by Laurie Lee
The Severn rises in Plynlimon mountain, a few miles from the sea near Aberystwyth. Plynlimon is a great rising ground of rivers. At least four well up from its mossy pools and take their separate courses. The Rheidol and Ystwyth have brisk brief lives, scampering straight to the nearby sea. The Wye runs south, winding through lovely wooded valleys to its mouth at Chepstow. But the Severn turns its back on the ocean altogether and aims straight for the heart of middle England, giving birth to abbeys, cathedrals, cities, and travelling two hundred headstrong miles before its life is done.
This is the young Severn near its source, slipping, bouncing and bubbling down little green gorges whose banks are stuffed with lead mines and ringed by ancient cairns. So the river would have appeared in its early days to the buzzards and hawks that fly these lonely skies. Over two thousand feet above the sea, there is nothing else to watch its tumbling source, but sheep, foxes, rabbits and wild ponies. Here the Severn is light and fast and free, tumbling in little waterfalls and racing round stones. These are its miles of infancy and carelessness. It runs its capricious course in quick loops westward, and is hardly aware of being a river at all, until it enters Llanidloes, the first township on its banks.
At Llanidloes the sparkling Plynlimon stream is first proved a river and a pathfinder. Here the road and the railway join the river to use the valley it has given them. Here also it is joined and strengthened by a tributary, who also rose in Plynlimon. Thus grown and broadened, but not yet sobered, the Severn ambles northeast to Caersws, the site of a Roman outpost which, when it was first set up here, still in the heart of Wales, must have seemed to the garrison a camp on the edge of the world.
All rivers are neutral. They will act as a defensive moat to the defender, or just as easily turn traitor and lead the invader through the hill passes just as the Severn led the Romans to Caersws. No wonder they are feared and worshipped. They are barriers to men and protectors. Life grows from them as from a stalk. At Newtown the Severn makes a little casual arm, but within the curve of this arm the men of Newtown founded their fortress.
Here at Newtown a canal appears – the Shropshire Union Canal, walking staidly by the ambling river and censoriously cutting out the bends. But the Severn is still the ancient guide, cutting through the round rough hill and pointing the way in and out of Wales. This is still the best and only way, and where the river goes the road, canal and railway all closely follow.
The riverway past Welshpool now is northward, wild and green. The banks are lined with rich but shaggy pastures. Ash, oak, birch and willow hang over the banks. In this quiet landscape you will see white owls, and hear the curlew and the sandpiper. Quiet as this landscape may seem now, the river was once the heart of border strife and savagery. The villages are built on the layers of ashes of many burnings. The hills and meadows are scarred with ancient battles. Here in 894, in this field near Buttington Bridge, King Alfred, helped by the men of Powys, slaughtered an invasion of the Danes and choked the river with their corpses.
After Shrewsbury the Severn changes course and turns southwest. It is still an erratic and impetuous river, winding, shallowing and scampering over rapids, but it is entering into some of its loveliest country. The fields hereabout belonged once to Squire Mytton, the beloved Shropshire eccentric who married a mermaid he fished out of the river, and who cured his hiccoughs by setting fire to the tail of his nightshirt.
Further on, the meadows are full of ghosts, for here is the site of the Roman Uriconium, still littered with mounds under the grass. Uriconium was another of those towns fathered by the river, and was one of the last on the Welsh frontier. Poised on the barbarous edge of the known world, Uriconium was a fair city of fine buildings, with basilica, public baths, villas, temples. It was burned at last by the West Saxons, and for over a thousand years sheep grazed above the smoke-blackened bones of the victims of that pillage.
The Severn now is the heart of Shropshire; it runs singing through rich and dramatic country. To the south, Wenlock Edge lifts its thick leaf-tufted skyline to seethe and blow in the westward winds. To the north, like an aged and sprouting pyramid, stands the Wrekin, eerie of name and drenched with blood and memories. Like Breidden Hill, the Wrekin is another fortress height to which the men of the river withdrew in times of trouble. Peaked with tumuli and encampments, it is heavy with legend and rich with macabre names such as the Raven’s Bowl and the Gates of Heaven and Hell.
