A Traveller's Life (5 page)

Meanwhile I climbed one of the mounds, and looked out over an endless, undulating stretch of grass that looked like a heaving sea and reminded me, perhaps because I had eaten too much, of the real sea, also under a cloudless sky, the time we had gone to Sark by ship and my mother and I had been dreadfully sick, partly because of the heavy swell that was running, partly because we had eaten something called haricot mutton in the dining-saloon. Then, below deck, we had been ministered to by terrible-looking women dressed in black, called stewardesses, who handed us
earthenware vessels a bit like chamber pots to throw up in, and who called me ‘ducks'.

While we were having the picnic, in answer to my question my father told me that the mounds, on one of which I was now standing, were really tombs and there were dead people under them and probably treasure, too. And as the one on which I was standing was already eroded on one side so that the chalk showed through I got a bit of stick and tried to dig my way into it with the intention of looking at one of my ancestors, and perhaps finding a crock of gold. However, in spite of these incentives, I soon gave up and simply sat on top of the tumulus, listening to the larks' song rising and falling, looking out at the sheep lying close together, like white rugs on the green grass, until it was time to take to the road again.

On to Salisbury (one of my father's detours), where we visited the cathedral, and we were taken over it by an extraordinarily enthusiastic white-haired guide. At one moment we were up under the roof with him among enormous timbers that made it seem like a forest of leaning trees; the next he was lining us up, numbering us off from right to left, and teaching us bell ringing with handbells in the vestry.

We had tea in Dorchester, then drove on into the eye of the now declining sun, with occasional entrancing views, ahead and away to the left, of the shimmering sea, in Lyme Bay. At Morecombelake we visited what looked to me like a very old factory in which local women were rolling out what looked like huge musket balls of dough on wooden tables. Put in the oven they emerged later as what are called Dorset Knobs; and my mother bought a large tin with a lovely red, white and blue label on it ornamented with towers and castles.

Not long afterwards we descended a very steep and winding road with a notice reading ‘Engage first gear' at the top of it, and
entered a pretty little seaside town at the mouth of a deep valley. This was Lyme Regis and here we were to spend the night at an inn where my father had taken rooms. Why he had chosen to do so when Branscombe was only about twelve miles away was a bit of a mystery. He may have thought we would arrive much later, allowing for punctures and mechanical breakdowns. Whatever the reason it was quite an expensive decision, but it might have been worse. I was half price and did not qualify for dinner, having eaten a large tea. I would be content with a hot drink and some Bovril sandwiches. And Lewington and Kathy would both qualify for the special terms offered for chauffeurs and servants, which included supper, bed and breakfast. Only my parents paid the full rate for their double room, dinner and breakfast.

But our arrival at Lyme Regis did not mean that it was the end of the day for me. Before it was time for bed I had already ‘done' Lyme Regis. I had seen the studded door of the old lockup with its inadequate airholes, now incorporated in a picturesque but more modern building; I had visited a museum full of fossils and what called itself a ‘fossil depot', where one could actually buy them, except that they were very expensive. Nevertheless, in the course of the evening, thanks to Lewington, I acquired a collection of my own. Walking along the beach after the abortive visit to the fossil depot and climbing over a number of groynes, we eventually came to some dark and crumbling cliffs. By this time of the evening they were already in shadow and made a striking contrast with the enfilade of great sandstone cliffs which stretched away beyond them towards Portland (one of them the highest of its kind in southern England), the summits of which were glowing like golden castles in the evening sunlight and would continue to do so for some time after it had departed from the remainder of the landscape. That evening, by some strange chance, perhaps because there had recently been a heavy rainstorm, fossil ammonites could
be seen protruding from the stiff clay of the cliff, and by dint of some energetic scrambling, prodding with long bits of driftwood, and some stone throwing Lewington, who was young and active, managed to dislodge several fine specimens, making his blue serge chauffeur's suit rather muddy in the process. Altogether, apart from not having been allowed to bathe when we reached Lyme Regis, from my point of view it had been a thoroughly successful day.
¹

(The inn at which we stayed that night, or another very similar inn, was the scene, more than thirty years later, of a disgraceful incident in which I was myself involved. Not long after the Second World War, while on a walking holiday with a great friend along the coasts of Dorset and Devon in the depths of winter, the two of us arrived at Lyme Regis where we put up at one or other of the inns. It happened to be New Year's Eve and, in the course of the evening, having fulfilled a lunatic ambition to visit every pub in the town, and previously weakened by having walked some twenty-five miles, we became stupendously drunk. It was as a result of this that in the early hours of the morning, being incapable of finding the light
switches, we both peed down the bend in the staircase from an upper floor on to what I recall to have been the visitors' book on the reception desk, under the impression that we were in some sort of lavatory. How we escaped detection is a miracle and a mystery only explicable by the fact that the staff of the hotel must have been revelling too.)

