from Venture, September–December 1966
PLACES
There was once a Wiltshire gardener who was given a piece of land to clear. He worked at his accustomed pace—the slow pace of the true countryman, which can be kept up all day and accomplish absolutely nothing. But the land belonged to the vicar, who kept an eye on him and urged him on. At last he had finished and the vicar congratulated him.
'You have done well, my man,' he said, 'with God's help.'
The gardener spat on his spade.
'You should have seen this place, Vicar,' he said, 'when God had it to Hisself.'
It is a long time since God had Wiltshire to Himself. For the last five thousand years, we Wiltshiremen have plodded on, and He, we must suppose, has always added His invisible assistance—though of late years, in view of some of our activities, it may not have been so readily granted. Certainly, when He was alone here, the place was very different. The central structure of chalk down was covered with heather and scrub, and the valleys choked with trees, undergrowth and swamp. Since then, man's slow tread and slow work have changed everything. We have no untouched nature. What we call 'nature' in this country is something so lived-in, so brushed and combed, that it is hardly to be distinguished from a garden or park. Five thousand years of grazing has carpeted our downs with a short and perfect turf. Even the roots of the original flora have rotted away, and we can restore the natural vegetation to the mind's eye only by an elaborate pollen analysis. The rivers are cleared of weeds, and cultivation stretches to the edge of either bank. Some people think that our small patches of forest are remaining portions of unspoiled nature, but they deceive themselves. Savernake Forest, for example, has been tended by woodsmen for eight hundred years. It is a beautiful forest, of course, but not a natural one. It is divided geometrically by rides and planted avenues. Trees that fall do not rot; they are cut up and carted away for firewood. Even the clumps of trees that stand so elegantly here and there on the downs are the work of eighteenth-century landscape artists.
The elm trees that seem so natural a backing to a grey village church are not indigenous. They were brought here by the Romans eighteen hundred years ago, so that they might train their vines on them according to the precepts of Virgil. The vines did not take, but the elms remained. So did that most decorative bird, the pheasant, which they brought with them to strut ornamentally in the courtyards of their villas. So did Roman blood, since the legions occupied the land for more than three centuries. Roman blood was mongrel enough, especially that of legions raised in every part of the empire. We—Celt, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman—are even more mongrel than they were. To be English—and more specifically, Wiltshire—is to speak English and be used to English ways, nothing more.
What, then, makes Wiltshire different from anywhere else? Why do I, who could live anywhere, choose to go on living here? I believe the answer is that Wiltshire has a particularly ancient and mysterious history that has left its mark in every corner. Almost every question we ask about that history goes unanswered, and tantalizes. The Romans seem modern, compared with the nameless tribes, nations, empires, that rose and fell here before Claudius Caesar conquered the land. It is evident that Stonehenge and Avebury were centres of wide influence and that those who designed them controlled a vast labour force. There must have been a kingdom here, but no one knows the king's name or even what language his people spoke. Silbury Hill may be his grave or cenotaph—perhaps literally his pyramid—but no one knows. If we ever find his body it will be burnt fragments of bone in an earthern pot, and we shall be little wiser than before. Of course there are names attached to places, but they only tantalize again: Wayland's Smithy and Wansdyke refer not to men but gods. The whole land is seamed and furrowed with ditches, erupts with grassy forts and is scattered with the mounds of enigmatic graves.
I do not wish to exaggerate my interest in prehistory. Everyone has heard of Stonehenge; yet it is true that only after you have spent a liftime in Wiltshire do you come to some sense of the richness of event, the subtlety of change and the astonishing age of everything. I could show you a school that was founded only a hundred years ago yet has on its grounds a mound said to be the grave of Merlin.
I could take you to a certain old house, and I believe you would exclaim at its gabled quaintness. You might be sorry to see how a road only a few centuries old lies between it and a river; and how a still more modern road has severed the house from its garden and thrown it back on itself to brood on the encroachment behind a high wall. But then I should tell you what no tourist would have the time to discover: there is another road, that runs at right angles to the others, though it is invisible. It comes up from the river and goes straight under the foundations of the old house. It is the track along which the stone was hauled from Wales—perhaps about 1400 BC, when nameless people were rebuilding Stonehenge. This is antiquity on a time scale to compete with Egypt.
Or I could show you the remains of the castle that William the Conqueror built at Old Sarum—inside an Iron Age fort that is inside a Bronze Age one. I could give you a drink in the inn outside the fort, which is still called the Old Castle Inn, though the castle itself was abandoned in the sixteenth century. The Romans built a town near the fort, but it vanished until only the other day, when Salisbury dug drains for a new housing estate and rediscovered Sorbiodunum.
