The Road to Little Dribbling (18 page)

Ponting spent years refining the footage into a movie, called
Ninety Degrees South
. A ten-minute extract is shown continuously on a television in an upstairs room. I sat down out of mild curiosity and was instantly absorbed. Suddenly the people I had been reading about in the nearby displays were animate and real. They waved and smiled and moved about, albeit jerkily, cheerful in their preparations and obviously unaware that soon they would be dead. Ponting cut and recut the film for so long that by the time he was ready to share it with the world, the world had rather lost interest and the film was a commercial failure. Ponting was wiped out both physically and financially, and died more or less a pauper. The Gilbert White museum seems to be the only place in the world where he is remembered.

—

I left Selborne by way of Gracious Street, which is not only prettily named but prettily arrayed with cottages, most of them wearing a comely cap of thatch. Then it was a long tramp up a steep slope and onto farmland, with yet another expansive outlook. Here, however, the view was dominated by a chain gang of electricity pylons marching dolefully across the foreground. I still have an old cutting from
The Economist
—I know I was just railing about
The Economist,
but this is different—from the time when Mrs. Thatcher was privatizing electrical distribution, observing that if the power companies were required to devote just 0.5 percent of their turnover to burying cables, that would provide sufficient funds to bury one thousand miles of cable a year. If the government had done that then, the cables would all be underground now.

But we have had enough bitching about assaults on the landscape for one chapter already, so let’s just shield our eyes here and hurry down the slope to the pleasant village of Farringdon. There isn’t a great deal to Farringdon, but I saw more of it than I expected to because I lost my way and ended up exploring a number of its lanes. This meant, happily, that I stumbled on an extraordinary building that I now know is called Massey’s Folly. Large, ornate, and built of brick, it is a building of great charm and no evident purpose. From some angles, it looks grandly domestic, but from others it is more seemingly industrial, as if it might be an old mill or pumping station.

I passed two ladies walking dogs and asked them about it. They only knew a little, so I looked into it a bit more later, and what I now know is that it was built by a rich, eccentric local clergyman, Thomas Hackett Massey, who lived in Farringdon for sixty-two years, from 1857 to 1919. Massey apparently intended the building as a kind of village hall and nursery school, but just kept adding to it in a random and piecemeal manner. Massey’s other notable feature—rather an unexpected one in a clergyman—was that he was a recluse. He erected a screen in the village church so that his congregation could hear his sermons but not look at him. In February 2014 Massey’s Folly was put up for sale. At the time this book went to press, it still had not found a buyer.

Although the ladies didn’t know too much about the village folly, they did know the way to Chawton and they escorted me to the edge of the village to show me a path through a housing estate and up into some woods, and with a cheery wave we parted ways and I continued on.

Soon afterward I crossed a narrow but excitingly busy highway, and made my way onto a disused railway line, now converted into a walking trail. This was the old Meon Valley Railway, which connected the market town of Alton in north Hampshire to Gosport in the south. Since not many people have ever wanted to travel between Alton and Gosport, the line was not a success and it closed to passenger traffic in 1955, only a little more than half a century after it was built. The track passed beneath some lovely brick bridges, now so overgrown as to be effectively part of the natural landscape. They were decorated with bands of bricks in contrasting hues—a touch of attractiveness that would never have been visible to anyone but engine drivers and track workers. It is amazing, the trouble Victorian engineers took to make things special.

Thanks to its obscurity, the Meon Valley line did have one special moment of glory. Four days before D-Day, the principal Allied leaders—Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jan Smuts of South Africa, and William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada—met on the Royal Train, just south of where I now was, to discuss the final details of the invasion. The Meon line was chosen because it was so safely obscure, which I quite liked. Perhaps they should make that the motto for the region: “Welcome to East Hampshire. We’re Safely Obscure.”

Consulting my map, I discovered that I was getting a lot more history on this walk than I ever expected, for I was now on something called St. Swithun’s Way. This is part of the Pilgrim’s Way running from Winchester to Canterbury across the North Downs, and this in turn is part of the far more ancient track leading on to Stonehenge and Avebury. For at least a thousand years this route on which I was walking now was the Interstate 80 of the pedestrian world. St. Swithun himself may actually have walked where I was walking now.

It occurred to me that I had no idea who St. Swithun was, so when I got home I looked him up. He was Bishop of Winchester in about 850. One day he came across a woman who was distraught because the eggs in her basket had broken. With a pious wave, Swithun made them whole again. It was a good trick, I grant you, but I believe it would take more than nifty egg-fixing to get me to hike 130 miles from Canterbury to Winchester to venerate a bishop, yet that is what people did throughout the Middle Ages. Swithun became a cult. Cathedrals across England competed to get a piece of him. His head ended up in Canterbury, an arm went to Peterborough, and other parts of him were distributed hither and yon. It is a little ironic that the man who could put eggs back together couldn’t keep himself in one piece.

In 971, Swithun’s remaining bones were moved from one spot to another within Winchester Cathedral, and this coincided with a mighty storm. The date, July 15, became known as St. Swithun’s Day, and spawned a legend commemorated in verse:

St. Swithun’s Day, if thou dost rain,

For forty days it will remain:

St. Swithun’s Day, if thou be fair,

For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.

Chawton is another sweet little village—this part of the world is full of them—tucked away down a side lane and not on the face of it a great deal changed from Jane Austen’s day. Chawton Cottage, where Jane lived with her mother and sister, is a mellow brick building built close to the road. The interior is furnished simply, as it would have been in Austen’s day, with a few good pieces of furniture but with a curious air of emptiness enhanced by the bare floors and empty grates. Knickknacks and personal effects are conspicuously absent from tabletops and mantelpieces, presumably because anything left out would be filched. The result, as with so many homes of famous people, is that you get a good notion of the walls and ceilings but not so much of the life of the person who lived there. That’s not a bitter complaint, just an observation. It’s the way it has to be.

