The Tall Girl from Somerset 5

 Erewhon

Mi infancia son recuerdos de un patio de Sevilla  

My childhood is memories of a courtyard in Seville, 

Y un huerto claro  donde madura el limonero.

And a sunlit garden where the lemon tree grows.

                                      
                                                         Antonio Machado  'Retrato'  1917

Let me take you back to where she grew up. Yes, it’s me Henry again, as old Tom Forrest used to say for years when he started the omnibus edition of ‘The Archers’ on Sunday mornings.  It’s still going, you know.   ‘The Archers’,  that is.  It’s still going though Tom Forrest died years ago.  They have to change the actors, you see, a bit like ‘The Mousetrap’.  It will probably go on for ever, and I hope it does.  I still listen to the daily episode after lunch, when I can.

It doesn’t matter where you’re born.  What matters is where you grow up, where you climb trees, and fall out of them, and where you go sledging.  Ever since I was a boy, when I pick a leaf of mint and rub it between my fingers, and breathe in the scent of the mint, it takes me back to the old garden of Erewhon, and to its mint bed under the Victoria plum tree.  The garden was sunlit, (memories are always sunny), but there were no lemon trees, as there were in Machado’s, because Anne’s garden was in a corner of Somerset, half way between Exmoor and the Cotswolds, on the slopes of the Mendip Hills.  She lived her childhood there, in a farmhouse called Erewhon that had presided over the hill and its surrounding fields for more than three hundred years.  The garden lay on the south side, and the cow houses, woodshed and apple orchard looked north, north towards Bristol.

The garden was a good one, even by Somerset standards.  It was a garden where you could:

- doze in the shrubbery listening to the test match on the radio,

- pick strawberries till your back ached,

- hoe peas, gather plums and watch out for wasps that always found the plums before you did,

- ride a bike over the lawns and disappear up paths to nowhere,

- have bonfires that lasted for days in autumn.

There is nothing, by the way, absolutely nothing as pleasant as making a bonfire. A bonfire has its quirks, though, and, like a young horse, it needs a little discipline early on.  Its favourite trick is to team up with the wind to cover you with smoke whichever side you decide to stand.  You are sure that the wind is blowing from the west and so you go round the fire to the side where the air is clear.  No sooner do you start raking up the leaves there than once more you are gasping for breath and you can’t see your hand in front of your face.  So you go round to the other side and set to work with the pitch fork once more. The next second the wind veers and once again you are coughing and spluttering in the smoke.  The noise of the crackling flames sounds distinctly like a quiet chuckle.  Then you go and stand about twenty yards from the fire and look at it again to see what method there might be in its madness.  The smoke is now rising in a controlled column vertically above the base, just as it is supposed to.  You go back warily and on tiptoe so that the fire cannot hear you, bend to your task again and in about three seconds you are coughing and spluttering once more. 

The older villagers accepted this state of affairs long ago, and they retire to a safe distance where they light their pipes, and watch the youngsters’ efforts.  

Once it is trained, however, a bonfire can work wonders.  You have to go little by little, of course.  Find the spot you normally use, it will be grey with the ashes of years of previous fires, then crush up some old newspaper.  It’s no good chucking the paper on in a pile.  I’ve seen sheaves of papers unburnt after being in a fire for days.  Just charred round the edges they were, like the manuscript of Beowulf.  That was just charred at the edges.  Still that’s given the academics something to do, to debate what words were on the charred bits.  Anyway, as I was saying, open out each sheet of newspaper and then crunch it up into a ball.  Use about half a dozen sheets and then cover them with some dry grass and twigs, if you can find them.  Then take your match and light the edge of the paper.  This is the best part of all.  When you have a good flame, then load on the branches and rose cuttings and leaves and sticks and grass that you have in the heaps around you.  You have to have a good base, but once you have that, you can heap the bonfire to the sky with damp leaves and green branches and weeds with the earth on their roots, and however wet and however heavy the leaves are, the fire will slowly burn through them.  The bonfire is a noble servant.  It will work away for days if necessary, and it only needs some more twigs and leaves when it burns through every three or four hours.  Heap it up at night and it will be waiting for you in the morning, the smoke rising quietly in the still air.  It is working while you are sleeping.