield to Winchcombe, passed that way and blessed the anonymous thane’s habitation; so the place, which was now an established settlement, took the name of Chad’s Bourne to honour his sanctity. By the spring where this saint had preached, a rude shrine arose, into whose foundations—since rock was scarce in that clayey land—some careful builder imbedded the Roman milestone; and soon afterwards (for time began to move swiftly now) a Norman, kin to that D’Abitot whose greed made his name anathema in monkish ears—Hight thou Urse? On thee lie Goddes curse!—replaced the oaken structure by a square tower of stone with lancet windows (convenient, at a pinch, for bowmen) and a round arch heavily indented with dog’s-tooth carving—in atonement, perhaps, for Urse’s wolfish ways, but with a weather eye on the Welsh always crouched beyond Severn.

Other towers the D’Abitots reared to enforce their dominion; but their stones, less durable than the hated name, have vanished. One remnant persists; a low mound, hardly perceived, in the field still known as Tump Piece, to the north of Chaddesbourne Hall, the seat, for the last four hundred years, of the Ombersley family, the Lords of the Manor and hereditary squires of the village. Of the D’Abitots, indeed, no material trace remains at Chaddesbourne save the broken effigy of one prostrate crusader set upright with crossed knees in the northern transept of the church. For however sternly the D’Abitots may have established themselves—and in Domesday “Guy D’Abitot holds Chadsborn for a knight’s fee with two mills and a fishery”—time has given the dispossessed a sure revenge. The Norman’s dominion passed like a brief and violent dream. Though his blood (and that of the Roman and Brython, for that matter) persists, it has certainly suffered ample dilutions. On the monuments of the church, on the humbler stones of the graveyard, on the tablet which commemorates the fallen of the Boer War, a small group of names, Saxon all—Bunt, Hackett, Lydgate, Sheppy, Ombersley—recurs and preponderates: it would almost seem that no stranger had ever died there. And since the spirit of a place takes its colour and shape from the dreams of its dead no less than from the thoughts of its living, the soul of Chaddesbourne, sustained by such continuity of habitation and race, seems peculiarly, richly English.

Its spiritual meridian runs straight as a wood-pigeon’s flight betwixt Piers Plowman’s Cleobury and Shakespeare’s Stratford; if the line do not cut the precise and physical heart of England, it is as near as makes little matter. Fifty miles from the Dyke which Offa heaped to keep out the Welsh, and twenty within that shadowy limit beyond which no nightingale sings, Chaddesbourne D’Abitot lies lost (or found with difficulty) in a region of moated farmsteads and blossomed orchards, of straw-thatch and half-timber, of tawny-sanded brooks feeding one great river, of pastures perpetually green in seasons of drought and red-clodded arable, of unruly hawthorn hedgerows and minty ditches, of blowing banks afire with gorse and foxy coverts smelling of autumnal leaf-mould, of isolated oaks which have groaned in the wind since Rosalind roamed Arden and elms that sprang, folk say, from the Roman’s budding vine-poles, yet appear, by adoption, as autochthonous as the oaks themselves.

And all this store of beauties, too humble, too intimate, too unspectacular, too familiar, perhaps, to be noticed by those to whose condition of life they are as essential and natural as the atmosphere in which their scents are suspended, are washed, enveloped and made magical by the ebb and flow of limpid Atlantic air, magnificently roofed by the pageant of Atlantic clouds searching the tidal basin of Severn as though, indeed, it were still a part of their marine dominion—save only when the wind sets northerly, blowing over the lip of the Black Country’s smoking cauldron. Then the landscape suddenly fades, the Atlantic air loses its limpidness; the sky droops duskily on woods and fields, its density seems to flatten the very contours of the land. “It’s the blight,” people say. “When the wind shifts it’ll clear.” And the wind shifts sure enough, for here the south-west is lord, and colour shines out anew on wood and field and hedgerow.