Jane Austen lived in the house for eight years, from 1809 till 1817, and during that time did most of her most lasting work: wrote
Emma, Persuasion,
and
Mansfield Park,
and revised and prepared for publication
Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,
and
Northanger Abbey
. The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions—surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement—in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly. I followed them from room to room, enthralled by their conversation, until I realized that I was becoming part of it, and that they were casting glances at me with something like unease, so I bowed apologetically and left them to admire an old fireplace with low moans of expressive rapture.

When Jane Austen left the house, in the summer of 1817, it was to go to Winchester, sixteen miles to the west, to die. She was only forty-one, and the cause of her death is unknown. It may have been Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma or a form of typhus or possibly arsenic poisoning, which was surprisingly common in those days as arsenic was routinely used in making wallpapers and for coloring fabrics. It has been suggested that the general air of ennui and frailty that seemed so characteristic of the age may simply have been generations of women spending too much time indoors taking in gently toxic vapors. In any case, three days after St. Swithun’s Day 1817 she breathed her last.

I was very pleased I went, though not quite so pleased to discover on emerging that the skies had darkened significantly and that I was about to walk home eight miles in the rain.

II

The National Trust, Britain’s foremost conservation charity, is a wonderful organization. There can be no doubt about that. It safeguards 160 historic houses, 40,000 archaeological sites, 775 miles of coastline, and 250,000 hectares of countryside. It even owns and manages fifty-nine villages. The world is unquestionably a better place for having the National Trust in it. So here is my question: Why does it have to be so very annoying?

I mention this because my next port of call was the ancient Trust-owned village and megalithic site of Avebury, which manages to be both fabulous and exasperating in about equal measure. Avebury village is an attractive place with a post office, shop, some pleasant cottages, a manor house, a thatch-roofed pub. It’s an entirely conventional village except that scattered through and around it are great, angular standing stones. Some are quite massive and clearly took huge effort to maneuver into place. The largest of them weigh up to a hundred metric tons.

The stones at Avebury are not smooth and picturesquely grouped as at Stonehenge but rough-edged and of varying sizes, which gives them a more primitive and sinister air. The scale of Avebury, rather than the beauty of it, is what takes your breath away. The outer circle of stones covers twenty-eight acres, and that is only part of a much greater pageant of antiquity. The immediate environs also include two other fragmentary stone circles, a giant bank and ditch, processional avenues, and barrows by the, well, barrowload. Yet Avebury is only a shadow of what it once was. Today it has seventy-six standing stones. Once there were over six hundred. Even so, it remains the largest stone circle in Europe, fourteen times bigger than Stonehenge.

The size and complexity of Avebury and the fact that a village stands in its midst make it awfully hard to get your bearings, and the National Trust does precious little to help. There are no information boards or usefully sited maps to help you get oriented, absolutely no boards providing interpretation. If you want to know what you are looking at, you have to buy a guidebook. The directional signs point only to places where you could spend money—the shop, the museum, the café. It would be a kindness if they gave you a map of the site when you paid for parking and admission, but that is not the National Trust way. They like to charge for every individual thing. The day cannot be too far off when you have to pay for toilet paper by the sheet in a little booth manned by a volunteer.

Within minutes of arriving, I had paid out £7 for parking, £10 for a ticket to the manor house and garden, and £4.90 for the small museum, and I still couldn’t find my way around the stones, so I went into the gift shop and bought a big handsome map for £9.99, which meant that I had spent £31.89 at Avebury without even having had a cup of tea. So I went and had a cup of tea (£2.50) and studied my map. Then, feeling ever so slightly grumpy, I went and wandered among the stones and everything was suddenly fine, for Avebury is both awesome and entrancing.

Modern Avebury is almost entirely to the credit of an extraordinary man named Alexander Keiller. Keiller was born in 1889 into marmalade, as it were. His family made the famous Keiller marmalade in Dundee, Scotland, but his parents died young and Keiller grew up as a very rich orphan. When he came of age, he left the running of the business to an uncle and devoted his own energies to fast cars, skiing, a breathtakingly active sex life, and several harebrained business pursuits. His investments included a “wind-wagon,” a car powered by an airplane propeller mounted on its back. The only problem was that the propeller was liable to slice unsuspecting passersby into salami-sized pieces and so the business failed. Keiller then invested in a car with seats that folded down to become a bed, but unfortunately the business folded before very many seats did.

When he was not hurling his money into foolish business ventures, Keiller devoted himself to “exploring the range of sexual practices,” as the
Dictionary of National Biography
delicately puts it. According to his biographer Lynda J. Murray, Keiller bemused a young woman named Antonia White by asking her to climb into a laundry basket “wearing nothing but a mackintosh so that he could poke her through the wicker work with an umbrella.” Quite how Keiller found pleasure in this and whether Ms. White complied are questions not addressed in Murray’s otherwise thorough biography. With some like-minded men, he founded a club whose members took turns having sex with a willing (and presumably resilient) prostitute, then sat with whiskies and compared notes on the experience. Despite (or, for all I know, because of) these quirks, Keiller enjoyed a steady string of mistresses and four marriages.

In 1924, aged thirty-five, Keiller visited Avebury for the first time and instantly found a new calling. Avebury at that time was not the glorious, manicured treasure we find today. The stones, Murray relates, stood amid “a jumble of pigsties, derelict corrugated buildings, crumbling cottages, and an old garage which was in need of renovation. The whole area was overgrown with shrubs and trees and the remaining stones of the circle were overshadowed by indiscriminate building.” Many stones were toppled. Others had been broken up in earlier times and used as building materials. When Keiller arrived just fifteen stones were still standing.