At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Devon and Cornwall are the seafaring counties. Most of the great seamen from Drake onward came from this part of Britain. You can see from the statue of Drake on the Hoe at Plymouth that this is the sea-traffic gate of England and can understand why this naval city suffered frightful destruction during the last war. The Devon towns grew rich not only on wool and their orchards and farmlands but on sea traffic, war, piracy and the prizes. In later times, Devon has been the county of the retired Empire builder: he can be seen, in his tweeds, in places like Budleigh Salterton, Sidmouth and in the exotic Victorian architecture of Torquay. He sits on his property, sun-reddened and shrewd, dreaming of curry and Bombay duck, gazing sleepily at the red cliffs and the hot coves and the boats on the long Devon estuaries.

  The peninsula gets wilder as it pushes out into the sea toward Lands End, the color of the soil changes again and we are out of England, strictly speaking, and in Cornwall. There is a sudden change in architecture. The villages are slate-roofed, and built in gray or whitewashed stone in the manner of Welsh or Irish buildings. They are odd and severe to the eye. The richer English have far more taste for domestic style. The large country houses in Cornwall seem to belong to a wilder, older and poorer economy. Seamen, tin miners, workers in China clay, small farmers, the Cornish have seen the traditional trades dwindle; the Cornish miner who was working in the time of the Phoenicians now turns up in Johannesburg, in South American and African mines. He has been in all the world’s gold rushes. His own land is very much a place for the holiday-maker now; and since he gets the warm weather much earlier than any other part of England, he also does an enormous trade in cut flowers. Not only the daffodil and the crocus but the fuchsia and hydrangea belong to this country.

  The stranger feels something mysterious about the Cornish. There is a long tradition of the fairy tale and Celtic superstition, and like all the Celts, the Cornish are remarkable natural storytellers. Theirs is reputedly the country of King Arthur and the Round Table. By the singsong sound of voice and words used, by a certain excitable restlessness we can tell these people are not Anglo-Saxon. They are engaging in their ordinary address. They use words curiously. The postman talks of “going up-along” or “down-along” the steep streets. On buses, in pubs, in shops, you are called not “Sir” or “Ma’am” but “my dear” or “my love,” caressingly, as if you were a member of the tribe; for the Celts always wish to endear and please at first sight.

  Wesley, the great preacher, had a total success in Cornwall; his rhetoric caught the Cornish taste for romantic phrase; they became Methodists overnight. Severe in custom, they close public houses on Sundays, just as the Welsh do. The innumerable chapels are packed with hymn singers; in England proper—so pious in Victorian times—the churches are poorly attended and the decline of Methodism and other nonconformist sects has been general.

  I was standing on the quay at St. Ives, a pretty fishing town in North Cornwall. It is now a holiday place and has been famous for two generations as an art colony. As I stood there I heard two fishermen shouting at each other and moved closer to see what the quarrel was about. Of all things, it was about religion. One was crying out: “But it says in the Bible, ‘By Grace ye are saved.’” You would never hear a public row going on about Grace and Works in England. The English would be ignorant of theology. Nor can the English sing hymns with the fervor of the Welsh or the Cornish, though they have wonderful choirs in places like King’s College Chapel in Cambridge or at Canterbury Cathedral. Ordinary English singing when the pubs close is like the dying of cows; and in the ordinary churches the singing sounds as if the whole congregation were dragging out a bad cold in the head.

  The Cornish have been overrun by the English; their customs die. They are still notable wrestlers. Some loneliness in the life has produced many eccentrics. They like practical jokes and carry them to farcical lengths. There are jokes which are really private charades and which last for days on end. They are sometimes carried further by theatrical disguises. If the telephone rings and you are told that your lawyer or the chief constable or some important enemy is speaking, do not believe it. Reject the story he ingeniously concocts. If your neighbor’s grandfather comes to tea, do not believe that either: pull his wig off. The Cornish live a good deal in their imaginations and manias, and the strong Atlantic air and the violent changes of a drugging climate make one uncertain of the borderline between reality and dream. The solid kind of Englishman, who is humorous rather than witty and has no time for fancy, never gets the hang of these people and is fair game.

