The Wild Hills

By Rupert Croft-Cooke

This Latest Volume of Autobiography opens in 1934, in an isolated hamlet in the Cotswolds. Mr. Croft-Gooke was 30 years old. He had published six novels, was earning £300 a year, and considered himself 'an enviable young man'. He had a house with peacocks on the lawn. He was happy.

He decided however to revisit Argen­tina, where he travelled extensively, lecturing and meeting old friends and new. When he returned to his isolated hamlet, in fog and snow, he was no longer happy, but restless and unsettled. He decided to go back to Kent, where he was born.
With charm and humour, Mr. Croft-Cooke vividly recreates the places and people of his youth.

As a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote: 'Social historians of the future will do well to consult Mr. Croft-Cooke's in preference to certain more pretentious and less objective memoirs of the period.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448204786

Rupert Croft-Cooke

The English author Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979) published thirty-odd novels on a wide variety of subjects in his life-time, as well as poetry, plays, non-fiction books on such diverse topics as Buffalo Bill, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, Victorian writers, criminals, the circus, gypsies, wine, cookery, and darts. Under the pen name of Leo Bruce he also wrote more than thirty crime novels. At the age of 20, Croft-Cooke spent two years in Buenos Aires, where he founded the journal La Estrella. In 1925 he returned to London and began a career as a freelance journalist and writer. His work appeared in a variety of magazines, including New Writing, Adelphi, and the English Review. In the late 1920s the American magazine Poetry published several of his plays. He was also a radio broadcaster on psychology. In 1940 he joined the British Army and served in Africa and India until 1946. He later wrote several books about his military experiences. From 1953 to 1968 Croft-Cooke lived in Morocco where he wrote his Sensual World series, possibly his most important contribution to English letters, written as a series of twenty-seven autobiography-cum-travel books.

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Chapter One

Salperton—Not Sapperton

[1]

On New Year’s Day 1934 I drove my small Singer car from Thanet to the stone-built cottage I had found for myself in an isolated hamlet of the Cotswolds. I had been with my family for Christmas and was returning to the life and home I had chosen and already held dear, though I liked to think of myself as an exile in Gloucestershire from the leafy fertility of my native Kent.

The car was not so much open as lacking a hood. I had bought it for ten pounds from a young mechanic who had nursed its old engine well, and this hummed away without protest or interruption as I covered the lonely miles from Oxford to Witney, past Burford and through Northleach.

I was thirty years old and believed myself a very enviable young man. Five over-written and immature novels of mine had been published and a sixth which I considered far superior to anything I (or almost any other young writer) had done, was to come out in March. From these and other literary efforts, supplemented with some dealing in old books, I made a living of from £250 to £300 a year which in those undemanding days was sufficient to provide me with my small house, this old serviceable motor-car, the domestic services of the village baker’s son, enough to eat and beer in a pub at night. I will not say this was all I wanted, but after periods of sharper poverty it seemed by comparison munificent.

Besides, there was always the hope, very lively throughout those pre-war years, that the next novel, or the next or the next, would miraculously start selling in immense numbers and make me rich. I should have laughed at the notion that I might continue to earn a living by writing, even in time an adequate one, without ever hitting the jackpot. I remembered how a bookseller and playwright named Ernest George who was also born under Gemini had once told me that to us of that sign the very direst things never happened, every disaster we met might have been worse, but that we missed the great successes, too. It seemed merely quaint at the time and I considered astrology (as I do still) a picturesque superstition. This pleasant belief in each successive forthcoming book of mine as a potential best-seller made the poverty of the moment easily endurable.

Nor was it a restrictive poverty. Without that cruel and limiting thing a small irrevocably fixed income, I never felt poor. There was always the belief that I could earn more money in an emergency, that debts could be somehow met, that if I spent the five pounds in my pocket prodigally I could find a way to replace them, that periods of economic crisis were transient, and I rarely made small sacrifices. I had already managed to travel pretty widely in South America and Europe and should see a good deal more of the world without achieving the fanciful sudden wealth I pictured. My way of living, providing for the house and so on, might be highly erratic, might know periods of difficulty, but was not parsimonious.

