To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  But, when I went there in the rain, there were no children to be seen. Perhaps there were none left for, when a village faces the possibility of its eventual extinction, the children are the first to go. Beyond Helechosa the road came to an end. The Guadiana flowed across it into the lake where once there must have been a bridge and only a ravaged track corkscrewing up into the hills offered an alternative to turning back. At this point the river in spate carried red earth in suspension. A magenta stain was widening in the lake and, as I watched, a white bird folded its wings and dropped into it after a fish.

  Beyond the rising water, cork oaks were meticulously spaced in the order imposed by nature in a landscape which—apart from artificial lakes—had been left to itself, and the maquis was as clean-cut as a well tended garden. Within a decade or two the human presence would almost certainly be gone. I wondered if the wolves would eventually find their way back, as they had in the Sierra de la Culebra in the north which I had visited in the spring. Villages containing many old houses exist where a single family remains. In one village, Boya, all the self-supporting young had been enticed away to the discos in the towns, but most of the middle-aged hoped to stay on. It was a pleasant place, amazingly reminiscent of a village in unspoiled England, perhaps in the Cotswolds, with an ancient church on the green, merino sheep cropping the grass, and cottages with flower gardens. When the talk of wolves came up, Jaime Martinez, owner of the bar, was philosophical. ‘You see one now and again,’ he said, ‘but they don’t really trouble us. They’re something you can cope with. It’s the wild boars that bother us. They root up everything in the gardens. You could even say the wolves are useful in a way. At least they keep the boars down.’

  IN ESSEX

  ESSEX IS THE UGLIEST county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and to get away from the settlers from London south of the river. It was flat and untidy and full of water with the Colne and the Crouch and the Blackwater and all their tributaries fingering up from the sea and spreading vinous tendrils of water into the flat land. For half the year, the wind blew in from the east, over shingle, mud-flats, saltings and marshes, and even twenty miles inland, where I first set up house, gulls drove the crows out of the fields.

  I found an empty farmhouse called Charmers End in the village of Long Crendon, took a three-year lease on it and settled in. Many of the farms and villages had odd and even poetic names, Crab’s Green, Sweet Dew, Blythe Easter, Fan-tail and Honey Wood, which I suspected of being part of a process of self-deception, for on the whole the more fanciful the name the more dismal the place. There were black-and-white cows in a shining field at the bottom of the garden when I first moved in. They were largely responsible for my choice. Otherwise, this part of Essex reminded me of the southern tip of South America where the trees are deformed, a cold wind combs the grass, and glum Indians, reserved and off-hand like the country people of Essex, are muffled in their clothes against the grey weather.

  The farmer who had lived here before had grown old alone and sold his land. One day, hauling himself to the top of the tallest tree in the garden, he had drunk a quarter of a bottle of Lysol, put the barrel of a German pistol collected in the war into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. This man had liked cows, just as I liked them, but the new owner did not especially, so they disappeared soon after. The old farmer had left the place in a terrible mess. He had thrown everything that was left of his possessions out of the window but had left an old broken rocking-horse with a bunch of flowers tied to it in the kitchen. For some reason the agent who showed me the place had decided to leave this where it was. The house was surrounded by a great moat—giving some indication of the security problems of the past—and all along its banks stood big white leafless trees which, stripped of their bark and dying, would eventually fall in. It was like the Amazon. Some of the trees in the water had lost their branches, and little remained but their trunks, turned grey and slimy like submerged alligators, showing only the tips of their snouts above the surface. Those still standing provided an annual crop of an uncommon oyster fungus, collected by an Italian from Chelmsford. He called with a present of a bottle of Asti Spumante soon after I was installed.

  The Post Office found me a woman to clean up four days a week. She arrived on a horse, charging up the lane and across the moat, black hair streaming in the wind, again contributing to the Latin American aspect of this corner of Essex. With her fine, aquiline features and almond eyes she could easily have been an Indian of the plains under the eastern slope of the Andes, where the natives are tall and slender.

