Pen and Plough: Further Broadcasts: Henry Williamson Collections, #16

By Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a 'nature' writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. What is not so well known is that during the late 1930s he became a broadcaster of some repute on the BBC. 'Pen and Plough' collects twenty-one scripts of the broadcast talks given by Williamson between 1936 and 1967. Ten of these were broadcast only in the BBC's Empire Service (forerunner of its renowned World Service) in 1938/39, and concern the countryside and farming – the BBC called them 'nice, pleasant, dreamy talks, to make people homesick for England'. A further four talks are about Williamson's ongoing struggle to bring life back to the derelict farm in North Norfolk that he had bought in 1937, while one of the later broadcasts has the intriguing title 'On Seeing Marilyn Monroe'. There is a separate section of talks on books and writers, including broadcasts on R. D. Blackmore's famous Exmoor novel Lorna Doone, and the novelist Arnold Bennett.

'Pen and Plough', with the companion 'Spring Days in Devon' (both available as e-books), contain all forty-three of the surviving scripts of Henry Williamson's popular talks for the BBC.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Feb 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781873507636

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

This collection first published 1993

E-book edition 2013

Smashwords edition

The Henry Williamson Society

14 Nether Grove

Longstanton

Cambridge

Text © The Henry Williamson Literary Estate 1992

Cover image: Henry Williamson ploughing on the Norfolk farm © John Fursdon

ISBN 978-1-873507-63-6 (EPUB)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

Contents

Editor’s Note

Part One: The Country Reporter

Norfolk Farmer

Field and Pavement

The Malkin

Rail and Fen

The Rain Comes

Birdsong Reflections

Family and Farm

The Forest of Exmoor

Still Close to Earth

The Reckoning

The Gale

Baggy Point

More West Country Reminiscences

On Seeing Marilyn Monroe

The River

Part Two: Books and Writers

Lorna Doone and the Doone Valley

Arnold Bennett

On Writing a Novel Series

Book Reviews:

1. The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence & His Brothers, edited by M. R. Lawrence

2. Morale, by John Baynes

3. The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad, by Jerry Allen

Appendix: A Checklist of Broadcasts by Henry Williamson

Editor’s Note

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) is perhaps best remembered today as a ‘nature’ writer, the author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon, although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the Flax of Dream tetralogy and his magnum opus, the 15-volume novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. What is not so well known is that he was also a broadcaster of some repute, both before and after the Second World War. It is clear from looking at his scripts that as much care went into the writing of these as into his books, and they remain immensely readable.

The surviving scripts of his broadcasts have been gathered into two volumes by the Henry Williamson Society and published as Spring Days in Devon (1992) and Pen and Plough (1993), both now available as e-books (2013).

The talks in Pen and Plough have been divided into two groups: ‘The Country Reporter’ and ‘Books and Writers’. They are presented chronologically by broadcast within those groups. The talks have been taken from the BBC’s microfilms of scripts and transcripts, the scripts being the ones that Williamson actually used; the great majority bear changes in his own hand, many extensive. The versions used here are not quite as broadcast; while additions and revisions have been retained, deletions (sometimes whole paragraphs) have been restored when it seemed appropriate. Often these deletions were made at the time of rehearsal, purely to fine tune the talk to the time available for the broadcast.

Pen and Plough could not have been compiled without the generous help of the BBC Written Archives Centre, and especially Neil Somerville, who answered all my questions with such patience. My thanks also go to Dr Wheatley Blench for both his advice and providing the bibliographical information regarding Dick o’ the Fens and Greene Ferne Farm.

The Henry Williamson Society gratefully acknowledges the permission of the Trustees of the Henry Williamson Literary Estate to publish this collection and the photograph of Henry Williamson in his sailing dinghy Pinta, from the archive of the Literary Estate.

John Gregory

2013

Part One

The

Country Reporter

Norfolk Farmer

It feels strange to be in London, after weeks of working as an agricultural labourer on the Norfolk coast. Only a few hours ago I was sitting on a tractor, rolling a field of barley, while the east wind whirled a light dust in my eyes and ears, and powdered my hair. For weeks I meant to get my hair cut, with the luxury of a shampoo. It was so long and thick, I needed no hat. I broke several combs trying to reform it every morning.

This morning in Norfolk I was a tousled labourer; tonight in London my head is sleek, and feeling slightly chilly. I arrived at Liverpool Street Station on the East Anglian express, which takes 2¼ hours from Norwich. It was nice to relax in the coach, to feel that someone else was doing the work. I walked here from the station, and thought how clean the streets of London were; and how much smarter the lorries were kept, and also the horses. I took quite a professional interest in the van horses, looking at their feet, their well-groomed coats, their well-cared-for appearance. Farm horses are much harder worked – ‘hard graft’, as they say in Norfolk.

