The Day Gone By (11 page)

My father pointed silently to a hawthorn bush overhanging the opposite bank of the river. I watched for perhaps half a minute, and was beginning to wonder what I was supposed to be looking at when the surface was broken, with a kind of unhurried intentness, by a rising trout. I saw the rings go radiating outwards and the whole circle of the rise float downstream until, diminishing little by little, it died away on the flow.

‘Isn't
he
a splendid chap?' said my father. ‘He'll do it again in a minute, I expect.'

He did, and this time I watched the mayfly drifting down on the surface, and anticipated the moment when the trout would rise to gulp it down. We remained sitting on the bank for perhaps ten minutes or more, and I found a point of vantage from which I could actually see the trout beneath the water, veering from side to side with flickering of its tail, sometimes allowing itself to be carried down a few feet before recovering its old position, yet always on the watch for the next mayfly. When it rose I could see the dark spots along its side, and once the dorsal fin broke surface as it turned to follow a fly a couple of feet downstream before taking it.

There were other footbridges - a bit out of repair and precarious, some of them — and on these we stood and looked down into the weed and the bed of the stream. My father showed me the difference between a grayling and a trout, and I learnt to recognize the chequered pattern of the grayling's high, long-based dorsal fin and the characteristic look of a grayling rise, different from that of a trout — or of a chub, for that matter. I remember I had a little, white, two-bladed penknife which someone had recently given me, and that while standing on one of the bridges I unluckily happened to drop it into the river. It must be down there still.

We took to going to the Halfway Wilderness quite often, for my father, though not himself a particularly keen fisherman (I expect he could have fished it if he had wanted to), saw that I was elated by the river and wished for nothing better than to walk the mile up its length to Wawcott and back on a sunny afternoon. One hot, still evening of high summer, we came upon a fisherman throwing a fly. This turned out to be a friend of my father, a celebrated fisherman named Dr Mottram. I watched fascinated as he splashlessly shot the light, delicate line and leader straight out to what seemed to me an incredible distance, let them drift down, recovered and re-cast. My father showed me the best place to stand when someone is casting - just behind his left shoulder. While we were there Dr Mottram rose, played and landed a trout, which he insisted on giving to us. He showed me how to pass reeds through the gills and carry it by them.

‘Is he a very good fisherman?' I asked my father, as we went on.

‘Dr Mottram?' he replied. ‘He'd catch a fish where no fish was.'

‘How d'you mean?' I said. ‘Not really?'

‘No; but you see, the thing is to find a fish and
induce
him to rise.'

Well, he induced me to rise all right. From that time on I knew I wanted to be a fly fisherman and bring home trout for supper.

But if I had lost my heart to the Kennet, with its great reed maces, its crowfoot and arrowhead and yellow water lilies (brandy-bottles) in the still pools, I still had another one to lose to the Downs. There are two ranges of Downs, one on each side of the Berkshire-North Hampshire area, the Kennet and Enborne valleys: the northerly, White Horse downs, which run westward from Streatley, south of Harwell and Wantage and on to Astbury and Liddington; and the southerly, Basingstoke-Winchester downs. It was to these latter that I always went with my father; or sometimes all five of the family would go. I can't remember ever to have done anything - anything at all - more delightful than walking on the crest of the downs, looking away into the purple, heat-rimmed edge of the horizon.

The downs, like Greenham Common, were a different country: different soil, grass, flowers, birds, and the land put to a different use. In those days, before the coming of the tractor, they were still mainly a place to graze sheep and train race-horses. Hardly anybody used to go up there except the shepherds, the race-horse trainers and their lads. The sunlight, the breeze and the stillness seemed intensified rather than interrupted by a grazing flock. Leisurely and unhurriedly they moved on across the grass, and every now and then would come the unresonant, cloppering tinkle of the bell round the neck of the bell-wether - the true sound of the downs on a hot afternoon - intermittent and unaltering as bird-song. Once, I remember, a shepherd greeted my father, ‘'Aft'noon, Doctor,' and then, after a few exchanges, rather tentatively, ‘D'you like t'ave a look at this ‘ere arm o' mine? 'E don't seem just right yet.' My father did so. I was well aware of standing orders - never show curiosity about patients or try to overhear consultations - and went to find another interest some way off.

