Icons of England

by Bill Bryson

  Chris Watson

  on birdsong

  A JUMBLE OF WARBLED notes tumbling down through the bare branches of a large beech tree was the starting point for me this year. It was mid-january. A mistle thrush, head thrown back, was singing powerfully into the face of a cold wind from the highest point in the canopy. I was grateful to that bird. Not only did the song lift my spirits on an otherwise cold and grey day, but it also reminded me of what was to come. This single bird song, these solo notes, would develop into a chorus of bird songs, gradually stirring across the whole of England.

  As the january daylight lengthened, other birds joined in. Robins began their evensong; a song thrush established a song post on a television aerial and broadcast its beautiful repertoire of repeated phrases. And from deep within the leafless twigs of our cotoneaster hedge, I heard the muted tones of blackbird subsong – a quiet and peculiar rehearsal for the full performance during the weeks to come. It’s in the woodlands, however, where the volume of song builds most. Agile nuthatches pipe their sweet notes from high branches and on early mornings the still atmosphere vibrates with one of early spring’s most exciting ‘songs’ – great spotted woodpeckers drumming, rattling a tattoo on a favourite tree.

  These birds are our resident solo performers, advertising for a mate or establishing and defending a territory. During February we can isolate and localize these individuals as pinpoints of sound in the awakening woodland canopy. And then, one day in March, when the sound builds and the intensity increases, there is a change. I hear it twice or more before I actually stop and listen … Is it the end of a wren’s song? An aberrant chaffinch phrase? No. It is the sound of the first willow warbler. Unseen but clearly heard – a silvery descending song from somewhere above. Within moments, my ears also pick up another recent migrant’s tune – the jazz-like rhythm of the onomatopoeic chiffchaff. Over the next couple of weeks these warblers are joined by redstarts, pied flycatchers and secretive blackcaps. Eventually, the line-up is complete.

  In late April, I always keep a weather eye open for a high-pressure system over Northumberland, and then make my move. I arrive on the edge of ‘my’ woodland in the middle of the night (around 2.30 a.m.) and cable a stereo microphone sixty metres away, underneath a small stand of oak trees. Perched on my camping stool, with headphones on, I listen and wait. At 3.12 a.m., a redstart sings and is quickly followed by a robin – with a territorial reply across the clearing – then song thrush, wren and blackbird.

  The notes, phrases and songs mix and melt into a rich wall of sound, and this dawn chorus seems to light the spark for sunrise. At our latitudes I believe we have the very best dawn chorus in the world. Characterized by its slow development – a kind of evolution each new year – all the solo performances coalesce into a new sound and release an outpouring of song from our woodlands. It’s our own private chorus that transforms the darkness into light.

  BEAUTIFUL EVENINGS

  Francis Wheen

  on village cricket

  THERE ARE FEW LOVELIER words in the English language than ‘bucolic’, and few scenes evoke it as beguilingly as a village cricket ground. It is a late Sunday afternoon in rural Essex, in the first week of September. Sheep graze in an adjoining field, occasionally raising their woolly faces with a quizzical look at a roar of ‘Howzat!’ A late-summer breeze rustles the branches of oak trees which have been silent spectators at this pastoral performance for more than a century. Those drizzly grey clouds that seemed so menacing three hours ago have long since floated off in the direction of Chelmsford.

  Eric, the bowler, celebrated his seventieth birthday last week, but his gentle off-breaks are almost as steady as when he first played for the village, a few years after the fall of the Attlee government. One of the batsmen at the crease is my stepson, a strapping teenager; the other is me. In the pavilion, a couple of girls scavenge for the remnants on the tea tables – a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, the last slice of chocolate cake. My young sons frolic just beyond the boundary with a tennis ball and a borrowed bat. The church bell tolls six o’clock; the vicar has arrived for evensong. Shadows lengthen.

