by Tom Fort
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THE A303
Also by Tom Fort
Against the Flow
Downstream
Under the Weather
The Book of Eels
The Grass is Greener
The Far from Compleat Angler
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
A CBS Company
Copyright © 2012 by Tom Fort
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Tom Fort to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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222 Gray’s Inn Road
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WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Dehli
A CIP catalogue for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-85720-328-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-327-4
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd,
Croydon, CRO 4YY
To the memory of my father and mother
CONTENTS
1. Ignition On
2. The Road to Manderley?
3. Heston Services
4. Dead Men and Algebraic Equations
5. Beasts, Body Parts and Horns
6. Mutiny and Flower Power
7. Ancestral Voices
8. Old Stones, Big Birds
9. Men in White Robes
10. Digging Deep
11. Wiltshire Horn
12. Grossly Disordered
13. The End of the Plain
14. All Knightly Deeds
15. Roman Ways, Bloody Assizes
16. Coaching Days
17. The End of the Road
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION
Many of us have a road that reaches back into our past. It was not the road itself that mattered, but where it led. It took us to another world which, because it offered a vivid and thrilling alternative to our lives at home, had special status. It was the world of our family holidays, where we spent some of the most precious times of our growing up, times experienced with peculiar intensity. The memories of them, of the special places at the end of the road, retained their definition through the decades that followed.
As children we probably didn’t have the dimmest idea of where to find the road on the map. But it was as familiar to us as the way upstairs to bed. We knew the landmarks that measured its progress: maybe a pub sign, a red post-box, a old, sagging stone wall weighed down by ivy; a church steeple, a big, ancient tree. In our hearts we embraced each as it passed. Each delivered the same message. Nearly there now.
The special place stirred something very deep inside us. It offered adventure, excitement, a particular kind of intense happiness. Part of it was because it was different from home, but part of it was that it also had something of the same familiarity. We knew where the key was left, where to find the path that led to the sea, where the wood was stored. We knew to watch out for the low beam in front of the fireplace, the tight turn on the stone staircase.
Even though we were there for only a fortnight, we felt able to claim a kind of ownership. For that time it was ours, shared with no one else; certainly not the tenants who came before and after. Not knowing them, we were somewhat inclined to despise them because they could not possibly possess all the secret knowledge that we possessed, and therefore could not prize the place as we did. We would leave, aching with regret, but consoled by the thought that it would be ours again next year or the year after that, or one day.
Later in life, if things work out that way, we may pick up the road once more. Then we come back with our own children, hoping to give them the magic that we found. Because the magic was real, and because they have something of us in them, it can work for us through them. Holidays make us children again. They legitimise sandcastles and picnics and cricket on the beach and scooping at rock pools with nets. What has changed is that now we have to know the number of the road and how to find it.
For me and my elder brothers the road led to a low, grey, thick-walled cottage at the southern end of Coniston Water in the Lake District. It was owned by my grandmother’s elder sister, and for a fortnight most summers it was annexed by us and assorted cousins, friends and hangers-on under my grandmother’s benign supervision. There was a shack crowded with beds where the children slept, and a path past dripping laurels (it rained more often then) down to a long, green boat-house with a corrugated iron roof that nestled in the reeds at the lake’s edge.
Those were pre-motorway days. I, naturally, took no interest in the route north from our home in Berkshire. Looking at the family copy of the 1959 AA Road Book, I would guess that we picked up the A423 Oxford road at Henley-on-Thames, and the A34 at Oxford. This would have taken us to Birmingham, Stafford and west of Stoke to Manchester, where we must have joined the A6 past Lancaster. A few miles short of Kendal we turned left on the A590 Barrow road for the south Lakes, at which point I would be roused from my daydreams by the appearance in the west of the dark Lakeland fells, their rough-edged heights pushing at the sky.
It was the best part of 300 miles and it took a whole day. We left early in my grandmother’s sky-blue Morris Traveller. She was not a particularly slow driver, but it was rare for the speedometer to get above 60 m.p.h. Sitting in the back seat behind her, I could sense from the crescendo of engine noise and the slight shuddering of the chassis when we were approaching top speed. I would lean forward over her shoulder to watch the needle tremble as it reached the sixty mark. Silently I would urge it onwards; I longed for it to reach seventy, although I think that even at that tender age I was aware that the top speed of eighty displayed on the speedometer belonged in the realms of make-believe. Sixty was exciting enough, but on the single carriageway, traffic-clogged arterial routes of those days, it was never maintained for long.
For most of the way, I stared out of the window but saw very little. I was sustained by my imagination working on the special place, building dramatic scenes of slaying pike, slicing the canoe into the reed-beds and preparing an ambush, laying eel lines in the big pool down the river, playing cowboys and indians in the bracken. That first sight of the Lake District, with the westering sun flooding through the clouds, would recall me briefly to the real world, but it was followed by another slow, boring crawl as we skirted around Morecambe Bay towards Ulverston.
