How the Heather Looks Page 7

  “Mommy, where have you been?” asked Ian. “I waited and waited and you didn’t come.”

  “And where have you been?” I asked, not to be outdone. “Didn’t you go into the cave? I distinctly saw you go into that cave and I expected to meet you there.”

  Ian shook his head in bewilderment. “Was I supposed to meet you in there? It’s kind of spooky!”

  I sat down on the sand. My knees felt weak. The young couple explained that Ian had been playing by himself and had seemed a little lost, so they had invited him to join them. He had asked them and several other people if they had seen me, but of course no one had. I told them of my experiences in the cave and we all had a good laugh. If mine was a little hollow I hoped they could forgive me. We sat and talked for a few minutes while I tried to wring out my be-draggled skirt, then Ian and I said good-by and set out at last to climb the steep zig-zag that led from the beach to the Inner Ward, to see if we could find, at last, a clue to the real Arthur.

  Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing a good seven hundred years after the historical event is supposed to have occurred, is the first to mention Tintagel in connection with Arthur and as his birthplace. In his day a Norman castle was built on the headland. Under it workmen found the remains of a Celtic monastery or collection of hermitages such as the early Welsh and Irish saints inhabited. The promontory would have made a natural fortress, especially as there are several wells on the island. It seemed a perfect place for the Duke of Cornwall to have put his wife for safekeeping from the lustful Uther Pendragon, and if there were already a company of hermits there, so much the better. It is Malory, writing in the fifteenth century, who tells us:

  When the duke had this warning, anon he went and furnished and garnished two strong castles of his, of the which the one hight Tintagil, and the other castle hight Terrabil. So his wife Dame Igraine he put in the castle of Tintagil, and himself he put in the castle of Terrabil, the which has many issues and posterns out.

  The Inner Ward of Tintagel has only one “issue and postern.” Ian and I climbed the steep and winding path, holding tightly to the handrail in some places and picking our way carefully where steps had been cut into the living rock. An amazing number of others were making the pilgrimage, most of them British, but a few foreigners, too. The path had been constructed in 1852 when the poems of Tennyson and nineteenth-century romanticism rekindled an interest in anything to do with Arthur, and now it is under the care of the Crown. We came at last to the gate, paid our shillings to the uniformed guard, and stepped onto the green and rolling carpet of the Inner Ward. Ahead of us were a Norman arch, broken walls and merlons, and unfinished steps leading into thin air. The whole place brought to mind those steel engravings by Maclise in old editions of the Idylls of the King and the lines from “Enid”:

  He looked and saw that all was ruinous.

  Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern;

  and here had fallen a great part of a tower,

  Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff,

  and like a crag was gay with wilding flowers:

  And high above a piece of turret stair,

  Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound

  Bare to the sun….

  Ian and I set out to explore the ruins. The island was larger than we had thought. There were several walls, and it was treacherously pitted with ankle-wrenching rabbit warrens. The rabbits, the guidebook said, had been imported and bred as a part of the food supply for the medieval monks. Despite the map at the entrance and the careful explanations in the guidebook, we found it difficult to keep the overlapping buildings and reconstructions straight in our minds. There were the Celtic hermitages, the medieval halls, the Norman chapel, the fourteenth-century prison, the fifteenth-century fortifications, the nineteenth-century reconstructions. But what matter? Here was physical proof of how Celtic legend could be incorporated in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, how Malory could provide a foundation for Tennyson, T. H. White, and a host of others.

  On our last evening in Tintagel we took the walk to St. Nectan’s Glen. It reminded me of some lines from Coleridge:

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon lover!

  I was struck afresh by the way in which the landscape seemed to fit the topography of my dreams. We came at last to a waterfall. The stream, making a tremendous leap from the height, had hollowed out a little basin halfway down where it swirled and foamed for a moment, then leaped forward again through a perfectly formed circle cut through a curtain of rock. It was the sort of place where one could expect to find a hermit’s cell or, running a wild boar to its lair, come upon the Green Knight.

  The next morning we set out on Quest again, bound for Glastonbury. We stopped in Camelford, not because we wanted to but because traffic was tied in a knot by a herd of cows gone astray in the middle of town. We were so bemused that we forgot to watch for Slaughter Bridge, the place where Arthur is said to have received his mortal wound from Mordred. Ian almost screwed his head from his neck trying to get a better look out of the rear window. I think he was hoping for blood stains, but the bridge that now spans the Camel is of modern brick. Dozmary Pool, where Sir Bediver flung Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, is on Bodmin Moor, near Camelford.

