ninth day—streatley to east hendred, by upton and hagbourne hill farm
when i started from streatley to see the western half of the icknield way it was with several uncertainties. i knew that the icknield way was not the ridgeway, but a lower road which was in several places not more than a mile or two away from it. this lower road, it has been said, was the wantage-to-reading turnpike for part at least of its course; one writer’s road clearly lay south of this turnpike; another had expressed a doubt whether it was the turnpike or a road to the south. the decision that the icknield way in berkshire was distinct from the ridgeway had added this difficulty; that the ridgeway, supposing it to have come up from the ford at streatley, must have been a road from beyond the thames, and what that road was i had not discovered, though it had been suggested that it was the upper icknield way. but if the icknield way of oxfordshire and the icknield way of berkshire were linked, it must have been at streatley, though it may also have been at other fords.
moulsford bottom.
the first half-mile of the main road through streatley to wantage is the beginning of the ridgeway’s ascent; but a little past the fork to wallingford the ridgeway becomes separate from this main road, and goes westward out of it. there was at first no possibility of an alternative out of streatley to the west, and i set out on the same road as when i followed the ridgeway. on my left i saw “lyndhurst,” “bellevue,” and “montefiore,” or their more expensive equivalents. i ignored the first coombe, the turning up it of the ridgeway, and went on upon the roadside grass bordered[272] with wormwood and traveller’s joy. almost at once the road crossed the entrance to another coombe running up westward into the moulsford downs, and those woods which the ridgeway skirts on the south. it was a shallow coombe, the sides dappled with thorns, the bottom covered with corn, and in the midst of it a barn called well barn. through the mouth of the coombe which opened towards the river in the east i saw the pale corn, and the dark woods above it, of the chilterns. crossing this coombe the road had no hedges, but corn on both sides. it was usually hedgeless, but banked as it went up and down, and dipped into another coombe of the same kind called moulsford bottom, where a quarter-mile north of the thirteenth milestone from wantage a road came in from the south stoke ferry, the continuation, perhaps, of a track from the icknield way near ipsden. from moulsford bottom the main road went visibly curving uphill, but from the top of kingstanding hill, at three hundred feet, it went straight between its low hedges and grassy banks towards blewburton hill. it had still corn on both sides in stooks, downs on the left, and on the right the valley of dark trees stretching far away into mist. it was a plain, well-kept road of easy gradients, no corners, and such banks or hedges that anything approaching in front could be seen. it lacked the company of telegraph wires.
the villages of aston were almost completely hidden on my right, as i passed within a third of a mile of them. that was by the eleventh milestone from wantage, and there the road was following along and under one of the low, natural walls of chalk which so often guide a road and are in turn defined by it. my road, icknield way or not, went hedgeless under this wall, with oats above and stubble below. the flowers on its narrow green edges were chiefly yellow parsnip and white carrot, both dear for their scents, and succory, that pale blue flower which a strange fate has closely attached to the coarsest and stiffest of dark stems and placed where dust is likely to be most thick.
here the dust was thick, and i was glad to feel, to hear, to smell and to taste, and to see the rain falling as i passed the “barley mow” at blewbury. according to custom i stood under the broad, overhanging eaves of one of blewbury’s thatched roofs and watched the rain, but it was better to be in it and to smell the wetted dust which association alone has made pleasant. any road was good now, though mine was an unadventurous, level, probably commercial, road.
but, rain or no rain, i was looking for an excuse to leave this road at upton, the next village, which is by the ninth milestone. the map had shown me a road, or an almost continuous line of pieces running from upton westward to lockinge park, and on the east possibly connected with the roads i had already travelled between little stoke and upton by way of lollingdon farm, aston, and blewbury, but traversing land near upton which is liable to floods. either this road or the turnpike was the icknield way, because a more northern[274] road would be too low, and no more southern one had left any traces.
a hundred yards or so before the road i was on bridged the didcot, newbury, and southampton railway i noticed the line of a hedge leaving on the left at an acute angle, and forming a triangle with the railway and road for its other sides. as an old road is not likely to form such triangular fields, except with the help of a new branch, it occurred to me that this branching hedge marked an earlier or original line of the same road, or of one coming from upton village, and there connected with the field roads from blewbury and aston. across the railway another hedge and a depression that might once have been a road continued this line and led naturally into a lane turning out of the main road on the left beyond the bridge and passing upton vicarage. i supposed that when the railway cutting was made to have left these crossing roads in their original state would have meant making two bridges or one very broad one necessary. the courses, therefore, were slightly altered, so that, instead of a crossing or “four-went way,” there was a road receiving a branch at one side of the bridge, and a second branch from an opposite direction, the left, at the other side. but on referring to the old six-inch ordnance map, made before the railway, i found that i was mistaken. the amended crossing may have been made when the old road was superseded by the turnpike. this left-hand road being the likely-looking road on the map, i followed it, especially[275] as the main road, half a mile beyond, by the “horse and harrow,” at west hagbourne, took a right-angled turn which suggested a piecing together of two older roads, an east-and-west one and a north-and-south one.
