by Hugh Thomson
Edward Thomas’s reputation as a poet has grown exponentially during the century since his death. His adaptation of Frost’s plain-speaking verse to an English setting was greatly influential on Auden; more recent poets like Glyn Maxwell and Matthew Hollis sing his praises. Yet I suspect that if Thomas had not become so fine a poet, his earlier prose books would be far less admired: many are journeyman works, written at speed and under pressure, as he complained at the time. There is the odd flash of genius and much makeweight material. His book on The Icknield Way is a case in point. He had suggested several other topics before the publishers pointed him in this direction. After a brilliant dedicatory preface, the book gets bogged down in a minute description of exactly where the route went.
Letters show that at the time he was suffering from a bleak depression, the black dog trotting along at his side. He wistfully quotes Leslie Stephen, who had remarked that walking was a panacea for writers that could have cured Samuel Johnson. There is the sense of a man glad to have no company with him. He talks to no one.
A row of red-brick houses at Cleeve remind him of all the unimaginative, lumpen buildings for labourers, far from the wisteria-clad Georgian rectories that Edwardian England congratulated itself upon, just as Country Life England still does. In his poem ‘Wind and Mist’ he talked of one such red-brick house with a garden where ‘the flint was the one crop that never failed. The clay first broke my heart and then my back.’
The preface contains some wonderful, mystical lines: ‘I could not find a beginning or an ending to the Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness.’ And it was difficult to resist this clarion call to follow in his footsteps: ‘there is nothing beyond the furthest of far ridges except a signpost to unknown places.’
When Thomas arrived at Little Stoke and the Thames from Norfolk, he was halfway through his journey, so I was meeting him at midpoint in the route, so to speak, coming the other way, as I took the Ferry Road down from Cholsea.
In his day there was still a ferry in operation across the Thames – and there is still the old ferryman’s cottage just up the bank – but now there was only one way to cross, short of a five-mile walk around the nearest bridge. I folded up my clothes in the backpack, left the bike under some bushes, and swam.
After days of travel on the hills, the shock of cold water was both welcome and extreme. The sun was out and by the time I was halfway across, the edge had been taken off that first cold shock. On the other side of the bank, the flowering horse chestnuts were casting deep pools of shadow along the bank. There was a lane directly ahead and I could see up the trees to a familiar house at the far end.
For there was a final and less scholarly reason for wanting to make this my Icknield Way crossing of the Thames, and reach Little Stoke on the other bank. It was where I lived.
Chapter 3
Homecoming
‘Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,’ Rat said presently. O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.’
The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. ‘I hear nothing myself,’ he said, ‘but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.’
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
MY FAMILY HAD lived at Little Stoke for over thirty years. Which is not to say I always had. It was my parents’ house. I had lived here as a boy and then travelled away, both to Latin America for books, films and expeditions, and also to Bristol where I had a house of my own for many years, and married. But Little Stoke had always played a central part in my life, partly because I had first come here as a city boy from London, aged sixteen, and the shock of arriving in the country had been both deep and pleasant; it was perhaps because the countryside had once been foreign for me, not familiar, that it still held such appeal. And in recent years I had returned there as a refugee after a painful divorce and exile from Bristol, as a natural place to retreat to, to rebuild. My parents had since moved on from their house, and I remained, renting out a thatched barn near by.
Little Stoke is a small hamlet of just a few houses, between the two larger villages of North Stoke and South Stoke, which also lie on the river. There is a big Manor Farm, to which most of the surrounding land belongs, some cottages up on the first outlying hill that rises towards the Chilterns, and the old ferryman and dairyman’s cottages. And the house that we had lived in, a white house with green shutters that faced down a willow-lined lawn to the river, with an adjoining old barn.
There was a small orchard and a rambling walled garden which we planted with vegetables when we first arrived, my mother being determined to lead the Good Life in as self-sufficient a way as possible; we kept chickens in a movable coop that we wheeled around the lawn, leaving scorched squares of acrid grass from the chicken excrement. My sisters kept a pony in the paddock.
When I was young I used to sit under the willows along the backwater to read, or take a small motorbike up into the hills, or follow the traditional English pastime of messing around on the river in small boats.
Over the years, I had swum the river many times. But this was different. This was after a long journey and some time away, a coming home. It was early evening by the time I crossed and the usual traffic of small crafts and barges had more or less disappeared, although I kept an eye open for the almost silent rowing skiffs sculling down from the Oxford University boathouses upriver: lethal, sharp bows, and a helmsman looking backwards made these potential assassins in the water, particularly as the last thing they expected to find in the Thames was a lone and silent swimmer.
Although perhaps they should. For in the last few years, swimmers, like the freshwater fish, have started to come back to the upper Thames. Where once I saw another swimmer perhaps every other year, now there were far more in a week.
I can date it back to a single summer’s day a few years before. I was sitting with my boys in the barn when we saw four swimmers in wetsuits crunching their way down the gravel of the lane. Some of them were large and well cushioned, as is the way with long-distance swimmers. Their more svelte leader turned out to be Kate Rew, whose book Wild Swim had done much to popularise the idea, and who had founded the Outdoor Swimming Society; she lived close by and sometimes came here to swim with a group down to South Stoke. We joined them.