Moreover, I had vigorous good health and immense gusto. I was passionately interested in things and people, and particularly in this new world I had found west of Oxford. I delighted in having a small home of my own and being able to maintain it by doing the work I wanted to do. I felt no menace in world events and no fear of personal tragedy. Illness, accidents, physical suffering, the loss of sight or hearing, imprisonment, hunger, the horrors of war, human loss, madness, paralysis, utter loneliness, chronic lassitude and boredom, persecution, torture, death—all these I may have recognized as existing in the world but for me at that time and in that place they had no meaning. I had a child’s trust in life, a boy’s self-confidence and a man’s resolution. That New Year’s Day was the beginning of an epoch of fulfilment and felicity and of horizons which widened enticingly whichever way I turned.

[2]

I have told (in The Purple Streak) how I found the village of Salperton which at that time housed less than fifty people, a group of cottages built in the seventeenth century for the dependents on a great estate, and how that estate had dwindled to a gloomy large house where the widow of a Birmingham iron-master named Harter and her son sought to keep up appearances. They were converting several of the labourers’ cottages in the village to the use of those who demanded a slightly higher standard of living, bathrooms, running water, electricity, and I was the first outsider to rent one. It was called the Long House because its rooms were in a single line and it looked long as cottages go.

Salperton had no pub, being one of five tiny groups of habitations within two miles of the Puesdown Inn on the main London to Cheltenham road, and it shared a parson with two other villages. It was more than six miles from any shop and twelve from a town, Cheltenham. It was in fact in one of the loneliest areas of Southern England. But in the two or three months I had lived there I had felt no apprehensions about its solitude. The house itself, a house of my own, achieved by my own literary efforts, would have been enough, wherever it was, and this was truly attractive—a long, low cottage built of Cotswold stone in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, roofed with the curly grey tiles of the region, with stone-mullioned leaded windows and stone or tiled floors. It had a large open fire-place with a mighty oak beam over it and its ceilings had more rough-hewn oak. It was solid as a rock temple, cool in summer, snug in winter, and I had enough books to line one of the long walls of the only sitting-room. For me it was a home to be proud of and I took positive and undiminishing pleasure in it.

I was proud, too, of my discovery in the village baker’s son, of a naturally talented cook. The youngest but one of a large struggling family, he had been from childhood his mother’s favourite and had learned from her to cook for them all during her long periods of ill-health. The father rented a small bakehouse near my home, and alone and unaided baked each day for a hundred or so families in the surrounding villages, delivering his good bread in a small van. But there was such poverty in this agricultural area that his life was a long tussle with debts, his customers’ debts to him and his own to the flour-mills for, a kindly man, he could never refuse credit where there was want. Eric had been brought up, like most boys in Gloucestershire of those days, to a hand-to-mouth existence of hard work. But his mother had learned, or inherited, an art which is less rare in rural England than foreigners suppose, and Eric was a cook of quite extraordinary ability and adaptability, as I was to find. He was then about sixteen, fair-haired with large rather shallow blue eyes. He had come to me when I first moved in and asked if he could work for me for ten shillings a week and his keep. If he had said twelve-and-six I should not have dared commit myself out of my only certain earnings of less than five pounds. He ran the house vigorously, noisily, cheerfully, and cooking was his pride.

I had made other additions to the household since my arrival in the late autumn. A wealthy young man with a large house in Kent had suddenly decided that all his pets should be white and had therefore given me Dingo, an Alsatian pup which had turned a rich tawny colour as it grew, and I had bought as mate for him a fine sensitive almost black Alsatian bitch. The same young man had wanted only white peacocks and had sent me by rail in a huge crate a magnificent peacock and his mate. These I called Guy and Pauline and they strutted imperiously about the little square of lawn at each end of my house or sat high on walls with Guy’s tail hanging down iridescently. I had an orchard in front of my house through which a stream ran so I had ornamented this with a family of Khaki Campbell ducks. But most unaccountable of all in her ways was Faustine, a young nanny-goat who had to be prevented from eating all the bark from the ancient and mostly barren fruit trees in the orchard. I had bought her in a pub for half a crown. There was also, least obrusively, yet most self-confidently, a sandy kitten, born in a barn, of doubtful parentage and known as Tess. This large family of creatures with their names derived from books were deliberately left as far as possible to their own recreations and habits and were wholly undisciplined. Only Dingo, the most powerful and ferocious of them, showed as time passed that he could not live except under human mastery.

