But today they were bound on a very different mission. They were going to Cranborne Chase.
The great sweep of land that lay south west of Sarum had always been a desolate place. Across it, nearly two thousand years before, the Romans had built the road that went to the heart of the territory of the proud Durotriges. A few small settlements had sprung up there in later Saxon times and medieval kings had hunted there. But generally speaking, the place had retained its character from prehistoric times, with a combination of forest, clearing, and bare wilderness dotted with sparse hamlets. It invited few visitors.
And yet, the Chase in recent years had become one of the most extraordinary places in England.
For in the middle of the Chase lay a great estate – some twenty-five thousand acres – recently and unexpectedly inherited by a talented man, known to history as General Pitt-Rivers.
So it came about that, in the 1880s, the people of Sarum were suddenly aware that in the empty region to the south west, something very strange was happening.
First, parts of the estate were thrown open to the public and pleasure grounds set out with picnic sites, swings and a bandstand. There were fireworks displays and hired singers; and the public was encouraged to use bicycles by the great man in order to reach these pleasures. But, in a sense, these activities were only a lure. For Pitt-Rivers had two serious missions in life. One was the pursuit of archaeology; the other was the education of the people. It was the museum he built at Cranborne Chase that was the key to it all.
Jane had never been there and Porters was eager to show her everything. He showed her where the general had found and excavated a farm of Roman times; he showed her an opened barrow, from a still earlier period. But his excitement rose to its most intense when he brought her to the latest excavation: for here, as though cut through in cross-section by a knife, lay, in all its perfection, the carefully constructed agger of the great Roman road to the south west.
“He’s found a staging post,” Porters explained, pointing to the area most recently laid bare. “He’s found drains, coins . . . a treasure trove.” His face was shining as he remembered his own more modest finds in the old water channels years before. Those had all been placed in the little museum in St Ann Street now, but the Salisbury museum was small compared to the general’s.
He led her round it as proudly as if it were his own. Painting, pottery, crafts, agricultural implements: it was a huge collection already. But it was not only the size of it that impressed Porters.
“See the way he has arranged it, Miss Shockley,” he explained. “All arranged by type so that you can see, over time, the evolution of each artefact. That is what Pitt-Rivers wants to tell the people: that Darwin was right and that species, and cultures too evolve. He wants to educate them so that they can improve themselves.”
She smiled to see him so enthusiastic.
“You believe society can improve then, Mr Porters?”
“I believe it is evolving all the time.”
She nodded. It was exactly what she wanted him to say.
For it was only as they made their way back from the wonders of Cranborne Chase that she broached the subject in her mind.
“You believe in human progress?”
“Certainly.”
“And that each generation men raise themselves a little higher, develop their gifts further?”
“I do. That is progress.”
“Does this apply to women as well as men?”
“It does.”
“Then when will society evolve sufficiently to give women the same rights and freedoms as men?”
He looked worried. Why was it, she wondered, that Porters was so full of ideas for progress, so happy to follow a visionary like Pitt-Rivers, and yet so cautious the moment he was faced with any idea that might challenge authority?
And Porters in turn thought: is she, once again, going to become wild and unpredictable and do herself harm? He tried to soothe her.
“I am in favour of some reform, yes. The property act for married women . . .”
“That allowed a married woman to keep what was hers instead of being robbed by her husband? What of it?”
“It is a start.”
“The campaign for women’s equal suffrage began over twenty years ago,” she reminded him. “Yet women have nothing. No woman has a vote. Yet ever since the Great Reform Act, the franchise for men has been extended. Why is democracy only for the male? Is this Darwin’s evolution?”
The arguments were falling out as she had planned. Though he did not know it, Porters was her guinea pig. She waited his response.
“These matters have been discussed in Parliament and refused.”
“Not quite. The bills passed their second readings. They should have been made law. But the cabinet always holds them up.”
“Yet in some areas in the north, the suffrage movement is declining among women,” he countered.
“Only because they are discouraged by the men who do nothing.”
She looked at him accusingly.
“You should take care, Miss Shockley, that you do not speak too much of this in Sarum. Dr Pankhurst who leads the movement is a man not liked in all quarters. He is a socialist and a republican you know.” For Mrs Pankhurst was second fiddle to her husband as yet.
“Florence Nightingale supported the movement, and she is neither,” Jane snapped. To her this was the final word, but to her fury he seemed unimpressed.
“I am starting a suffrage society in Sarum in two days,” she proudly told him. “And if, as you say, you believe in progress, you will support me.”
He shook his head.
“I cannot.”
She glared at him. She had been so sure that she would win the argument.
“Then, Mr Porters, I think you had better not call at the house again.”
The meeting at the White Hart Hotel was boisterous. There were people from both sides present, including the leader of the non-conformists, Mr Pye-Smith.
But the speech of the evening, which brought the hall to a hush, came from Miss Shockley.
