A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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a hedgerow in which he had been lurking to flag down a luckless motorist for ‘speeding’. Until November 1931, the speed limit in Britain for all motor vehicles was officially twenty miles an hour. And we saw lots of tramps, most of them, like us, heading west, one of them a diminutive elderly man wearing a bowler hat and a wing collar, who was helping his equally elderly wife to push a very old-fashioned, high-wheeled perambulator with all their possessions in it along the road. And once we saw a team of huge English carthorses pulling a wagon with an enormous tree trunk on it.
At one point we came to a magic place where a road forked away from the one on which we were travelling, a place that I never forgot and was therefore subsequently able to identify, although it was years later. There, sheltered by trees was a grass-grown open space, with a number of low, barn-like buildings disposed about it. Some had slate roofs; some were thatched; some of the more important-looking ones – that might have been part of a farm – were built of cob, a mixture of clay and straw, and had enclosing walls of the same material, which were also thatched or tiled, as they had to be, otherwise they would have melted away in the rain, something I had never seen before.
And it was here, at this moment, as if to set a seal on my memory of it, a memory that would endure for the rest of my life, and embody so many feelings that I could never express, that my father half stood up in the front of the car and shouted over the top of our windscreen, ‘Hilda! Look at those buildings! How they’re built! That means we’re in the West.’ And he was right. For this was Weyhill, the Werdon Priors of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, famous for its ancient six days’ fair beginning on old Michaelmas Eve (10 October), one of the most ancient in Britain, to which a line in The Vision of Piers Ploughman, c.1360, ‘To Wy and Wynchestre I went to the fayre’, perhaps refers. Horses, sheep, cheese and hops were the principal things sold at the fair and as many as 150,000 sheep once changed hands here in a day. The second day of the fair (old Michaelmas Day) was the great hiring-day for farm servants and labourers in this part of Hampshire and the adjoining districts of Wiltshire, the carters appearing with a piece of plaited whipcord fastened in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool. For many years now I have watched the at first gradual and later the accelerated decay of these strangely beautiful buildings and, recently, I have witnessed the final destruction of the best of them.
We continued our journey across Salisbury Plain. There were sheep on every horizon now, and from time to time we passed clumps of ugly buildings. (My mother said they were military buildings left over from the war.)
There were more sheep around Stonehenge and I remember hearing the skylarks overhead, so high that I could barely see them, and running my hands over the surfaces of stones so huge that I could scarcely apprehend them. The only other visitor was a vicar in a dog-collar who had driven there with a pony and trap, and I remember thinking how much funnier we looked with our smart clothes and our shiny motor car in such a place than he did with his old suit and his rather yellow dog-collar, and his pony and trap.
A little further on we turned off the main road and followed a track that led past a number of grassy mounds, and there we had our picnic, not in the motor car using the collapsed windscreen as a picnic table but as we always did, unless it was raining, on rugs on the grass.
It was a memorable picnic, even though picnics arranged by my mother and father were always memorable. It is not just family pride that makes me say so. They really had a flair for picnics. Everyone said so.
There was a big pie, whether it was veal and ham with eggs embedded in it (not extruded through it as they are today) or pork is of no importance. I only know that like every other pie at every other picnic for which my father provided pies it had a design embossed on the crust (acorns and thistles were popular), and was the most delicious sort of juicy pie imaginable. And there was a ham, which my father had bought in case the meals at the pub at Branscombe were not always up to scratch, and an ox tongue and Stilton cheese, and lettuce, tomatoes and spring onions, and loaves of bread like cannon balls and Huntley and Palmer’s Oval Water Biscuits, and home-made mayonnaise, and Ventachellum’s Sweet Sliced Mango Chutney, and fresh fruit salad, and to drink there was Whiteway’s Dry Devonshire Cider for the grown-ups, and for me lemonade, made at home by Ellen. After which everyone except myself had ‘forty winks’.
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