How the Heather Looks Read online

  To a little boy thus steeped in history, the prospect of being able to act out the death of William Rufus on the actual spot was irresistible. Since Lucy was uncooperative, Ian stretched himself full length beneath an immense oak and asked us to take his picture. He was very anxious, please, not to get the Rufus Stone into the photograph. It had not been there on the day of the famous hunt and Ian, like his father, was a stickler for authenticity.

  Back in the car again, we drove on slowly, stopping often to let herds of wild ponies go by. Sometimes they merely stood and stared at us, refusing to budge until they wanted to. It was obvious that human beings took second place in this old preserve. At last we came to Brockenhurst where we took lodgings at The Cloud, a pleasant sunny inn with one of the prettiest inn signs I have seen anywhere: a green tree, a blue sky, and one white cloud. Our windows looked straight out on a stretch of open land with a herd of milling ponies and a brook that flowed out of the forest.

  Ian was so wild to get away from the hotel that I said he could go for a walk on the moor (or was it a heath? I am never quite sure). I wanted to walk into the little village to buy a guidebook and to ask if anyone knew which was the original of Arnwood, the house in which Children of the New Forest had lived. Later I was cross at myself for wasting so much time chasing a wild goose when we could have had a much nicer time exploring the forest paths. After all, the most interesting part of the book is when Arnwood is burned by Roundheads and the aristocratic Beverley children have to live in a keeper’s cottage and learn to fend for themselves. Captain Marryat’s book, written in 1847, was one of the earliest novels for children and has all the charm of a desert island story. Captain Marryat seemed to know that the secret of many successful children’s books is that the author gets rid of the grownups right away, either killing ’em or packing ’em off.

  We arrived in Tunbridge Wells late the next afternoon and took up residence at a large and elegant hotel on the heights overlooking the town. We reasoned that, since the hotel had sixty acres of park, Ian could roam to his heart’s content, and since it had its own farm, Lucy could be amused by the pigs and ducks and chickens. The town itself had been a fashionable watering place in the days of Beau Nash and still had the airs and graces of a well-to-do spa. Our prosaic reason for choosing it was that it was a rail center and we had shipped our baggage there. More important to us, it was close to Rudyard Kipling’s farm at Burwash and A. A. Milne’s house in the Ashdown Forest. It was also Rosemary Sutcliffe country.

  Rosemary Sutcliffe, who herself writes exceptionally good historical fiction for children, makes full acknowledgment of her debt to Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, and its sequel, Rewards and Fairies. Ian, too, fell under the spell of these books. For more than a week, John had been reading Puck to him every night at bedtime. I almost envied his hearing for the first time how Dan and Una had acted out their version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times in the meadow, and how Puck had appeared before them to conjure them back into the past. Listening with half an ear, I was reminded of my own childhood enchantment. An older cousin had read the same stories aloud to a group composed of my sisters, younger cousins, and me when we were all quarantined with mumps in a isolated country house in Wales. I remember how we were made almost drunk on the rare, rich prose and how time and space seemed to melt away as we were transported back across the centuries.

  Not all of Puck’s stories quite come off, but surely any child who is exposed to “Young Men at the Manor” will have a feeling for the Middle Ages that will last him all the rest of his life. I wish that teachers who want to explain the concept of feudalism would read aloud the paragraph in which Sir Richard tells how and why he followed his overlord to Hastings. Pages of history are condensed to a few vivid sentences. Any writer would envy Kipling’s marvelous skill with details that are never static, but “magicked” (as Puck would say) into shifting, shimmering, everchanging life. Simul taneously with his lucid explanation of the laws of feudalism, he keeps the story moving by holding before us another picture of Sir Richard:

  … bare-headed to the sunshine, dandling the sword in both hands, while the gray horse cropped outside the Ring, and the helmet on the saddle-bow clinged softly each time he jerked his head….

  The wonder of it is that Kipling can fit so much into less than twenty pages. The framework of his story is like one of those nests of intricately carved ivory balls that one used to find in collections of oriental curios. At first the child is captured by the outer surface, then by the movement of sphere within sphere, and finally by the impact of infinity.

  The day that we arrived in Tunbridge Wells it began to rain, and it either rained or threatened to all the time that we were there.

  It was in pouring rain and a state of desperation that we packed ourselves into the car and headed south to look for Bateman’s, Kipling’s farm and the site of Pook’s Hill. The clouds began to part and break up and there was a sort of diluted sunlight that hovered over the landscape. We followed a road that twisted its way through the soggy countryside with lushness on either hand. It is hard to realize that England was once a land covered with great primeval forests that had to be cleared by resolute pioneers. The section through which we were traveling is still known as the Weald and lies between the high chalk lands of the Downs to north and south of it. Once its clay soil supported a great oak forest that was probably as frightening to the early settlers as the jungles of Africa were to the nineteenth-century explorers. The Romans called it the Forest of Anderida and it is described thus in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s novels. Joseph Conrad gives a good idea of what it may have been like in his long short story, “Heart of Darkness”:

  … think of a decent young citizen in a toga – perhaps too much dice, you know – coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men….

