9 March 1985

SATURDAY
     A bright and almost balmy day. Thin scattered clouds drifting south eastward above the heavily mullioned tall windows in my bedroom occasionally filter the strong sunlight. In cool looking waves it alternately washes across the lawn, rises to the dark of the wooded bank by the north wall and then recedes into the angular shadow of the Abbey. (The daylight in my room even on the sunniest mornings has a pale, Edward Hopper quality.)
     Somewhere among the lime trees—60 to 70 feet high—and the dense but shorter evergreens,Robert Denton is at work with his chain saw. The growl and whine of the saw cutting through branches reminded me, for some reason, that I wanted to ask him about the wood pigeon feathers strewn in several disordered heaps and patches along the Abbey paths. I hurried out of the building to get to him before he moved off, and as I walked thought about my visit, last night to the Rose and Crown pub in Ratley.
     I had been taken there with Nicholas Baldwin, by Philip and Tara Inwood, respectively a College art tutor and his wife. Tara, a descendant of the Heinemann family of publishers, I have been told, is bright and attractive, with a trim figure, dark, softly waved hair, and a warm, full-lipped smile. Philip, with red gold hair and a clear, boyish face, is as good looking as she is. The occasion for her and Philip's inviting Nick and me to the Rose and Crown was their having finished preparations for their shows. Tomorrow, Tara's photographs will be on view at the Bampton Arts Centre as part of a two woman exhibit—Caroline Forbes is the other contributor—entitled "Writers and Musicians." On 24 March Philip's "Watercolour Landscapes" private show will open for two weeks in the Great Hall of the Abbey. The evening out was, thus, their celebration, a sort of self congratulatory ceremony that they chose to share with Nick and me.
     The pub is in a neat and orderly little village of perhaps 300 or 400 people. Its stone cottages clustered around and on the hill that rises steeply from the lower level, above a narrow lane leading eventually, I think, back to Wroxton through Hornton and Horley. Like Philip and Tara's Wroxton cottage on Main Street, the Rose and Crown seems little changed by the several centuries it has endured. Both have stone and plaster walls and thick dark beams, warped, age fissured, and low enough to require defensive stooping by all but the shortest visitors.
     How do public houses like the Rose and Crown and Wroxton's White Horse avoid law suits by guests who bash their skulls on some of the great joists—at least eight inches square and no more than six feet above the floor—that run through their main rooms? In the rapaciously and opportunistically litigious America of today, $50,000 judgments would be a regularly provided for operating expense, covered by a liability insurance policy costly enough to force the price of beer up to £1.50 per pint.
     Over here everyone accepts the beams not as annoyances but as contributions to the coziness of the places in which they are found. In one that I visited with the students on one of our "Pub Crawl" nights, the main beam in the largest room had affixed to it a hand printed sign reading "Duck or Grouse."
     The honest atmosphere of such pubs free of any of the adulterations prized by polyurethane-and-permastone improvers, makes me think about the character of my own land and people. When I did so sometime back in circumstances similar to those of last night, one image flashed instantly in my awareness. It was the end panel of a pack of fig roll biscuits that I purchased on March 7 for 27p in Banbury's Marks and Spencer's market. Under "Ingredients" appeared this listing: "Fig Paste. Wheat Flour. Sugar. Glucose Syrup. Vegetable Oil. Dried Skimmed Milk. Salt. Flavourings. Citric Acid." Where's the rest of it? I wondered, the magical additives and congeners that would have made totally unnecessary the legend printed on the see through cover of the British package: "Display until 30 Mar D Best Before 13 Apr."
     The Ratley pub is Philip and Tara's favorite. "No juke box or anything like that," Philip said approvingly as we got into his V.W. in Wroxton. "Tara and I hope that not too many people find it." Although I will probably never visit it again, I, too, hope it stays the way it was when I was there: quiet, and unimproved but warmed by a ready friendliness, a bit chilly but brightened by pleasant fires in large hearths at either end of its two rooms made one, unaffectedly homey with a sturdy white labrador rolling on the floor in invitation to playful mock battle, and two Jack Russells barking and scratching behind some solid door decently muffling their racket in a distant room.
     Robert put down his saw the instant I came into view. Before I could ask about the pigeon feathers, he entered upon an explanation of his cutting up the tree. "`Twas a healthy tree, but tipped over by the wind," he said, eager to have me understand that he would never have felled it otherwise. "`Twas badly rooted here in a wet spot on the hill. The water gets under them, you see, and the first strong wind knocks them over." When he had finished his comments on the tree, I finally asked him about the pigeons and asked if he, too, had noticed the remains of several.
