The Path Through the Trees
Page 1
To Lesley and Clare and to the memory of my Father
Preface
In my first book, The Enchanted Places, I was writing about my childhood, saying what I needed to say about Pooh and Christopher Robin. The present book is in a way a sequel, starting where the other left off. But, rather more than that, it is a complement. It is about the non-Pooh part of my life. It is an escape from Christopher Robin.
It is the story of a young man who left home, and in one of his pockets he had a handful of talents given him by his mother and in the other a handful given him by his father. What did he do with them? Where did they take him?
If you can divide humanity into two groups, those who are better with their head than their hands and those who are better with their hands than their head, then my father was in the first and my mother in the second. I, inheriting from both of them, have in consequence spent much of my time hopping from the one group to the other, uncertain which was the more likely to lead me to fame and fortune. This is not the best way of achieving either. Nor does it produce an autobiography in which each chapter follows the last in a steady progression towards an ultimate goal
The result, therefore, is a disjointed story – but a happy life.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair.
And having perhaps the better claim.
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by.
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Contents
Prologue. The Path Through the Trees
PART ONE: The Road to War
1. The Distant War
2. Preparations for War
3. Training for War
4. Reflections on War
5. Flowers in the Sand
6. The Lull
7. War – The Events
8. War – The Adventure
9. War – The Horror
10. War – The Fruits
11. War – The Lesson
Interlude. Hedda
PART TWO: The Road to Work
1. A Walk Through the Hills
2. Downwards
3. Lesley
4. Westwards
5. Setting up Shop
6. Not Just Books
7. Books
8. Friends and Helpers
Interlude. Clare
PART THREE: The Road less Travelled by
1. Town Life
2. Country Life
3. Animal Life
4. Life
Epilogue. The New Path
Prologue. The Path Through the Trees
The road runs up the valley and a little stream keeps it company. It is a narrow road – if two cars meet unexpectedly one will almost certainly have to reverse – and the hills rise steeply on either side. After about a mile there is a gap in the hills on the left and here another valley, another road and another stream join the first. There is a bridge and a giant plane tree and then, twenty yards up this second road, a pink-walled, slate-roofed house. The house is at the foot of a slope, the land rising steeply behind it so that on the ground floor there is a door in the front onto the road and on the first floor there is a door at the back into the garden; and if your shoes are not too muddy this is often the best way from the one to the other.
At the back the ground goes on rising until it reaches the top. The top of what? Not really the top of the garden because it is no longer garden up there. Not the top of the orchard, because the apple trees are lower down. The top of the estate? The top of the wood? The top of the copse? The top of the wilderness? None of these sounds quite right; so we just call it ‘the Top’, because that’s what it feels like when you reach it. But it isn’t really even that, as you discover to your surprise if you cross the road and climb the hill on the other side. From here you can see that our Top is only about a third of the way up. You can also see why there are two quite separate ways there; for it lies at the junction of two slopes. There is the slope that faces the first valley. This is a gradual one and the path on this side climbs between fruit trees and hazels, through daffodils, primroses, bluebells, campions and knee-high grass according to season. The other slope faces the second valley and is steeper and rockier. Here the path climbs in a succession of steps and terraces, between oaks and blackthorns, through bracken and bramble.
All told it is a tiny area, no more than a quarter of an acre, but as you do the round, going up one path and down the other, pausing here and there (if you are unaccustomed to Devon hills) and spending a moment or two on each of the seats you find on the way, you will notice that at each point the view of your surrounding world is different. At one point you look down the first valley, at another you look up it, at a third you look across it, while at a fourth you look across the second valley. Nowhere can you see more than half a mile, and in places scarcely a hundred yards. It is a small world. But with such variety does one need a larger one? I sometimes wonder about this. What is the advantage of size, of distance? Does the astronomer with his telescope see more than the biologist with his microscope? Does the man who travels see more than the man who stays at home? Is the distant view of a bank of primroses more beautiful than a single primrose held in the hand? I don’t think so. To the eye a beautiful view is no more than a pattern of light and shade, of this colour and that. Distance and closeness are calculated by the brain, then judged by the heart. Each heart has its own preference and mine has always been for the small and near, with the large and far-away providing the contrast.
So I live at the bottom of a valley. I have a small bookshop in a small town; and I seldom venture far afield.
