From a Country Hilltop: Henry Williamson Collections, #9

By Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, and particularly the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1951 and 1969 he published his great work, the fifteen-volume novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, the story of Phillip Maddison. While he was writing these he was also continuing to write short pieces for newspapers and magazines. From a Country Hilltop is a collection of 58 such essays written between 1958 and 1964, which were published in the Co-operative Society's Home Magazine and, in its Out of Doors series, the Sunday Times. The 'country hilltop' was his haven, the field at Ox's Cross in North Devon that he had bought after the success of Tarka the Otter, and where he had built his writing hut. These short essays – personal musings on life, his children, North Devon (now known as 'Tarka Country') and other subjects – show HW's descriptive powers at their best. Nowhere is this shown better than in 'The Last Summer', a longer piece that is an evocative personal re-creation of the last golden summer of 1914 before the outbreak of the First World War and life changed forever; it was published in 1964 in the Sunday Times Magazine to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Sep 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507391

Henry Williamson

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy. He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka. His writing falls into clear groups: 1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird. 2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front. 3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books. Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

Book preview

I

Every animal, bird, fish, and plant, to be happy, must have a base or place of security. In the nature of things, individuals grow old, and come to value memories—more and more. That is part of their security.

The longer I live, the more I believe that animals, including fish (which I have studied), are related not only structurally to man, broadly speaking, but also spiritually. By spirit, I mean the essence of life. And while that essence remains in the body, we all need security, or a base from which to live outwardly.

The body is related to the earth, it comes from the earth and returns in due course. Old countrymen speak of the top soil of a field, its fertility, as the mother soil.

When I went to farm in Norfolk some years ago—hoping to make a new base for my then-growing family of four sons—I was puzzled by my stockman, a sensitive, intuitive man, saying that the marther had been hided on the near-derelict fields.

The fertility, which is a living balance of bacteria ever re-making the soil, had been filched, crop after crop had been taken, and narthing put back. It was nearly barren. The mother soil had been outraged. The basis of life, health, happiness, had been removed. Unemployment on the land; rotting cottages; near-bitter spirit in the village, based on decayed love, which is hatred and fear.

It was a hard struggle, in those days before the war, to alter things; and when the war was over, I returned to the West Country, to a particular field, which I loved more than any place on earth. Originally it was two acres of grazing, by four cross-ways, and ‘hedged by raised banks of earth and stone, topped by thorns. I had bought it in my youth with the prize money from a book I had written about an otter here in Devon.

What excitement, to own a piece of land for the first time! With tape measure and prismatic compass I made a map of my field of would-be mathematical accuracy, and related its position to the stars above, wheeling around Stella Polaris, behind the beech spinney to the north. My young self was a discoverer, charting a new continent. My little boy rolled with me in the summer grass, and watched butterflies and bees among the shaking pollen.

The field was 600 feet above the Atlantic, which rolled upon sands a mile away and below, to the west. Winds blew hard at times. I planned a wooden hut, with open hearth. First, wind-belts of trees to be planted, to enclose all sides except the south, with its views over a distant estuary, and farther on, the grey tors of Dartmoor.

Thus the first year; then the hut was built, teaching myself the trade. It had an oak frame like a wooden ship, bolted to a concrete sill. Panels of compressed straw and wire covered the frames. They were water-proofed with 40 gallons of bitumen, before being roofed on top with Cornish peggle slates, held by copper nails, and the sides enclosed in wavy elmboard.

Inside, across one corner, stood my open hearth. There I sat, while gales of salt-wind and rain blurred the windows, before a drift-wood fire, while the chimney roared, making my first pot of tea from the heavy cast-iron kettle hanging from the chimney bar.

To-day, nearly 30 years later, my hut is still the same, strong and friendly. The oak frame is now dark brown. Outside, the trees rise 30 feet and more into the sky—pine, oak, beech, ash, larch.

The drive I dug and laid with stones, the seaweed-composted garden and orchard, lie within my domain. Here I have known a tame fox, a pipistrelle bat that got tiddly on six drops of sherry.

A pair of buzzard hawks nest in one particular tree every year. Tom-tits roost behind the elmboards.