  There are few remains of prehistoric settlements in the Weald. Even the Saxon settlements (whose names end in “hurst,” for forest and “den,” for dell) must have been like islands, almost submerged by a vast green sea. By medieval times, however, the oak had yielded to the metal ax and ox-drawn plow, and the forests were being burned off to make way for crops. Oak was also burned in the furnaces, for the smelting of ore had become an important industry.

  We took the road toward the village of Burwash, almost missing a sign designating National Trust property. We turned down a graveled lane and swung into the wide open space before a lovely stone house surrounded by gardens and outbuildings. The house had originally been a Tudor farmhouse but was bought and enlarged by a wealthy ironmaster in the early seventeenth century. It fell into disrepair when the iron industry, for want of fuel, moved to the Midlands. About 1890 it was bought and restored by an architect who sold it to the Kiplings in 1902. In Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself, he gives an account of his house-hunting in a Locomobile and how he came upon Bateman’s:

  We had seen an advertisement of her, and we reached her down an enlarged rabbit-hole of a lane. At very first sight the Committee of Ways and Means said: “That’s her! The Only She! Make an honest woman of her – quick!” We entered and felt her Spirit – her Feng-shui – to be good. We went through every room and found no shadow of ancient regrets, stifled miseries, nor any menace, though the “new” of her was three hundred years old.

  When I say that Kipling’s autobiography is disappointing, I do not mean that it is not well-written or witty or entertaining, but that in fact he gives very little of himself. So with his house. It is lovely, it is everything that a famous author’s house should be, but even so it is difficult to feel that a family actually lived there. The study is exactly as he left it (but so tidy!) and Mrs. Kipling herself embroidered the chair seats in the dining room, the canop
y over the bed. There are oriental brasses and silks to remind us of the Indian boyhood and some paintings to remind us that his cousin was Sir Edward Burne-Jones. There are also some plaques by Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s father, who illustrated Kim and The Jungle Books. A mimeographed pamphlet tells one that the dining room is paneled in Cordova leather, the parlor has a Dutch bureau, an English Dole cupboard, and a Flemish tapestry. It is all controlled opulence and carefully considered taste, and I find it sad to contemplate. It has been said that Kipling was a vulgar little man who happened to be a genius. Once he became a successful author and owner of a proper country house, the genius was throttled. Never again did he come to grips with intellectual or emotional problems on an adult level. I like to think that he was much more interesting than either that house or his American wife would allow him to be.

  We escaped to the garden. The sun had made a grudging appearance and the grass sparkled with wetness. We followed a path over to the side of the house, past the reflecting pool and through a hedge. A small new-mown plot, piled with heaps of unbound hay, contained the graves of family pets. They were marked with rather touching little headstones. The children stopped to play in the hay for a few minutes and then ran forward, coming rather unexpectedly onto a river bank. This was the River Dudwell. It was much smaller than I had imagined from the stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill. I wondered how Kipling’s children, the counterparts of Dan and Una, had managed to do any boating there, until I remembered how they used to pull themselves along by the willow branches in a birch-bark canoe, and how it scraped in the shallows. It doesn’t take very much water, after all, to satisfy a small boy – or a small girl, either. Lucy had already found a bridge to sit on and was taking off her shoes. Ian was casting pebbles into the brown waters. Suddenly he stopped, his hand halfway back to his shoulder. He was staring at a small wooden building just across the bridge.

  “Is that the mill?” he asked.

  We all stared at it. An old mill figures in several of Puck’s stories, especially in “Hal o’ the Draft.” This one certainly looked very old, all crouched down beneath its strangely pitched roof, its windows staring out from under beetling brows.

  See you our little mill that clacks,

  So busy by the brook?

  She has ground her corn and paid her tax

  Ever since Domesday Book.

  This little mill was not so much clacking as humming. A sleek modern turbine had been installed where once the mill wheel must have been, an obvious source of electricity for the house and farm. Later I was to read that the Kiplings at a dinner party had met Sir William Willcocks “who had designed the Assouan Dam – a trifling affair on the Nile,” and that they had mentioned their project for de-clutching the water wheel from an ancient mill at the end of the garden and using its microscopic millpond to run a turbine. He came the next Monday to advise them to tear down the trees and bushes and to slope the banks properly. He also advised them to bury the cable (evidently a revolutionary thought in a country where such things are “laid on”) and obtained for them a rejected deep-sea cable which had failed under test at twelve hundred volts – “our voltage being one hundred and ten.” It was in connection with this project that a well had to be dug and an old pond cleaned. By the time the well reached twenty-five feet, the owners had been handed a Jacobean tobacco pipe, a worn Cromwellian lateen spoon and, at bottom, the bronze check of a Roman horse bit. In cleaning out the pond the workers dredged up two Elizabethan “sealed quarts” and, in deepest mud, a perfectly polished Neolithic ax head.