There is a level terrace just below the Top and here one day I am going to build a hut. Clare and I have already been to the sawmills to buy some of the wood, she in her wheelchair watching, while I picked out the 3 by 3 oak that I will need for the frame. And we have been up to the site to do some preliminary levelling – clearing away brambles and bracken and tidying up the rock face at the back. That was as far as we got last spring, and now it is summer and too hot for that sort of work, and besides there are too many flies. So we’ll wait until the cool of autumn and then hope to finish it so that on winter afternoons we can go there and sit there protected from wind and rain and for an hour or so I can dream that I am Thoreau at Walden.
While I was clearing away loose stones from the rock I came upon several little caches of empty hazelnut shells – the larders of a bank vole. And sometimes under a stone I found a slow worm and picked it up and let it twine itself around my fingers and then around Clare’s. When I move in the bank voles and slow-worms will have to move out. This is always the way of it. But they needn’t move far and many other creatures will not need to move at all.
Willow warbler, chiff-chaff and blackcap will still come in the spring to sing to me. Longhorn moths will still be there in their scores to dance over the bracken on sunny s
ummer mornings; and dor beetles will make aeroplane noises on summer nights. Up there I shall be one of many. For our different reasons we have all chosen this particular hillside. Some of us live here all the year round; others pay annual visits; others come one year but not the next. Why for instance are there so many common blue butterflies here this summer? I have left a patch of grass unscythed for them. It is only a dozen paces across and I have counted up to fifteen resting on the grass stems, and there are seldom fewer than six. Have they come here from further afield because my grass is best? Or was it because some years ago their food plant, birdsfoot trefoil, suddenly blazed into flower below Clare’s swing? Was it the trefoil that brought the blues? And what, then, brought the trefoil?
It is as if a multitude of invisible lines all converge on my hillside, and along these lines have come the creatures who now live here. There are the annual lines that bring the migrant birds, short in time but long in distance. Then there are the lines that stretch back through generations and that have brought the residents; the buzzards that circle overhead, the voles, the slow-worms, the blues, the trefoil, the dor beetles. And among all these converging lines is my own. Was my coming as natural and inevitable as theirs? Could a scientist explain it as confidently as he explains the return of the swallow? My line twists and turns, sets off in one direction then seems to change its mind. And along its course are many points where the way appears to diverge, many points where I might have chosen differently and gone somewhere else. Or was the choice only illusory?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other. . . .
But was there really a choice even then, even for Robert Frost walking through a Vermont wood? He thought there was. The two roads were so alike, it was just that one of them seemed a little grassier, a little less worn. That was the road he took. But would he have been Robert Frost if he had taken the other?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This then is the story of the road I took on my journey from Cotchford Farm in Sussex to my hillside at Embridge. When one is a child one has little say in the matter: one’s parents decide. Mine chose Cotchford and they chose the various schools I was sent to as I grew up. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin my story at the point in time when the choice stopped being theirs and became mine. And if I were asked to pick on an actual date when this happened, as good a one as any – and with the advantage that it is also a memorable one – would be September 3rd, 1939.
PART ONE
The Road to War
1. The Distant War
I was just nineteen. I had left Stowe and was about to go to Cambridge. My father and I had been spending the last fortnight of August on Dartmoor, near the village of Harford on the Erme. But while we were watching buzzards circling in the blue sky, elsewhere the clouds had been gathering, and in the end the news had brought us hurrying home. On September 1st Germany had invaded Poland. It was now September 3rd and we were awaiting – indeed all the world was awaiting – Great Britain’s reply. He and I, side by side on the sofa in the sitting-room at Cotchford, hunched over the wireless. . . .
Four years earlier my father had published a book called Peace With Honour. In it he had written: ‘I think that war is the ultimate expression of man’s wickedness and man’s silliness.’ He had now just finished his autobiography. In it he had written: ‘. . . it makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, war.’ He had been a pacifist before 1914; he was a pacifist again from 1919 until 1939. And he was now, it might seem, about to betray the cause of which he was one of the more eloquent champions. He who had written: ‘A nation has no honour’ was now about to thrill with pride that Britain was doing the honourable thing. He had served with an Infantry Battalion in France in 1916, and it needed little imagination to see me following in his muddy, bloody footprints.
And I? Of course I shared his views on this as I shared his views on almost everything. I was too young ever to have labelled myself a pacifist, but I was certainly pacific enough. My only excursion into militarism had occurred at a Christmas party when I was about seven years old. Luke, who was larger if not older than I, had suddenly and unaccountably announced to those around him: ‘I fight with my fists!’ Feeling – I don’t know why – that this called for some sort of reply from me, I had answered: ‘Me, too.’ I had approached him, been struck on the nose and been borne off by Nanny in a flood of tears. Since then I had been discreet rather than valorous. I may have spent hours pouring over The Times’ History of the Great War in the library at my prep school, tingling at the more dramatic pictures, but I kept well clear of the more pugnacious among my schoolfellows, and willingly agreed with anyone who told me that war was a bad thing.