Now, what can I talk to you about? Well, the chief topic of talk among English countrymen at the moment is the drought. I should explain that I work a mixed farm of about 240 acres. For me, and my neighbours, the drought is serious. I took my farm over only six months ago, at Michaelmas (incidentally without any previous experience of farming whatsoever), and owing to lack of implements and the derelict condition of the farm buildings, and also a job of house building for myself, I could not get any of the usual autumn and winter ploughing done. In February, however, I started ploughing the first of our fields. Our arable is on the hill above the farm, which lies on the coast. The north wind comes over the sea straight from the Pole. Wrapped in an old flying leather coat, and several jerseys underneath, and wearing a moth-eaten pair of war-time puttees, flying helmet and gauntlets, I sat on the tractor day after day while the wild geese flew overhead, and the gulls followed my furrows, screaming and jostling.

After living nearly twenty years in Devon, with its soft climate, I had been bracing myself to meet these East coast winds which swept across the upland fields of my coastal farm; but was astonished to find that I could withstand them more easily, apparently, than the natives. My fellow worker and teamsman, as he walked behind the single furrow plough, drawn by Blossom and Gilbert, wore six coats and his face was gaunt with cold when he met me at 12 o’clock for our lunch under the lea of the haystack.

February passed, and in the middle of March we started to drill our barley.

There are three kinds of land on my farm – light, otherwise sandy or gravelly land; loam, with a pan of hard chalk a few inches down; and a medium to heavy brown, clayey soil, not stiff like the gaults of Essex, but like them, quite unworkable when the furrows have dried out. We drilled two fields of lighter soil with barley, but when we came to cultivate the furrows of our brown fields, which in a good season produce barley which goes to make some of the best beers in England, we found them unworkable. Now, at the end of the third week of April, they are still unworkable. The season for drilling barley is practically over, and I have one-third of my cornland useless. The barley is up in the other fields, but beginning to go yellow for lack of rain.

There is another trouble, too; no grass for the bullocks and cows. The root heaps, covered with straw and earth last October, are now almost finished, and most of us in East Anglia, and indeed in other parts of England except the extreme West, will find ourselves without food for the beasts. They say there has been nothing like it during living memory – and in this part of England men live longer than anywhere else.

However, there are many other things, too. This part of Norfolk is renowned for its wild pheasants, which, owing to this light rainfall and generally light soil, manage to rear most of their broods. Someone said to me, ‘Don’t buy a tractor if you want to keep the pheasant in your woods, they’ll leave, if you do.’ Certainly these birds are very wary and shy here, but the tractor so far from scaring them, seems to me to be one of the things which reassures them in their otherwise constant wariness of man. When I was ploughing they took not the slightest notice of me or the machine, but would feed within a few yards of the twin furrows corkscrewing behind my slow and noisy progress. It was the same with the wild pigeons, usually the shyest of birds. As for the rooks and jackdaws, they continued to hammer my turnips, when I was ploughing near the line of unpulled roots, as though I were no more than an old and trusted scarecrow. In fact I have opportunity to do, since I have become a ploughman, what I have not been able to do for years owing to the intensity of my literary work – become a genuine idle bird-watcher again. For any brain-worker who needs to slow down his super-civilized tempo, with its hypersensitiveness about the wickedness and cruelty of humanity, I recommend the job of farm-labourer. After the first few score of tons of roots or ‘muck’ lifted into a tumbril, when the muscles have ceased to ache and that hopeless feeling hardens off into the zest of natural living – the reward comes, in the form of contentment, and patience, and freedom from mental agitations of the city-dweller.

Broadcast in the Empire Service on 21 April 1938,

in the series Green Fields and Pavements.

Field and Pavement

Arnold Bennett once said that the most beautiful word in the English language was ‘pavement’. I wonder if he was judging it by its sound alone. It’s a smooth word. I read once in my youth, when such things were foremost in my mind, that the famous chemist’s-assistant line of Keats – or, as they pronounced it in those days ‘kimmist’ – ‘apothecary’, I think is the right period word – that Keats’ line

and lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon

was the most melodious line in English poetry. Robert Graves, a living poet, pointed out that much of Keats’ verse revealed a strong sense of taste, whereas the finest poetry is based on a fusion of the sense of sight, whence comes insight. Now keen sight is natural, whereas limited sight is unnatural, in that surroundings have dulled or limited the vision. A narrow-minded man is the man whose sight, through physical or psychological defects, is limited. To see properly is to understand. And, coming back to Arnold Bennett and his feeling that the word ‘pavement’ is the most beautiful word in the language, and knowing that he had keen sight, I should imagine that he was not thinking of the smoothness of the word, as a mere sound, but of some association that had given him sudden joy. The sight of old grey flagstones, worn by generations of human feet, drying after a sudden April shower – nice clean washed flagstones (for Arnold Bennett loathed dirt or untidiness) – and himself happy that he had just made a good contract for some articles, or that he was going to meet someone with a luminous mind. Perhaps if he had been passing that way when the flagstones were being heaved up, possibly with the aid of machine-gun-like noises of pneumatic drills, or hot steaming asphalt being poured into the earthy cavities, he would not have thought the word ‘pavement’ a beautiful one. There would be no peace, no reflection, no meditation to go in mental association with the word.

Of course, one mustn’t take a writer too seriously. He lives, or makes his living, through the use of ideas which come into his mind. He capitalises his ideas. He is very grateful to his sub-conscious self for throwing up ideas for essays and articles.

Consider the idea behind this very talk, for example. It arose in this way. A few hours ago, this very morning to be exact, I was