  The land was soaked in history and when someone suggested to Kipling that he write “a yarn about Roman times here … about an old Centurion of the Occupation telling his experiences to his children,” he found himself interested, although at first his thoughts did not come smoothly and he discarded several stories:

  I turned my back on the whole thing and walked away. Therefore, the whole thing set and linked itself. I fell first upon Normans and Saxons. Parnesius came later, directly out of a little wood above the Phoenician forge; and the rest of the tales in Puck of Pook’s Hill followed in order.

  Almost all the stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill and its sequel begin and end within the geographical framework of Bateman’s Farm, although sometimes a tale within a tale takes one as far afield as the Roman Wall or to Africa or to the Americas. Besides the mill, Kipling uses the cone-shaped oast houses, the village church, the fields and woods in the neighborhood as springboards to take the reader back into the past. He describes the hill from which Puck issues as “… a bare, fern-covered slope … that runs up from the far side of the mill-stream to a dark wood. Beyond that wood the ground rises for five hundred feet, till at last you climb out on the bare top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey Levels and the Channel and half the naked South Downs.” We could see the hill in the distance and set off along the brook to walk to it. We had not gone far, however, before we found ourselves in morass that, in the next few steps, would be over our knees. The mists crept up out of the bog, the sun disappeared again, and it began to rain. We stood up to our ankles in mud, gazing at the unattainable, then wandered disconsolately back toward the house and parking lot.

  The next day we drove down to Bateman’s again, although why we expected any miracles I cannot imagine. The landscape was as soggy as ever. We learned later, by consulting maps and reading R. T. Hopkins’ Kipling Country, that we could have reached the hill by driving back along the main road and going through another farm (Lynden Farm in the stories; Dudwell Farm on the maps). At least we have the satisfaction of knowing that, according to Hopkins, the hill we saw was the one we sought and that the countryfolk ’round about still call it “Puck” or “Pook’s” hill. Very likely the hill was once inhabited by the Flint People (the Dark People, Rosemary Sutcliffe calls them), the shepherds and hill people who were living in Britain before the Celts came. Miss Sutcliffe writes of them in Warrior Scarlet, her story about the Bronze Age. In her introduction she explains that the hero, Drem, lived nine hundred years before Rome was founded – and Celtic Drem thought of the Dark People as being ancient. “The oldest thing in England …,” says Puck, when speaking of himself. There is something about that hill that makes the prickles rise on the back of one’s neck.

  Frustrated in our efforts to reach the hill, we returned to the car and drove about the countryside, peering through the rain. In the village of Burwash, all gray stone and humped roofs, we saw the church and the inn, both mentioned in Kipling’s stories. Behind the farm, on a back road, we came across a quarry and wondered if it were where Una saw the gypsy encampment. We tried to find Weland’s Ford (now Willingsford) because Weland, “a sort of kin to Scandinavian Thor,” is the subject of Puck’s first tale. Perhaps we had insulted the Smith of the Gods in some way for our little car wandered about on back country lanes as though it were bewitched.

  Finally we decided to head south toward the seacoast, although it hardly seemed the weather for it. Our history buffs wanted to see Hastings, and we thought it would be fun to seek out the castle at Pevensey where several of Puck’s most exciting stories took place. Morale was so low that it seemed a good idea to stop first for tea. This was made difficult by the fact that all we had seen for an hour were narrow lanes, green fields, and deep woods. At last we came across a gloomy rustic hut which stood back from the road among dark pines. A faded sign, creaking in the wind, advertised Teas. We might have thought the place deserted but for two enormous trucks drawn up outside, and a spark of light inside.

  We were used to being stared at, but this time our arrival seemed to have an electrifying effect. The two truck drivers and the buxom serving wench seemed dumbfounded by our arrival. They were all three sitting at one of the wooden tables looking at a map or piece of paper, but now one of the men whisked it out of sight and into his pocket and the wench (she did look like someone out of Tom Jones!) rushed behind the counter. I asked for tea and cakes. The girl ran her hands down he
r apron and looked imploringly at the taller of the two truck drivers. He nodded at her, apparently as much in anger as encouragement, and pointed out that there were some packaged cakes on a shelf above the gas ring where she was boiling water for tea.

  In a few moments the girl brought each of us a mug and we stared glumly into the steaming brown depths. Ian wrinkled his nose at the bitterness of the stuff and Lucy found hers too hot to drink. I asked for milk, an ordinary request, but the shorter of the two men, who was drinking something out of a mug, gave what might have been a sneeze – or a laugh – and spluttered drops halfway across the table top. He was sobered by a glance from his companion and sat wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The girl went into the kitchen and came back with a can of “condensed” – the kind, said John, that the army used to get in Australia and which is so thick you can cut it off with scissors, like ribbon. Despite this recommendation, the children did not like it. We would have risen to leave then but for a burst of activity. The taller man had summoned the wench to his table.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I think it’ll be better if I take them cans now,” and he pointed to four big milk cans that had stood unnoticed in the shadows. “You get ’em over to the door and Al and me will load ’em into my lorry.” The girl went over and grasped the handle of one of the cans and pulled hard.