She spoke very simply, and only about what was in her own experience.
“It is true that at an Anglican school, we will allow those of other churches to absent themselves when Anglican matters are discussed. Yet, as one who has taught, I can tell you, these children in practice are left outside in cold corridors and sometimes bullied. More often, if the truth is told, the wishes of parents are ignored and the children are given Anglican religious instruction anyway.”
And when the objection was made that the bishop himself had offered to provide a new higher grade school to give extra places, it was she who quietly reminded them:
“Fees of nine pence a week are proposed. But many non-conformist poor, in my experience, cannot afford that. The bishop,” she concluded, “wants the Anglican church to control Sarum. It did so in the middle ages, but it need not do so now.”
That brought thunderous applause.
It was flushed with such a sense of triumph therefore that, at the end of the evening, she reminded Mason that he had promised to announce her own meeting, the following night. It was a perfect opportunity since many in the hall were women that evening.
He blushed.
“Not now, I think, Miss Shockley.”
“Mr Mason, you promised not only to announce me but to support me.”
He looked embarrassed.
“With so many people . . . all sorts,” he began.
Could this be the brisk temperance reformer she had known in years gone by?
“Mr Mason,” she reminded him coldly, “you promised.”
“At a more intimate meeting . . .” he pleaded.
The people were already filing out of the room.
She stood up.
“There will be a meeting of the Women’s Suffrage Society, in this same hotel, tomorrow night at seven,” she cried.
But no one was taking any notice.
; On Tuesday evening, at six o’clock, the parlour maid came in to announce that there was a new moon.
Half an hour later Jane Shockley walked through the quiet close.
Old Mr Sturges was conveying a young lady to a party in his ancient bath chair – a magnificent wooden contraption with a leather hood whose purpose was, in theory, to ensure that young ladies’ satin slippers did not get dirty by walking in the street, but which in practice was more of a solemn ritual within the close. In the High Street, an old woman carrier had gone to sleep beside her cart.
Although she had spent the day pinning up notices of her meeting and informing everyone she knew, she was not hopeful any more.
She waited at the White Hart for an hour. Nobody came.
Except a contrite Mr Porters who claimed that, upon reflection, her arguments of two days before had finally convinced him.
She knew it was not true.
She let him walk her home.
THE HENGE II
1915: SEPTEMBER 21
Dark days. In far-away Gallipoli, the advance of the forces of the British Empire had ground to a halt. In France, a new offensive was about to begin. On the fifth of the month, in hard-pressed Russia, the Czar himself had assumed the supreme command of the armed forces.
Dark days. As it was now clear that the Balkan campaign had failed, all chances of a short end to the most terrible conflict that the world had yet known seemed to have receded over a horizon riven by lowering flashes and packed, to who knew what depth, with black thunderclouds.
In the New Theatre, Salisbury, the little crowd was half expectant, half amused. The auctioneer paused, feeling that, after all, the moment should be invested with a little drama, yet half afraid that murmurs of derision might intervene instead and adversely affect the sale.
He cleared his throat.
“Lot 15. Stonehenge.”
The heir to the local Antrobus estate had already been killed in action. Now his father, Sir Edmund Antrobus, had died. The estate – a huge tract of Salisbury Plain – was for sale; and it included Stonehenge.
The old monument had nearly been sold before. A decade earlier, the American John Jacob Astor had tried to buy it from Sir Edmund for the British Museum. The staggering price of £25,000 had even been mentioned. But Sir Edmund had feared it would fall under control of a government department and after tiresome negotiations, the matter had been dropped.
Others, too, had shown an interest in the place. An organisation called The Church of Universal Bond had suggested that ownership be transferred to a public company of Druids and Antiquarians. By act of Parliament two years earlier, Stonehenge was also protected against demolition and export.
The bidding was not excited. The price rose quietly to £6,000, then seemed to stop.
It was then that a local gentleman raised his hand.
He did so, he confessed afterwards, on impulse.
Mr Cecil H. E. Chubb, of Bemerton Lodge, Salisbury, had begun his adult life with a brilliant Cambridge degree in science and law. But he had never practised his profession. Instead, he had taken control of the Fisherton House Asylum in Salisbury, which had been left to his wife by her adoptive father. He had also recently bought an estate.
It seemed to him a good idea that a local man should own the place.
He bought it for £6,600.
In 1918 he gave it to the nation.
Lloyd George made him a baronet the same year.
THE ENCAMPMENT
1944: MAY
Soon the mighty offensive of D-Day would begin. No one, of course, not even the Supreme Commander, could be certain of the date. But, God willing, very soon. The time for the European war’s last act was drawing near.
In the month of May, 1944, had a German spotter plane been granted free access to the southern coast of England for an hour or two, it might well have directed its flight to a point a few miles west of the Isle of Wight, to the low hill and sheltered harbour at Christchurch and thence followed the little river Avon up its lazy course to the north.