  Harold Pinter never wrote a more resonant line than that describing one of his bunk-offs from RADA to watch Middlesex at Lord’s – ‘that beautiful evening Compton made 70’. It’s the word ‘evening’ that adds the magic. Think of any memorable cricket verse, such as Henry Newbolt’s ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight/Ten to make and the match to win …’ Or, better still, Francis Thompson’s elegiac musings at Lord’s:

  For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

  And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

  As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, to and fro …

  Meaningless, I’d guess, to children who know only the modern urban game – the razzmatazz of Twenty20 matches played under floodlights in dayglo polyester tracksuits, with ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ blasting over the PA at the fall of each wicket. But they can still catch a glimpse of something more ancient and English and almost immutable if they happen to look out of a train window while rattling through the shires: something with the heady aroma of leather, mown grass, linseed oil and egg sandwiches. At twilight they may even notice the weary cricketers leaving the crease and adjourning to the pub across the road, the Leather Bottle.

  Eric, having taken five wickets, is obliged to buy a jug of beer, shared with his teammates and opponents as they muse on another sublimely pointless day, and the end of another summer. No more slogs over square leg until next spring: sheep may safely graze. The half-dozen worshippers at evensong have gone home, shriven and blessed, to prepare for another working Monday, after a final chorus of ‘Abide With Me’. Even so: if you return to the cricket ground as the darkness deepens and wander past the shuttered pavilion, you may discern that ghostly batsman playing to the bowling of a ghost, just as he did when old Eric was a boy. Other helpers fail and comforts flee; this abides.

  ALFRED’S CAKES

  Michael Wood

  on historic Athelney

  BORN IN AN INDUSTRIAL city in the cold north, it always seemed to me that the south-west was the real England. Somerset in particular – the ‘summer land’ as it was etymologized by medieval writers – for me was the mythic landscape of our history. On childhood trips there in my dad’s old blue Austin 9, I used to think that if one stared hard enough, the past was still reachable – that you might still see its ghosts. And even these days, when I go down to visit my in-laws, between the reassuring surroundings of Bath’s Roman springs and the soft contours of the Quantocks, I can’t stop myself musing on the stories of English history. There’s one place that stands for the whole tale of this island nation. It’s an unprepossessing spot, easy to miss on the A361 from Glastonbury to Taunton. But, for me, it is the most resonant landscape in our nation’s history: Athelney.

  The story of Athelney takes us back to the Viking age, in the winter of 877–8. Alfred, the young king of Wessex – whom we know as the Great (he’s the only person in our history to merit such a nickname) – is surprised and routed while celebrating Christmas at Chippenham. He takes refuge with a small warrior band in the Somerset marshes. The place was an inland sea in those days, a patchwork of islands and swamps, ‘only reachable by punt’ says Alfred’s friend and biographer, the Welshman Asser. This ‘Isle of Princes’ was a place where the king must have hawked and hunted from boyhood, and it was there he hid while the Vikings harried Wessex. Homeless and with nothing to live on except what he and his band could forage for, his idea of England – our England – hung by a thread; his kingdom shrunk to a few square miles of watery wilderness.

  ‘Then after Easter,’ says Asser (and you can almost sense the quickening of his pulse as he writes), ‘he built a fort at a place called Athelney … from where, with the thegns of Somerset, he struck out tirelessly on raids against the Vikings.’ Events th
en led to a surprise attack on the main Viking army in Wiltshire around 9 May (under the White Horse at Westbury). Following a savage clash of arms, the surge of shield walls and the rush of spears, Alfred wins and England is saved. The rest is history.

  So Athelney was the key. To find it today, stop on the A361 at Lyng church, which still stands over a big defensive ditch of Alfred’s time. At the end of the village you can walk on to the causeway, which Asser describes as leading across the swamp to the island where the fort was constructed. The island is now a low mound above the river Tone. To commemorate his victory, Alfred later built a little monastery here, which survived until Henry’s Reformation, when the last monks were pensioned off and the buildings plundered for their stone. Nothing now remains above ground.