  If we leave wild, wind-polished Cornwall and go north back into solid England, to the lovely terraces of Beau Nash’s Bath so favored by retired naval officers and readers of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey; if we press on north to Bristol, where the Cabots sailed from, the port for the American expeditions, the slave and the tobacco trades, we are in the valley of the Severn. The yellow stone of this country has been got out of its hills. Again, up the Severn, the people change; and the country changes too. Celt and Saxon are well mixed here, for we are on the Welsh border. In the Welsh towns the people smile and in the English they do not. We see the mixture of two antagonistic races abusing each other at the top of their tempers for lying, thieving and hypocrisy throughout the centuries. Language and blood have profited.

  “You’ve come back with the bloom on you, as ripe as a plum,” cries the old Shropshire farmer to the beautiful girl who has come back from some city to be married. And with a wink at her young man he says to her: “If that young devil don’t keep you quiet, I’ll be upstairs in a jiffy.” This is merry England, fleshy, sensual, shrewd and uproarious. It loves to see the girls blush and the men drink. It gets round the law. It crowds to the cattle shows. Its small towns rock to the gossip of love affairs. You eat the Severn salmon and don’t ask whether it has been caught illegally; if you do you will be answered by a look as pious as a Methodist chapel. This is the country of A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad, of lovely towns like Ludlow on its cliff, of Clun, Much Wenlock and Church Stretton.

  But we must turn now and face the important fact that England is an industrial nation and that we have been dodging it. Ninety percent of its people live in towns; and of those, 40 percent live in the huge industrial conurbations. It is all very well: the most intelligent, alive and interesting people belong to the industrial population. Oxford dispels an illusion: an industrial city has engulfed the university, and the student body is formed, not by the privileged classes but by poorer clever boys up on scholarships from the redbrick suburbs and the industrial towns.

  At Stratford, on Shakespeare’s birthday, the long American cars of the diplomatic corps pack the streets for schoolboys to admire. A town councillor told me, as we watched the swans of Avon turning on the river, that he had never read Shakespeare until he came to Stratford. But now he had discovered, as a businessman, that “Shakespeare had the answer to every question.” That’s the spirit of the Midlands: practical.

  Its capital is Birmingham, that huge concentration of engineering works, where town runs into town under the smoke, where the ground subsides over the coal fields, until we reach Arnold Bennett’s Black Country. That is a region to see at night, when the kilns and the furnaces glow; it is inhabited by a race apart. Yet once these industrial wildernesses are passed, we realize that they have emptied the countryside and left enormous empty panoramas of moor and mountain. The north is the one part of this unspectacular island which is dramatic.

  Suppose you drive up from Derby, where they make the Rolls-Royce engines, toward Manchester: you are traveling through ravines of the Peak District.

  “What’s life like in Derby?” you ask the man at the garage.

  He gives you the set industrial look. “Dead,” he says. “You coom here for the money and the work.”

  The North, you realize, means work, the love of work, the cult of work, the scorn for those who don’t work. When you drive through the Peak to Buxton, looking down at the green curling
River Wye, watching the water go over the weirs like glass, and passing through the spacious parklands where medieval Haddon Hall with its battlements looks across the centuries to Chatsworth, you see the busloads of industrial workers out on holiday. They have come out to see the spa waters blessed at Buxton, to hear the town band, drink pints of beer and eat potato crisps. Sheffield, with its steel and mines, is not far off over the hills.

  A hard climate here. There is less sun than in the south. Snow blocks the roads in the winter. Hedges have gone, grass is poor on the hills. It is a country bony with rock. The bare fields are chained by loose, blackened stone walls; and from now on in the North, the stone wall will have taken the place of the hedge and there will be few flowers and grasses close to them. From the top of the high country you see Manchester lying twenty-odd miles away under a white chemical fume that makes you cough the moment you drive down into it. You have re-entered the poisoned-climate twentieth century.

  When you stop to ask the way, you notice the accent has changed from the short, flat tone of the Midlands to one broad in its vowels and cutting-sharp in its consonants. They know how to pronounce the letter r in the North; indeed, in Tyneside, the miners and shipwrights use the only guttural r (very much like the French r) known in the Kingdom. The northern demeanor is different too. No southern obsequiousness, no flattering desire to please.

