Читать книгу England have my Bones - T. H. White - Страница 25

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It was a wrench to come back, in one’s conscious mind, but perhaps subconsciously a kind of ease. One gives in to coming home, and it is right to know where one lives. That is the trouble with the theoretician: he knows how he thinks, but not where he is. It is salutary to have many contacts with the world about one: not only with people, but also with the trees which bower the place where one has left one’s car, with the interests and occupations of the place itself, with its history. I am an individual, living my curious life according to certain lights: but so also is every place I set my foot in, a thing infinitely older and more packed with history than myself, a thing from which one can draw interest and information. The town dweller fuddles through Fleet Street without the faintest idea of its individuality. Not so the countryman. Old Pat, uneducated though he may be, is interested, expanded, completed by his knowledge that a gibbet stood at this corner, where perhaps Lord Beaverbrook does not even know what people passed through Ludgate. It is a kind of humanity, a contact with one’s fellow men, even if dead. If they are men who lived ten hundred years ago, they are those who have left their impression on England. They turn one’s eyes outward.

I drive through the Shire at a good speed, but it is seldom a question only of speed. There are the crops to think about, and how they are doing, but also there are the old people who made the place what it is. It is not a reactionary interest. I seldom think back purely for the pleasure of reminiscence. I think of the Mad Hatter of Shireham, who lived first on bran, water and turnip tops (at a cost of ¾d. a week) and finally on a simple diet of dock leaves and grass, not because he is an interesting antiquity, but because he had his own effect on the place I am in. The place develops, plunges into the future, because of him and me. He had a sackcloth suit, built his own hut, preached, meditated, saw “visions of the Paradise of God” while digging his parsnips, was an astrologer, a doctor with 120 patients, and a witch. He was imprisoned at Clerkenwell, without any food at all, until a dog, on a kind thought, brought him a bit of bread. He was a haberdasher of hats at Butterbury, but he would pray behind the counter. He sold everything to give to the poor, after he had been a soldier, a vegetarian, a Quaker, a hermit, an author, a haberdasher, a doctor, and a wise man. Eventually they called him The Mad Hatter; and he gave birth of a hero of Alice in Wonderland.