God knows there were enough. The chalk itself always attracted me. The topsoil was shallow and friable, and the chalk subsoil was always breaking through, with or without the help of rabbits. You really could write - on a beech tree, for instance - with a lump of this chalk, although it was more scratchy than the sticks of chalk you bought in shops. Sometimes, though rarely, you might come upon a ‘shepherd's crown'; a fossil sea-urchin. I still have three of these from those days long ago. One is a real beauty: about two and a half inches in diameter and an inch and a quarter thick; regularly shaped liked a heart, with the five lines of tubes clearly marked on top, as is the vent on the bottom. I. O. Evans, in
The Observer's Book of British Geology,
says of these, ‘In the Chalk, they are so plentiful as to have been given folk names; the peasantry call the more pointed sea-urchins “shepherds' crowns” or ‘‘shepherds' mitres”, and the flatter, broader type, shaped like a playing-card heart, “fairy hearts” or “fairy loaves”.'

I soon found out that the chalk had its own flowers. The most beautiful were the wild orchids, which still bloom on the northward slope of Cottington's Hill almost as though in a terraced garden bed. Lady's slipper, too, flowered everywhere, as did the purple thyme. In season the cowslips grew thickly. I don't know anything nicer in the way of wild flowers than a big bunch of cowslips, and I rather think Shakespeare was of the same opinion, e.g.,
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
II, 1, lines 10-16.

‘The cowslips tall her pensioners be

In their gold coats spots you see:

Those be rubies, fairy favours:

In those freckles live their savours:

I must go seek some dewdrops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.'

Another flower I liked was the salad burnet. Since it was called the salad burnet I used to eat the leaves, supposing that you were meant to; but I've never really taken to them. They taste oily and rather hot. Milkwort there was, the flowers of which can vary with the soil from pure blue to almost white: and wild gentians, yellow wort, horseshoe vetch, dropwort, scabious, yellow rockrose and the beautiful purple-pink sainfoin: and everywhere, of course, the ragwort, covered with the yellow-and-black caterpillars of the cinnabar moth.

Downland woods, too, were different from those in the vale below. The beech hangers of the downs - dry, open-growing and airy, with no grass underfoot and the sunlight falling dappled and quick-moving through the patulous leaves - were quite unlike the damp Bluebell Wood, or the Sandleford copses of oak and hawthorn. The smooth-trunked, grey beeches, so thick about and standing so wide apart, pleased me simply by their huge size, even though they were no good for climbing. (You couldn't scramble up into them.)

It wasn't hard to learn to recognize the birds. The commonest and the most conspicuous were the yellowhammers. You could hardly miss them, for they seemed to have scarcely any fear of humans, and would sing out their little phrase from a hawthorn bush or a juniper almost at your elbow. There were cirl buntings too, but since in those days my bird-watching was spontaneous and largely uninstructed, I didn't distinguish between them and yellowhammers. The linnets I liked, partly for their song but mainly, I think, because (by English ornithological standards, anyway) the males are rather showy, with their deep pink breasts and foreheads. Best of all were the goldfinches. They forage along the downs in small flocks (‘charms') feeding on thistle seeds, groundsel and the like. I defy anyone not to be stirred by the sudden, twittering arrival of four or five goldfinches, fluttering and pecking from one thistle to another. I remember calling out in delight ‘Oh, Daddy, look!' and getting the wonted reply ‘Aren't
they
a lot of splendid chaps?' Kestrels were not uncommon, and once I took one unawares, coming round the sharp corner of a beech hanger in time to get a close look at it sitting on a strand of wire, before it took alarm and flew away. What I chiefly noticed was the black band round the edge of the tail and the black spots, or speckling, all over the chestnut-coloured back.

Hares, too, were common in those days. In fact, you could hardly go up on the downs without seeing one or two. If you happened to be down-wind of them, and particularly if you could stand still in some sort of cover or half-cover such as a juniper (gorse doesn't grow much on the Hampshire downs), they would sometimes come quite near before suddenly realizing what you were and dashing away. The thing I have always admired in hares is their ability to rotate their huge ears through at least 180° and, I wouldn't be surprised, even a little more. In spring they caper in the open in a most arresting way, although I can't actually recall seeing them do this when I was a little boy. It is a courtship display, or so I have read.