The real excitement began as we crossed the River Crake where it entered a branch of the bay, and turned north on the Coniston road. The river was intensely familiar to me because its mouth was just along the shore from our cottage, and it flowed through many of my favourite imaginings. From there onwards the road followed its valley. One either side were green meadows speckled with sheep and separated into irregular shapes by the wandering lines of the dry-stone walls. Higher up, the fields gave way to the rock and bracken of the fells.
From then on my senses were on full alert, trained on a succession
of landmarks: grey pebble-dashed farmhouse, overhanging copper beech, small slate-roofed church; a pair of high, rusted metal gates, never open; Coniston Old Man ahead, its lop-sided summit lit by the evening sun (if it was clear, which it sometimes was). The climax was the first sighting of the lake. There were always false alarms, because the road went up and down and twisted left and right many times, and I could never remember exactly which rise in the land would reveal that first sight of water. So when it came – a liquid gleam against pale green reed-beds – there was the shock of recognition followed by a jolt of delight.
As a grown-up I have been back many times with my children. The road is the same, although the trees are taller and the cottage seems even lower. The moment at which the lake reveals itself feels exactly as it did half a century ago.
I did not know the A303 then. It was later, much later, that I found it. I was in the process of discovering two rivers that would become places of enchantment for me; the road opened my way to them and thus became important to me.
The first of the rivers, travelling west, is the Avon, which winds south from Amesbury towards Salisbury. It’s a chalkstream of rich feeding where the trout grow big, and pewter-scaled grayling shoal in the hatch-pools and in the deep holes on bends where the current has scoured out the bank. Further on, beyond Stonehenge, through the village of Winterbourne Stoke and past the grassy earthworks of Yarnbury Castle, is the valley of the Wylye. It is half the size of the Avon, although it has surprising depths, and it runs through woods and meadows and past old beamed houses with mullioned windows, connecting a string of the prettiest, sleepiest villages in England. You can lose yourself on the Wylye, and fish for hours without seeing a soul or being aware of anything much beyond these willows and alders and the sound and movement of water, or the likelihood of finding a feeding fish where the gravelled shallow shelves down to the head of a pool.
I would drive the A303 sometimes on my own, but often with a particular friend. In summer we would generally go down in the evening, towards the sun, reaching the Avon as the shadows of the trees stretched across the water, and finish late with the bats out and owls hooting across dark meadows. In winter the fishing days are short and the water can seem lifeless. But even the coldest of them can startle you with a magical hour around noon when insects suddenly hatch and the grayling wake up to eat them. And always the A303, holding out the promise of delight on the way there, the way back always more muted, the radio on to cover the silences, the landmarks passing unnoticed, their meaning forfeited.
The A303 extends from just west of Basingstoke to a few miles east of Honiton in Devon. The distance is little more than ninety miles, which makes it a baby among major arterial routes (the A1 is 400 miles, the A38 290). But the A303 straddles spheres. It can take the adventurer from cosy, commuter-belt Hampshire to the threshold of another land entirely, one of wooded dales enclosing tumbling streams, steep hillsides and old stone farmhouses, purple treeless moors, eventually rocky headlands and sandy beaches and the surging sea. It is a road of magical properties.
From the late 1950s, for ten or twelve years, Linda followed it each year with her father, mother and younger brother from their home in Buckinghamshire. Their first car was a Hillman Minx, their destination a caravan site near Weymouth. As their circumstances improved, they migrated west for the annual holiday, to Devon and later Cornwall, and it grew from one week to two.
Linda’s father, a clerk with the Gas Board, would really have preferred to have spent his leave entitlement at home tending the garden that he loved with a deep, quiet passion. But Linda’s mother insisted that they must go away, and as he loved to drive, he drove. He wrote down the route on an envelope: across to Basingstoke, A303 to Honiton, A30 further west – the destination always a caravan site. Linda’s mother did not drive and could not read a map, so Linda sat next to her father, passing on the instructions when it got complicated. The end of the road varied, but there was one constant. Linda would ask if they were going past Stonehenge and when they did, they would stop and climb on the stones and wander among them and wonder at them. Each year, the monument which had delivered different messages to so many over thousands of years told them that they were on their way.
Linda’s father liked the A303 because it was faster than the narrow, winding A30. The A303 gave the journey a firm, propulsive shove. He liked it even more when they widened stretches of it into dual carriageway. Stuck behind a crawling lorry or – worse still – a tractor dragging a stack of hay, he would become silent and tense. Then a section of dual carriageway would beckon and the mood in the car – later a Triumph Herald, later still a lime-green Ford Capri – would lighten as the accelerator pedal went down.