  Glastonbury is just a few hours from Tintagel, but it took us three days to get there. We drove north, cutting inland, until we reached the coast again at Bideford Bay. We stopped at Clovelly – everyone stops at Clovelly. It was terribly quaint, but self-consciously so. There were crowds of people dutifully climbing up and down the steep stairstep streets, peering in shop windows and eating ice cream “cornets.” Except for the donkeys, the place reminded us of Carmel, California. The donkeys are used to carry loads up from the quay, and for sixpence one can buy a ride for a child. We thought it a charming idea, but Lucy, usually unafraid of animals, howled during her entire sixpence ’orth. She was sleepy, and after the ride when we were halfway back to the car she found one of the few level spots in Clovelly – a wide, sunny doorstone – and she lay down and promptly went to sleep. John carried her the rest of the way up the hill.

  Back in the car, we looked at our map which showed us that we were near the town of Westward Ho! Of course! This was the very countryside from whence Sir Amyas Leigh and his brave men of Devon had embarked on their voyages. Ian was too young to appreciate Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! but John remembered it fondly and was anxious to turn off the main road to see if there were a house or a Kingsley museum we might have missed. The town proved rather disappointing, but thumbing through the Guide to the National Trust I came across reference to yet another old favorite, Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. Kipling went to school here, but his happiest hours were spent in a gorsey hideaway along the cliff edge, to which he and a company of friends would repair to read and talk and smoke forbidden cigarettes and stare out to sea. Now that I knew how close his school was to Tintagel I could better appreciate the intensity of Kipling’s lines from Puck of Pook’s Hill:

  I’ve seen [says Puck] Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou’westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the Hills wild with fright. Out they’d go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they’d be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again…. It was Magic-Magic as black as Merlin could make it and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hills picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!

  The strip of land along the cliff edge, where Stalky & Co. once skulked, has been presented to the National Trust as a memorial to Kipling. How Stalky would have enjoyed the irony – that the myopic Beetle sho
uld be the one so memorialized! We would have liked to stop and explore but we still thought we were in a hurry.

  We crossed the River Taw and stopped for petrol in Barnstaple. Lucy and I crossed the road to look at a bookshop and the shopkeeper, recognizing that we were Americans, showed us some guides to Exmoor and seemed to take it for granted that we would spend several days exploring it. It seemed rude to explain to him that we intended merely to skirt it as quickly as possible in order to drive on to Glastonbury. Just as John and Ian entered the shop he reached into a case and brought out a copy of Lorna Doone. The book was illustrated with photographs of places mentioned or described in the novel, and I could see John weaken before my eyes. “Might take a look at just a few of the places,” he said, and when the man went on to talk of wild ponies and sheep-dog trials and badgers and red deer and otters, Ian was completely captivated. We did not know it then, but the bookseller had not only sold a book, he had talked us into two whole days in Exmoor.

  I am glad he did. I cannot give a clear account of our wanderings there because we seemed to spend most of our time being lost, but no matter, since the countryside was wild and beautiful. We never did find the wild ponies or see a red deer, but once we came upon a little stone bridge near an old mill and the children put on their bathing suits and went swimming in the river. Later from maps and pictures and careful reading and rereading of the book, we found that they had been paddling within a few yards of where Tarka the Otter, of Henry Williamson’s beautiful story, was born.

  To us, the most amazing thing about this West Country was first its wildness and variety. There are bleak moors, hidden valleys, thick forests, deep swift rivers, beautiful little villages, and trim little sea-coast resorts. It is a whole world in itself and I suppose that is why writers have been attracted to it. We did not find the waterfall up which John Ridd climbed when he first met Lorna Doone, but we did find Doone Valley, where the outlaws had lived. It is so narrow that, whenever two cars meet, one of them has to back up. The next day we found the farmhouse which is supposed to be the one where John Ridd lived, and we stopped at Oare church nearby. Lucy was sleeping in my lap, but Ian and John went inside to see the interior and the window through which Carver Doone was supposed to have shot Lorna as she stood before the altar in her bridal clothes. John had read bits of the book aloud the night before, but did not realize how literally Ian had taken it until he begged to be allowed to look for bullet holes.

  Surely among the most unusual books about Exmoor – “by children, about children, and for children” – are the Oxus books written by Katherine Hull and Pamela Whitlock when they were fourteen years old. Using Arthur Ransome’s books about the Lake Country as a springboard (rather than a model), the two girls while at boarding school planned and executed a complete manuscript about a group of children riding and camping on Exmoor. They sent their unwieldy efforts to Mr. Ransome, asking his advice about presenting it to a publisher. At first suspicious that he was the victim of a hoax and that the book was really the product of an adult imagination, Mr. Ransome proceeded with caution. To his amazement he discovered that the two girls had written the entire book in secret, using the backs of old exercise books so as not to arouse suspicion by the purchase of large supplies of paper.