     "Oy," he answered and led me to a place a hundred yards toward the ice house. The soil, covered by conifer needles, was disturbed, and feathers lay in an irregular circle two feet or more across. "Fox has had him," he declared bending low over the spot. "He won't have caught the bird, probably. It will have been `pricked.' The farmers are shooting the pigeons right now to keep them from the seed. Some of the birds get only wounded and fall to ground. Others die in the night and drop off their perch. But oi've watched the fox having a mouse. It's wonderful to see the way it crouches and pounces"—here he rose on his toes and thrust his arms out suddenly—“and comes down right upon the creature."
     Robert then asked me if I had seen the badger sett, and, when I told him I never had, we set off on the path north of the Great Pond to the high ground in the woods about a quarter of a mile away. Continuously, as we walked, Robert drew upon his steady and acute observation of the Abbey grounds, proudly showing off his authority as a scholar of the earth. "This would be honey fungus," he said pausing over a pale orange growth on a rotting stump. "Deadly it is. If you get it in your garden it runs right along the roots underground, spreading everywhere and the whole lot is lost." Bracket fungus, he went on, was just about as bad. It got its name from looking like a shelf bracket, he added as a foot¬note.
     A rabbit started up as we left the stump, and Robert stopped to call my attention to its "form." "They will go underground in a burry," he explained, adding, when he saw my look of slight uncertainty hearing "burry," "We call them `burry' here. Others will say burrow. `Tis all the same," he finished in a tone that left little doubt that the local term was unquestionably the better one. "They keep above ground more now," he said, resuming his remarks about rabbits. "Crafty, they are. They know the fleas in the burries spread myxomatosis." (Robert much admires the ability of wild creatures to perceive all sorts of danger, and, after their form of careful analysis, to draw up reasoned solutions to cope with present threat. Foxes are better equipped for such planning than rabbits, he is certain. "They have moved into hurban areas like Banbury," he has told me. "They know they are safe from the hunt there.")
     We got to the badger sett only after several more stopovers. During one, Robert pointed to a hole high on the side of one of the tallest trees nearby and told me that it was used by dozens of bats that roost in the rotting trunk. "They'll be in there now. They were once in another weak old beech that we had to cut down. Swarmed out of it, they did, in the light of the morning. This one should come down as well. It will fall soon in a strong wind and will probably damage some of the young trees we've set out for future generations. But I believe we should leave some dead trees about for creatures like the bats. And the green headed woodpecker. The barn owl is almost extinct now, with the way `modern farming' is pulling down the old barns at such a rate. We need the hedgerows, too, and there are perishing few of them left here about now. I don't think `modern farms' should be allowed around here. They don't fit in, do they, with their metal sides and roofs and the way they've done for all the spinneys? Every last inch of earth must be plowed. The countryside looks sterile," he said sadly, looking through the trees toward the expanse of rolling hilly farmland, freshly turned over for later "corn drilling."
     "I don't hold with squeezing every pence out of the land. If we have enough to live by that's enough, isn't it? Look off there toward Bretch Hill estates. All of that used to be trees. It's horrible looking now, with all the walls and roofs everywhere. And the people don't care for the environment. The young lads come in here with knives and girdle the trees. I will show you some foin' larches and Scotch poins of 30 years or more with the bark stripped off six feet of trunk. There's no point to it. Just vandalism and destruction.”
   As he nodded his head in mingled anger and despair over the damage to the trees, I recalled a passage I had read years before in Frazer’s Golden Bough about primitive Germans’ love of trees and hatred of those who destroyed them. A typical punishment for girdling a tree, as I recall, was nailing the girdler’s navel to the tree and then rolling him round and round the tree, wrapping the barked section with the innards of the malefactor. Studying Robert’s expression as he moved away from one of the dead trees gave me a new understanding of the passage.
     “Last year,” Robert, went on, “was a bad one. They were in the grounds all the toim. Pinched m' favver's tools and pulled stones out of the dam and bridge. A few years ago they stoned the swans, breaking their necks. And one came in wiv a shot gun and blew the ducklings apart. A doozen or two birds, he done for, leavin' the bodies lyin' about. Oi've tried to teach some of the young ones some country lore, but they just give you lip and get ugly wiv you if you try to correct them. `Twill all be like Leamington Spa one day. That was a smashin' place one toim. But it's overgrown now. `Tis all changed, it is. Everything moves too fast. Loik in the States. Coo! That's too swift for me. Oi never get bored with the quiet of these grounds. There's soomthin’ new to see and learn all the toim. Even in the winter wiv the snow coverin' all, you can read a great record in the tracks."
     Embarrassed, all at once, by recognizing the length of his remarks, he strode rapidly away, neither of us speaking until he drew up again before another hole in a tree. "That there would be a tawny owl's opening," he said.
