Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  My father loved to plan and to carry out a complicated expedition like this; and one of the things which most endeared them to him was the fact that they had to be arranged so long beforehand. He hated sudden, scatter-brained decisions, and he nicknamed me ‘Flibbertigibbet’, because I often wanted to fly off at a tangent.

  When we were at our Grasmere house in the summer, these expeditions were far more frequent than they were at Wilton because there we often had guests who had come on purpose to see the Lake Country. Blea Tarn was the first place to which our guests were taken. The uncle from whom my father inherited his Grasmere estate, had been a passionate Wordsworthian, and at some time in the 1870’s he bought the whole of the Blea Valley, in order to save its solitude from being invaded by a projected enormous hotel. It is now many years since I last saw Blea, but I hope it is still:

  a little lowly vale,

  A lowly vale, and yet uplifted high

  Among the mountains: even as if the spot

  Had been from eldest time.…

  So placed, to be shut out from all the world!

  Urnlike it was in shape, deep as an Urn

  A quiet treeless nook, with two green fields,

  A liquid pool that glittered in the sun,

  And one bare dwelling; one abode, no more!

  … The little fields, made green

  By husbandry of many thrifty years,

  Paid cheerful tribute to the moorland house.

  Not one line of that picture need have been altered to describe Blea Tarn as we knew it in the’nineties. Uncle Alfred had completely preserved the farm and valley as Wordsworth knew them.

  An excursion to Blea began with a walk over Huntingstile, to the village of Elterwater in the next valley. Lake Country walks must be taken Indian fashion, in single file; for the narrow footpaths are fringed by overhanging ferns and plants, and these are perpetually dripping from the never-ceasing rain. Stepping off the path is like stepping into a little mountain stream. So, one behind the other, we crossed the pass, and as we were slithering down among the stones into the valley, we saw, as surely in Westmorland as in Wiltshire, Papa’s wagonette waiting for us on the road below. A slumbering driver sat on the box behind two slumbering horses, and the trio looked as if they had been waiting there ‘ from eldest time’. We then drove towards the Langdale Pikes, but after walking behind the carriage up the last steep hill, we always turned off the road to climb the pathless mountainside. In this way, we could descend upon Blea as Wordsworth did, on foot from out of the ‘tumultuous waste of huge hill tops’.

  The tenants of the farm were Mr. and Mrs. Weir. Uncle Alfred had been proud of finding them, for he thought that the farmer was indeed Wordsworth’s Solitary in the flesh. The old man might almost have been a piece broken off from one of those rough stone walls which always meander across mountains. This was not surprising, as his farming largely consisted in mending the holes made in them by his sheep. His voice was the savage roar of some prehistoric sheepdog, and his language was more canine than human. He never spoke a complete sentence, but as he came up from the farm to meet us, he barked out a few unconnected syllables before he turned into the stable to hang up his coat. My father generally followed him there, as he enjoyed the conversation of this primitive man; though the rest of the family found that Mrs. Weir’s superior social gifts made her more accessible than her husband.

  She was a cheerful little woman with a shiny wrinkled face and a very jolly smile, and she liked an opportunity for talking. Indeed she chattered away as if she was a practised conversationalist; and was far from giving the impression that she spent her life in a remote mountain valley, acquired by its owner with the sole purpose of securing it for ever as an inviolable fortress of solitude.

  Blea Farm at this time belonged to my cousin, Harry Olivier, who was then a soldier in India; and Mrs. Weir’s first remark was always ‘How’s the Maj?’ as if he were some curious exotic magpie. She then gave us a most delicious tea, everything made by herself; but as she always called bread ‘cake’ and cake ‘bread’, it was difficult to know which she was offering and we generally found on our plates the one we least expected.

  Wordsworth was of course our Grasmere hero, and my copy of his Poems is still filled with flowers which I picked in the garden of Dove Cottage in the firm belief that every tree and plant in it had been planted by him or by Dorothy. Papa often thrilled us with the story of his first visit to the Lakes, when he saw the poet himself at the gate of his house at Ambleside and found him not at all forthcoming. Then one day, when we were looking at Wordsworth’s grave in Grasmere churchyard and saw written upon it the date ‘1850’, Papa suddenly exclaimed: ‘ Why, he died years before I ever came here.’ So ended a legend; and I wonder how many of the memories in this book are as imaginary as my father’s recollection of the poet Wordsworth.

  One of my father’s later sightseeing excursions came to a dramatic end. He often drove to Pepperbox Hill, a ridge about five miles south of Salisbury, upon which stands Eyre’s Folly, an eighteenth-century tower or gazebo. From here the view is superb. Looking towards the south, there lies beneath the eye a wide expanse of undulating New Forest country, smiling and wooded, its rich luxuriant green flooded with a warm and amber light. Southampton Water glitters in the distance, the ships passing to and fro upon it like little nebulæ in the Milky Way. And then, looking to the north, there is a world of quite another colour. A thin grey mist often hangs over it; but as the eye rests upon this, there comes a sudden revelation—a point where the haze freezes miraculously into something sharp, clear and exquisitely soaring. It is the spire of Salisbury Cathedral rising up from the broad shallow valley where the five rivers meet. We often drove to the Pepper Box, to walk for an hour or so along that ridge.