  This was Dorothea, aged 37, handsome if not quite beautiful, with a semi-disabled husband and a pretty daughter of 12.

  Dorothea took control. She persuaded the pump to emit a dribble of doubtful water, removed the mummified jackdaw from the chimney, dropped a pebble by way of a test into the black and silken surface of the fluid in the septic tank, and nodded with satisfaction. The horse was a bother to her. It was impossible to leave it free to crop the grass because of holes leading to tunnels, where, as she thought, the inhabitants had once hidden themselves in the bad times of old. I said, ‘I saw you on a bicycle the other day. Why don’t you use it to come over here?’ She replied, nodding apologetically in the horse’s direction, ‘Well, I just ride it when I can. It’s something you have to do.’

  She went with me in the car to point out the baker’s, the man who might agree to cut the grass and mow the lawn, and the one who could fix up a television aerial. Assistance of this kind was easily procured in Long Crendon, as Dorothea explained, by adopting a tactful, even ingratiating approach.

  We passed two men in baseball caps, one wearing dark glasses and a lumberjack shirt, chatting outside a pub. ‘Americans?’ I asked.

  ‘No, locals. Carpenters up at the base.’

  ‘They look like Yanks.’

  ‘Well, they want to, don’t they? Most of the fellows work on the base these days. If you can call it work.’

  The village was a long, narrow street, straggling in fits and starts for the best part of a mile, hence its name. There was a bad smell at one end from a rubbish dump that looked like a collapsed volcano that had been smouldering for several years, and at the other from a pig farm. The houses were simple and plain, with white plastered fronts, the poorer and smaller ones thatched, some still with leaden lights. A substantial mansion standing in gardens back from the road had suffered brutal modernisation, the garden being now enclosed with a ranch-style fence. Until the previous month it had been named Hill Top, said Dorothea, but now with a new owner who had been in property development, it had become Rancho Grande. It was the only evidence that money had been spent in the village, either on preservation or ornament.

  We passed three depressed-looking pubs and a grey little school with children squabbling in the playground. The church was the only building of note, with a Norman door, good stained glass and tombstones packed close in separate familiar groups as if to carry earthly associations beyond the grave.

  The tour ended with a passing glance at the village hall. ‘That’s where I go dancing with my friend Mr Short on Saturday night,’ Dorothea said.

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Well, not my boyfriend. Actually I don’t like him all that much. We just go dancing together. Otherwise I don’t find him all that interesting. I expect you heard all about Dick’s accident?’

  ‘Doesn’t Dick mind?’

  ‘Mind, why should he? He doesn’t dance and he realises I have to have some sort of break. Well, I mean it’s only normal isn’t it?’

  Later I heard the gossip: that she was the target of village adulterers, who were encouraged by Dick, her complaisant husband.

  I questioned Dorothea as to why she felt she had to ride, mentioning that, according to village opinion, the horse was a bad one, with the habit of tripping over its legs.

  ‘It’s an old jumper,’ she said. ‘It’s not so much its legs as its back. It’s hit the deck a few times.’<
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  ‘They were telling me you were a member of one of the Cloate families, whatever they mean by that.’

  ‘It’s a sort of clan,’ she said. ‘The thing they have in Scotland. Dick and I belong to it. About half the village used to be Cloates, but there’s only five families left now. They say only the Cloates were allowed to ride in the old days, but they say anything.’

  ‘What else do you do beside ride horses?’

  ‘Well, nothing really. We’re supposed to help each other, but that’s a laugh. Really it’s more a question of keeping in touch. You sometimes get Cloate people who’ve gone overseas writing home. I suppose they feel lonely out there. Maybe you write two or three letters and then it drops.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘We have a sort of get-together in August. There used to be about fifty of us, but now it’s down to half that. A lot of these things are dying out. I mean, times change.’

