The Day Gone By (5 page)

In those days, Wash Common was still a village a good mile or more outside Newbury, up Wash Hill on the Andover Road. Its population would have been a few hundred, I suppose, and there was open country between it and Newbury. Newbury really began (conveniently for my father) at the hospital, a mile down the hill from our gate.

The first battle of Newbury, at which Lord Falkland, a leading cavalier, was killed (some say suicidally), was fought on 22 September 1643 at Wash Common and on the lower land lying between Wash Common and Newbury. In my day this was something which every Wash Commoner knew and could talk about with at least a smattering of local topographical knowledge. (‘Ah, that's where they put the guns, see?')

The Royalist army, under the King and his nephew Prince Rupert, had been besieging Gloucester. Gloucester was defended for the Roundheads by the gallant young Colonel Massey, and Parliament, determined to relieve him, had sent an army from London, commanded by the Earl of Essex. The siege was raised and Essex duly set out to march back to London. If he couldn't get there his army would disintegrate for lack of supplies. Rupert was eager to outstrip Essex and put the King's army between him and London. To this end he urged the King to push on hard, by way of Marlborough and Hungerford, to the town of Newbury on the river Kennet.

Essex, also hoping to outstrip the enemy, was moving by a more southerly route, and approached Newbury south of the Kennet, via Kintbury and Enborne. Near Enborne you can still see ‘Essex's Cottage', where he slept (briefly) the night before the battle.

The Royalist army reached Newbury first, and since any manoeuvre to the north was blocked by the Kennet, Essex had no alternative but to fight for his disputed course eastward. On the morning of the 22nd, the Royalist army came up Wash Hill and took position on Wash Common. Essex perforce attacked them.

Compared with other battles of the Civil War, relatively little is known about First Newbury; though everyone knows that Falkland (who was very much undecided about the rights and wrongs of the whole business) said to someone that morning that he would ‘be out of it all by nightfall'; and later rode, as it seemed deliberately, into a gap covered by a Parliament gun. He died of wounds in a house still called Falkland Lodge. (Everything's ‘Falkland' on Wash Common. The cricket team's always been called Falkland, for instance - though no pub bears the name.)

Some maintain that most of the fighting must have taken place north of Wash Common, down below the plateau and south of the Kennet, on ground east of the village of Enborne and west of what is now the Comprehensive School. I don't subscribe to this view for two reasons. First, the vital road which Essex needed, if he was going to by-pass Newbury on the south, was Monks' Lane (Monkey Lane, as everyone calls it), which ran directly eastwards, south of our paddock and the aforementioned oak trees, to Pinchington Lane and Greenham Common. To gain access to this lane he had to fight his way across Wash Common.

Secondly, there are the grave mounds. In the middle of the village (more-or-less), there has always been an open space, something over an acre, known as ‘The Battle-Field'. This is still a public recreation ground. On it are two fair-sized tumuli, marked at the summit with rectangular stones saying ‘1643'. (The stones are later, of course: Victorian, I should think.) These are mass graves, where the locals buried the dead after the battle. Obviously they wouldn't carry them any further than they had to, and certainly not up onto the Wash Common plateau from down below.

Of the fighting little is known, but at the end of the day the Royalists fell back into Newbury and on the following morning did not resume the battle. Essex, so the books say, ‘blew a trumpet blast', but got no response. So on he went, down Monkey Lane, across Greenham Common and so on to Aldermaston and the London road. Rupert was so indignant at the failure of the Royalists to renew the battle that he took his cavalry to Aldermaston and fought a harassing action; but this did not avail to stop the Parliamentary army, which reached London in tolerably good shape.

Charles I was always a bungler. Perhaps he failed to appreciate that if he had put all he had into defeating Essex at Newbury, he would probably have won the war.

About two hundred yards south-west from where we lived, and in the village, as it was, stands the Falkland Memorial - quite a large affair - on a little green. Here hounds sometimes used to meet, and I would come with Constance to pat them, to stare up wonderingly at the big men in ‘pink' and to smell the exciting smell of horses. Here, too, the village adolescents would congregate of an evening - with or without bikes - to smoke Woodbines, crack jokes, shove around and waste their time. My mother called them ‘the Idle-ees' and I was told to have nothing to do with them. Not that I'd have dared to. To me they seemed like men; big, rough and - I must say it — smelly. People
were
smelly in those days. There were no anti-perspirants and they had thick shirts and few, if any, changes of clothes. Smelly was just taken for granted.