  If you come to a crossroads and you stop to ask a passerby for a direction he will not say, for example: “Turn sharp right.” He will say: “Turn stoomp raaight,” touching the “stump” of his arm as if going through an emergency amputation, or as sharp and brutally right as having your arm chopped off. He likes the brutal physical image; but the voice, though hard, is kind. The dramas that occur to a Lancashire man or his neighbor in Yorkshire—from the raids on Berlin to a singsong down at the local pub—have to be compressed in a few words of poker-faced understatement. He will say: “We ad a bit of a do,” to describe the Normandy landings. If pressed he will add, “It were nowt.” Compliments are rare and based on practical observation. The young man said to his girl: “My, th’ mother keeps tha nice.” The whole of England is a man’s country run by men for men; Dad rules, Mum cleans. This is above all true of the North, which makes for a quizzical, practical, hardheaded kindness between the sexes. When she went up to Haworth to see old Mr. Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell observed how slowly the affections moved in these people; but that, once moved, their passions, in antagonism or love, were violent and for life.

  I stood in the garden of a Lancashire man’s house, on a ridge of the Pen-nines, looking down on the industrial plain. He was a blue-eyed, fair-haired, pink-faced man as men here always seem to be—ebullient, laughing, talking, with the sardonic northern edge to his voice, a scholar and a wit. In the South his counterpart would have been harder to know, more cautious and less immediately hospitable: I would have been shown the ancient buildings. But this man had taken me to all the modern buildings of the city, its schools, halls and galleries; he had taken me on a tour of the rich manufacturers’ suburb and had talked about the ups and downs of fortune in the cotton trade. He was more American than southern English; for the Northerners have immense civic pride.

  There is dash, energy, a love of gambling and a touch of fantasy about the Lancashire people. They are famous for their music-hall comedians and their popular singers and for laughing at themselves. “Clogs to clogs in three generations,” the mill hands say; humble men have piled up fortunes and spent them fantastically.

  All across the North you are in something like a democracy; you certainly are not in the South. You are “lad” or “lass,” not “sir,” in the North. They are outspoken, laconic, love a coarse word; they test you out, hit hard, hope to be hit back. “Now for nowt” is a Yorkshire saying; nothing for nothing. Men and women work together all their lives in the mills; in one of the small mill towns of the Pennine ravines, it will be the men in the quarries, the women in the mills. The passion for work is joined to a passion for cleanliness among the women. In the evening, you will see women polishing their brass door knockers, whitening their doorsteps and window sills, cleaning windows, scrubbing floors and children. My Yorkshire grandmother used to seize us southern grandchildren and cry, “Eh, ah a doubt but what tha moother lets th’ run about like a gooter lad.” My indignant southern mother would snap back in Cockney: “You’d scrub the inside of a goose, old girl.” My grandmother, undefeated: “Eh, ah never could abide London moock.” Such altercations shock a southern sensibility; to the Northerner they are inoffensive, the life blood. And after the working and cleaning and the downright words, there are the huge northern meals to mollify the temper. Tripe and pig’s trotters, hams and sausages and pies, cakes and twenty kinds of bread—a variety far beyond the southern imagination contents these aggressive people.

  Yet here I am generalizing about the North, when there is all the difference in the world between the Lancashireman and the man from Yorkshire. And in Yorkshire a great difference between those of the West Riding and the East: the western part of Yorkshire is the more intensely industrialized; the eastern part remained for longer in the hands of the landowning aristocracy. The East—the Westerners say with contempt—are gentlemen. If Lancashire is likely to spend, Yorkshire is cautious and canny and likes to save. “Ay,” an old lady said to me in a moorland village, “they’ve got a lot of brass felted here.” To “felt” is to hide and “brass” is money. A child born of Yorkshire and Lowland Scottish parents is impregnable in finance. Yorkshire has more reserve, self-regard, less imagination than Lancashire. The Yorkshiremen are an obstinate, critical race. They like to say, “Ah won’t boodge.” I stood in the signal box outside the railway station in York during the war. The city had just been bombed. The signalman nodded to the towers of the Minster rising above the city.

