Everyman's England (11 page)

From Bourton I walked up the river and over the hill to the villages of Upper and Lower Slaughter, which are all that Cotswold villages should be, except that they make no provision for the thirsty traveller. At one or other of the villages I had hoped to get lunch, or at least find an inn for a drink. There was no inn. One house had a sign hung out declaring lunches, and, after I had with difficulty made friends with a large dog which guarded the doorway, I pulled the doorbell and was answered by a half-witted boy who cocked his ear at the word ‘lunch' as though I were uttering some heinous blasphemy. He then disappeared into the gloomy echoes of the house to reappear fifteen minutes later, when I and the dog were beginning to get impatient, to announce that the mistress did not want to buy anything today, thank you. Controlling myself I explained my request once more and waited another fifteen minutes, at the end of which time the boy appeared again and, uttering no word, shook his head at me sadly. I gathered that lunch was off and left the house, keeping a wary eye on the dog.

My thoughts, for I was tired and thirsty, were sufficiently sanguinary to prompt the suggestion that the name of Slaughter had been given to the villages by thirsty but disappointed Romans, digressing, in the hope of a drink, from the nearby Fosse Way. Finally, I bought from the village store some sweet biscuits, of a kind which I loathe I discovered after I opened the packet, and some small cheeses. I walked down the river, eating the biscuits on the principle that what I had paid for I ought to consume, and thereby spoiling my appetite for the cheeses which by themselves I might have enjoyed. To finish the meal I had to get upon my stomach among the frost-bannered grasses and drink water from the Windrush, trying to forget that some villages upon rivers have primitive ideas about main drainage.

As I left the hills a westering sun was dipping in a dull, glowing ball to the top of a thin crest of spruces, throwing the fields into fiery light and the valleys into brown shadows, across which were traced the black lines of Cotswold walls, typical walls of flat stones that blaze with the purple and gold of ivy-leaved toad-flax and stone-crop in summertime.

Nowadays the Cotswolds have lost touch with the world, and lost little by it. Agriculture, it is true, still flourishes there, but history has left it severely alone for a long time. Once the Romans threw their roads across the undulating uplands and patrolled the long vistas with their cohorts, and soldiers from sunny Dalmatia probably cursed the climate at Stow-on-the-Wold where, as the rhyme has it, ‘the wind blows cold'. The first time I was ever in Stow my bicycle developed a plethora of punctures in the back wheel. It was not a modern bicycle and I had to take off the chain-case and release the back wheel before I could get to work on the punctures. Into the midst of my grease and confusion and bad language, came a short-sighted tourist who tapped me on my shoulder and asked me, as I was forcing the sixth of six particularly intractable patches to stick, if I could direct him to a shop which sold picture postcards. It said a great deal for the humanising influence of environment, education and religion that I answered him politely.

After the Romans the hills were left alone for a while, until the mercers came with their packhorses carrying great panniers of staple and turned the military roads into great highways of commerce that are still marked by old pannier bridges, Pack-horse and Staplers Inns and in the name of Dunstable – the Down Staple town – which was at the junction of two important trade ways. The Cotswolds once sheltered the great woollen industry of England, and merchants grew wealthy enough to endow churches, and towns which are quiet backwaters were once noisy with looms and the bustle of trade. Now the Cotswold roads have gone back to their original pedestrian purpose.

G. K. Chesterton made the possibly libellous suggestion that:

And if ever you are in the vicinity of Bicester late on a Saturday evening you may be fortunate, or unfortunate (it depends upon your view of these things), enough to hear the old roads re-echoing to sounds that were common before the Romans came…

All that is now left to mark the passing of the great woollen industry are the sheep that still crop the hill-sides and the tombs and brasses of past merchants which fill the grey Cotswold churches…

The passing of fame and industry has been a happy process; it has not left the hills scarred or the towns depressed. Everywhere is a quiet reposeful beauty, a beauty that takes its birth from the grey stones and seems to impart to the men and women of the Cotswolds some of the steady spirit of the hills and gentle valleys.

CHAPTER 12

If a complete stranger asked you to be kind enough to show him your town would you be able to give him an interesting day? Do you know as much as you should know about your own town?

You are probably saying to yourself: ‘Of course I do. I haven't lived in the place for thirty-five years without learning all there is to know about it.' Then you are an exemplary exception. Most towns seem to be inhabited by complete strangers, so that if one asks for information of a man standing on a street corner there comes the usual reply: ‘Sorry, but I'm a stranger, too.'

Visitors to towns get accustomed to this reception and, learning wisdom, usually arm themselves with a good guidebook or trust to their own native wit, both of which are generally incapable of supplying the irrelevant information which they want.

Very recently in a small town in the West of England I found myself in the same predicament. I wanted to know something about the town and from the three people I approached came the typical replies. ‘Sorry, I'm a stranger, too.' ‘It's been there as long as I can remember – that's all I know.' ‘Mr Higgins, next door, would be able to tell you all about it, but he's away today. I never take much interest in these things myself.'

