How the Heather Looks Page 15

  “I can’t budge it,” she said, then caught Al’s eye and dissolved into giggles.

  “’;Ere, let me do it,” said the tall man, but although he took a firm grasp and really bent his back to it the can barely scraped across the floor. Behind his back, Al carried on a curious pantomime. He would look at the cans, then look at us, then look at the girl – and something in his very manner caused her to burst into helpless, silent laughter. His companion was still struggling with what must have been the heaviest milk cans in the British Isles, when he turned suddenly and caught the revelers in the act.

  “’Ere, ’ere! Get to work now. Give me a hand and look smart. Both of you!” His glance flicked in our direction. We then realized that we had been staring open-mouthed. Finally the cans were hauled out the door and loaded, and the two trucks drove off in a swirl of gravel. The girl came back into the hut and directly into the kitchen. She began putting up shutters and locking doors and windows with such thoroughness that it looked as though she were shutting up shop forever. John asked for the bill and she brought it to us in an absent-minded way, hardly seeming to care whether she was paid. We went off down the road, all agreeing that this had been the most dreadful tea we had had in England.

  “I don’t like that kind of milk,” said our two-year-old, positively.

  “I don’t either,” said Ian. “Why didn’t they open one of those big cans and give us some fresh milk? They had it right there.”

  John grew strangely excited. “Ian’s right,” he said. “Do you realize that this is the first time since we’ve been in England that we haven’t had fresh milk offered to us?”

  “Well, maybe it was too hard for them to get it out of those cans,” I ventured. “Those cans were awfully heavy.”

  “You’re right they were heavy,” said my husband. “Ian, do you remember ‘Hal o’ the Draft’? Remember how the Burwash men made cannon for the pirates and hid them in the church, then sent them down to Rye under the wool packs? That wasn’t milk in those cans!”

  “Smugglers!” cried Ian.

  “Then I think we should notify the proper authorities,” said I, very prim. John and Ian glanced at each other in masculine conspiracy, then began to laugh.

  “We can’t have half Sussex hanged for a little gunrunning,” said John, quoting from Puck. And that night, back at the hotel, he read Kipling’s “Smuggler’s Song” to us:

  If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,

  Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,

  Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie.

  Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

  Five-and-twenty ponies,

  Trotting through the dark –

  Brandy for the Parson,

  ’Baccy for the Clerk:

  Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

  And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by! …

  We came out on the main road near the village of Battle and drove through the rolling countryside, trying to imagine what it must have been on that day when the Normans came ashore at Pevensey. They marched inland toward London and were met by Harold’s forces on these fields north of Hastings.

  See you our stilly woods of oak,

  And the dread ditch beside?

  O that was where the Saxons broke

  On the day that Harold died.

  I found myself thinking of The Golden Warrior, by Hope Muntz, and wishing that Ian were old enough to appreciate it. It is the story of the Saxon cause at the Battle of Hastings. Even though sympathetic to Harold, it tells why he deserved to lose. I do believe it is my favorite historical novel. The author worked over it for eleven years, making of it a sort of bright Bayeux Tapestry of prose. Surely the children will appropriate it in time. It is too good to leave to mere grownups.

  We stopped at Battle Abbey, hoping to glean more information about the surrounding countryside, but it was closed to sightseers, so we drove on toward Hastings. The town was no more romantic than the grimmest “front” on the Jersey shore. Ian was disappointed and pleaded for Pevensey. I had a bad few moments trying to find the town on the map, because I looked for it to be along the coast. We finally located it toward Eastbourne, a little inland. Later we discovered that the shallow bay had silted, leaving flat green fields between the village and the sea.

  Our luck seemed to change the moment we came into Pevensey. The sun came out in full force just as we rounded a curve in the village street, gilding two battered stone eagles that surmounted a pair of gateposts. We wondered if they had any connection with De Aquila, that wonderful little man whom Kipling describes:

  He was little, like his father, but terrible with a nose like an eagle’s nose and yellow eyes like an eagle. He rode tall war-horses – roans, which he bred himself – and he could never abide to be helped into the saddle.

  Kipling seems to have fallen in love with his own character, for he allows him hearth space in three of Puck’s stories, “Young Men at the Manor,” “The Knights of the Joyous Venture,” and “Old Men of Pevensey.” He is even allowed posthumous influence on a twist of plot in “The Treasure and the Law,” which supposedly took place a hundred years after Aquila died. Kipling makes him wonderfully clear to us – always fretting with his gauntlets, poking someone in the ribs with a dagger as he talks, hopping round and round some great horse with one foot in the stirrup. Whether his historic self equaled his literary one we have no way of knowing, but a family named De Aquila did exist and Pevensey was its aerie.

  I must say that Pevensey is one of the most satisfying ruins I have ever seen – just tumbled down enough to be romantic, but in good enough repair so that the imagination can build where the eye leaves off. There were curtain walls and round towers, a moat and a drawbridge, all the satisfying details for which Ian’s heart yearned. Nowadays Pevensey is a medieval castle surrounded by the brilliant green of the Pevensey Levels, but on that fatal day in 1066, when William of Normandy crossed the sea and came to Pevensey, water lapped almost to the walls of the ruins of a Roman fortress there. One can still pick out the letters in the Bayeux Tapestry: Hic Wilhelm Dux in magno navigo mare transivit, et venit ad Pevensal.