Particularly in the evening I loved to float downstream, with the odd curious cow looking down from the banks of the fields, and to see the coots, moorhens, and crested grebes up close as they glided out from the overhanging branches of the tall horse chestnut trees. Sometimes I startled a kingfisher, which would startle me back even more with its small rocket propulsion away from the bank, a shot of turquoise and gold like an Italian firecracker going off.
So to swim back home after my long journey from the coast made emotional as well as practical sense. After dealing with some of those practicalities – like rowing a dingy back across the river to retrieve my clothes, pack and bicycle – I lay on the ferryman’s old jetty and let the setting sun fall on me. The flambeaus of the horse chestnut trees were lit up by the last rays of light, like lanterns for a river regatta.
It was a disorientating homecoming in some ways – as if Little Stoke, which I had known all my adult life, was somehow repositioned in my mind. I had always thought of it as just the place my family happened to live: its central position on the Icknield Way had never registered more than as an abstract fact; nor that this was such a heartland for the Anglo-Saxons.
By following the Icknield Way up from the Dorset coast, I had been going with the historical weather behind me, so to speak, as a good walker should: I had come from the earliest prehistoric beginnings of England and through its Celtic and Iron Age development; now I was in the centre of the Saxon world, of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ after the Romans de
parted Britain. And ahead lay the Viking invasions on the coast of East Anglia that brought that world to an end.
I had shied away from the Anglo-Saxons at school, and for that matter at university, where my English Literature course started late enough, with Chaucer, to avoid their study. Looking at the history books again, I realised why. The long complicated genealogical tables of kings’ names – Æthelbald, Æthelberht, Æthelred – with little detail to distinguish the reigns of most of them, aside from Alfred the Great, and the battles between the rival kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, had left me cold.
What I had now begun to appreciate far more was the Anglo-Saxon culture not of the courts but of the fields: the farms, homesteads and hunting lodges that had established a pattern of village life which had endured for over a millennium; being back at home for a while would enable me to re-examine that village life with the shock of familiarity.
*
There is nothing like sleeping in clean sheets after travelling rough. The comforts of home. Even listening to the electric kettle boil gave me pleasure. One of the principal reasons to camp, surely, is to help you appreciate domestic mundanities. I went to bed with a cup of tea and a book.
At 4.30 in the morning I was woken in those clean sheets by a frantic knocking on my door. Feeling like Badger, I went to see who had got lost in the night. It was my Czech girlfriend Irena, who lived on the London fringes of Kent, some way distant. I could tell she had not come out of a feverish desire to see me; it was the middle of the working week and she commuted into London. Her face was tear-stained and dishevelled.
‘It’s the chickens.’
This had been a disaster waiting to happen. Like many Londoners, Irena craved the countryside, and yet couldn’t move out easily because of work and school commitments. So she had bought chickens for her suburban garden: three, named in the traditional way after American states and Fleetwood Mac songs – Utah, Amber, and Green Manalishi.
This was fine in principle. But her area of leafy south London was like a town in a western before Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart arrived: foxes lounged on street corners, watching passers-by with nonchalant insolence; their cubs gambled in the laurel hedges; when I wrote at her house, a vixen stalked past the garden windows on regular, hourly patrol.
Like a good homesteader, Irena had put in thorough defences: the coop was underwired; the perimeter defended with trip-wire searchlights and sonic alarms; but still they came.
Amber had already been taken, in broad daylight. Now presumably Utah and Green Manalishi had gone the way of all fowl.
‘They didn’t get Utah.’
From the BMW behind her, I could hear the faint clucking of an alarmed hen. Irena looked at me. I had just become a chicken rescue home.
I gave her tea and breakfast and she caught the first dawn train to London and her job. Utah looked around my barn, which had comforting rafters and thatch, like an extended coop. She gave a contented gurgle. I knew exactly what she was thinking: ‘This is a place where I could lay my eggs.’
Before she discovered the delights of my duvet, I rang my sister, who lived not so far away and kept chickens; one more to add to the flock.
*
This area of South Oxfordshire was still surprisingly empty and agricultural for a place within striking distance of London, although farming had changed greatly during my lifetime.
‘It’s the London boroughs. They round up the urban foxes, put them on trains and release them off the embankment at Goring. First real bit of countryside they reach out of London. We never used to get foxes here. It’s not fox country.’
Sarah Phipps was looking mournfully at her chickens, which had suffered recent fox depredations. We were sitting on the back lawn of her Old Vicarage Farm in nearby South Stoke, a cheerful jumble of fields and vegetable gardens stretching down to the river, with the odd cow ambling across the meadows. But now only the odd cow. Time was, when Sarah and her husband John first started farming here over half a century ago, they had a herd of sixty Jersey cattle; their friend Tony Knowles worked with them as a dairyman and had always lived in the house, together with a cheerful assortment of lodgers, waifs and strays whom Sarah had mothered down the years I had known them.
Which had been some time. Almost my first memory of meeting them was at the celebrations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, when a float paraded around the village packed with neighbourhood dignitaries in Roman togas and cod armour, and John and Sarah had an open party on the meadows. Another local farmer filmed it all on Super-8; the reel had often been played at village hall events since, so had become part of local folklore.