[3]

On that journey westward and homeward, I drove through Northleach, a small town conspicuously Cotswold in character, whose huge church with its memorials gave one an idea of the importance of the place as a wool town in previous centuries. It was the last village I would pass through before I reached my home though this was still eight miles away. Past the derelict prison on the outskirts of Northleach, past Hangman’s Corner where the last man to be hanged in England for sheep-stealing had swung almost in living memory, the road with not a house beside it ran over the bare hills till it went by the Puesdown Inn. This stood back from it, a long low grey stone building, a coaching house not long since. Then, by a rough lane northward from the main road, I came towards my village.

I could see the large house of Salperton Park through the trees, a mixture of architectures with pretentious pseudo-Elizabethan additions made by the present owner’s father. Hatfield Harter, who lived there now with his mother, was my landlord, an affable enough young man, fleshy, moustached, bespectacled, with a car-salesman’s manner and an Old Etonian tie. His daily race-going seemed unprofitable because the estate was in debt, but his alcoholism was not yet the public scandal it came to be during my years as his tenant. It was all rather in the Victorian literary tradition particularly since Hatfield Harter was never called anything but the Squire, and this without irony or familiarity. He was the Squire, owning the whole village, having every inhabitant of it, including two farmers, as his tenants. His great neglected house and sibylline old mother, his debts and drinking bouts, might all have been created by Mrs Henry Wood.

Leaving Salperton Park on my right I drove down a slope of rough lane between trees and in a moment was in the village itself, a mere group of cottages which might have been uninhabited that New Year’s Day, so deserted was the road between them. The village seemed smaller than when I had left it and indeed I marvelled that it appeared, though in minute type, in the Times Atlas. No one seemed ever to have heard of it and I had often to explain that I lived in Salperton not Sapperton, the latter being reputedly a centre of ‘picturesquesness’. But I scarcely noticed the village as I came to my own house, culmination of that eight hours’ cold drive across the South of England. This was the first time I had returned to it after an absence of more than an hour or two and it seemed to be secure, reassuring, welcoming.

Eric had lit a fire of fruit-wood logs in its one great open fire-place and put an accumulation of letters on a small table beside it. I remember that moment very clearly, finding my own home, the long low room with its wall facing the windows unbrokenly lined with books, the big fire, the stack of letters, and Eric, a cheerful boy earnestly dedicating himself to a serious job, coming in to ask if I was ready for lunch.

[4]

I knew all the inhabitants of Salperton now, at least by sight, and looking back I see that they had only one thing in common, their poverty, which was of the eighteenth-century rural order. With the exception of one young farmer named Lawrie, who successfully farmed a couple of hundred acres, there was not one of them to whom I with my precarious two or three hundred a year did not seem a well-to-do householder.

An old blacksmith who had made the fire-basket in my house at his forge in the outbuildings of Salperton Park lived with his daughter in the cottage nearest to me, but he died soon after my arrival. Beyond his cottage was one occupied by a very odd character named Hopkins who was the village road-mender employed by some rural district council. He was an elderly man, a widower, who wore a flamboyant grey moustache and cycled to work in all weathers in a bowler hat. He had a solemn manner of speech using always the majestic plural pronoun. We are glad to see you’ve come to live here, he informed me when I first moved in. We supply the music in church on Sunday, he said further. This was true. The village church, a small neglected building in the park had no parson of its own and since the Harters were Catholics no support from ‘the Squire’. There was no organ and when on Sunday afternoons the incumbent of Compton Abdale, a neighbouring parish, came to hold a service, Hopkins scraped a hoarse violin for the hymns, chanted by the five old voices of the congregation. We lost our wife some years ago, he explained ambiguously. We don’t have much to do with anyone—we like to read The Book in the evening.

