Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  Earlier migrants came seeking to impress themselves on the faces of the county. The Romans threw five unflinching roads across the country from the ramparts of Old Sarum, while others took their undeviating course from end to end of the county, going from Winchester to Marlborough or the Mendip Hills, or from Silchester to Blandford in Dorset. Most of these roads have been reabsorbed into what now looks like the virgin soil of down or meadow, though here and there the stone paving is still lying concealed only a few inches underground. I have seen it brought to light a few paces to the north of the present Bath Road, just where it passes the Avebury Sanctuary; and once when I was driving near Wishford with G. M. Young, he sensed that we were near the spot where the Roman Road would have crossed the lane on its way from Old Sarum to Grovely. A short search revealed in the level meadow-land a straight course, only a few feet wide, where we seemed to recognize the impress of another levelling two thousand years old. Mr. Young took the great iron key of the hatches and struck it two or three times into the earth, and then his tool rang on a hidden pavement of stone. Across the sodden marsh of the then undrained Wylye valley, the Romans had driven their hard unshakable road; and it was still there.

  The road builders must once have been there in their thousands, disturbing the quiet of the country with the noise of their hammers and the sound of voices talking a foreign language. The beauty of Wiltshire must then have seemed defaced for ever by the tents and the hutments, and by the great heaps of road-building materials which were carried along in creaking carts, to be thrown out by the roadside. It must have seemed that Sarum and Shaftesbury were becoming suburbs of Rome. But no. All those men have gone and the green grass has surged again over the stones which they laid down with so much turmoil and dust.

  Some centuries later, the Normans ruled over Wiltshire, building their proud castles upon the ancient earthworks, which had been planted on all the key places of the county by long dead military geniuses— members of tribes whose very names had been forgotten. The county belonged to the men who owned those strongholds, or so it must then have appeared. The fortress of Old Sarum would have looked terribly strong to the men who stared up at it from their farmsteads in the Avon valley; and the arrogant soldiers who garrisoned it thought they could be as rude as they liked to the bishops and clergy who dared to take the part of their Saxon flocks. But one day those soldiers were a bit too rude. It must have been an excellent joke in the Mess, when, one spring evening, the Rogation procession was so long making its circuit that the Bishop and his canons failed to reach the gates at the top of the long hill, before the Curfew bell had sounded. The soldiers pulled up the drawbridge and the Churchmen were shut out for the night. But they had their pride too. They abandoned the old city to the garrison, and in a meadow in the valley below they built the elegant slim cathedral which soon superseded the old castle as the principal landmark in the county. The townsmen followed the Clergy. The new city of Sarum rose outside the Close, and the migrants were left isolated in their eyrie. Gradually the castle and the city and the old cathedral fell into ruins, and were for centuries the favourite stone quarry of village builders for miles round.

  Wiltshire was again the fashion in the Plantagenet days, when the kings kept their Court at Clarendon. This legendary palace had a unique distinction in those warlike times, for it was completely unfortified, and was a palace of pleasure alone. The soldiers remained at Old Sarum some six miles away, and here, on the slope of the hill above the Avon valley, there arose this wide-spreading lofty building, its walls supported without by colossal buttresses and painted within by some of the leading mural painters of the day, who founded here a far-famed school. The floors of the palace were paved with fantastic tiles, worked in elaborate patterns; and from its gates, companies of kings rode forth to hunt in the forest, or to joust on the tournament ground above Bemerton. Edward III hunted here with three kings after the battle of Poitiers—John of France, Philip of Navarre, and David of Scotland. Ridiculous courtiers brought into the country the latest fashions from town. The men had long points to their boots and the women long points to their hats, and in the palace they played their games, sang their songs, and composed their verses, completely ignoring the other life which was going on around them. In the farms the Wiltshire people were wearing clothes which were cut in almost the same pattern as those their predecessors had worn two hundred years before, and they were carrying out the same tasks in exactly the same manner. Then that romantic palace vanished, and vanished more mysteriously than any other great building in the world. To this day no one knows what happened to it. It just ceased to be, leaving behind it the tradition of a gold chair buried in its vaults, and of the path by which St. Thomas à Becket walked daily from his cure at Winterbourne in the valley to say Mass in the Palace Chapel—a path which since then has always remained miraculously green. Once again Wiltshire, with its unchanging steadfastness, surged over the outstanding buildings thrown up on the high ground by those passers-by. The stones of the palace were absorbed into the humble houses of the surrounding villages, and for many years its foundations were hidden beneath a tangle of green growth. Only in the past few years has the plan of Clarendon Palace been rediscovered by Tancred Borenius and his wife, whose zeal and knowledge have rescued it from the oblivion to which Wiltshire persists in consigning her migrants.

  During the past thirty years, armies of soldiers have crossed Salisbury Plain. During the war, there were several parts of Wiltshire in which one drove for nine and ten miles at a stretch through continuous camps. The ugly ramshackle buildings of wood and tin completely swamped for the time those villages which had always been so remote with their little thatched houses and their large quiet churches. One then felt that Wiltshire must be ruined for ever. But now all those huts have gone. The grass has grown over the scorched untidy ground which they left behind them. Here and there can be seen a fading memento of the war-time settlements of the Colonial battalions which thronged the Wiltshire villages while the war lasted. It may be the faded and washed-out remnant of what was once a big and gaudy advertisement painted on the side of a house, to announce that a cinema would be open three times in the day; or there are regimental badges cut through the turf into the chalk on the downs, in the manner of the Wiltshire white horses. These were a constant interest to the men who cut them, but they are now very erratically ‘scoured’. And then one comes across here and there a war-time cemetery, or the graves of strangers in a village churchyard.

  There are, of course, still many soldiers on the Plain, and their camps look solid and permanent, but so must have looked the great Norman castles which have gone. To the people of Wiltshire, the soldiers will always be passers-by.

  Wiltshire is now fashionable again, and a great many amusing parties are given here by people who delight to say that the county is now as gay as London, and gay in the same way. They would like it to become a suburb of London, although it long ago refused to become a suburb of Rome. Like the earlier migrants, these migrants of to-day would find the real Wiltshire life extremely boring, and as a matter of fact they never touch it. They could not do so, unless they were content to settle down in a Wiltshire village, to live there year in and year out and to have a great many children in it. None of them wish to do this, and until they do so, the natives will still adopt towards them the traditional Wiltshire attitude of: ‘’Ere’s a stranger. ’Eave ’alf a brick at un.’

  A friendly young new-comer to a village in the county made a practice of going to the inn in the evenings to talk with the men sitting in the bar. There lived in the village a rascally old horse-coper, who was very racy of the soil. And one of his friends invited him to come in one evening, to meet the new-comer.

  He shook his head.

  ‘T’ooden do no good to I to be seen wi’ that lot,’ was all he said.

  It is still a case of the fox and the fleas.

  Copyright

  First published in 1938 by Faber & Faber

  This
edition published 2014 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-6624-2 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-7199-4 HB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-6623-5 PB

  Copyright © Edith Olivier, 1938

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