Here I enjoy my life and work, content with a small scope which permits the happiness within to arise and spread outwards. I am content.

After trials and errors I have found my true home, and serene in that my son will have, and care for, the same things when in due course I go back to the marther. Fortunate is the man, animal, or bird on its own base.

April, 1958

II

Somebody said to me, You have lived in Devon many years now. What are the changes in your village that strike you most? I can look back to before the first war, when simplicity was the key-note. Everyone knew his or her place. The test of a person was the work done—the ploughman, the thatcher, the baker (delivering bread by horse and cart), the oil-man who came from Ilfracombe, walking beside his horse up and down long hills with his tall covered cart hung with brooms, salted tea fish (cod, hard as board), boots, pans, and a tank of paraffin under the floor. The oil-man walked 20-30 miles a day, cheery, hard as nails, regular as the church bells on Friday practice night.

The squire, employing most of the village, was in the Big House, which was built either of local stone or of cob, a traditional mixture of loam, cowdung, straw, and broken stone, the thick walls of which protected from heat and cold, but must be kept dry by over-hanging thatch.

So close was the village as a unity that neighbouring villages were regarded with suspicion and sometimes contempt.

After the war, the change began. The old squire sold up. Unemployment came. Repeal of the Corn Production Act meant arable tumbling down to weeds. The tumbling down phrase came from the tumbling thistle seed, a term probably used long before the Plymouth Brethren left in the Mayflower, for to-day the thistle in America is called Tumbleweed.

Bitterness ruled in the village, as elsewhere in Britain. The inns at night were scenes of quarrelling. Malnutrition produced thin children, some with haunted eyes. It was worse in industrial areas. At least we had the sun in Devon.

To-day, what a change! But it is everywhere. Red-brick houses, neon-lighting in the old inns, well-dressed boys and girls, the old crafts almost gone; but so are the rancour, the bitterness, and the rivalries due to insecurity. In my opinion Britain—that is the people as a whole—have never been so free and happy in their long history. This spirit we owe to two great wars. Good and evil (otherwise human nature!) are inextricably mixed.

We have all read about teddy boys. Personally, I think rock-and-roll a real dance, wonderful exercise for the body, and so for freedom for the spirit.

Now let me tell you about some teddy-birds. Vans with jingling crates of milk bottles pass along our Devon lanes, calling at cottage and bungalow, sometimes followed by flocks of tomtits. As soon as the van stops, the tits alight among the bottles, and rip off the metal caps, not so much for food, as for devilment, as the old village term went. They’re out on a spree. Well-fed, their security as it were guaranteed, they have their fun, or sport.

In my hilltop field, I have a bird tray. Woe betide me if I am late with the daily spread! As I write this in my hut, a blackbird is staring at me through the window, while a robin is waiting on the threshold of the open door. Jackdaws are beginning to chatter in the treetops. A blue titmouse is actually scolding me. I’m late, you see!

What a wonderful morning! The cuckoo calls in the valley below, whitethroats and willow warblers sing in the shade of the tall hedge-parsley, the hawthorn buds are opening and the larks are high over the pale green barley plants.

May, 1958

III

Ilove birds, and try not to take sides, though at times this is not easy. On my Devon hill-top is a small spinney of beech trees, dead along their seaward sides, so that they appear to the casual observer to be wind-bent.

The fact is that, after years of trying to grow branches or shoots facing the south-west and the Atlantic winds, they have given up; and only those branches with some mutual shelter manage to keep their leaves from burning in the salt winds.

For as long as I can remember—which is nearly half a century—a pair of carrion crows have owned the half-acre of struggling trees. Oh, yes, the title deeds are in my name, but the crows own the spinney by right of holding it.

Their defence is elastic, which means they fly away long before a man comes within gun-shot of them. And what a cawing and cursing when rooks come near, or a buzzard hawk! Off the intruders are seen! Trespassers will be pecked, dived on, pursued with vile corvine oaths. Karr-karr-karr! and pursuit over the fields, side-slipping and diving, for a couple of hundred yards. Then silence, and a slinky return to the spinney, by a wide circular roundabout route, looking for man, who generally hates them.