  Cautioning the young authors to secrecy, Mr. Ransome took the manuscript to his own publisher and then entered into further correspondence with them about the practical aspects of editing, cutting, and having the manuscript typed. He himself wrote the introduction, setting forth the history and evolution of the book and including some of the correspondence. One paragraph, which he quotes in full, should be learned by heart by all would-be writers:

  You may think there is an excessive amount of red ink splashed over the typewriting, but we tried to cross out four main things. Firstly, any parts which were misleading or didn’t fit into the story. Secondly, any unnecessary and drivelling descriptions. It’s funny how when writing you feel you have to make points clear and then, on reading it over, you find it is all repetition. Thirdly, we got rid of all useless words like rather, quite, very definitely, etc.; and any words which we disliked, such as children, graceful, poised, etc. Lastly we knocked out all the passages we loathed but which somehow managed to squirm their way in.

  I wonder what an imaginative English teacher could do by supplementing the indestructible Lorna Doone with readings from Tarka the Otter (such beautiful, taut prose) and the youthfully zestful Oxus books? The last are out of print, but those who knew them when young are tenaciously loyal to their memory. Girls, especially, respond to these stories. I once read that Mrs. John F. Kennedy, when asked about her favorite books as a child, answered that she had liked most some books about camping and riding on Exmoor. There were no titles given, but in answer to my written inquiry, her secretary wrote that Mrs. Kennedy wished to inform me that the Oxus books were indeed her favorites as a child, and that they had been given to her by her grandmother.

  CHAPTER 5

  Down to Camelot

  We had been lost in the Forest Sauvage and had wandered about like King Pellinore, but we had not forgotten our Quest for Arthur. Perhaps we had been dazed or mazed or bewitched because we hardly knew what to expect at Glastonbury and it was only afterward that we discovered how much we had missed. I will not go so far as to say that everything went wrong, but nothing seemed to go right either.

  As we drove toward the town we saw a great hill, the ancient Tor, that stuck up from the surrounding landscape and seemed to dominate all the country around with its tower atop, but when we actually drove into the narrow streets, that strange green hill seemed to have disappeared. We parked the car and walked into the Abbey grounds, only to be taken aback by the number of souvenir shops and books stalls just inside. The Abbey is under neither the Crown nor the National Trust and there seemed to be no authorized guidebook. Not that there wasn’t all sorts of “literature” for sale, most of it making the most extravagant claims! We finally chose a comparatively innocuous little pamphlet and hoped for the best. King Arthur seemed farther away than ever.

  I know now what was wrong. We were approaching Glastonbury from the wrong point in time, the wrong point of view. We were too sophisticated; we thought we knew more than we really did. It was all very well to tell Ian that of course there would be no island, that the marshes had been drained centuries ago, to intimate that it was childish to think of Avalon in such literal terms. Why an island? What difference did it make? But an island is distinctive, individual. An island is magic. And, of course, we should have known to tell Ian that it was not so very long ago that the marshes were drained away, that a fairly large lake, five miles in circumference, was still on the maps as Meare Pool in the seventeenth century, and that even in the nineteenth century an intricate system of ditches and drains was needed to keep the land from being lost again.

  In 1892 an antiquarian became curious about some mounds in the area, discovered that workmen had unearthed bones and artifacts while tending the dikes, and subsequently directed the excavation of two amazing “lake villages” of the same type that had been already discovered in Switzerland. Large piles had been driven into the peat to support a man-made island of immense logs held together by a cement of clay. The village which had once existed at Godney was about three acres in size and connected to the mainland by a drawbridge and causeway.

  The people who lived there flourished about 300 B.C. Jacquetta Hawkes, in a beautiful little book called Early Britain, paints an idyllic sketch of what life must have been like in the lake villages. They were Bronze Age people, similar to those described by Rosemary Sutcliffe in Warrior Scarlet, although Miss Sutcliffe’s red-haired, freckle-faced hero lived high on the Sussex downs several hundred years before the lake village was built. But Drem and his people were of the same La Tène culture, and it is with a pang that I realize we could have visited the Glastonbury Museum and seen examples of the marvelously wrought collars and bracelets and delicate fibulae with which the
Celts adorned themselves.