Simon and his family went every year to Devon or Cornwall, always staying on a farm, always taking the A303, always stopping at Stonehenge for their picnic. Simon’s father was an Austin man: the family progressed from Austin 7 to Austin 55 to Austin 60. He had all the maps covering the south-west and had – or felt he had – no need of a map-reader. ‘Dad was in charge of getting us lost,’ Simon remembers. When Simon, as a young man, took his girlfriend to Yorkshire for a holiday, he felt they were going the wrong way. It was unnatural not to be on the A303. The road was in his blood.
There are plenty who still follow the same path. I went to find a random sample of them on a Friday in the 2011 summer holiday season. It was grey and drizzly, the forecast dodgy. The traffic was heavy but not exceptionally so, just the usual solid stream. The car parks at the service areas were full; the Little Chefs were packed, with queues outside. Humour was good despite the weather and the traffic.
A family from Hatfield in Hertfordshire – father, mother, two kids, two grandparents – were heading for Exmouth, their seven-seater packed to the roof. ‘Always take the A303,’ Dad said, ‘less boring than the motorway, and you’ve always got Stonehenge.’ Derek from Newmarket was taking a cup of tea from a Thermos in the shelter of his boot-lid as the drizzle drifted down, his team – wife, daughter, two grandsons – tightly packed into a blue saloon bound for Bridport. Derek had seen a BBC Four programme I’d made about the A303. ‘Here, meet the wife,’ he said proudly. She, he confided to me, would rather be heading east to see the sun – Yarmouth or somewhere like that – but he made the decisions and one of them was the A303.
An elderly couple in the queue for a cup of tea were doing as they had done most years since 1957, when as honeymooners they set off for Devon in their Austin 7. Now they had their ten-year-old grandson with them. They had had their foreign holidays since then and there was nothing wrong with them, but there was something about the south-west, something special, and this was the way to find it. An old rocker with a pony-tail told me that it had begun for him in the mid-1960s folded into the back of the family Mini, and he’d finally settled in Cornwall and not come back. ‘It was part of my childhood, the A303,’ he said, speaking slowly and nodding in that old rocker’s way. ‘So part of me.’
There were more the same, taking the road not because they had deep feelings about it or had ever thought much about it, but because it was part of a familiar and comforting act of escape. Everyone knows the motorway is quicker: M25 around London, M4 to Bristol, M5 to Exeter. But the A303 belongs in the ritual and the motorway doesn’t. We go this way because we always went this way, and we’re still doing the same thing only we’re older now and the car’s rather smarter and the traffic is just as bad as it ever was. All those I spoke to explained their preference on the grounds that the motorway was boring. There was more to see on the A303 and more time to see it. Stonehenge, always Stonehenge. Two of the drivers were ex-truckers. They said most truckers would take the A303 if they could, for all the same reasons, plus better, cheaper, hotter, fresher-made breakfasts at the cafés along the way.
Everyone moaned about the traffic, but in a good-humoured way, almost affectionately. It was part of the A303; what else could you expect on a Friday afternoon in the holiday season? Don’t fr
et, mate, we’ll all get there in the end.
Coming back is something else. Same road, but not the same at all. For a child, there is an almost physical ache as the special place is left behind, and even as adults we feel the sadness. The road is complicit in the loss. The landmarks in their reverse order remind us of what we are leaving behind. We twist our heads for a last glimpse of the cottage or caravan or campsite, catch a last gleam from the lake or the sea. Ahead is home, work, school, routine, daily shaving, uncut lawn, unpicked veg, duties, appointments. It is the road that is returning us to this enslavement and we resent it. It’s then that the jams seem against us, an extra injury. A man in my cricket club was telling me about coming back from his holiday in Devon, infant daughter fractious, wife testy, the traffic solid. ‘Fucking A303,I hate it. Don’t talk to me about fucking Stonehenge, sick of the sight of the fucking thing.’
* * *
‘You can let yourself go on the 303,’ pounded forth Kula Shaker. ‘You can find your way home on the 303.’ The song celebrated in enigmatic lyrics the way to ‘the land of the summer sun’ – presumably Glastonbury, where the band was born at the 1993 festival. Each June the Glastonbury faithful still follow the road in pursuit of some kind of escape or release, a few days of another kind of life.
For the generation before them, the lure was Stonehenge and its Free Festival – music, drugs, free love, hugs and acid smiles and signs of peace, a repudiation of the cheerless world of career and mortgage beyond, and the grim, dangerous world beyond that. Down the A303 the Love Convoy rolled, until Mrs Thatcher and her ministers and the Daily Mail decided that society had had quite enough of that sort of useless parasitism, thank you, and put a stop to it.
There was no psychedelic rock for me at the end of the road, and certainly no free love, just flowing water and the sweet, fulfilling joy of casting a fly for a fish. Like most travellers, I did not trouble myself about the road itself – not at first. It was nothing more than a means to my end. The idea of looking into its story took form slowly. But once I began to pursue it, the feeling was like that of pushing open a door into a walled garden full of interesting vegetables and trees laden with apples and plums and pears; or into an attic where there were old chests in which the records of old adventures had been left to gather dust.