The highest point on these downs is Beacon Hill, which forms part of the Carnarvon estate. There is still a public footpath up it from the A34 on the east side (or the Earl allows people to climb it, anyway) but in those days, before Hitler's war, there was a golf course below the hill, on the west side. It wasn't much of a course by exacting standards - the turf was spongy and the greens were slow - but from the age of about eight I used to enjoy playing there and it was novel and pleasant to be driven a matter of nearly two miles through the woods of Highclere Park. This is why, when I was a little boy, we always used to climb Beacon Hill from the west side, where the golf course was. You can't do that any more. The fascination of climbing Beacon Hill was that on the top lay — and still lies - Lord Carnarvon's grave. This is that Lord Carnarvon who, with his faithful henchman Mr Carter, discovered Tutankhamen's tomb. (In those days everybody used to pronounce it
Tootang-Karmen,
and I still do.) We all knew the story: how the findings were more wonderful than anything ever seen (though no one had seen them as yet): how there was a terrible curse of the Pharaohs on molesters of the tomb, which had carried off Lord Carnarvon for a start: and that was only the beginning. Of course, it wasn't my mother and father who told me about the Curse and its effects; but Constance did, and Thorn the gardener, and several other people in the village. It was common local knowledge.

Although there is a stone now, in those days the grave was unmarked; I suppose because the ground hadn't yet settled, or for some such reason. The site, perhaps five yards square, was surrounded (as now) by high, stout iron railings and mown smooth. In the middle the turf rose into the man-long hump of the interment, at which I used to stare in numinous awe. There lay the Earl who had been killed by the Pharaoh's Curse. This had all been his land, and his great castle could be seen a mile away among the trees. He had known the King George V. Yet none of this grandeur had served to avert the curse.

He had been such a nice man, by all accounts. There was an anecdote current which I had been told as an example of the manners of a true gentleman (and I have always remembered it). It seems that at some midsummer before the Great War, Lord Carnarvon was giving a fete in the grounds. There was a cricket match, and a marquee had been put up, in which the Earl's tenants were sat down to a generous feast. Lord Carnarvon himself was strolling round, talking to people and making sure that everyone was having a good time, when he came across an old fellow who was addressing himself to a slab of ice pudding.

‘Hullo, Giles,' he said. ‘'Hope you're enjoying yourself?'

‘Well, my lord,' replied Giles, ‘I don't reckon much to this 'ere pudden. Why, 'tis stone cold.'

Lord Carnarvon picked up a spoon and tasted it. ‘So it is!' he said. ‘What a shame! Smithers, take this away and bring Mr Giles some of that hot apple pie.'

A good seven miles westward along the downs stood and still stands Combe Gibbet. Although it was thought rather a long way in those days, we sometimes drove out there for a picnic. The story of the gibbet - what little we know of it - is a grim one, but even as a little boy I'd had it told to me. In 1676 two villagers of Inkpen, George Broomham and Dorothy Newman, were convicted at Winchester Assizes of murdering Broomham's wife and son ‘with a staff on Inkpen Down. The crime excited so much local horror and vengeful indignation that the pair were sentenced, exceptionally, to be hanged ‘on the highest point in the county' (Hampshire), which by a coincidence happened to be the summit of Combe Down. (It's Inkpen Down on the north side of the ridge and Combe Down on the south. The summit is not quite 1,000 feet.) A double gallows was erected for the purpose and the pair were duly hanged. No one else has ever been hanged there, but it has become traditional to maintain the gallows. (I believe there is an obligation upon either the landlord or the tenant: I have been told which, but I forget.) When it becomes worn out by wind and weather it is replaced. The one there at the moment is quite recent, stout and good for years, I would say: but in the ‘twenties, when I first went up there, the gibbet was old, the tall upright rifted and leaning awry, the lateral arms, not very long, rifted and tapered by weather. I didn't know it wasn't the original. I used to imagine the scene, two hundred and fifty years before; the jeering villagers, the hangman and his wretched victims in the cart, the horses blown from their long pull up, no doubt some dignified J.P. or magistrate in charge, the clergyman with his book, all in the stiff west wind along the down. How long did it take them to strangle?