Paradoxically, it is the very neighbourhood of those smoke-breeding cities—with North Bromwich and Wolverbury as chiefs—which has blessed Chaddesbourne D’Abitot with a happy obscurity, which has allowed it, as I say, to lie lost. For where once the main tides of human commerce set steadily westward to the ford of Severn, during the last hundred years the iron magnet has swung them eastward. Severn itself is no longer a waterway, nor the road which the Romans made and the Saxon followed a channel of trade. The freight-trains of hardware go clanking and roaring, by day and by night, through a gap in the hills five miles eastward of Chaddesbourne village; the main road South, with its metal core of Shropshire granite and its facing of Trinidad pitch, carries perpetually whirring wheels shod with tropical rubber an equal distance to the West; and neither of these two impetuous streams takes heed of Chaddesbourne, which sleeps in the silence midway between them like a green stagnant pool. Even the solitary signpost which stands where the metal road cuts the track that still links it with Bromsberrow market bears a name scarcely legible, and the grass-grown surface of the lane itself, together with its hesitating contortions, leads the traveller who follows it to fear that he may find himself mired in the cul-de-sac of some farmyard. In short stretches the lane assumes a promising dignity, with wide verges of grass flanked by oaks that resemble an avenue preparing the eyes for the sight of some stately mansion. Overhead the oak-branches meet and are interwoven: a squirrel might cross and recross for a mile without touching the ground. Very possibly a squirrel (and a red one at that) may be seen, his erect tail feathered with light, or be heard, impatiently chattering on a bough that swings with his weight, or, more likely still, a white-waistcoated stoat may halt and peer from the centre of the track with his kittenish face. But when promise of an end seems highest the lane degenerates again into a straight burrow running eternally between thickets of hazel and holly. It is with a gasp of surprise, if not of awe, that one emerges from this green tunnel to see, from a sudden brow, a vista of incredible magnificence: all the heaped hills of Shropshire and Wales from the Holy Mountain to Abdon Burf—so remote as to seem part of the sky rather than of the earth. Severn, slinking between her undercut banks of marl, lies sunk in the green middle-distance, unheard and invisible; but right at the traveller’s feet, so startlingly near as to appear larger than natural, spreads the cluster of dwellings, with its mysterious complement of human sorrows and joys, loves and hates, aspirations and despairs, which is called Chaddesbourne D’Abitot.

From this viewpoint, where the village no less than the traveller is caught, so to speak, unawares, its outward shape may be examined with a leisurely detachment. It is seen to consist of less than a score of cottages, for the most part half-timbered and thatched, with tall chimneys of brick to carry their smoke through the eddying air, disposed at unequal intervals on either side of a single street. At one end of the street a short avenue of rook-haunted elms approaches the Hall, a rectangular mass of masonry impressively masked by a pedimented Georgian façade and portico. When winter thins the shrubberies, curious eyes may catch a glimpse of a paved terrace and the gleam of a sheet of formal water. At the opposite end of the street, where another clump of elms holds a second rookery, stands the church, with Guy D’Abitot’s Norman tower of tawny sandstone commanding a more fragile nave and transepts of Late Perpendicular; and hard by, the Vicarage, mid-Victorian Gothic, slate-roofed, and mercifully concealed by shrubberies of laurel and overcrowded conifers of the kind called “ornamental.”

Between these two poles of Church and State, embraced, as it were, by the magnetic field which they generate, lies the domain of the commonalty. Save in the midst of the village—where the bakery, the butcher’s and grocer’s shops, the post-office (which also sells sweets), the village hall, the smithy and the surgery, together with two or three prim, spinsterly dwellings of a minor gentility, create a nucleus of relatively modern brick about cross-roads dominated by the “Ombersley Arms,” whose dilapidated stables proclaim its former state as a “posting-house,” the cottages of Chaddesbourne show a typical individuality. Though they compose the village street they appear to retire from it. No single one resembles another—save in a general air of irregularity and disrepair—and each is separated from the road and its neighbours by gardens which have nothing in common but the pride and ingenuity with which they are tilled and embellished and the uniform latched gates at which, when smoke goes up straight and the rooks fly home on a summer evening, a man, having dug his potatoes, may stand in his shirt-sleeves and gossip at his ease. With their thatched roofs and mossy pathways, their porches and arbours entwined with sweet honeysuckle and glowing clematis, their old-fashioned roses and casual sweet-williams, each and all make “a picture” of idyllic peace to bring tears to enraptured eyes. That most of the thatched roofs leak when rain pours, that the bedroom windows are sealed hermetically by rot or by ivy, that the living-rooms are unlighted and paved with damp-sweating stone, that the water bucketed from their picturesque well-heads is reasonably suspect, that indoor sanitation is unknown to them, and that the agricultural wage is fixed in those parts at thirty shillings a week, are circumstances that do not enter into the calculations of a casual sentimental observer of rural England. For the Chaddesbourne villagers, as well as their cottages, are “unspoiled.” The women, who live to a great age, wear faded sunbonnets and have faces like wrinkled pippins; the little girls curtsy; the older men actually touch their caps when a motor-car passes. They vote ... but who knows how they vote? That is the only fly of suspicion in the emollient which seems spread with such satisfying smoothness over the surface of this sweetly old-fashioned spot, this fragment of an old-English landscape by Nature after David Cox, compactly caught and preserved within the silver snare of the Chaddesbourne brook. Over this little world, for a period of three-score years, Roger Ombersley ruled, a benevolent autocrat, till, having neglected a winter bronchitis, he took to his bed and died within forty-eight hours, and Miles Ombersley, his son, reigned in his stead.