The next morning when I looked out of the window, Lyme Regis was more or less obliterated, filled with a chill mist that was funnelling up into it from the sea, and in spite of various local prognostications it failed to disperse before we set off.

Sitting in the back, in spite of having our own windscreen and the travelling rug, we were glad of one another's proximity as the car groaned in bottom gear up the hill which seemed almost as steep as the one by which we had entered the previous evening, past bow-fronted buildings and more classical edifices. As we climbed above the town I had fleeting glimpses of rustic houses, partially hidden by flint walls and foliage, some of them with pretty verandahs. One house, which had a steep pitched, thatched roof that came down so low that it had to be supported by posts, looked as if it was sheltering under an over-size umbrella, and was so minute that it seemed impossible that any grown-up could enter it, let alone live in it; this was Umbrella Cottage, Lyme Regis, which still stands.

Then we left Dorset for Devon (a sign told us so), crawling along in high, open country with the headlights on, alone in the sea mist, as if we were the only living creatures in the world, apart from an occasional cluster of cattle at a hedgerow gate, or a couple of horses, their breath steaming; seeing not much else but an occasional tree, the telegraph poles as they came looming up one after the other through the mist, or the vague outline of some building, the mist clouding the windscreen so that several times Lewington had to stop, get down and clean the glass. It was
mysterious and exciting. It was the kind of weather, I heard my mother tell Kathy, that one expected in ‘the West'.

We descended steeply to the River Axe, crossed it by a narrow bridge, then waited for some time at a level-crossing for what looked like a toy train when it finally appeared to emerge from the mist and chug across our path, whistling mournfully, before being swallowed up once more; then climbed to another upland where, if anything, the mist was thicker, my father busy with the map now, until suddenly he told Lewington to turn into a lane on the left that was almost invisible in such conditions.

At first it ran between hedges through the same flat, upland country, then after a little while it began to descend and all at once we were out of the mist and before us was an enchanting, arcadian prospect, so enchanting that my father ordered Lewington, who although perfectly happy to stop for a motor accident was singularly obtuse when it came to such phenomena as views, to stop, so that we might admire it further.

There was no more wind and the mist was now above us on the high ground. Far below in the bottom of a narrow, sheltered valley and in the mouths of a couple of lesser combes which contributed to it, was a long, straggling village of thatched houses from the chimneys of which smoke was rising in tall, unruffled columns. The steep sides of the valley were decked with woods that seemed to hang above it and from the trees came the sound of a thousand disputing rooks. Even as we looked the mist began to dispel from the high tops, revealing long ridges running inland.

By the time we reached the village square, if the conjunction of three small roads at the point where a general shop and a butcher's stood could be dignified with such a description, the sun was shining from a clear sky. We had arrived at Branscombe and it was going to be a lovely day.

Behind the Mason's Arms, the pub which stood next door to the cottage my father had taken for the summer and of which it formed a part, there was a yard surrounded by various dilapidated outbuildings and a piece of ground overgrown with grass and nettles which concealed various interesting pieces of rusted, outmoded machinery, the most important of which was an old motor car smelling of decaying rubber and dirty engine oil. The stuffing of what was left of its buttoned leather upholstery was a home for a large family of mice. This yard was to be the scene of some of the more memorable games I played with my best friend in the village, Peter Hutchings, whose mother kept a grocery, confectionery and hardware shop on the corner opposite Mr Hayman, the butcher's. It was from Peter Hutchings, who was killed while serving as a soldier in the Second World War, and whose name is inscribed with the names of fourteen other village boys who died in the two great wars on the war memorial at the entrance to Branscombe churchyard, that I learned the broad local dialect which was so broad that by the end of that first summer at Branscombe no one except a local inhabitant could understand what I was saying. ‘Sweatin' like a bull 'er be,' was how Peter
Hutchings described to me one day the state of his sister, Betty, confined to bed with a temperature, and it was in this form that I passed on this important piece of news to my parents.

There in the inn yard, in the long summer evenings, we used to sit in the old motor car, either myself or Peter at the wheel, taking it in turn, the driver making BRRR-ing noises, the one sitting next to him in the front making honking noises – the horn had long since ceased to be – as we roared round imaginary corners, narrowly missing imaginary vehicles coming in the opposite direction, driving through an imaginary world to an imaginary destination on an imaginary road, a pair of armchair travellers. In the back we used to put Betty Hutchings, if she was available, who wore a white beret, was placid, said nothing, apart from an occasional BRR, and was in fact an ideal back-seat passenger. Sometimes, if we felt like doing something ‘rude', we used to stop the car and pee on the seats in the back, and Betty would pee too. This gave us a sense of power, at least I know it did to me, as I would not have dared to pee on the upholstery of a real motor car belonging to real people. Less courageous than my wife, who confessed to having peed on the back seat of a ‘real' very expensive motor car stopped outside her parents' house at her birthplace in the Carso,
and
smeared it with cow dung.