  William stumbled as he came ashore, a mishap that might have been interpreted as an ill omen by his followers. With great presence of mind, he reached out to grasp a piece of turf in both hands. Scrambling to his feet and holding it up for all to see, he called out that he was “taking seizin” to all England:

  “What’s taking seizin?” asked Dan, cautiously. And Puck answered:

  “It’s an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren’t lawfully seized of your land – it didn’t really belong to you – till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it – like this.” He held out the turves.

  We filed through a gap in a low outer wall, walked across a meadow and clumped over the drawbridge, our shoes making a hollow sound in the moat. We found ourselves in the grass-grown inner bailey. There was a well in the center of it. As we peered down into its depths we were reminded of the secret well where the trea sure was hidden in “Old Men at Pevensey” and found again in “The Treasure and the Law.” Kipling described it as being built into the walls and then abandoned because it was tidal. We went in search of a guide to find if such a well existed. He smiled and said that many people asked him that question. He thought there was such a place in the south wall, at least so he had heard, but he could not allow us to look for ourselves because that part of the castle was in poor repair and closed to visitors. Ian asked him if he had ever tried to look for himself. We were shocked to hear him admit that not only was he not curious enough to search for the well, but that he had never bothered to read Mr. Kipling’s books! Later, doing a little research of our own, we learned that more than twenty years after publication of Puck of Pook’s Hill a secret well was discovered in the walls at Pev
ensey. Kipling was delighted, of course, to have archaeology confirm imagination.

  The sun cast a cheerful glow over all of Pevensey. John and I found a bit of wall to sit on while we watched the children climb about the ruins. Ian and Lucy especially liked the dungeony feeling of the North Tower and now that the sun was shining so brightly spent most of the time going up and down the dank steps. John lay back to snooze in the sun and I scanned the guidebook we had bought near the gate. I found that during World War II the interior of the towers was adapted as quarters for the troops who garrisoned the castle. An inner skin of brickwork was built, wooden floors were inserted, the windows were glazed, and roofs put on. All the work was done by the military, but under the direction of the Ministry of Works. The government did not want the Germans to know that the fortress was being used again, so no effort was spared to give it what Edgar Eager, author of Knights Castle, would call “a proper yeomanly appearance.” I called Ian to me in order to read to him from the guidebook. When at home, Ian’s favorite toys were his model soldiers for whom he spent long hours making landscapes or dioramas. He had developed a good eye for the form and texture that goes into making a convincing ruined wall and he was fascinated by the ingenuity displayed to make modern pillboxes look like parts of a ruined castle. He had often put oatmeal boxes and milk cartons to much the same use, and viewed the efforts of the Ministry of Works with the eye of a fellow professional.

  “By the grace of God,” I read aloud from the otherwise unemotional prose, “these twentieth-century defences were never put to the test, and Pevensey Castle remains untaken by assault.” In 1945 the Ancient Monuments section of the Ministry of Works resumed control. It was decided to leave the greater part of the recent military works intact as evidence of an important phase in the long history of the castle. I don’t know of any decision that could have done more to strengthen our family’s sense of history. We had seen too many self-conscious restorations in our own country coupled with senseless destruction (for example, the tearing down of honest-awful nineteenth-century buildings in order to replace them with ersatz eighteenth-century ones). The men who manned the radar screens at Pevensey were just as brave and just as much part of history as the medieval men-at-arms or the Roman legions who had held Pevensey before them.

  The Romans’ name for Pevensey was Anderida and it is thus that Rosemary Sutcliffe refers to it in her novels of Roman Britain. The Roman fortress covered more acreage than the medieval one which is built into a corner of it. Before crossing the drawbridge, our family had come through a gap in the tumble-down Roman wall and had had to cross a meadow to reach the medieval part of the castle. Now, as we left the castle, we turned toward another gap in the outer wall and went through the Roman East Gate and around in back of the Castle. A sign announcing “Teas” drew us like a magnet toward a cluster of sheds huddled against the wall. We ordered a proper tea this time – scones and raspberries and real milk.

  To our hostess’s surprise we chose to sit as far back as possible from the doorway, in heavy shadow. It was the wall that drew us. At our level it was still of Roman construction, but, peering upward, we could see where the Roman stone and flint left off and the medi eval “restoration” began, for in this part of the castle the Normans had full use of the work of their predecessors. We sat and leaned our cheeks against the cool stone and rubbed our hands over its surface, wondering about the men who had built it. This wall had been old when William came. We talked, too, of Dunkirk and what would have happened if the Nazis had made their invasion. “We will fight on the beaches … !” quoted John. “That would have meant Pevensey.” Perhaps it was not just the cold of the stone that sent shivers down our spines.