So, for our different reasons, we were both pacifists – and now we were about to renounce our beliefs. Why?
My father gave his reasons in a small book called War Aims Unlimited. To put them very briefly, they were that Hitler was different: different from anything he had ever imagined possible; that, terrible though war was, peace under Hitler would have been even more terrible. I am not here going to elaborate on his arguments. Indeed I am doubtful if pacifism versus militarism, either in general or in any particular instance, is a proper subject for argument – any more than one can argue about love. War and love: they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer.
So I will merely record that on that September morning he and I felt a flood of relief, a thrill of pride, when the news came through that we were at war. And no doubt thousands of others, hunched over their wirelesses, felt exactly the same.
There were two immediate questions to be answered. Would I be going up to Cambridge? And would my parents be returning to London? The answer to the first came a few weeks later. Yes. The answer to the second was No. Indeed, not only would they not be going to London, but Londoners would be coming to live with us. Evacuees.
Thus it all began, and at first it seemed very remote. On the BBC and in the papers we learned that England was doing this and Germany was doing that and Russia was doing something else. We read about German tanks and Polish cavalry and the cautious manoeuvrings of the Allied Armies in France. From these generalities a few individuals emerged: Chamberlain with his butterfly collar and umbrella, Lord Halifax with his bowler hat, Hitler with his little moustache, Stalin with his big one. As that great cartoonist, Low, drew them so I saw them and thought of them, puppets dancing on a stage, puppets whose activities did not as yet touch me very closely. If one day I might have to become a soldier, it seemed that I was going to have to be an undergraduate first. But I had no very strong feelings one way or the other.
Cambridge in October, 1939. The war had been on for a month; yet although it was front page news in the papers, it had already – with so many other, more exciting things clamouring for my attention – receded to the back pages of my thoughts. As a Trinity scholar I lived in college – in P.1. Whewell’s Court, to be precise – and there I found that I had been provided with a sitting-room and a bedroom together with the larger and more essential items of furniture. The smaller items I had to provide myself. I made a list. Table lamp, some pictures, saucepan, kettle, china, cutlery . . . and at the bottom I added cigarette box and ash tray. For I was now grown up.
There are three small things that distinguish the grown up from the boy: he can drive, he can drink and he can smoke. Admittedly these were skills boasted of by many while still at school, and certainly with me nothing had been e
xpressly forbidden. It was just that there had been no encouragement either; and when it came to growing up, encouragement was what I needed. My father drove, safely, unenthusiastically and in total ignorance of what went on under the bonnet. When on one occasion my mother asked if I, sitting next to him, was ever allowed to change gear, he said, ‘No’ – and the subject was dropped. But he sometimes let me hold the steering wheel while he lit his pipe.
My father drank, in moderation and without much discrimination. He liked a glass of cherry brandy before lunch and a cocktail before dinner, and he celebrated special occasions with a bottle of hock. But none of these were the drinks of undergraduates in 1939. If we drank at all we drank beer. My father did not drink beer. He said he didn’t like the taste, and I was prepared to accept that I wouldn’t like the taste either. So I stuck to bottled cider. This left smoking.
My father smoked a pipe. In fact he was seldom without a pipe in his mouth. I remember on one occasion he and I went for a swim together while on one of our Dorset holidays. We had just dressed and were preparing to spend an hour or so reclining on the beach, idly throwing stones into the water, when he felt in his pocket. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘I’ve left my pipe behind. Quick. We must go home at once.’ And he set off, running. . . .
I had never smoked. So now was the moment to make the experiment. Pipe or cigarette? The trouble with a pipe was that you had to start by buying one, and when you went into a shop it would be obvious to everybody that it was your first pipe you were buying. I doubted, too, if I could ever light it in public without everybody noticing how badly I was doing it. Cigarettes were easier. Provided I said, ‘Capstan, please,’ with sufficient confidence, no one would know that it was the first packet I had ever bought. I said, ‘Capstan, please,’ and bore my treasure home. . . . In all I suppose I smoked about six cigarettes, and a friend or two helped me with the rest. That was the end of the experiment and I’ve never smoked since.