This of course is Housman’s country. The hills, trees, winds, men and battle, the ghosts of blood in the Severn water – all of these moved him to a moment of intense poignancy in his ballads. Man’s tragedy hereabouts was no doubt more savage, less fragile; but you cannot look at Wenlock now without remembering Housman’s still and singing voice.
Leaving Wenlock and the woods of the Wrekin, past Buildwas Abbey and the landslip where, two hundred years ago, the bed of the river is supposed to have burst fifty feet into the air, changing the river’s course, the Severn is suddenly pulled tight into a gorge and the landscape darkens. For here, out of the spacious green of Buildwas, a curious outcrop of the Black Country emerges. All the names in the valley – Coalbrookdale, Ironbridge, Coalport – reflect the change. Industry has punched this valley black. The river is ragged and soiled. There are coal pits, slag heaps, steel foundries. The rocks of the valley are full of coal and iron.
Ironbridge takes its name, simply enough, from the bridge of iron which spans the river here. It was the first bridge of this kind ever cast in the world. Over 150 years old, with a span of one hundred feet, it possesses today a slight, almost Chinese charm. The engineer Wilkinson, who built this bridge, also built a cast-iron barge here, and launched it, in 1780, amidst universal doubt and derision. To the local farmers it was a gigantic folly, like building a ploughshare of paper. But the iron craft floated, and Wilkinson wrote: ‘and so I convinced the unbelievers, who were 999 to the thousand’.
From Coalport the Severn turns south at last, shakes off its industrial dust, and takes on again an air of gracious elegance. This is a turning point in the life and quality of the river. The next town is Bridgnorth, a pleasant slumberous town with an old stone bridge and red sandstone cliffs above it. On southward through the thick Wyre Forest, past Bewdley, once a famous centre for barge traffic, now decayed and tranquil, to Stourport, where a canal comes in and the Stour adds its waters to the main river.
The Severn now is broad, mature and navigable. It has come of age. From its tumbling, racing headquarters, it has grown smooth, deep and slow – a place for meditation. It is said that this stretch of the Severn once had more religious foundations than anywhere else in Britain. Near this island, for instance, there is a hermitage in the rocky bank said to be capably of holding a hundred holy men. There are others, too, scattered along the banks. But this holy valley has not been without its times of shock and turbulence. The inhabitants of Worcester city twice crowded for refuge upon this small island – once for protection against the Danes, and once in terror of the Plague.
Three miles south of Bevere Island rises the redstone cathedral of the river’s first city – Worcester. It stands on steep banks of rock, facing west to the Malvern Hills (which Byron, as a boy, first saw with rapture, a foretaste of the grape-blue hills of Greece). The river, leaving Worcester, runs parallel with the Malvern range, and at little Upton-upon-Severn reveals itself as a full-grown river of ships in the existence of these docks. A few miles more, at Tewkesbury, there is another meeting of the waters, as the Avon comes in from the east, mixing the dust of Shakespeare’s town in the roar of the tumbling water.
Tewkesbury’s abbey is one of the finest in England. This great golden-coloured tower, booming with bells, could well be a grass-grown ruin like all the others, if it had not been for the townsfolk of Tewkesbury, who bought it from Henry VIII, at the time of the dissolution, for £550. And what a bargain they had of it.
At Tewkesbury the Severn first smells the sea, faint tremors of tides run up towards the weir, and
there is traffic on the river dropping down to Gloucester. Gloucester is a city older than memory. In its time it has had many names. The Iberians called it Caer Glow, or beautiful city. In Roman days its name was Glevum – which may have come from Gle-Avon, or shining river. The Romans held it until the sixth century as a stronghold against river pirates. Since then it has been a seat of parliament and of kings. It was a besieged fortress during the parliamentary wars, and martyrs have been burned in its streets. And all its crowded life and history have sprung from the river, because it held the gateway to the wilds of Wales and the estuary to the sea.
Now, as the river opens in broad sweeps past the great orchards of Minsterworth and Epney, it flushes daily with the currents of the sea. Sea fish and river fish mingle together, and wild geese inhabit the meadows and sandbanks. The Severn is coming back to its home in the sea, and it has come back to my home also, to the point where I first saw it. It is a major river by now, a shining river of light by day, and at evening, when the sun drops into the hills of Wales, a river of blood.