  Several months later, when I was reading Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Lantern Bearers, I was reminded of our feelings that day at Pevensey. At the beginning of Miss Sutcliffe’s story her young hero, an officer in the Roman Cavalry, is faced with the decision whether to remain in Britain and fight the Saxon invaders, or whether to sail away with the Roman legions. Is he British, or is he Roman? He elects to stay, but that night – when the last Roman galley leaves Britain – he climbs up to the platform of the great beacon tower at Rutupiae and, on a sudden impulse, sets fire to the pitch-soaked brush piled there.

  … even from the shores of Gaul they would see the blaze, and say, ‘Ah, there is Rutupiae’s Light.’ It was his farewell to so many things; to the whole world that he had been bred to. But it was something more; a defiance against the dark.

  Pevensey is not far from Richborough Castle and we could easily have driven there to see the ruins of Rutupiae and the site of that enormous beacon tower which, faced with pure white marble, could be seen for miles out at sea, either day or night. According to Leonard Cottrell’s Seeing Roman Britain, some authorities believe that the lighthouse at Rutupiae may have been as large and impressive as the Phares of Alexandria. The remains of a second Roman lighthouse are incorporated into the walls of Dover Castle, but we missed that one, too. There is a picture of it in Cottrell’s book and he gives clear directions how to find it. He describes it as “a monstrous construction, octagonal outside, and square within; and, entering it by the large archway on the east side, the interior is seen to be hollow, though there are clear enough indications that once there were chambers, one above the other, where those who tended the fire lived like eagles in their aerie high above the world.”

  Alas! We will always regret that we did not know about those lighthouses when at the time we were so close. It would have been a simple matter to drive over to see them. But something of their meaning shone through to us that day at Pevensey, shines through still in the Book of Common Prayer! “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Little Countries of the Mind

  Besides Puck and Pook’s Hill, we had Pooh and the “Enchanted Place at the Top of the Forest” in mind all the time we were in Tunbridge Wells. Soon after A. A. Milne died in 1956, Life magazine published photographs of his house and garden in Sussex. This had emboldened us to write to the publishers of the Pooh books – both British and American – to ask for help in the search for clues. We wanted to find out for ourselves if at least some of the storied places on the maps in the end papers of the Milne books actually existed and, if so, to search them out. We had given the post office at Tunbridge Wells as our forwarding address and were most excited, therefore, when John brought back to the hotel an invitation to visit Mrs. Milne at her home at eleven o’clock Sunday morning. “I am always happy to meet friends of dear ‘Pooh,’” she wrote, and signed herself, “Daphne Milne.”

  Mrs. Milne had given as her address a little village at the edge of the Ashdown Forest. We had some difficulty in finding the house. We drove up and down an earth lane several times before it occurred to us to plunge into a leafy tunnel that led off down a bank. In an instant we emerged in another world – a wide sweep of gravel drive looking out toward garden and meadow, with copse and spinney beyond. Farther off, half hidden by low rain clouds, we could see the hills of the Ashdown Forest. Close to us, huddled under the bank, was a wonderful old steep-roofed farmhouse. There is a sketch of it in Now We Are Six, seen from a distance as part of the background for “Buttercup Days.” Now, seen thus closely, it seemed smaller, cozier, more secret somehow than either Shepard’s sketch or the photographs in Life had led us to expect. This was the house where Christopher Robin had lived, this was “The House in Another Part of the Forest.”

  Mrs. Milne came out to the terrace while we were disentangling ourselves from the car. She was tall and white-haired and elegant and dressed in several shades of green. She suggested that since we were still in our outdoor clothes we might as well tour the garden. As we walked about I found myself getting it mixed up in my mind with a place in a book by Kenneth Grahame, not A. A. Milne. It was like the Mole’s garden in The Wind in the Willows, but instead of Mole’s gallery of plaster statuary (“Garibaldi,
and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy”) the garden abounded in stone images of Christopher Robin and Pooh and Piglet.

  Then we found ourselves all talking. The children were telling Mrs. Milne about their own Pooh and Piglet (stuffed) and John went back across the wet grass to the car to fetch them and Mrs. Milne asked would Ian please not talk so fast, because she could not understand American accents, and where did he get that dreadful hat? Ian’s ears were turning rather pink when John came back with the animals and Mrs. Milne looked them over carefully, noting that Pooh’s nose was torn and that one eye was missing. We explained that Lucy had chewed off the nose several months before, the eye’s disappearance was a mystery. According to Milne’s autobiography, “The animals in the stories came for the most part from the nursery. My collaborator had already given them individual voices, their owner by constant affection had given them the twist in their features which denoted character, and Shepard drew them, as one might say, from the living model. They were what they are for anyone to see; I described rather than invented them….”

  Mrs. Milne now turned her attention to Piglet. “But he’s too big!” she said, genuinely surprised. “He’s much too big. Piglet is supposed to be small, you know – small enough to fit into your hand or put into your pocket. Oh, no, this is not Piglet!” She was quite right, of course. Piglet was of a size so that he could be slipped into Christopher Robin’s pocket when Christopher went off to school. He had to be so small that he could fool Kanga (although only for an instant) into thinking that he was Roo. Even Eeyore makes a virtue of his size, although ambiguously: “‘About as big as Piglet,’ he said to himself sadly. ‘My favorite size. Well, well.’”