Country Moods and Tenses

by Edith Olivier

  “It is not now, and it never has been, a ‘ sport’ or a ‘kind of amusement’ … No one who has seen the dance can think of it as anything but serious, whether deriving from Christian or Pagan days. It is, and always has been, a ‘rite’. It is impersonal. It does not provoke amusement. It creates a sense of wonder and respect.’’

  The Horn Dance must have the same origin as other Mummers’ Plays, but its character as a ballet has saved it from degenerating into farce. It remembers its high ancestry.

  The village of Great Wishford in Wiltshire possesses a manuscript of 1603 in which is written “A true recital of the old, ancient and Laudable customs” of the place. Among these “ customs” is this:

  The “ Lords, Freeholders, Tenants, and Inhabitants of the Manor of Great Wishford, or as many of them as would in ancient times; have used to go in a dance to the Cathedral Church of our Blessed Lady in the City of New Sarum on Whit-Tuesday, and there make their claim to their customs in the Forest of Grovely, in these words: Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!’’

  A year or two ago there were still living in Wishford grandchildren of Nanny Trubridge, the last of the Wishford maidens who danced before the High Altar at Salisbury Cathedral. That custom disappeared at some time in the last century; but the Wishford people still troop to Grovely Forest on Oak-Apple Day. There they cut their green boughs, and then they carry them in procession round the village, the men in foresters’ dress, and the women with faggots on their heads. This is a land of ceremonial mumming; and I class it with the others because it is a genuine folk survival, kept alive by the village people among whom it originated. The war, so far, has not interrupted it.

  Pageants are quite another story. They make no claim to be natural growths and they are frankly theatrical, for they must be necessarily on a large scale, and demand a producer efficient enough to handle crowds. Skilled wardrobe mistresses and a big orchestra are also required. In recent years there have been a good many pageants. They are among the things we country people do. The rehearsals are perhaps the best part of all, and in this, pageants resemble other private theatricals. They also give considerable amusement to their audiences, although this amusement gets much of its flavour from a certain tartness in the point of view of some of the spectators.

  A pageant has usually some historical dignity. It is built round the story of a great house, an abbey, a group of villages, or some famous historical personage. Its trump cards are local descendants of the chief historical characters. If enough of these are collected, the pageant is bound to be a success. In the past few years we have had several in Wiltshire. Longford Castle staged one in the Tudor period—the time when the present castle was founded. Lacock enacted a whole day in the life of its village and abbey during the sixteenth century. Wilton produced a George Herbert pageant, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the death of the poet.

  Pageants demand a large number of players, and every class of performer appears. At Wilton, the present-day members of the Herbert family impersonated their ancestors: Tim Tillbrook, the huntsman of the Wilton Pack, hunted his hounds over the hill; Mr. Elliott, the Wilton tailor, was called in, as his predecessor had been, to measure George Herbert for his parson’s suit; the Bemerton villagers of to-day represented their forefathers, who stopped their various daily avocations when they heard Master George Herbert’s praying bell; Wilton people stocked the stalls at their historic fair; and the oldest brewing family in the neighbourhood produced from its cellars casks and bottles of the correct date. But perhaps the greatest coup of all was the appearance of the Dean of St. Paul’s in the part of Doctor Donne.

  From this summary of one pageant it can be seen that its purpose (like that of all the others) is to recall to life and to dramatise something which once really existed or happened in the place. Pageants have therefore a definite historical aim, although to most of those taking part, whether as performers or spectators, two other of their characteristics are more predominant. They give pleasure, and they raise funds for local charities. Country people are fortunate in being able so frequently to combine these two.