  We were returning from there one afternoon and had reached the crossroads in the middle of Wilton, a few yards from our own house, when a man driving a fast horse in a high two-wheeled tax-cart shot out of the side road, and tried to cross in front of us. His horse was not quite fast enough, and there followed a terrific crash. Horse, cart and man were hurled to the ground. After a second’s pause our horses set off at a headlong pace up the Wilton street. The impact with the other cart had smashed to splinters the pole of our carriage, and this now swung between the horses, cutting their flanks with every lurch and driving them to madness. The driver found that when the pole was broken, he had no control over his horses, and he conceived the magnificent last expedient of leaping off the box to go to their heads. He jumped: and was of course left behind in the road with several broken limbs. My brother Frank was in the carriage and he now climbed on to the box to take the reins, but found that they had fallen to the ground and were dragging among the horses’ feet. There was nothing to be done. The horses put down their heads and stampeded. I shall always remember the frantic clatter of their feet, and the sight of them reflected in the windows of the houses we passed. They looked quite small.

  This drive seemed eternal, though it really must only have lasted about a couple of minutes. A pair of horses running away between two rows of houses makes a noise which is surprisingly deafening; and in the middle of this hullabaloo, we sat in our landau, very stiff and dignified, no one saying a word. People flew to their windows as they heard us approach, and then they followed, running up the street behind us. The crash came at the next corner. The horses were killed: the carriage was broken to bits, and we were conveniently thrown on to the one patch of grass which was to be found beside out route. After the racket and rattle, there now came a sudden hush. We found ourselves lying in a heap on the ground, and as we looked at each other, we saw to our surprise that we were all alive. But both my parents had been badly hurt. My mother had broken her shoulder, but she did not lose consciousness for a minute. Papa had fallen on to his head and for a few moments he lay quite still and stunned; then he woke up to find himself in the arms of Whatley the builder—the first of the townspeople to reach the scene. I believe that a
fit of fury is very commonly the first reaction to concussion of the brain, and this now seized my father, who angrily asked Whatley for a cup of tea—a drink he never tasted. It was an absurd anti-climax, and so indeed seemed the end of that most spectacular series of accidents. After that prolonged runaway and that terrific smash, there were no lives lost, only a few broken bones. But I think that this was the last of our deliberately planned expeditions.

  The pleasure one derives from sightseeing varies very much with one’s companion. It was my father who gave the tone to all those early expeditions among the Wiltshire downs; and since then I have found that all my memories of sightseeing are coloured with the personality of my travelling companions.

  Zita James and I have made more than one motor tour in different parts of England, and she is an extremely scholarly and accomplished sightseer. Into the back of the car is packed her Travelling Library, which consists of a single bookshelf enclosed in a case. On these excursions, made with the definite purpose of visiting beautiful parts of the country, this case contains a row of Guide Books, mostly dating from the eighteenth century; and with these books as our companions, she and I have seen the country together in a very pleasant and unusual manner. The old Itineraries give the names of the owners of important houses on either side of the road; and so one immediately is thrown into the society of two hundred years ago. Other old Guide Books are the Catalogues Raisonnées of art treasures in certain great houses, which were compiled in large numbers in Horace Walpole’s day. These contain many engravings and plans of the houses and grounds in their eighteenth-century condition. We sometimes found that our old Guide Books acted as passports into places we could not otherwise have visited. I remember one particular evening, we were mistakenly told that a very beautiful Yorkshire garden was on view for the Queen’s Nurses’ Fund. We left our car at the gate and walked more than a mile across the park, laden with huge tomes filled with drawings of a most elaborate series of water gardens. It seemed a very long walk, but the prospect of those formal cascades and fountains on terraces one above the other was enough to make us forget the weight of the books we were carrying. We arrived to find the gardens were not being shown after all, and we blundered into the presence of the owner of the house who was extremely surprised to see us and was at first inclined to join her dogs in shooing us away. But those heavy piles of books melted her heart, and when she looked over our shoulders at the enchanting pictures which had drawn us so far, she completely relented and allowed us to wander about the gardens until night fell.

  Zita’s sightseeing equipment does not only consist of Guide Books. She has a genius for picnics, and loads the car with bottles of out-of-the-way and delicious fruit drinks, and with knives and forks, plates and glasses. In the little towns and villages through which we pass, she goes into side streets and visits local dairy shops, from which she buys amusing food never heard of anywhere else. We eat this food and drink our fruit drinks in woods and fields, and are never dependent upon the roadside inn for a meal.