The Royalist guns, it is believed, were sited near here, and one of the two pubs hard by is called ‘The Gun'. (The other is ‘The Bell', of which more anon.)

When I was a very little boy - about three or four - the Andover Road and Monkey Lane, which form an acute angle at the Bell corner and ran either side of our garden, were still white dust roads. In those days roads were still regarded as being primarily for horses, sheep and cattle. Cars were a minor matter. I think perhaps the Great War had retarded progress in this respect. In summer the dust was dry and powdery. You could see approaching flocks of sheep or herds of cattle a long way off, by the clouds of dust. Stirred up, it fell on the hawthorn hedges, making the leaves white until the next shower of rain. It had a pleasant, singular smell - to me the smell of high summer. Later, in adolescence, I was to be struck by King Lear's lines, in the cornfield scene with Gloucester.

‘Why, this would make a man, a man of salt,
To use his eyes for garden water pots,
Ay, and laying autumn's dust.'

A cottage garden beside a road needed a good deal of dust-laying to keep it green and fresh.

One of my earliest memories - as early as the rhododendrons - is of being taken by Constance, in my pushchair, down the little lane leading off the Andover Road into Sandleford Park. Sandleford Park is not a municipal park, but a tract of open country a mile square, with woods, meadows and a brook. (It was from here that Hazel and his rabbits were later to set off on their adventures.) The lane led past some rather rough cottages, in one of which lived Mrs Dolimore, the milk lady. She used to come to our back door with the milk in a great metal drum with a lid, and from this, with a metal dipper, she would dip as much milk as we wanted. The milk and the metal also had their own smells.

The lane ran on between elms and high hedges into the Park meadows themselves. I remember the smell of the dust, the smell of dried cow-dung and of nettles and woundworts in the ditches. In the Park were some old, gnarled hawthorn trees, all bent every which way. One was bent into a regular ‘S', and formed a natural seat. This seemed wonderful, and I always used to go and sit on it. Even a light breeze would bring out a whispering from the boughs of these isolated trees.

‘Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind,

Says suum mun, hey nonny nonny.

Dolphin my boy, boy! - sessa! . . .

Close by the Falkland Memorial lay the Pond. There were actually two sizeable ponds on Wash Common (for watering passing horses, flocks and herds), but this was the better known and more used. It lay between The Gun and Mr Jessop's house. I remember the herds of cows - huge beasts to me - on their way to Newbury market, wading knee-deep (hence the thrush's song) in the brown water, lowing and splashing, and the dogs holding them there while the drovers went into The Gun for a well-earned pint. (4d.: that is, a bit less than 2p today.) Being shallow, the pond often froze hard in winter. I used to go sliding with the village boys (the ban on Idle-ees was somehow lifted) and had a lot of fun. I don't recall a single person ever skating on the pond, though.

The upper pond, at the west end of the village, was lonelier and different. It was overhung with trees on the further side, and it was bigger, greener and more rural. There were rushes and reeds, including the Great Reed Mace; coots and moorhens and, in summer, reed warblers. Here, too, I sometimes slid and also learned how to throw ‘ducks and drakes'. This pond, in winter, I associate now in my mind with T.S. Eliot's lines in ‘Little Gidding'.

‘When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,

In windless cold that is the heart's heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.'

This pond was all of half a mile from our home. Constance and I didn't go there much, unless we were doing the Cope Hall walk, or else, perhaps, going to Nutworth's (that is not its true name), the village shop and post office. There were exciting things on sale at Nutworth's. One of these was windmills - so-called. A windmill consisted of four vanes of curved, brightly-coloured, mottled celluloid, pierced and held together by a central pin at the top of a stick. You held it up like a sceptre in your right hand and ran along, and the vanes, catching the wind through their curvature, would rotate in a medley of colours - red and blue making purple, blue and yellow making green - and a light clattering and justling of crisp celluloid.