  5 Some Country Pursuits

  COUNTRY PURSUITS CAN BE DIVIDED INTO TWO CLASSES—those which are accompanied by noises peculiar to themselves, and those which are carried out in silence. Hunting brings with it a complete orchestra as well as a vocal chorus. There is the “Yoick!” “Halloo!” “Tally-ho!” of the hunters, the merry tune of the horn and the music of the hounds giving tongue. Shooting is less noisy, though the beaters come up like an in-coming tide and the keepers occasionally fling out a “ mark over”. Then there is always the cannonade of the guns. Football is a pandemonium of bawling and yelling, mostly coming from the spectators, and cricket is silent but for the thrilling click of bat and ball, and sometimes a sharp “how’s that?” towards the umpire, who is generally so taken aback, he can’t think what to say. Then again roars from the gallery. Tennis has a very individual set of noises made up of the curious “olde wordes” which traditionally register its score. Whichever of these games is being played, the people in the next county are pretty well bound to know about it.

  Among the more silent pursuits, fishing comes first—that exquisite, meditative, poetic sport interrupted only by the whizz of the wheel and the ripple of the stream. It is more like dreaming than living. Golf is nearly as quiet, for the players seldom break into yells of triumph or even of despair. They pursue their ball with an unshatterable concentration over a landscape which is often of miraculous width and beauty. Then there is the pursuit of wild flowers by botanical fanatics, who go from one end of England to another in order to be on a particular day at the particular spot where a particular blossom is timed to appear. Pursuing blackberries is sometimes accompanied by a good deal of noise—laughter from those who enjoy the sport, and shrieks of anguish from those who are being pricked; but the chase for mushrooms is, at least in England, a silent one. Champion mushroomists go out at five in the morning, and this is not the hour for a great deal of noise or hilarity. Secretively they pursue the magic moonlight discs which now furtively show themselves in the fields. In Ireland, however, I suspect the mushroom to be of a somewhat different habit. I have never gone mushrooming there, but I remember once staying in a country house in County Down, when the stillness of the night was suddenly interrupted by an outburst of the most terrifying and uncanny shrieks it has ever been my lot to hear. The whole party rushed into the hall in various forms of déshabille and with wild surmises as to the source of those banshee howls. The guests were anyhow rather an extraordinary mixture. There were the Irish hostess and her three children; a French and an Italian governess; a young Swiss girl; an Englishwoman; a Swedish boy; and servants of all types, ages and nationalities. The only person missing was the cook. It eventually turned out that the screams which had awoken us came from an unfortunate boy who had walked in his sleep, fallen out of his bedroom window and broken his arm. That is, however, not the point of this story, which is, that when next morning the cook was asked whether she had not heard the noise that had awoken everybody else, she answered:

  “I heard it. I thought it was the kitchen-maid picking mushrooms.’’

  Other county sports, which fall between the noisy and the silent, are swimming and skating, often practised on the same pools, the one in summer the other in winter. Bathers generally shout a good deal, though their shrieks are not inherent in the art of swimming. Their purpose is to tempt shivering and nervous onlookers to make a first plunge, and to declare that the water “ is quite deliciously warm”, despite the green faces and the chattering teeth of those who so loudly proclaim this obvious lie.

  The noises accompanying skating are generally not made by the skaters, but by long lines of boys who completely spoil the ice by sliding across it; though there is sometimes an outburst of hearty laughter when an ominous crack is heard and somebody falls in, to clamber dripping out.

  Besides their classification according to their sound or sound
lessness, country sports have different degrees of dignity, arising in the first place from the way in which they appeal to one generation or the other.

  Hunting and shooting come first in this social hierarchy, and they are the recognised prerogatives of landlords and parents. The master of the house allows that they are serious occupations. County business is not fixed for hunting days. A three-lined whip is as impossible to ignore as is a shooting party. Guests for these sports are selected by the master of the house. They are not “young” parties like those which meet for dances. Parties for point-to-point meetings have the same dignity. Father and mother have the first call on the spare rooms, a right which at other times is not so unquestionably their own as it used to be when I was a girl. Picnic luncheons for shooting parties and point-to-point meetings are the only ones served by butlers. In fact they are not really picnics at all, but functions. It is true that the younger members of the family are allowed to share in these officially sponsored amusements, but they appear as cadets, not as hosts and hostesses.