When we got tired of driving our car we ourselves used to become motor cars, tearing up and down the street outside making BRRR-ing noises of varying intensity as we changed gear, disturbing the elderly ladies who used to sit at their cottage doors making Honiton lace, pillow lace, appliqué and guipure, the principal manufacture of the village. Close by, over the hill at Beer where there were stone quarries, the quarry men's wives had made the lace for Queen Victoria's wedding dress in 1839, something that was still talked about in the neighbourhood more or less as if it had happened yesterday. It was these hideous BRRR-ing noises that no doubt
prompted old Mrs Bamford, whose cottage also faced the main street, to utter the words, ‘She didn't ought to 'ave 'ad 'im.'

But all this was in the future, that first day of our holiday.

The next morning I woke at what must have been an early hour and, obeying some mysterious summons, dressed myself in the clothes that I had worn the previous afternoon – white shirt, shorts, socks and white sun hat (I couldn't manage the tie unaided), brown lace-up shoes from Daniel Neal's in Kensington High Street (soon to be replaced by hobnail boots, bought for me at my earnest request so that I could be a real country boy, which took me ages to tie) and my pride and joy, a hideous red and green striped blazer with brass buttons that I had persuaded my mother to buy for me, much against her will, from Messrs Charles Baker, Outfitters, of King Street, Hammersmith, so that I should look more like what I described as ‘a real schoolboy' rather than an infant member of the kindergarten at the Froebel School in Baron's Court. As school blazers were not made to fit persons as small as I was, when I was wearing it my short trousers were scarcely visible at all. Not even Messrs Baker appeared to know which school it was, if any, that had red and virulent green stripes as its colours. Then, having picked up a stout stick that I had acquired the previous day, I stole downstairs and let myself out into the village street which was deserted as it was Sunday morning.

At the side of the road, opposite what I was soon to know as Mrs Hutchings's shop, a little stream purled down from one of the side valleys, one of several such streams that, united, reach the sea at Branscombe Mouth; and there, under a brick arch, it issued from a pipe which supplied this lower end of the village with water, before burrowing under the road to reappear once more outside the shop. From here it ran away downhill over stones along the edge of a little lane with an old, ivy-clad wall on one side of it, chattering merrily to itself as it ran over the stones in a way that seemed almost human.

Here, in this narrow lane, the water had what looked to me like watercress growing in it, and it was so clear and delicious-looking that I got down and had a drink of it, only to find that it was not delicious at all and that it had a nasty smell. Later I discovered that Betty Hutchings used to drink from this crystal stream if she was not watched which was probably the reason why she sweated like a bull.

I continued to follow the stream, racing twigs down it, until it vanished into a sort of tunnel from which proceeded a delightful roaring sound. At the other end it emerged beyond a wicket gate to flow more placidly under a little bridge and in these calmer waters I spent some time stirring up the bottom with my stick and frightening some water beetles, the air about me filled with the droning of innumerable insects.

From this point it ran to join the main stream in the middle of the valley and here the path turned away from it to the left beyond a five-barred gate which, because I could not open it unaided, I squeezed underneath, to find myself in a beautiful and what seemed to me immense green meadow, hemmed in by hedgerows and huge trees and filled with buttercups, while high above it to the right were the hanging woods we had seen the previous morning from the car, the open down above them alive with gorse.

At the far end of this field the now augmented stream was spanned by a small wooden footbridge with a white painted handrail. When I eventually reached the stream, in spite of all these distractions and making a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts to spear on the end of my stick some of the older, harder sorts of cow flop in which the field abounded, and launch them into the air, the water tasted even funnier than it had done in the village outside Mrs Hutchings's shop and I stung myself on the nettles getting down to it.

Beyond the bridge the path continued uphill, dappled with sunlight
under the trees, and here the air struck chill after the heat of the meadow. Then it dipped and suddenly I found myself out in the sun on the edge of an immense shingle beach which had some boats hauled out on it, and in my ears there was the roar of the sea as with every wave it displaced and replaced millions upon millions of pebbles. To the left it stretched to where a cluster of ivy-covered white pinnacles rising above a landslip marked the last chalk cliffs in southern England; to the right to the brilliant red cliffs around Sidmouth; and beyond it, out to sea, on what was a near horizon, for there was already a haze of heat out in Lyme Bay, I could see the slightly blurred outlines of what Harry Hansford, the local fisherman who lived opposite the blacksmith's shop, would soon teach me to identify as a Brixham trawler, ghosting along under full sail.

‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific – and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.'

Many years were to pass before I read these words of Keats, but when I did the memory of that morning came flooding back.

There was a sound of feet slithering on the pebbles behind me. It was Kathy, panting slightly, as she had been running. ‘Whatever did you do that for, Eric, you naughty little boy, without telling me?' she said. ‘Your mum's ever so worried, and your dad, too. He'll be ever so cross if he finds out where you've been. You'd better keep quiet when you get back. I'll say I found you in the field.'

Together, hand in hand, we went back up the hill towards the village where the church bells were now beginning to announce the early service.