Almost better, however, was the bluebird. He worked on the same principle: a model blue bird, about four inches long, held to a stick by some nine inches of string in the middle of his back. He had a long blue tail of three or four ‘feathers' - strips secured by a central nail - and similar wings. You waved the stick round your head and he ‘flew'.

These were cheap German toys, which in those days were imported and sold in numbers. All sorts of cheap clockwork toys, too, were stamped ‘Made in Germany'. On account of the war, I suppose, and on account of their cheapness and fragility, the phrase ‘Made in Germany' was used as a derisory taunt. ‘Yah! Mide in Germany!' the village children would shout at some egregious victim: to which there was, really, no effective retort. Best ignored.

There were also, of course, sweets on sale at Nutworth's, but my brother had somehow put it into my head that they were not nice, and I generally went elsewhere. There was no ice-cream - not yet by eight or nine years, which were to see refrigeration introduced. (My mother never possessed a ‘fridge in her life, which ended in 1957.) Ginger beer and fizzy ‘lemonade' in bottles, un-iced, were the best to be had in hot weather.

The real reason, as I now understand, for people feeling that there was something wrong with Nutworth's was the Nutworths. They were unsmiling, disobliging and down on life: with good reason; they had an only son who was hideously deformed. Mrs Nutworth was a little, sharp, black-eyed woman whom you always felt was waiting for a pretext to snap at you. Mr N. was a quiet, rather surly man who never bantered, or called you ‘young doctor', like the other grown-up villagers.

But Cecil, the son, was the frightening one. Poor Cecil! He was a hunchback - a really bad one, with a great hump, a pigeon chest and his head, with no perceptible neck, sunk between them. He had a good enough face, but he wore his straight, black hair long, which made him appear even more sinister. Small children, of course, feel no pity for deformity - only curiosity if it's slight and fear if it's severe. The very possibility that Cecil might be going to serve you was enough to make you think twice before going into Nutworth's - certainly if you were alone.

However, you couldn't entirely avoid Cecil, because of Mavis. Mavis was a private 'bus - very rattly, and bottom gear up Wash Hill. (I suppose Mavis may have been Mrs Nutworth's name.) It was painted in yellow, in a flowing script, down each side of the ‘bus, which was brown and held perhaps twenty-five people when (and if) full. It went down into Newbury and back twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon - 2d. for an adult and 1d. for a child. (Rather less than 1p and rather less than ½p
.)
Mr N. drove and Cecil was the conductor, with a ping-ping ticket-punch at his belt. There were no official stops. You just held up your hand anywhere along the road and Mavis would stop. Once aboard, it was tensile to be aware, not daring to look behind, of Cecil ping-pinging his way up the 'bus until he was standing over you. He never spoke. Later on, as I grew up, Boris Karloff got few shivers out of me: I'd been inoculated by Cecil.

I feel so sorry for them, now. I never used to see Mrs Nutworth at the Women's Institute gatherings, where I sometimes went with my mother {competitions, amateur dramatics, concerts, whist drives - not half bad fun, actually), and I never saw Mr N. in The Bell either. (Perhaps he went to The Gun, though.) They were not liked. A damned shame, I reckon.

The other shop was Leader's. This was nearer home - only about half the distance to Nutworth's. Leader's really
was
Ginger and Pickles - or Sally Henny Penny's, perhaps. Mrs Leader, a warm, genial woman with a beautiful voice, certainly sold bootlaces and hairpins, if not mutton chops. Again, sweets and ginger beer were about my range. Mr Leader was moustached and loquacious - sententious, even. Later on, however, as a young adult in The Bell, I came to enjoy his company. They were childless, I rather think. Mrs Leader played golf, which was unusual for a village woman in those days. It rather raised her standing.

Another early memory, going back to when I was perhaps four or five, is of the tarmac being laid in the Andover Road and in Essex Street. Essex Street was the principal street in Wash Common, leading from the pond and the Falkland Memorial about half a mile west, past Nutworth's and the upper pond to Wash Common Farm. (Cotterell's, it was called then, and a Cotterell farms it now.)