The Tall Girl from Somerset 5 Erewhon

Erewhon

A bed of mint, a bonfire and a lily pond.

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 tall.

                                      

                                                         Antonio Machado  'Retrato'  1917

Let me take you back to where Anne grew up. That always moulds a person. 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 on the radio though Tom Forrest died years ago.  They have to change the actors, you see, like in ‘The Mousetrap’ in London.  ‘The Mousetrap’ will go on for ever, I suppose, and so will ‘The Archers’ with a little luck.  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, where you build your den with your friends, where you make pea shooters out of stalks of cow parsley and where you go sledging in winter.  Children know every blade of grass of their garden, every nook and cranny.  They have all day to discover things and to fill their minds with memories. You never forget the garden that you knew when you were a child. This is the garden that all later gardens are measured against. Whenever I visited Erewhon, it seemed to me to be the perfect place to live in. Even now, all these years later, when I pick a leaf of mint and rub it between my fingers, and breathe in the mint, I am taken back to the old garden of Erewhon, and to the 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 the old 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 of the house, 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 while listening to the test match on the radio,

- pick strawberries till your back ached,

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

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

- have bonfires that lasted for days in autumn,

-cut holly from the tree in the paddock every Christmas.

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 hide you in smoke whichever side of it 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.  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 perfect 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 less than two 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 proceed little by little, of course.  First separate the pages of some old newspapers and crush them into balls.  It’s no good throwing on sheaves of newspaper.  I’ve seen piles of papers still unburnt after being in the middle of a fire for days.  Just charred round the edges they were, like the manuscript of the old poem, ‘Beowulf’.  That was just charred at the edges.  Still, that gave the academics something to do.  They still debate about 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, load on the branches, rose cuttings, leaves, sticks and grass that you have in 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 grass and weeds with the earth on their roots, and however wet and heavy the leaves are, the fire will slowly burn through them.  The bonfire is a noble servant.  It will work 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 there waiting for you in the morning, the smoke rising quietly in the still air.  It is working while you are sleeping.

In a secluded part of the garden, a long way from the house, and far away from the bonfire patch, in the corner by the field, was a round lily pond.   The whole of Erewhon was perfect, but the lily pond was nirvana.  When Anne was a child, she used to go there to escape from all the pressures of school.  As she grew up, the lily pond was a protection against challenges and obligations. It was the place where she could be on her own.  The pond was surrounded by a paved walk, and around the walk was a tall yew hedge, so thick that no one could peer through, winter or summer.  By the pond was an old wooden bench, and this was the place for dreaming while the tadpoles slowly changed into frogs.

Near the house was a stone barn with a hay loft and next to that some cow houses.  These were empty of cows, for Erewhon was no longer a farm.  As a child Anne played with the old metal chains, which had once tethered the cows for milking and now hung down from the wooden stalls and  rusting through lack of use. There was a holly tree in the thorn hedge that separated the hen pen from the field.  It was a good-sized tree, and every Christmas Anne’s father cut the holly there to take inside the house.  Every picture  was decorated with holly, and the holly tree never grew any bigger because of this annual pruning. 

But time has passed, as it inexorably does, like the race-winning tortoise, since Anne played in the cow stalls, and she is now 18.

I have a photo of Anne here on my desk.  It was taken at the end of Brean Down, that long hill that stretches out in the Bristol Channel and reaches out towards Wales.  We walked there one Saturday on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas.  There was a biting wind, and then it came on to rain, but we managed to reach the end that dipped into the sea.  We reached the end and that is always important.  You have to reach your goal on every walk however short it is. Then we had a quick sandwich in the shelter of a rock, and after that we walked back with the wind and the rain in our faces.    

And this photo here is her matriculation at Oxford, October 64.  Look at her smiling there!  There she is, the tall one.  The second from the right.

How we do try for the camera!  All hopes and fears are put aside, and we smile just for the necessary 1/125^th of a second. Happiness is short, isn’t it?  When that photo was taken, I have the feeling that Anne was battling away with various doubts and worries, but more of that later. There she is, and she looks very happy.

Erewhon has gone now.  Not nobly razed to the ground or magnificently burnt in a raging fire like Thornfield or Manderley, but bought by a Bristol solicitor and changed, changed out of all recognition from a rambling old farm, where the cows had filed in daily, into a prim, expensive country house for a prim, expensive city lawyer.  Do not look for the lily pond behind the old yew hedge; it is gone.  It is a paved barbecue area now.  There is a gleaming metal barbecue where the pond used to be. Health and safety regulations do not like lily ponds. Do not look for the cow stalls where the chains hung down, slowly rusting.  They are gone, thrown away in the first clean-up.  Inside the walls of the old barn, where there was a glorious muddle of bales of straw and firewood and where Anne’s father kept the bean poles which were cut from the hedges and used for the runner beans every summer, there is now separate accommodation with two en-suite bedrooms. 

The garden has gone. The mint bed, the rows of broad beans, the potatoes and the peas, the carrots and the beetroot. All are gone.  Now it has all been put down to lawn.

The old farmhouse which worked with cows, hens and goats, with cabbages, plums and apples, is now retired and has nothing to fill its hours winter or summer.  

‘How nice!’ people say politely.   ‘Yes, it’s very nice, isn't it!  I think it is a very elegant house.’

Erewhon is now full of taste and empty of life.  

It cannot be happy.