I walked along the main street wondering whether I should leave the town when coming towards me I saw a tall, thinnish man, soberly clad, with the face of a scholar. I know the men with faces of scholars in provincial towns. They almost invariably turn out to be corn-chandlers who have one interest in life and that the breeding of pigeons.

Impelled by a quite ungovernable impulse, I stopped him and said gently:

‘Good day to you, sir, I wonder if it would be a breach of good manners if I were to ask you whether you could oblige me by telling me a little of the history of this town, and what the major preoccupations of its inhabitants might be, and whether, as a whole, they are happy or depressed, in work or unemployed?'

‘Why, I'm—'

I stopped him with a gesture.

‘I know what you are going to say, that you, too, are a stranger here, that perhaps the publican up the road might be able to tell me, if he were not away today, that—'

I stopped short as I saw that he was laughing.

‘I'm afraid,' he said slowly, ‘that you are quite wrong. I shall be only too happy to help you, in fact I wish more people would ask me to do the same for them.'

‘You mean you know all about this town and will tell me about it?'

‘I do. Follow me.'

And follow him I did. When we started, Dursley, for that was the name of the town, meant only a name on a map to me. When he had finished with me, and there were times when I wondered if I could politely escape from his tenacious enthusiasm, Dursley had taken shape and life.

He led me to the top of a hill overlooking the town and then turned to me and said, almost admonishingly:

‘What is the connection between a field of teasels, billiard cloths and lawn mowers?'

‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' I countered, and wondered what there was about me which merited the pitying smile he was bestowing upon me.

‘A raven is not like a writing-desk,' he said curtly. ‘That's all nonsense—'

‘And so is this teasel, billiard cloth, lawn mower stuff—' ‘It is not,' he replied. ‘There is an answer.' He paused for a second or two and then went on: ‘I suppose that you had never heard of Dursley and had to look it up on a map before you found that it was where it was?'

‘Perhaps,' I admitted and added, to ameliorate his scorn; ‘but my wife knew it was in Gloucestershire. She is very good at geography.'

He gave me a look which implied that my wife deserved a more intelligent husband, and then with an imperious flourish he waved his hand before him.

‘There is Dursley below you, and there lies the answer to my riddle.'

The town lay before us, cupped in a great curve of the Cotswolds where they press out towards the Severn. The hills, covered with trees, patches of gorse and pastures, sloped steeply towards the grey town which lay somnolent beneath a faint haze of chimney smoke. That somnolence I was to learn was only a pretence.

‘It looks very peaceful and sleepy,' I murmured admiringly, for I was beginning to dislike that withering little smile of contempt which he apparently kept in readiness for all the ignoramuses who have never heard of Dursley. As I spoke his dark brows contracted with a frown and I saw his tall figure tremble. Then he gained control of himself and replied with dignity: ‘It is a town – not a bedroom. And it is no ordinary town. Please come with me.'

‘But what about the riddle, the teasels—'

‘Follow me.' The command was not to be disregarded.

I followed and we went into the town. We walked along the quiet streets and, as I saw a dog dozing in the roadway, I secretly decided that my adjectives ‘sleepy and peaceful' were correct.

Suddenly he took me by the arm and led me through a small doorway of a building which looked like a convent. I was left in a panelled room while he disappeared and consulted, apparently, with someone deeper within the building. After a while he came back and I was conducted across a small yard and up a flight of wooden stairs into a large building to find myself confronted by a blaze of colour.

There were carpets everywhere; plain carpets, chequered carpets, patterned carpets, blue, red, green carpets and carpets of a mixture of every conceivable colour. They stood in rolls along the walls, they overflowed from shelves, they spread themselves along the floor until my eyes became confused with the chaos of colour and I began to think of transformation scenes in pantomimes. As if to complete the idea of a pantomime and fairyland there suddenly sprang from the earth beside me a wrinkled, short-statured, cheerful gnome who might have travelled from some subterranean recess of the neighbouring Cotswolds. Actually he was a Yorkshireman. He began to spread more carpets before me to exhibit the various designs and colours.

‘This one,' he said, ‘is very popular in the North of England.' I could believe it. ‘And this one we sell a lot of in London, and this, and this, and this…' He was plucking down carpets from the shelves, working himself into a frenzy of enthusiasm over them.

‘Dursley is famous for its reversible carpets and rugs – you should have known that. Any housewife knows that,' said a familiar voice.

‘And we don't only sell them in England,' the Yorkshireman was saying. ‘They go abroad, all over the world. Why, we've even sent orders to Mecca. Think of that, sending carpets to Mecca! Like sending coals to Newcastle, isn't it?'

I was taken to the workshops where girls operate the weaving-looms, and sing popular songs as they work. They were all as busy as bees, and making a pleasanter noise for, though there was no reason why it should be so, their singing harmonised with the mechanical rattle and bang of the shuttles as they flew to and fro across the looms. I cannot attempt to explain the process of weaving, and how a girl manipulates as many as fifty shuttles each carrying a different colour and works with them a pattern that for intricacy has the Maze at Hampton Court beaten. But if you want to know go to Dursley and visit the works and then you will understand and, like me, be unable to explain it to your friends. If you are interested in dyes you can spend a pleasant ten minutes about the dyeing vats which hold gallons of gorgeous dyes; that is, if you have no imperious conductor itching to snatch you away to sample the other delights of Dursley.