  The information Dorothea provided was vague, but one interesting aspect of the Cloate personality emerged—the clan’s attitude to education. Where their menfolk were concerned they saw schooling only as a means to an end. This end was usefulness and self-sufficiency. Boys took what the primary school had to offer, moving on as soon as possible to the education provided by life. In the old days, Dorothea had heard, a Cloate would build his own house. The function of a girl, however, was to please. If a girl was plain and dull, there was nothing to be done, but if she showed promise—beauty, even wit—no sacrifice was too great to develop her potential and place her on the road to success. Then she would be packed off to a boarding school—of an unassuming, yet rather special kind—in Woodford, London E11, where a village girl would be subjected to a process of transformation, so that at its end she would be hardly recognisable, even to her own family.

  First impressions often mislead. My original view of Long Crendon was of a poverty-stricken, backward Essex village, of the kind often described as ‘unspoilt’ because there was no money for necessary improvements. Every roof, whether thatched or otherwise, carried a television aerial, but that meant nothing. Only a quarter of the houses had bathrooms, or even inside lavatories, and less than half were connected to the main water supply or the sewer. Two houses, including the Rancho Grande, and the Pied Bull—most successful of the pubs—had central heating; otherwise, when the frost set in, coal fires burned, as ever, in small grates. The locals pretended contempt for luxuries city-dwellers everywhere took for granted. Some actually boasted of leaving their windows open through the interminable Essex winter. The fact that Long Crendon remained on the surface as it was, was a matter of stubborn conservatism and resistance to change, rather than economics. Yet a hidden transformation was in progress. In 1943 the American Allies had built an important base at Effingham, some five miles away; since then, despite all local claims to a preference for the hard but worthy life, self-indulgence and luxury were making their stealthy appearance.

  The Americans offered to employ every civilian in the area capable of holding down a job. They paid well and they were considerate, almost over-tolerant employers. Dorothea’s Dick was one of the many who benefited from their generosity. He had been considered unemployable after his accident, but as soon as he was able to get about he was taken on at the base as a timekeeper, an occupation for which nimbleness was not required. For some time Dorothea had kept him out of sight, but one day she brought him to see me, prematurely wizened and sitting askew on a pony he controlled with one arm. The story was that while working 12 years before in an agricultural smithy, the prototype of a new combine harvester had run amok, snatched him up, neutered him, torn off a forearm, an ear and most of one foot. He and Dorothea had been married a matter of weeks when the accident occurred, and their daughter, Jane, had been conceived just in time.

  I got to like Dick. Working for the Americans, according to most of the villagers, was like being on paid holiday for the rest of your life, the main problem with all the noise of the planes coming and going being where to find a place to sleep undisturbed. Dick put his endless leisure to good use. He liked people, and limped about the place getting to know everybody and picking up useful gossip. He was a treasure-house of village information, a holder of strong opinions and interested in religion.

  ‘But you don’t go to church, Dick?’

  ‘Well, no. Most people round these parts don’t.’

  ‘And yet you’re a believer?’

  He gave a sly grin. ‘When it suits me, I am. In the resurrection of the body, for instance. Now that’s something I believe in. And I’ve every right to. It gives anybody like me a second chance, doesn’t it? If the Bible says God can put back my missing bits who am I to argue about it?’ This, I supposed, was meant to be a joke.

  In my second year at Long Crendon the new farmer moved in. The black-and-white cows had long gone, and the farmer ploughed up the field and planted horse-beans, the most hideous of all crops. For thirty years the Essex farmers had been adding a few feet here and there to their usable land by tearing out hedges, but they had done it in a haphazard and disorganised fashion, whereas my neighbour was thorough. The trees across the moat were on his land, and they all came down, dead or alive, and were cut up. Those were the days when psychedelic painting was in vogue, and he rode round on a tractor painted in astonishing colours, like Sennacherib in his chariot, dealing death and destruction to nature. One of the big chemical firms was encouraging farmers to experiment with its sprays. He sprayed the banks of the moat on his side and in doing so killed off a vast colony of frogs. The resident mallards, feeding on these, also died. I watched them seized by a kind of paralysis, trying to take off. After splashing about in desperate fashion for a while they subsided and swam in slow, tightening circles. In the end they could no longer hold their heads up, and drowned. In a single year this man quite changed everything included in my view of the Essex landscape. What had looked in summer like the southern, treeless edge of the Argentine Pampas, became Siberia in the winter. This was perhaps the hardest, due to the efforts of my neighbour and his friends, of the century. Nothing held the east wind back as it blew in from the North Sea. Six inches of snow lay in the ploughed fields and the wind plucked it up like feathers from a moulting goose and dropped it into the hollows of the land. When spring came that year there were still yard-deep pockets of frozen snow lying between the bare banks at the bottom of the lanes.