   At another place he touched my shoulder and pointed to a tiny thicket of suckers half a dozen feet above the base of a large beech. He had left the suckers there when he pruned this autumn, he told me, because he'd remembered that a blue tit had four eggs in a nest there last spring, and probably would again this year. Above us a magpie labored upward with a fat stick in its beak, beating its wings strongly and rapidly to clear the top of a larch. I guessed aloud that the nesting would start very soon. "Oy," Robert agreed, "the aconite and snowdrops have been in flower for some toim now." They were all about us in the clearings, the bright yellow butter balls of aconite and tight clumps of spotless white. I looked at them and heard a line in my head:"Numbers of clumps of chimeless bells." I edited it as I followed Robert up the slope to the sett: "Countless clumps of aconite, its golden bells untolled." The punning final word made me smile to myself—out of pleasure or irritation; I couldn't tell which for sure.
     The badger sett was well worth the walk. At the edge of one hole Robert scooped up a small, sticky mass of fur, which he separated and let float on the air. It was from a baby rabbit, he informed me, explaining that although only the "rogue" badgers are thoroughgoing predators on game, all of them will "have a yoong rabbit when they can, though earthworms are their steady diet. They find the smallest leverets, he continued, with their wonderful scent, and led me along a badger trail that ran straight to a rabbit's burrow. "They know just where the little ones are. But they can't catch the large ones." He halted me again and stretched the toe of his Wellington, heavily weighted with red mud, toward a small opening in the grass. "That's a bolt hole. Hard to see, they are. Ivery rabbit will have one if it can, twelve feet or more from its burry opening. Sometimes, when you're hunting, you'll see the rabbit rise up by one of these holes, listening and looking for you. If you shoot, you think you've missed sometimes when you haven't at all. The rabbit has plunged down into the bolt hole, wounded. If you take a stout stem of briar, wiv thorns heavy on it, and reach down into the hole, you can often drag the rabbit back out. It got only a foot or two into the run wiv its hurt. That's a little trick that's saved more than one supper for a hunter who knows his business."
     Robert pointed out to me several other features of the sett. Some large bones he identified as those of a dead badger, its skeleton exhumed by another one making a later burrow. He picked up a piece of Hornton stone and showed me the marks upon it, proof, he reminded me, of the badger's powerful claws that enable it to dig through rocky soil. A few feet away from the burrow he found evidences of the young badger's testing of their claws by slashing at the bark of a tree. In leading me away from the complex of holes and mounds, he showed me the debris of the badger's old bedding, dragged out of the burrow and replaced regularly with new supplies of leaves and straw. "Badgers are wonderful clean about the burries," he said and reinforced the statement by finding on the surface of the soil a number of cup-sized hollows—“latrines,” he explained, in which the badgers void.
   Caught up in our walk and talk, Robert went on to guide me around the whole perimeter of the Abbey's 57 acres and beyond, up to the arch by the footpath, over to Trinity College's reforestation plot and then westward to the dovecote and back to the Abbey's front entrance. Enroute, he showed me the carcass of a dead munt jac deer on which "carrion crows" were feeding as we approached. The eye socket, I noticed—and tried at once to forget—had been pecked clean. On the height of a field planted with winter barley, we enjoyed a marvelous view of the villages of Horley and Shotteswell, a prospect, that was, Robert decided, vastly superior to the view of Banbury and the estate houses, semi detached or in rows of "terraces."
     Our walk had taken over three hours. Luncheon was near at hand, and we parted, Robert heading for Wroxton House up the slope beyond the Abbey, I to the cafeteria, where I ran over in my mind others of the items of information Robert had shared with me during the morning. I recalled his regret over the trees killed by the knife wielding boys: "Oi helped to plant those trees when I was a lad the soize of them what stripped them. Oi got £2 a fortnight for my work then."
     Reflection upon his first work for Lord North had led him to a brief impromptu lecture on the history of the grounds: "At one toim the last old lord had about a 100 workers at the Abbey. Near iveryone in the village was in his employ. Twenty five gardeners he had then, and some men just to look after the wall that ran round the whole of the property. There was a water wheel on the stream when I was a lad. It pumped water all the way up to the great house. But it was broken up, along with the house that used to be near. My mother delivered letters to that house on a bicycle when she worked for the postal service. `Tis a shame they destroyed the dwelling. The Old Lord got too poor to think about repairs. They had to put down some of his dogs near the end, Oi've heard, because he couldn't pay for the keeping of them, and some say he had to sell off one of the farms for £200. When Trinity College took over after his death, they didn't care."