  “Hitler says he’s going to be married up at t’Minster next spring,” he reflected. “But… ah doan’t knaw.”

  I still hear the slow broad Yorkshire voice dawdling its unsmiling irony along the words.

  The mountains and the moors are the lungs of the North and they come down to the very ends of the streets in the Pennine valleys. Here are the panoramas. The hard long ridges of the moors drop into the wide-wooded Dales with their lovely rivers and rise again to the Fells, the peaks of the Lake country and the Cheviots on the Scottish border. Until August comes, these moors are green with young bracken and dark with heather and tussocky grass; small streams trickle in them. Then the heather blooms and they are changed to a spacious and rolling sea of purple. The heights seem great—once you are used to the English scale—the treeless ridges are austere; you hear only the wind, the cry of the curlew and the baa-ing of sheep. You come down into clean gray towns of wintry stone.

  The beauty of England lies in all its small towns. The cities have drawn away the growing population and have left the towns in their perfection. There is the market square, the parish church—almost always interesting: a Norman crypt perhaps, some superb murals of the fifteenth century as at Pickering near Scarborough in the northeast, or angels and bosses in the vaulting—there are the red-brick or cream houses which so often turn out to be the patchwork of the centuries if you go down an alley and look at the backs of them.

  I think of neat, stone Kirby Lonsdale on the way to Westmoreland and the Lakes, with its warm little square. It was one of Ruskin’s favorite places. There’s a lively blacksmith at Kirby Lonsdale whose family has worked for generations in wrought iron and who made the lovely gates of the churchyard. He is a TV “character” now, but he is a real craftsman and wanderer: he has ridden all over the sheep drives of the north into Scotland, and they have hardly changed since Sir Walter Scott wrote The Two Drovers.

  I think of perfect Helmsley in the Pickering valley on the eastern side of Yorkshire. It is six o’clock in the summer, but it is cool enough for a big fire. People are sitting round it in the inn having tea. Two silent men are playing darts in the bar, and out of the window I
can see the elegant gray square, empty, without a building to distress the eye, unchanged in gravity for centuries. Do not misunderstand me: the age of a place means nothing. Helmsley retains a perfect moment of domestic civilization in silvering stone.

  We used to climb the Fells and look across to the higher mountains of Westmoreland and to Solway Firth under their changing cloud. We were looking at what the Lake Poets have made into official romantic scenery. The traveler who leaves Lancashire or West Yorkshire for these little lakes has to prepare for those days when, as the people say, the weather is “dampening on”—as good a piece of English understatement as I have ever met. The caprice of the sky, the changes from wet to clear enhance the grace and variety of the scene as one drives, say, over the Kirkstone Pass into Patterdale and Ullswater. Into that lake, red deer from the oldest herd in England will sometimes come down to swim. The Lakes are the country for walkers and climbers. The inhabitants are hardy, good, plain folk and taciturn; they have the Celt and the Viking in them.

  The observant and thirsty traveler will have noticed by now how many inns are called The Lamb, The Fleece, The Woolpack, and so on; he will have read that the Lord Chancellor is said to “sit on the Woolsack.” When you turn from Yorkshire and away from the machines and begin your journey down the eastern side of England from Durham to York, and then on to Lincoln and finally to that bulge into the North Sea which is called East Anglia, you will be traveling back in time to when the wealth of England was based on wool.

  When we learned to weave our own cloth in the fourteenth century, the beautiful wool towns of East Anglia were built and, in them, some of the finest churches in the country. I think of the churches at Lavenham and Stoke -by-Nayland, of lonely Blythburgh on its sea marsh and of the great church of Long Melford. I think of Norwich and the water-color painters who learned from their almost-neighbors, the Dutch, and who were moved by the immense light of this flattish country which has been cleaned by the prevailing east wind. It was always a place for churches. Suffolk is called selig Suffolk, which is nowadays pronounced “silly”; but the word means holy and describes a land of monasteries and abbeys. The Anglo-Saxon is almost pure here. I went to school in Ipswich when I was a boy and we always called each other “boa”—their German Bauer—instead of boy; and in the singsong speech of the county we said, “Farewell, boa” instead of good-bye.