I could take you to Grovely Wood, to a spot known only to three or four people, where you can pick Roman coins out of the mould if you care to take the trouble. In the middle of that wood is a block of sandstone that must have come a long way—and not surprisingly, since it is all that is left above ground of a Roman temple. Yet perhaps the temple has left something behind that is even more enduring than sandstone; for once a year, the young people of the nearby parish go to the woods to have fun and gather green boughs, and come back in procession shouting 'Grovely! Grovely! Grovely!' Nobody knows why, or what 'Grovely' means; but if they had a voice, I think the burnt bones in the buried pots could tell us.
I must be careful not to make Wiltshire sound like a graveyard; yet if I am to explain my own relationship with the county I must dwell on its antiquity. For me the land had the wrinkled complexity and austere beauty of an ancient face. Certainly it has other beauty too—a width of sky over the downs, a glitter of water, green escarpments, lush water meadows, buildings that seem to grow naturally out of the earth itself. There are the flowers too. Some of them are very rare; and I know one medieval house where you have to be a friend of the family before they will let you into a small wood to see a flower that grows nowhere else in the whole world. It is a beautiful flower as well as a unique one; and alas, I must neither name nor describe it, since I have given my word not to.
We have our wild orchids; and since in this last century we have become aware belatedly of how precious a heritage our flowers are, when the rare ones flower, volunteers stand guard over them. It is an amiable characteristic of the English, this love of flowers; and it is not without significance that we fought our bloodiest dynastic war under the banner of the white or red rose. So my Wiltshire life is, and has been, flowery. I remember the acres of bluebells that look like woodland lakes, anemones and cowslips, wild daffodils, the white daises of a cathedral close, or banks of purple loosestrife hanging over and almost eclipsing the dazzle of a river. Wiltshire has no more flowers than any other part of England; but it is in Wiltshire that I have seen them—buttercups and scabious on the short downland turf, harebells so delicate the weight of a bee will break them, purple orchids that seem to have a private access to the darkness under the mould.
Its history and its flowers seem insufficient reason for living in Wiltshire, and I do not think they can attract tourists. Tourists will not see what I see, for it is invisible. They will not clamber through the woods to find an orchid or a ruin. They will see Stonehenge in daylight with a guide, not at midnight with clouds scudding across a full moon. They will see Salisbury Close and perhaps admire it. They cannot enter every house in turn, or know the astonishing history of each, or the ghost stories that are never written down. They will find us mild, and the country mild. We are not exotic or grand. We have no Yosemite, no Grand Canyon. We have kingfishers, not cardinals; sparrows, not birds of paradise. The airfields and army camps spread. The base at Porton denies it has anything to do with germ warfare—so often that nobody believes it.
I cannot help it if tourists are cheated by travel photographs into thinking that Wiltshire is nothing but greenery, whitewash and thatch, grey stone churches, trout streams and downs and ancient monuments. Wiltshire is a place where most people live because they have to, like all people everywhere. If you ever see morris dancing here, it will be performed by eccentric doctors, university lecturers, solicitors. The few genuine country people left find the dancing incomprehensible and funny. No photograph will reveal the defects we share with you in your own hometown—the bunched telephone wires, road signs, advertisements. It will concentrate on the quaint. It will have discovered someone who can pass for a countryman and will have posed him outside a carefully selected pub, on a fake settle, with a mug of beer in his hand. When the photograph is of whitewashed cottages, the caption will not tell you that these cottages have been taken over by generals, writers, actors and the like, while the villagers live in the housing estates that are more sanitary but wholly unphotogenic.
The most abiding reason why I have lived in Wiltshire for half a century is the simplest of all. Twenty-seven years ago I was walking along a road near my home. I came on an American G.I. He had walked out of his camp to get away from the unbearable closeness of his buddies. He stood under a green bough and looked across the open fields to the downs. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders were hunched. A fine perpetual drizzle fell through the trees so that the downs were no more than a grey shadow; and if a slight breeze veered toward us it brought an almost imperceptible dampness to lie close on the skin. We fell into talk, and I found that he was desperate to get back to the Bronx. This desperation—and anyone who has fought in a war will recognize it—was so strong that he was nearly sick, hunched glumly, and swallowing now and then. It would not have taken much to add tears to the dampness on his cheeks. He described Wiltshire briefly and pungently, and I forgave him at once. For I too was on leave and had just crossed the dangerous Atlantic from New York, my heart like
—a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot.
I remembered very well my own desperate longing, and how the thought of Wiltshire when I was in New York had set me swallowing hard and spitting at Manhattan like a cat. Now I was expecting on the morrow to go off to some damned place—no matter how interesting or famous—some damned place or other; but for the moment I was in grey, drizzly Wiltshire, and at home.