  Fishing is also a prerogative of fathers, though it has never taken to itself the airs of the other two. It has a clerical, almost religious, unobtrusiveness about it. Only on one or two days in the year do the devotees of the gentle art make common cause with the rowdy poaching element which always hovers, unrecognised and ignored, on the borders of the world of sport. Those are the days when the river is being dragged for pike. Then everyone joins in—schoolboys and schoolgirls, water keepers and labourers, master and man, mothers and aunts. Everybody who possesses one, dons a stout pair of waders, and the others borrow or steal someone else’s. Nets are stretched across the stream; and at the appointed time these are hauled on to the bank in a way which might remind one of the twelve Apostles, if one’s mind were not diverted by the sight of eighteen pounders hurtling through the air as they are pulled out of the nets. The brave people catch these long-toothed monsters; the cowards flee. And there is fish for tea in all the cottages that afternoon.

  The golf-ball is another quarry pursued by parents; for, as is well known, golf is the game for the old gentleman, be he squire, vicar or haberdasher. Golf clubs are comparative innovations in the English countryside, to which they were introduced from Scotland only about thirty or forty years ago. In this country good courses are still rare, although the game has become a regular country pursuit.

  The next group of sports is admittedly the group of the younger generation. Cricket and football, tennis, swimming and skating—these are the young people’s games. No father plays football, and indeed in the country this game is only the inter-village cockpit of the under twenty-fives. But nowadays, when people who play games at all play them in deadly earnest, the young cricketers and tennis players have all been coached by professionals; so if any fathers join in, they make it clear that they are merely left-overs from some ancient battlefield upon which they won triumphs unguessed-at by the sportsmen of to-day. Swimming is now the most fashionable summer sport for the young of both sexes. All self-respecting country houses possess swimming-pools; and in most villages there are also bathing-places where children practise the art which they nearly all learn at school. In winter there is skating on these same swimming-pools; but the good skaters have left for winter sports in the Alps, and those who remain in England are mere amateurs.

  As the year goes round it brings its seasonal pleasures to the nursery too. In the spring little children pick flowers, and all through life this is indeed a perfect joy. Snowdrops and violets, primroses, cowslips and bluebells succeed each other as the goals of radiant sunlit walks or drives; and later on, there are the mushroom and the blackberry harvests which still are left for the children to gather. When I was a child we used to go with the other children to glean in the cornfields; and we ground our corn into flour in an old coffee mill for which we prayed for months. Then, by a miracle, it appeared in the nursery; curiously enough this was at the same time the cook acquired a new one in the kitchen. Nowadays, the mechanical reapers leave nothing behind for the gleaner, in spite of the injunctions laid down in the Book of Leviticus. But I suspect that machines are completely illiterate, so doubtless they have never even read that “ the comers of thy field and the gleanings of thy harvest” must be “left for the poor and the stranger”.

  The pastimes I have mentioned might, to the casual visitor, seem to be a complete life’s occupation for most country people, but so far I have not recorded the chief one of all. It is a pursuit equally absorbing to all ages, classes, sexes, trades and professions. I speak of gardening. This is indeed “the purest of human pleasures” as Lord Bacon said long ago; and the reason why it is so completely satisfying is suggested in the opening phrase of his essay: “ God Almighty first planted a Garden”.

  There lies the secret. Gardening is Creation. It is taking part in the activity of the Creator of the world, and this means perfection. “Be ye perfect,” said Jesus, “as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” So only creative work can fully satisfy the spirit of man.

  It is hard to say whether is best—to succeed to a great and famous garden, already a completed thing; or to plan and make the garden of one’s dreams. I have no doubt which I should prefer, for the first kind of garden contains not only the actual beauty which strikes the eye, but the added beauty of association and history to fill the mind. I would rather inherit Wilton than lay it out anew; and I would infinitely prefer to be the gardener of Hampton Court than the maker of the gardens of Delhi.