  Even swiftly told, it’s an epic tale. And, of course, legends soon gathered around it. Within a couple of generations, the story was told that in the marshes that spring, the starving Alfred had shared his last meagre rations with a wandering pilgrim. That evening his men came back, rejoicing in a miraculous catch of fish, and they all ate and slept well. And that night the pilgrim appeared to Alfred in a dream in his true form. He was none other than St Cuthbert, who prophesied for Alfred a kingdom of all England and for his descendants, rule over Britain (indeed, our present queen can claim Alfred among her ancestors).

  The other tale of Athelney is the most famous of all legends about Alfred. The story goes that, while in the marshes, the desperate king sheltered incognito in a peasant’s hut and was charged by the wife to watch the oven. He burnt her bread and was fiercely scolded. The Victorians loved the story, and you’ll still find it in junk shops, referred to on cigarette cards and biscuit tins, and in old children’s books and cartoons. (My favourite is from Punch, May 1941 – ‘Well I suppose they are a little overdone,’ says the king lugubriously, ‘but what does that matter in wartime?’)

  Of course it sounds like a pure fairy tale, and scholars have dismissed it. But the story of the ‘cakes’ first appears in a text of the 970s or 980s, when there were people (like the Somerset man Archbishop Dunstan) who, in their youth, had talked to those who were there – one hundred years is not long at all in a memorizing society. I wonder then whether the scholars have been a little too stern in rejecting the story? Asser tells us that the king ‘had nothing to live on’. Is it a coincidence then that two tenth-century stories about that fateful time both concern that essential of guerrilla war – food? Exaggerated it may have been in hindsight, as such things are, but it is not hard to imagine an old veteran of Athelney, sitting in retirement with his grandchildren in his orchard near Bath, forty years on: ‘Food? Did you say food? Well now, here’s a story. You’ll never guess what happened to the king one day when we were in Athelney …’

  MY ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND

  Benjamin Zephaniah

  on the Malvern Hills

  FOR AN INNER-CITY kid who grew up in the 1960s, there was really only one place to go on holiday – Butlins. In fact, if you weren’t holidaying at Butlins you weren’t usually going anywhere at all. But as a city kid from a large family, the world of knobbly knees contests and Redcoats was always just beyond reach for me. And, looking back, it seems I had a lucky escape. For when your childhood holidays involve the back of a family camper van and the Malvern Hills, you are never far from adventure.

  I will always remember the first time my dad parked up and let us run free on the hills. I felt like an animal set free from a leash. For me, it wasn’t that the Malvern Hills was an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – I certainly wouldn’t have known that it was designated as one the year after I was born in 1959. At that time, I didn’t really notice the varying landscapes – the forts, rolling pastures, open commons and ancient woodland. This sea of green was my massive playground. In Birmingham, playing outside meant scrabbling over bomb sites, what we called bombpecks, and digging out old brooches and photos from the rubble. But here, in this vast space, I could play on land without fences, breathe in the clear air and run wild over the hills.

  Of course, in my Malvern Hills, the hills were mountains; a den made of branches, my palace in the wild. This was a place where the nine of us could live out our adventures – not all of which were without danger. A game of hide and seek certainly takes on a life of its own when you have miles of hillside in which to disappear. And I do remember losing my brothers on more than a few occasions. My sister had a close encounter with what seemed like the edge of a cliff at the time, and it wasn’t until we reached down to her with a tree branch, and told her not to look down, that she was lifted to safety. It sounds like something out of a cartoon now, but back then, it felt like we were risking our lives.

  I am no longer that child waving excitedly from the back of our camper van. But I can still visualize the routes we took across the hills, and the places we parked. In fact, although when I went back recently it didn’t feel as big or as dramatic – I seemed to notice the buildings of Malvern a lot more – I think it means more to me now. Having travelled to Jamaica to rediscover my roots, I realized that, for my parents, the Malverns was not just a place to let the children run wild. It was the nearest thing to a piece of home in England.