Why? The crows take hens’ eggs, young chicks, and will, if not disturbed, eventually kill a ewe on her back, heavy with wool and unable to kick herself upright: a painful death.

I’ve told myself many times that I must shoot the crows of Windwhistle Spinney. This spring one tore out the nest of a Golden-crested Wren in one of my spruces; green mossy ball, minute pinkish eggs, and mother bird (her body scarcely larger than a bumble bee) all together. Fortunately I disturbed the crow, but it was too late to save the nest, the first I have seen here for over thirty years.

But can I get near the crow to shoot it? Karr-karr-karr! Anyway, the Goldcrest has made another nest, in a most unlikely place, a faggot pile. And at the time of writing this, the young are safe.

In the market town on Friday, I passed four small children waiting in a van. The mother of two of them was shopping. I knew them, as I knew their parents when young, and also their grandparents. All village dwellers.

Two boys, friends of the son of the van owners, were in the back. The youngest child, aged four, sat white-faced and dull-eyed next to the driver’s seat. Where’s Mummy? she moaned to me.

By her eyes I could see that she was suffering. I gave the usual reassurances—Mummy will come soon, don’t worry, and so on. Pale-faced, dull-eyed, she repeated her plaint.

She was a second child of young parents; the elder, a boy, was seven. He disliked his sister. His two friends had joined with him in telling her that an Indian, with turban—a well-known itinerant pedlar, who tries to sell little things from door to door—was going to take her away.

This of course was fun to the boys. One said to me, G’wan, Mister Wisson, tell’r the darkie wull take ’er away! with a sort of nervous grin.

I want Mummy.

The basic problem was one of jealousy. The elder brother was a nice boy; but Daddy fancied Sis when she was born.

Daddy, as I knew, was a different mental type from his wife; they didn’t cog in as old labourers used to say, from early farm machinery.

The father took to his little daughter, and the son felt unwanted. So he was, to put it broadly, unsympathetic to the stranger who had ousted him from Daddy’s arms.

I made just the same mistake with my first-born, although, in my youth, I knew so much more than my parents. From my observations, children so ousted never really feel secure again. They are like wind-bent trees, one side of them is, as it were, doomed.

June, 1958

IV

One of the things I enjoy about my life in this field, whence on a clear day the tors of Dartmoor can be seen nearly forty miles away to the south, is the garden. Originally poor moorland soil grown with heather, it was enclosed for a park in which to accomodate oxen on their way to Barnstaple market, eight miles distant. In those days there were no cattle floats, so bullocks went to market on the hoof.

Two acres of moorland were enclosed within stone and earth hedges, on which thorn was planted. The names on the deeds from that time, over a hundred years ago, show the field to have two names: Down Close and Ox’s Park. Here were herded the beasts, to be rested the night before their final walk to market. The enclosure was made at the junction of four tracks or lanes, called, simply Cross.

To-day, holiday-makers on their way to Ilfracombe and other places on the North Devon coast often stop at the tall white signpost with its four arms, and say, This is Oxford Cross, isn’t it? Yes, it’s on the stem of the post!

Then I have to resist a desire to say, Those clots from the town, making the Ordnance Survey map years ago, asked a stone-cracker on his pile of stone, tapping away with his long-handled hammer, what the place was called. Ooh, us calls ’n Oxen Cross, zur."

Oxen Cross, eh? D’you mind saying it again? And so the educated correction was made, OXFORD CROSS, and there it remains to-day, although the field is 560 feet above the sea a mile away, and no river ever ran in the lanes outside for the oxen to ford.

The labourers I knew in my youth spoke with beautiful simplicity, based on the prose of the Authorised Version of the Bible.

Speaking of a dead neighbour, He were as proper a man as ever trod ground.

Of myself, nearly forty years ago, ignorantly trying to garden in wet weather, Wait till the ground be in temper; it’s no use mucketting.

An old man in the Rock Inn, after hearing of a Parish Council squabble, said, If thee want good neighbours, thee must first be a good neighbour th’ self, midear.

Of an eccentric visitor, who had a fad about food (justified today!), it was said, Her praiches (preaches) to the wind, and of a sudden cloudburst, following a tremendous thunderstorm, when