‘Even then, the village was mainly a farming one,’ Sarah added as we were reminiscing about the Jubilee. ‘When John first came to the village in 1948, there were hardly any tractors. Everything was horse-drawn. When he bought the farm in 1956, it was about the only private property in the village; the rest were owned by one of the Oxford colleges and rented out to agricultural labourers. We had three shops, a school and a post office. Everything had to be here as the wives didn’t have cars. Now there’s hardly a farmworker left – or for that matter a horse. Let alone shops or a post office. The pub is hanging on by a thread. The work all gets contracted out. Some big farms around here don’t have a single worker of their own. And they’ve all had to diversify.’
Sarah and John’s herd had contracted over the years, not least through the difficulties of dealing with milk quotas (‘Ours was set during a bad year,’ said Sarah darkly, ‘so artificially low and completely unfair’) and their determination to have characterful Jerseys rather than the usual dull, black-and-white Friesians, a breed whose popularity only exploded to monoculture and monochrome proportions in the 1970s. To make up the income, they had leased out many of the surrounding outhouses to businesses, including one that renovated old cars, a business very much after John and Tony’s own hearts.
John was aged eighty, a gentleman farmer of the old school who chain-smoked and wore a panama hat. Tony, their old friend and dairyman, was now eighty-three and getting frailer. When I was a boy, I remember him as a tall, tremendously strong man who winched boats out of the river when no one else could. He shared John’s passion for cars and had a 1934 MG NA Magnet, even if, as he said, it usually stayed in one of their garages, under repair.
Sarah had come here from Wales where she had grown up near Abergavenny and had a countrywoman’s relish for the down-to-earth. Later, over dinner with John and Tony and assorted offspring, she expanded on the foxes that were being dumped in verdant South Oxfordshire by unscrupulous London boroughs.
‘Someone saw them doing it,’ she said.
I murmured that perhaps it was just one of those myths that people wanted to believe.
‘We live by myth,’ pronounced John wisely, holding an unlit cigarette as a temporary sublimation activity. The dining room was full of family portraits and fine furniture, covered with old farming magazines and the homely clutter that had grown over half a century of living in the house.
I asked politely about the red kites that had started to appear in numbers over this part of Oxfordshire ever since being reintroduced on the Getty estate, which lies inland from the Thames on the Chilterns. One of the most characteristic sights at Little Stoke over the last few years had been to see their forked-tail figures swoop down over the fields as they searched for carrion.
Sarah reacted strongly. ‘Well for a start, they are not just carrion birds. People say they are, but they’re not. They’ll take small chicks. I’ve seen them try to get among the chickens – although if a hen got hold of one, they’d get a kicking, as kites aren’t big birds, only about four and a half pounds at best. And they take songbird chicks. I know they do, because they take them into our pine trees to eat them, and the bits drip down.’
She paused dramatically to announce this last detail; her seven-year-old grandson Josh looked momentarily disconcerted, but then turned his attention back to the York
shire pudding. He was being brought up to country ways – just before dinner he reported that the dog was regurgitating whatever it was she had just caught in the hedgerow. Sarah told him that it was the one breed that had learned to regurgitate food for its pups, the Hungarian Vizsla.
Sarah had always been full of arcane and intriguing country lore. She had a keen interest in ley lines and was disappointed that I had not been following them more closely as I tracked across the country from the south-west. I shared the scepticism of archaeologist Richard Atkinson, who had once demonstrated that if you drew lines between all the telephone boxes in a county, you would get enough boxes lying on the same axis to prove the existence of ‘telephone box ley lines’, just as you can with ancient monuments.
But Sarah was a strong advocate: ‘Glastonbury, Avebury, Stonehenge – they are all places where the Michael ley line crosses with the Mary ley line, the masculine and feminine energies combining.’ She made a cross with her fingers. ‘Whereas Crowmarsh [a village just upriver] is way off them. That’s why it was a leper colony.’
Everyone looked surprised.
‘Were there leper colonies in England?’ asked Tony.
‘Absolutely. They had to put them somewhere,’ said Sarah firmly. ‘A friend of mine invited me over to a cottage she had bought in Crowmarsh. I couldn’t stay in it for more than twenty minutes. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. Gave her the creeps as well. She sold it after six months. When she dug over the garden for vegetables, she found a row of skulls.’
I had a quiet beer with Tony later in the evening. He told me he was still upset about the time when his herd was down to a dozen cows, and half had to be slaughtered and incinerated. ‘I made sure I wasn’t around that day.’ Almost all the rest had been due to go just a few months before we met, but there was a last-minute ‘reprieve’ and he was able to keep the remaining four. He still got up each dawn to let the cows out of their sheds and take them down to the river. ‘It’s easy in the evenings because they find their own way back to the sheds.’ Jerseys are smaller, more delicate cattle than the robust Friesians (one reason for increasing Friesian supremacy in the battle of the cows) and Tony felt protective about them. He still cut their hay from the meadows in late summer, but where once he used to cut 5,000 bales, now he cut just 200.