  Coming from a family where my 105-year-old grandmother has never seen a city, I consider the countryside, and not the streets of Birmingham, my real home. So much so that I now live in Lincolnshire. There is beauty to be found in its flat farming land and among its wildlife – especially a rather friendly barn owl that once accompanied me down a lane. But Lincolnshire will never be the Malvern Hills – my little piece of Jamaica.

  SUPPORT OUR CAMPAIGN

  Shaun Spiers

  Chief Executive, CPRE

  BY INVITING PEOPLE TO nominate their own ‘icons of England’, we ran the risk of ending up with some rather obvious choices – Stonehenge, Hogwarts, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Instead we have a very idiosyncratic and personal collection, an illustration of G. M. Trevelyan’s belief that places ‘have an interest or a beauty of association, as well as an absolute or aesthetic beauty’.

  And not just places. Floella Benjamin’s love of the English weather (a brave choice) goes back to her memory of first arriving in the country as a child. Richard Benson’s beautiful piece on ‘rural sensuality’ focuses on a single moment from his youth.

  One of the pleasures of reading these essays has been to enter into an imaginary dialogue with their authors, pitching one’s own experience against theirs.

  Jon Snow writes movingly about the Balcombe Viaduct – significant not so much as a structure or view, but as the backdrop to his growing up. Clearly this has great personal significance for him. But his viaduct may summon memories of other viaducts or great industrial structures that enhance the landscape. In my case, it makes me think of the magnificent Welland Viaduct in Northamptonshire, and the few remaining huts lived in by the navvies who built it.

  Fiona MacCarthy’s essay on Kelmscott Manor conjured up all sorts of memories for me. I used to walk or cycle to the house from Filkins, the village my parents moved to when I was eighteen. At that time I knew Morris more for his revolutionary politics than for arts and crafts, but I found it impossible not to be touched by the high-class doggerel embroidered around his four-poster bed:

  The wind’s on the wold

  And the night is a-cold,

  And Thames runs chill

  Twixt mead and hill,

  But kind and dear

  Is the old house here,

  And my heart is warm

  Midst winter’s harm …

  Sebastian Faulks’s piece on pub signs also brought back memories. I had a tutor at university who used to speak contemptuously of Britain as a ‘pub culture’. I told him I agreed, it was terrible, while privately thinking that he could do with an hour or two in a friendly pub. Faulks is right that ‘deliberately silly’ new pub names are regrettable. But old and silly names are, of course, entirely acceptable.

  One of
my favourites is the Five Alls, now the last pub in Filkins. The five ‘alls’ in question are, from memory; the lawyer who pleads for all, the parson who prays for all, the soldier who fights for all, the farmer who feeds all (or is it John Bull, paying for all?) and the Devil who takes all. How drab it is when quirky local pubs are taken over by chains and given the name and sign and decor of a hundred other pubs – or, worse still, suffer the fate of so many old interwar roadside inns and became a fast food ‘restaurants’.

  Local distinctiveness matters. Small things, seemingly insignificant patches of countryside can be ‘iconic’ to those who love them. So, for instance, Terence Blacker’s Lonely Road, with its ‘ordinary beauty’ is clearly not in the running to become a World Heritage Site. Indeed, he recounts how the local authority has dismissed it as being of ‘unexceptional’ landscape quality. But it is much-loved and well worth protecting.

  So it is with the ‘icons’ in this book and thousands more across England. The fact that we still have so much variety, beauty and history in such a small, densely populated and commercially minded country is a tribute not least to the work of CPRE and its members over the last eighty-four years.

  This work is not about stopping the clock. We energetically and effectively oppose all unnecessary developments, but we also make constructive suggestions for accommodating necessary developments, not least more affordable rural homes. If proper care is taken, development can even enhance rural areas. We work to protect the beauty and character we have, but we want to pass on to future generations even more that is worth treasuring.