     I also remembered his rapt attentiveness to everything we passed. Repeatedly, as we had walked, he leant down and picked up bits of litter thrusting the pieces into a sack to be thrown in the rubbish. Twice he picked up beverage bottles and carried them to where he could bury them under stones that he heaped over them. Once he drew up sharply and picked up a rock fragment four inches square, on the surface of which he had spotted a fossil shell the size of a small thumbnail.
     My morning's outing put me in a happy mood, and I decided to cycle into Banbury even though I didn't really have to do any shopping. I just wanted an excuse to be out again in the country¬side. By the time I had finished the long climb up Drayton hill, however, the complexion of the day, and of my mood, changed suddenly. Rapidly massing clouds turned the sunny afternoon gray, and almost at the same time, I discovered that the rear tire of the Abbey bike was slowly but steadily losing air. I also discovered that one of the student users of the bike recently had removed or lost the hand pump I had found attached to the bike's frame just two or three days earlier. Peering over my shoulder every now and then as I pumped my way to the Warwick Road and down it in the direction of Banbury, I comforted myself with the reassuring reminder that there was a petrol station only about a mile ahead.
     I shouldn't have counted on it as a source of help. For one thing, the air pump bore a sign warning that use of the hose to inflate bicycle tires was "dangerous and absolutely prohibited." For another, the hose end didn't fit my valve. British bikes come with two different types of valves, only one of them the same size as automobile tire valves. Mine was the other type. I looked for someone whom I could ask for advice but found no one. The station was a self service one with only a candy selling young woman behind the till. Wheeling my bake away from that station, I saw another one just down the road.
     My spirits rose when I saw that it sold bicycles and parts. Its air hose, I learned quickly was of no more use to me than that at the first station, but I approached a young man in the bike department, full of confidence that I would soon be spinning on my way. I wasn't. The young man saw no solution to my problem short of my buying a new handpump and an adapter. My suggestion that he lend me a pump drew from a blank stare of disbelief. He did, however, tell me that if I walked my bike the quarter mile, approximately, to Trinder's on Broad Street, I could get help there.
     Pushing the flat tired bike beside me, I made my way to the corner of High and Broad, and saw Halford's bike shop right on the corner. Why go three or four more blocks to Trinder's? I asked myself, looking at the crowd of Saturday shoppers, many of them with enormous prams or leashed dogs trembling and straining to move their sluggish bowels, I went into Halford's, described my needs to a be smocked young man who assured me that the solution was simple and sold me a 60p adapter, telling me that three blocks up on Broad Street, just past Trinder's, I learned, I should find a BP station with an air hose that the new adapter would permit me to use.
     A bit sheepish as I hauled the bike past Trinder's, I navigated my way to the station, waited for two car owners to inflate their cars' tires, and then, having with a proud flourish screwed the adapter onto my valve, pressed the end of the air hose to the adapter. Dust rose in a sooty cloud around my head, but the rim didn't. It rested on the squashed tire, unaltered by the rush of air. I tried the hose again, with the same pointless result. Finding no one to ask for help, I rolled the hose back up and pushed the bike back to Trinder's. The clerk there recommend the same remedy proposed by the one in the second service station: buy a bike pump and inflate the tire by hand. "Could I pay you 20 or 30p to lend me a pump?" I asked. "The bike is not mine, and the pump for it is somewhere back in the owner's shed." "Oh. I'll inflate it for you," he responded, and five minutes later—about three quarters of an hour after I had stopped at the first station—I was back in business, rolling the wrong way down Broad Street to the market square.
     When I got there and leaned my bike against a wall in the thronged lanes, my spirit changed again. I was certain that no one would bother to steal my bike propped against the wall. All the irritation I had felt in my attempts to get the tire pumped up disappeared. I felt good about being among people so predominantly decent and honest. I finished my chores and headed back toward Wroxton, feeling a mild elation all the way, even though, or perhaps because, the route back is mostly uphill. Struggling up the steep inclines on the old, one speed bike, I felt in the very muscles of my legs and back the contours of the undulating lands Robert and I had looked out over in the shining splendor of the late morning.
     A light, brief rain started as I reached the head of Silver Street, just west of the Roman Catholic church in Wroxton. I didn't hurry. I didn't voice any silent hopes that the rain would stop. I wanted it to continue, come down harder. I wanted to be wet, like the leaves of bean plants in the fields around me. I wanted to feel this place on my skin, to be a part of it. When the raindrops ceased a minute or two after the first ones moistened my hot forehead, I felt something like severe disappointment. I coasted down Mills Lane to the Abbey gates, watching the road surface rush under my feet. Was I moving forward, or were the road and the place beneath me speeding away while I stood still, disappearing behind me, flowing into the past? I didn't know. I didn't care.