Outwardly Dursley appears to be no more than a pleasant Cotswold town with no particular interest in anything but its own leisurely everyday life and with no desire to impress the outside world. Actually it is a town of dynamic force and full of industry. Its factories and mills are so skilfully tucked away in the valley at the lower part of the town that they in no way spoil its charms or hint at their presence to those who pass along Dursley's street towards some other goal.

The normal population of the town is not much more than three thousand. Between seven in the morning and six o'clock at night the population is increased to more like seven thousand, for Dursley's industries absorb the resident population and many more. From as far away as Bristol, Gloucester and Stroud, and from the surrounding hamlets, workers stream into the town each morning on foot, by bicycle, car, bus, train and motor cycle, to fill their places at the benches, foundries, looms, dyeing vats and machines of the various factories. While I was there the actual number of unemployed men on the books at the Labour Exchange was sixteen! Is there any other town in England which can boast so few unemployed workers?

I was taken over an engineering works, so large that it runs its own private service of omnibuses between the workshops.

Here I saw being made petrol engines that would function in heating, lighting and water-pumping plants all over the world. In the packing shops, strewn with straw and cases, it stirred me, though it left the packers unmoved, to see labels affixed to cases bearing such names as Zanzibar, Los Angeles, Cape Town… Cream separators, teak-wood garden seats and automatic sheep-shears for Australia – there seemed to be no end to the variety of articles made in the factory.

One workshop was full of the hum of modern machinery, which stirs contentedly all day, needing only an occasional attention from a mechanic, and alive with the movement of men doing jobs which machinery cannot yet supplant. This workshop represented the apex of modern machine methods and reminded me of the fantasia of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and yet across the way was another workshop, as though it were an exhibition piece placed in deliberate contrast to its fellow, where coopers were at work, fashioning by hand the tubs for milk-churns and making barrels with such skill that I could run my hand around the insides and not feel the joins of the individual slats of wood. The wood-workers were mostly elderly men and all of them had that wise kindness of face which seems to come to those who work much in wood. Wood, unlike steel, responds to the craftsman and gives its best when it is handled with love and respect. If you know how to handle wood, how much it helps in an understanding of men.

‘Coopering,' said the man of Dursley, ‘is one of our oldest existing crafts. There was a rope-walk in the town at one time, but that has gone.'

‘And what,' I said, ‘of the teasels and –'

‘Follow me.'

And I was whisked off again; this time to a woollen mill lower down the valley. Yes, a woollen mill in the west of England. Have you never heard of west of England cloth? Have you never worn flannel trousers made from such cloth or a tailor-made coat and skirt? Perhaps you have and never realised it. I was surprised when I was told that the flannel suit I was wearing came from the west of England. Until then I had regarded Yorkshire as the mother of all cloth.

In the mill I found the answer to my cryptic friend's enigma. What is the connection between teasel heads, billiard cloths and lawn mowers?

Unlike most mills this one does its own spinning, weaving and dyeing and, as well as grey flannel and white flannel, it produces some of the best billiard cloths in the world. Yet without teasel heads the cloth would be poor stuff, for that fine dress which billiard cloth has which makes it smooth to the hand as you rub in one direction and rough in another, can only be obtained in one way – by the use of teasel heads.

I saw huge stalls of teasel heads waiting to be used. These are fitted up in racks which, as the cloth runs over rollers, are lowered on to it. The tiny teeth of the heads catch at the cloth and bring up a knap which lies in one direction. Once the knap has been brought up it is impossible to get rid of it, and there is no mechanical device for raising the knap which is more efficient than teasel heads. Surrounded by every other conceivable invention of genius to facilitate industry the teasels retain their place. Nature's tool which man cannot satisfactorily duplicate or substitute with one of his own making. Somewhere teasel-picking must be a lucrative employment in order to supply the mills, but just where they are picked or cultivated the man of Dursley could not tell me. It was his one deficiency and I believe he felt it.

Without the teasel where would the billiard cloth be? And the lawn mower? When the knap has been raised by the teasels it is not, of course, of a uniform height and it has to be cut to the fineness which you can see on your own billiard table. Literally the cloth is mowed to take off the excess length of knap and it was the cutting-machine through which the cloth passes in these mills that gave a Dursley man, many years ago, a brilliant idea. Maybe he was one of those gardeners by uxorial insistence rather than from his own free will, and hated having to get upon his knees and shear the front lawn with clippers that brought callouses to his hands and wicked thoughts to his mind. If cloth, he must have argued to himself, can be sheared of its knap, why can't a lawn be sheared of its excess growth of grass in the same way. He did not dream about it. He did something – that was to invent the first lawn mower. He took out a patent in 1832 and today you and I cut the lawn by virtue of his genius and in the same way, intrinsically, as the Dursley mills shear their billiard cloths of excess knap.