Had it done so, its careful observers might have picked out several things to interest them.
They might firstly have noticed numerous small air bases. They might have made out Hurn, at Christchurch, Ibsley, just north of the small town of Ringwood, some ten miles inland, Stoney Cross, on their right hand side, in the New Forest; or others, carefully camouflaged, where a close inspection would have revealed numbers of P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts to astonish them and send them scuttling back across the Channel with the news.
But the spotter plane would probably first have continued on its way north, over Fordingbridge, Downton, and up the Avon to that great junction at the foot of Salisbury Plain, where like the outstretched fingers of a man’s hand, five rivers met.
It would have been an obvious place to aim at: for it was a point on the map well known to anyone in the Luftwaffe. It was, after all, a perfect natural signpost. The pattern of the five rivers, even seen by starlight from thousands of feet above, was completely unmistakable. It was for Sarum that the bombers had usually made on the huge and devastating runs when, coming in from the west and taking their precise directions from the rivers as from a compass, they branched off to devastate the port of Bristol, or the unlucky midland towns of Birmingham and Coventry.
Indeed, though the citizens of Salisbury did not know it, the city had almost been a target too: for when the plans for the series of so-called Baedeker raids on English cathedrals had been drawn up, the cathedral at Salisbury, after Coventry and Canterbury, had been third on the list. The raids had been called off after only Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed, and the people of Sarum remained unaware of their lucky escape.
There were other reasons to go to Sarum. The high ground of Salisbury Plain, for some forty years, had been a military training ground. There were several army stations there – no doubt there would have been something to see. A sharp-eyed scout might have realised that many of the country roads round the old cathedral city had been slightly widened and their ditches filled in; that around Old Sarum hill the roads were marked out in white – both suggesting the movement of tanks.
Having inspected Sarum, the plane might have turned north-east and followed the valley of the river Bourne in which direction it would have noticed other airfields.
But only if it had been able to come down, almost to touch the ground, would the plane have been able to see anything of the real secret of the area.
For as the great day approached, there was hardly a larger concentration of troops and armaments anywhere in Britain than there was at Sarum.
All over the plains, from Old Sarum north, trucks, tanks, weapons carriers, personnel carriers, jeeps, more tanks, and yet more tanks lay camouflaged, parked row upon row along the hillsides, by the edges of the trees, along the huge uncut hedgerows. English, Australian, Canadian, American troops, swarmed around the sleepy old city. In Lord Pembroke’s great house at Wilton resided the headquarters of Southern Command.
Sarum, for the first time in its history, had become one of the greatest encampments in Europe.
“The place is so loaded with armaments,” it was generally agreed, “it’s a wonder it doesn’t sink.”
Lieutenant Adam Shockley, pilot, Squadron 492, of the 48th Fighter Group, had taken the bus from Ibsley to Salisbury in the middle of the morning.
It was good to have a day’s rest. The squadron, with the two others at Ibsley, had been making almost daily sweeps over Northern France in their P-47s, attacking radar stations, airfields and bridges after having received intensive bomber training on their arrival at the end of March. The raids were continuing intensely. He knew the invasion could not be very far away.
Of the city of Salisbury with its grey-spired cathedral, its market place and curious round earthwork he knew nothing at all, except what he had seen from the air.
The bus moved slowly. He wished he had managed to hitch a ride in a car. It was hard to believe tha
t this road, with just room for two cars to pass, classified as a major highway. The little town of Fordingbridge, a village really, was picturesque beside the river. They passed through Downton, and a few miles further, came to a dip. On the right he saw the wall of what he supposed must be a great estate. He grinned. He was used to seeing stone walls round some of the old estates near his home in Philadelphia. “But these English walls are really built to keep you out,” he thought. On the right, a signpost to the village of Britford.
Then he saw the spire. Almost dead ahead, and a minute later he was gazing across the broad valley floor to the ancient city.
It was a peaceful-looking place. He wondered what he would find there. Nothing much, probably.
Brigadier Archibald Forest-Wilson leant back in the rear seat of the little Morris that was serving as his staff car that morning and, half closing his eyes, contemplated the back of the neck of the pretty young woman who was driving him. There was so much activity on the plain that day and such pressure on vehicles that the smartly dressed young A.T. S. volunteer had reverted to a practice from the start of the war – the car was her own.
The pool of A.T.S. drivers was fairly large, but she had often driven him before, between the various camps around Salisbury Plain, and he had noticed her fair hair and striking blue eyes with pleasure.
They had come across the chalk ridges from the Gunners’ camp at Larkhill, and now they were dropping down the long, tunnel-like avenue to Wilton. He smiled at the prospect ahead of him.
The officers’ club at Wilton was a very special place. No matter what the rationing might be, it was mysteriously always possible to get a whisky and a steak there. “And nobody but a bloody fool would ever ask how that fellow does it,” he thought fondly of the local man who ran this excellent establishment.
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