  The people who own the great and famous gardens are always busy in them. A garden is a living thing, and it is in its nature to keep on growing. The heir to a beautiful garden becomes the youngest apprentice in a great staff. He has around him all those workmen who knew the garden centuries before his day: the Head Gardener is the Spirit of the Place, who has made it what it is, and will inspire him to fit his most adventurous works into the long and lovely tradition.

  Still, for those to whom Heaven does not give the wonderful birthday present of waking up in a ready-made Eden, there are the almost equal joys of making a garden for oneself. In the country, someone is always doing this. Every time a new house is built in a village, a bit of field or woodland is reclaimed, to be laid out by ardent gardeners who go through all the thrilling processes of studying garden pictures, drawing plans, carrying cords and tape-measures from point to point, digging, Dutch hoeing, raking, rolling, weeding and watering. The man who makes his own garden from the beginning can certainly take a more personal pride in it than the man who inherits one, and it is an open question which gets the most pleasure.

  Then there are the tiny gardens, the real cottage gardens where certain flowers always seem to enjoy living far more than they do in the garden of the great house. The Madonna lily is one of these. But hollyhocks and phloxes also love the narrow borders which lead from a cottage gate; and that most capricious plant the mignonette, blooms in them late into the autumn. Some kinds of chrysanthemums can only be called cottage garden flowers. You never see them anywhere else. Their colours are oftenest yellow and brown, though they are sometimes of a delicious washed-out mauvish-pink, like the old-fashioned cotton dresses of village children.

  Lastly come the allotment gardens, which in war time are becoming the most important of all. These grow the most enormous turnips, carrots and vegetable-marrows, the last of which sometimes miraculously produce on their sides a picture in relief of the village church. The climax of the allotment year is the Annual Flower Show—a tremendous event in any self-respecting village.

  So in every walk of life in the country, gardening is the chief and most general of occupations. Long may it continue so to be.

  Social life among the real country people is chiefly limited to luncheons and tea-parties, as nearly everybody hates going out at night, except for something very important. Country functions of this kind are not wildly hilarious, and perhaps the most original one to which I was ever bidden was a luncheon party given by a cow. Cherry was not only a c
hampion milker, but had perhaps had her head slightly turned by giving a broadcast, when she was very chary about letting her voice be heard, although the whole world could hear the streams of milk which flowed into the pail when she was milked at the microphone. This is the invitation she sent me to her party:

  CHERRY

  requests the pleasure of your company at

  RED HOUSE FARM, AMESBURY

  at her final milking on completion of the 36 days world’s

  record at 12 noon on April 7th, 1939

  LUNCHEON AT 12.30

  R.S.V.P.

  The gayest of cities could never rival that.

  THE FIFTH MOOD

  CONDITIONAL

  Conditional

  WHILE I HAVE BEEN WRITING THIS BOOK, IT HAS GROWN ever clearer that the CONDITIONAL is the only Mood in which it is possible to contemplate even the immediate future. Life, as we have hitherto known it, has been sharply interrupted. The occupations, the pursuits, the pleasures, and the sports of which I have written in the preceding chapters, are nearly all in abeyance. Will country life ever be the same again? And how far do we wish it to be so?

  At present one is overwhelmed by a nostalgic craving for the beloved old things; and then one has to remember that even before the war they were not exactly as they used to be. Legislation has long interfered, to a certain extent, with our happy-go-lucky ways. We rebelled against every fresh change; but now we believe it is patriotic to submit to conditions prescribed from outside. Being independent Englishmen, we retain at least the freedom to grumble.

  “It’s the war, so we must put up with it”, we mutter, as we feverishly “fix the black-out” which obstinately refuses to remain fixed.