  Every penny Dorothea and Dick could scrape together was saved to send Jane to Woodford, but Jane was already thirteen and they were becoming desperate. Dorothea now worked three days a week at the Rancho Grande, owned by a man who had made a fortune from laundromats. Her beloved horse was for sale but there were no takers. She got permission to build on her garden and sold it off to a speculator. This was a sacrifice indeed for, endlessly enriched with the night soil from their cesspit, it produced vegetables of spectacular size and quality. Henceforth, she said, they would live on Cornish pasties with the occasional addition of sugar beet leaves. These, which the farmers threw away, looked and tasted like spinach of an inferior kind. ‘Are you really sure,’ I asked her, ‘that what you’re doing is for the best?’

  ‘We have to do everything we can to give her a proper start,’ Dorothea said. ‘After that it’s up to her.’ She mentioned her cousins, the Broadbents, accepted as the leading Cloate family. They had done well in the post-war period out of buying up and stripping the assets of several derelict estates in the neighbourhood, clearing the few remaining woods and turning the land over to agriculture. Bill and Emily Broadbent’s daughter Patricia had just finished four years at Woodford, and had gone straight from it to one of the leading schools for models and faced the prospect of a dazzling future. Pictures of her were already beginning to appear in the Essex newspapers, and there was talk of contracts. I made no attempt to dampen her enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that Jane—slouching about the village with rounded shoulders, pretty in a way but with a vapid expression, and burdened with a nasal and m
oaning Essex accent—could ever hope to imitate her cousin.

  A few days after this conversation Dorothea cut several inches from Jane’s lifeless hair, tidied up her fingernails and took her to Woodford for an interview with Mrs Amos, headmistress of Gladben’s Hall. She had found Mrs Amos formidable, a woman in her sixties she would have said, smooth-skinned, immaculate and precise. She was unnerved by the combination of Mrs Amos’s penetrating stare, and her almost excessively sympathetic manner. All in all, there was something spiderish about her. ‘But there you are,’ Dorothea said. ‘She gets the results.’

  Dorothea had an excellent memory and in describing the interview seemed to be repeating the conversation word by word. Jane, she said, was at her worst; fidgeting, embarrassed and tongue-tied. ‘She couldn’t have been more stupid,’ Dorothea said.

  ‘I want to know all about you,’ Mrs Amos had said. ‘Are you a sporty girl? Does music appeal to you, or do you like to curl up with a book?’

  But Jane just sat there and looked blank, Dorothea explained. ‘She wouldn’t utter. She wouldn’t even look Mrs Amos in the face. There was a picture on the wall of a German battleship going down after some battle—was it the Battle of the Plate?—and she was hypnotised by it. “I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs Amos. “It’s just her nerves. It’ll pass in a minute.” I have to say Mrs Amos was very understanding. Full marks to her for that. She asked Jane what she wanted to do with her life and Jane told her she didn’t know, and Mrs Amos said that was quite normal at her age, most young people didn’t. She seemed to be trying to draw Jane out,’ Dorothea said, ‘but Jane was terribly negative. When Mrs Amos asked her what she did in the evening she said she looked at the telly. She didn’t have any favourite programme, she told her. She just watched anything that happened to be on. It was all the same to her. Otherwise she went down to the bus shelter. That’s what the kids do when there’s nothing on the box. They just sit there and talk. Don’t ask me what about.’