This stretch of the Severn, from Sharpness to Gloucester, is the part I know best. My grandfather used to spear eels with a trident here. Playmates used to flop off the banks like frogs. And on Good Friday, every year, in the time of the spring equinox, we would gather here to watch the Bore. The spring Bore is the most dramatic event on the river, and is seen at its best where the river narrows above Frampton. As the high-peaked tide thrusts up from the sea it is piled like a heaped wave by the narrowing banks. As it comes, you hear it roaring far away, then there it is, boiling, seething, sweeping round the bends, frothing high at the banks, and tossing boats high.
To the novice, afloat, it can be death. But the old fishermen and bargemen of the river can ride it like a wild horse for miles upstream. Bargemen used to follow it and make it pull them up to Gloucester, taking the orchards of Minsterworth in one sweep of their eighteen-foot oars. The Bore divides and weakens when it hits Gloucester Island, but nervous tremors of it will run up as far as Tewkesbury to pile up and die against the weir.
The days of the great river bargemen are over now, for meek canals have cancelled the Severn’s tides and curves. At Upper Framilode a canal runs up to the woollen mills of Stroud, and at Sharpness the Berkeley Canal takes over from the sweeping river and runs in a straight line to Gloucester. To the docks of Sharpness ocean ships can come, unloading onto the barges their cargoes from the Baltic and the Indies. Here the Severn broadens fast, half-sea, half-river. The sandbanks grow large, and the estuary appears.
At Beachley Point the Wye comes wandering in, having run its own course from Plynlimon; and the Severn, reunited with its brother, is reunited also with its native soil of Wales. After Beachley Point the Severn opens and swells like the climax of a symphony. Here, beneath the rocky bed, the railway tunnel runs into Newport – the last terrestrial crossing. From now on you cross by boat or not at all. For the river has come of age. No more punts, weirs, locks, eel-spears and wading cattle. South is the port of Bristol. North are the black valleys of the Rhondda and Cardiff, the great port of colliers. The small unnoticed stream which bubbled from the mossy pools of Plynlimon has grown to this breadth of water, it has run its course, it has given life to a chain of towns and cities, and now the ports on its banks can barely see each other, lighthouses wink in midstream, and great ships are specks on its waters.
The Severn is a river no longer. The Severn has become the sea.
SUMMER
* * *
Summertime
You can sometimes tell it almost before waking up by its warm green breath on the eyelids. Then rich and sudden as a lucky gamble, hoped for but hardly expected, the flowered days come, a three-ringed circus, and everything happens at once. Almost overnight, hedge, field and garden are found loaded like Christmas hampers. From the thick serge fetters of winter clothing people walk free as though suddenly pardoned. Out of hiding at last they caress the air, pull it about them like silk, nibble it, drink it, and splash it over their bodies like children discovering water. Children and birds, so long subdued, suddenly populate the outdoor world, fighting, scuffling, flying cries and whistles, stretching their antics to the extremes of daylight. It is the easy, generous, overwhelming time, when life seems to rise like a soufflé. For everyone now there is sap in the blood: grass shoots, wheat swells, plump petals break open, all nature comes to a head. It is a time for short, sharp happy sounds, for long and languorous silences, for idling by water and lying on one’s back, for smelling the good in the ground, for forgiveness, love and skimming off the cream, and for examining again in a bee’s-eye trance the mesmeric centres of flowers, where still lie preserved the bright drugs of childhood that recall no other world than this.
The Thirties
The teenage bracket, like the licensing laws, is an arbitrary definition. You don’t measure a marrow by clocks or the calendar – when it’s big enough, you eat it.
We of the thirties were late developers, and the reasons, no doubt, were various. We had already rejected the fripperies of the twenties, were more austere, more self-denying. Our gramophones had horns and we wound them by hand. We bicycled against the wind. Our days were longer than days are now, our pressures less hysteric. Teenagers today are said to grow bigger earlier, but we, being poor, were less subject than they are to the artificial fertilizers of big business panders. We were reflective, slow and half in love with our youth. Consequently I remained a teenager till late in my twenties. Some of my contemporaries are teenagers still.