This ‘not having much to do with anyone’ was a universal claim among the families of Salperton, an occasional chat in the street being all they allowed themselves of social intercourse, except perhaps in the post office. This was a cottage among the others where Mrs Smith, who had been a parlourmaid up at the Park ‘in the days of the Old Squire’, now struggled in a bewildered way to sell stamps. She was an elderly grey-haired woman with a voice so wheezy that in damp weather it became an inaudible whisper, but what little gossip there might be in the village was exchanged in the small stuffy room of her cottage where letters were taken in for collection. Her husband, a diminutive farm-labourer, appeared rarely, but her brother occupied another cottage with his wife and family. He was John Lawrie’s shepherd, invariably known as Dick. When Dick the shepherd blows his nail, I quoted to myself rather obviously. He was a savage elderly man with many enmities and a brutish manner of speech.

More gentle but no less misanthropic was a retired cricket professional named Hearne, a thin ageing man who left his cottage only for a brief walk in the afternoon. Some other member of his family, he told me, was the more famous player of the two but he, I gathered from followers of cricket history, had known his hours of glory. It was a year before we spoke though we had met scores of times in the narrow lanes, for Mr Hearne was shy and reticent even among the people of that village. How he came to be spending his last days in such isolation and in such primitive conditions I could only guess—probably his pension was so small that he could not afford to live in a town. He had rented his tiny cottage before Hatfield Harter had begun to restore and (to the extent of a bathroom and electric light) modernize the unoccupied buildings in the village, and Mr Hearne’s cottage cost half a crown a week. His wife never emerged from it.

Harwood, the baker, was not, properly speaking, an inhabitant of Salperton, since he came only to make bread and rough cakes in an old bake-house built in the eighteenth century which he rented from Harter. His large wild moustache, a more luxuriant growth than the road-mender’s, entirely dominated his small face and from under it a fiery pipe seemed for ever on the verge of eruption. He was a tremendous worker who came to his bake-house before the village was awake and left it only when his little van was loaded for his rounds. He, too, ‘didn’t have much to do with anyone’ though he was not a surly or a bitter man. I can see him very plainly, arms, face and moustache white with flour, as he worked to a relentless rhythm in his bake-house, or looked up with a cheery greeting for which he did not take out his pipe.

There were other families of farm labourers who, through the number of their children, lived in conditions of poverty and degradation which, one would have thought, belonged to earlier centuries. A man earning twenty-five shillings a week with a wife and numerous offspring to support was in no condition to leave the village, even for a fivepenny pint of cider at the Puesdown Inn, and had no bicycle on which to get there, anyway. One such family was crowded in a hovel near my house, and the wife was an unwashed sloven, her breasts large and loose like udders under her worn and tattered clothes and her hair unkempt, verminous probably, her children unshod. There seemed to be no soap in that household, and the English who were proud of their insistence on baths in foreign inns might have realized that not only in such a backward hamlet as this but all over rural England there was until recently a lack of hygiene which would have shocked the meanest Arab or Indian, and did indeed shock the Romanies who passed through our villages. The agrarian English were not so ingenious or energetic in meeting the conditions of poverty as nomads and accepted too long their conditions of grinding labour for just sufficient to feed themselves and their children. Looking back from these rather more equitable times it seems harrowing to me that only thirty years ago people lived like some of the poor of Salperton.

In contrast to their indigence was life in another household, that of the small tenant famer Hodges who with only occasional hired labour worked a score of acres. His wife was a prim, pertinacious woman who wore pince-nez glasses and had been employed, as she informed one, in the household of the Marquess of Lansdowne; indeed she looked like a superior lady’s maid. But work? That woman was the most indefatigable and orderly human being I have known. Her own house was trim and spotless and she did all the work in her husband’s dairy, milking, churning, delivering the milk, butter and eggs, collecting her modest prices for these, moving always swiftly but with the dignity of a