  Anyone reading Sachie Sitwell’s books about pictures and tapestry would, I think, imagine him to be a very deliberate and contemplative sightseer. The opposite is the case. He is magnetic. The moment he enters a picture gallery, he seems to be drawn swiftly across it by an invisible ray in the direction of one particular picture. Before his companions are even acclimatized to the atmosphere of the room, he has absorbed everything in that first picture and has shot across the room in another direction. Meanwhile the rest of the party are slowly assimilating the beauties of the various pictures one by one, and it seems that Sachie must have missed at least half of these. Not at all. In talking over the day, it appears that, far from having seen only those few things which seem to have attracted him, Sachie’s eye has caught everything else which is worth while in the rooms through which he has passed. Sightseeing with him demands great quickness in the uptake.

  Rex Whistler is the perfect travelling companion. He follows no prearranged plan: he is ready to respond to any unexpected invitation. When one drives out in the morning with a certain destination in mind, Rex soon wearies of the important road which leads to it and is attracted by some side road which appears to meander nowhere in particular. He turns into this. From it there diverges another byway far smaller than the first. Then yet another. Rex finds each one quite irresistible and we soon become lost in a tangle of little old roads, each narrower and more forgotten than the last; and more than once our roads have become footpaths which end in a single plank across a stream. Then we get out of our car and wander lazily through some very remote piece of country. Two or three hours later, we laboriously back the car out of the cul-de-sac in which we had left it, and regain our original road. So much of the day is spent in these unpremeditated détours, that night is sometimes falling by the time we reach our ultimate destination; and this adds immensely to the first view of a very beautiful scene. I shall never forget the colour on the walls of Milton Abbey when Rex and I first saw it after one of those long wandering days. A richly coloured lichen always grows on those stones; but that evening the sun was setting through a crimson mist and in this light the walls looked like some palace in The Arabian Nights, inlaid with gold and precious stones.

  Another evening Rex and I arrived at a little chapel buried in a wood on the borders of Hampshire. We left the car in the road outside the rectory and asked for the keys. Armed with these, we penetrated into a deep dark forest, and felt our way along a very narrow footpath. It led to a deserted churchyard where, thrown wildly across the graves and shattering the tombstones, there lay an enormous uprooted yew tree, its roots and its torn branches tragic in the twilight. Behind it was a little fourteenth-century chapel. After fumbling for some time with the padlock, we made our way at last into a completely dark interior, upon the walls of which could faintly be guessed several seventeenth-century figures in high relief, some of them in clothes still brightly painted. We could not think what they were, and so we lit match after match beneath them; and as each little flame shone for a moment and then went out, we saw one after another the flickering faces of the long-forgotten members of the family of Evelyn the diarist. I have often been in that chapel since, but I have never seen so much there as I did that night.

  On one of our many excursions up by-ways leading to footbridges, Rex and I once saw a very charming little rectory house. It stood high at one end of a tiny valley hidden in the downs, and curved lines of willows indicated the course of a shallow chalk stream. The Regency French windows of this parsonage house looked across the village churchyard into a distance which was indescribably peaceful. The memory of this place haunted us for years, and at last we learnt that it might be possible to buy our little fairy-story rectory. We decided to go to see it. It was a grey and dreary winter afternoon and of course we arrived several hours later than we had intended. I left Rex drawing in the churchyard and walked alone to the rectory. The garden was a wilderness. Sombre yews and laurels had encroached on to the white gravel path; and in the untidy grass patch in front of the house, could be seen the ghosts of flower-beds which must have been forgotten for many years. The front door looked as if it had never been opened. It had the appearance of a dead door left in some fragment of wall in a ruined house. I gently pulled the bell, and felt sure that it did not ring. After a few minutes I pulled again, this time sharply. And now there sounded through the house the hollow bone-like rattle of broken wires, jostling each other ineffectively through the emptiness within. I heard immediately the approach of slow faltering footsteps, and a shaky voice said, ‘ Is anybody there?’ I announced my name in tones of bright friendly panic, and then began a prolonged fumbling and pushing of bolts and bars. It did indeed seem that the door had not been opened for years. At last after a great effort it gave, and opened with a dull puff of dust. A very old clergyman stood before me; and, unlike his door, he received me most hospitably, welcomed me with cordial smiles, and said that his house was indeed for sale as he was giving up
the living. I fetched Rex, and together we made the macabre circuit of the dark narrow crumbling passages in this Brontesque and forgotten house, which seemed to be inhabited by two ghosts from a generation back. Lucy, the housekeeper, was deputed to show us round, but as we groped our way up and down unexpected steps at corners the old clergyman was always stumbling behind muttering such phrases as, I’m ill.… I’m going away.… They think nothing of this house.… They belittle it.… Lots of people want it.’

  The house contained a great many small bedrooms, in each of which there was a dilapidated dusty bed, perhaps a chest of drawers, and sometimes a broken chair or two. The kitchen and larders were lordly—hung with pheasants, turkeys, rabbits and hares—presents from the churchwarden, so the old man said. But no one seemed to have thought of preparing all this game for the table: everything hung untouched in its far or feathers. On tables and window-sills there stood dirty plates and broken saucers, and upon these were pieces of bread and cake, thickly covered with dust. A rancid smell rose from all this decaying food.