This then is a report from a cloudy decade, part-Byronic and almost wholly forgotten. The time between wars, pre-nuclear and innocent, which no subsequent teenagers can know. The most tragic decade of the century, perhaps, because the young then were full of hope. In spite of the shadows of the oncoming doom we were confident we could resist it.
We were not to know, till the late 1930s, that we had lived through the last days of peace. It is only now, of course, that I can talk so knowingly. I’d no idea what was up at the time. I was a green country youth when the thirties began, uninstructed and more than usually naïve. Later I became involved in most of the myths of the time – but this almost entirely by accident.
In 1931 I was a small-town office boy, earning 7s 6d a week. I spent my spare time in my snug home village or cycling over hilltops in search of love. Born twenty years earlier, in that cut-off valley, I might have ended as head clerk or farmer. But the whispers were stirring: faint whispers already were arriving from the outside world. A threepenny cinema thrived in the town. Crystal wireless sets crackled at night. I picked up the music of the Savoy Orpheans; heard Bernard Shaw asking ‘Whither Britain?’ At the local library I discovered the works of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley and Lenin. I started a dance band, and began to talk posh.
My girlfriends were suitably confused.
As I stretched myself, the village shrank like a corset. It was time to get out and go. So I left home one morning and started walking to London. The journey took me a month. On the long road to London I joined a procession of tramps carrying bundles and billycans. At night we brewed tea by the grassy roadsides and they told me about the depression. There were nearly two million unemployed in Britain at that time, and these men were part of that number. They crowded the roads, just aimlessly walking. They were not going anywhere particularly.
I arrived in London in the summer and got a job straight away on a building site. This was largely through the influence of the beautiful daughter of a communist agitator. In return for her favours I was required to join the ‘movement’ – a debt which I owe her still.
London at that time seemed almost nineteenth century. Dusty, down-at-heel, secure. Wages were low (if you were luckily in work), but life was cheap and easy. A tot of whisky for 6d, a 6d seat in a cinema, cigarettes twenty for 9d – as a builder’s labourer earning £2 a week I lived the life of Reilly. At weekends I walked the streets of Soho, bought foreign newspapers which I co
uldn’t read, studied art books at Zwemmer’s, smoked Mexican cigars, and played the tables in the amusement arcades. Even the arcades wore an air of innocence then, unlearned as yet in the sweet uses of iniquity. The virginal pin tables, their springs unbent, showered the skilful with cigarette prizes. (No wonder teenagers today, forced to play without hope, take their occasional revenge with a sledgehammer.)
In London those were also the great days of jazz, newly come, like the pin tables, from America; not the pale pocket troubadours of today’s TV but the large group-bands of Duke Ellington and Armstrong, whose imitators crowded the music halls.
After a year, the job finished, and I looked about me and felt free to explore the world. There was a taste of peace like cream on the air. The world’s frontiers were still wide open. There were rumours from China and Abyssinia, but I for one didn’t heed them. I knew one foreign word, the Spanish for ‘water’. I decided to go to Spain. I landed in Vigo with £2 in my pocket, a blanket and a violin. For thirteen months I wandered happily through the country, as unaware as an illiterate clown. I’d come, without knowing it, to the great showdown, to the heart of the thirties’ tragedy.
The Spanish Civil War found me trapped in a village on the coast near Malaga. Through the dust of the battle came a neat British destroyer to take off its nationals. Tattered tramp though I was, bearing no more than a fiddle, I was piped aboard to a salute by officers. It was probably one of the last occasions when a British passport (signed John Simon) could be afforded such an honour. Very soon the pace was to grow too hot for such elegant niceties.
Back in England I could see what the Spanish Civil War meant. Here was an exercise in repression, and a flesh-and-blood testing ground for the techniques of totalitarian war. Feeling personally involved, I returned to Spain, crossing the Pyrenees in a December blizzard. In the International Brigade I realized at last that I was not alone in this fight. Many others of my age had made the same journey: teenagers from America, Britain, Europe, had come for the last romantic war.