my conjectural road began as a hedged lane that formed a short cut into the road to east ilsley and newbury. crossing that road it was a cart track—with a disused, parallel course on the right—over hagbourne hill, past hagbourne hill farm, which was derelict, but had sunflowers in the garden and ricks in the yard. less than a furlong south of the farm is a supposed roman burial-ground. a home-returning carter told me that the first part of the road as far as the crossing was baits or bates lane. it was a cart track, or usually a strip of three or four parallel cart tracks, going parallel with the downs, and almost straight between one road and the next that came from over the downs northward to the villages. it could easily make a straight course, like all the other roads round about, because it was on an almost unbroken plateau of cornland at the foot of the downs: so level was this piece of country that in about four miles the altitudes varied only between three hundred and eighty and four hundred feet. between me and the downs there were seldom any trees, except such few as stood by downs farm, its thatched barns, its old and new ricks. on the right a slight swell in the land often shut out everything but distant oxfordshire under a blue, bulging threat of storm. the road was for the[276] most part without hedges, and not a parish boundary. it was rarely or never sunken, but in places might have been a little embanked. on one side, shortly before reaching the newbury road, there were two old thorns. half a mile farther, after crossing hungerford lane—a track from milton hill to farnborough—it had a line of elm trees on its left, which was part of the enclosure of arfield farm, close by. i thought arfield—on the new one-inch ordnance maps spelt aldfield—might be the same as halvehill. the cottage pronunciation, except that it lacked an aspirate, was not discouraging. halvehill barn was said to be on the ickleton street or meer, but on inquiry i learnt that it was some way from my road down hungerford lane to the north, but on this side of the main road, which was here about a mile distant. this barn is now called horn down barn.
past arfield farm the road had hedges until it came to the tussocky little “arfield common,” so called, but perhaps not so in fact. here there were several forking cartways. mine seemed to go westward along the northern hedge and its traveller’s joy, but at the west side of the common, where cow lane comes in from hendred, there was a gap of a hundred yards or so before the old line was taken up by a road from the south-east, which led me into the road to east hendred. this was a little more than three miles from the beginning of the road at upton.
east hendred.
as i had had as much rain as i wanted on my skin, i turned downhill under a long train of[277] lombardy poplars and very lanky ash trees into east hendred for the night. it was a thatched village built on the slopes of a little valley, its houses standing snugly or in short rows high above either side of the steep streets. they stood high because the streets were very old and worn into deep hollows, and at the edges of these ran narrow, cobbled paths; but the cottages were still higher up, and four or five stone steps led up from the paths to their doors. at the bottom stood the towered[278] church, telling the hours and the quarters, not with clock-face and hands, but with bells. rain, however, drowned that sweet noise in a mightier sweetness, heavy and straight rain, and no wind except what itself created. for half an hour everything—trees, mud walls, thatch, old weatherboards, pale-coloured, timbered cottages, the old chapel at a crossing railed off as a sign of private possession—everything was embedded in rain. every sound was the rain. for example, i thought i heard bacon frying in a room near by, with a noise almost as loud as the pig made when it was stuck; but it was the rain pouring steadily off the inn roof. then in the dripping quiet afterwards the sunset blazed in little fragments like gorgeous glass and metal betwixt the black garden foliage.
before i went to bed an intelligent, unprejudiced man told me that the field-way i had followed was ickleton street or—he said it with some shyness—ickleton meer. i had asked no leading questions, so that his name seemed certainly the local though perhaps not invariable one. from his description and map knowledge i felt no doubt that this was the road mentioned in wise’s antiquities of berkshire (1695) as ploughed up in wantage east field, but visible from lockinge park, eastward almost the whole way to upton, through the parishes of ardington, east hendred, harwell, and west hagbourne.
it is strange that that same identification was not made in a book published in 1905. i mean miss eleanor g. hayden’s travels round our villages.[279] she lived at west hendred, yet described her village as lying between two roads known on the map as the “portway” (the main road between wantage and reading) and ickleton street, adding that they were known “locally as the ‘turnpike’ and the ‘ridgeway.’” evidently she had not heard the people talk of “ickleton street” or “ickleton meer.” yet her books prove her familiar with country people and country places as are few writers of country books. her travels and her turnpike travellers and islands of the vale gave the materials for an exceptionally full picture of country life. nothing was beneath her, and her love was equal to her curiosity. she was exceptionally modest, and put down everything with no obvious intention except fidelity to her own eyes and ears. she could be dull, and if you opened the book at random you might be disappointed; but if you read a whole chapter you were certain to be delighted. so many books are written by bungalow countrymen that we have got used to pretty things, surprising things, pathetic things, country equivalents of the music-halls and museums of towns. there were plenty of good things in miss hayden’s books. she was not afraid of quoting country talk at some length for its own sake, but she did not miss such things as the cottager’s “strutty little hen,” who was “a deal better christ’n nor many what calls themselves sich,” and the lonely shepherd’s answer to the question what he and his family did without a doctor—“we just dies a nat’ral death.” she appeared to make good books[280] as others darn stockings, because of the abundant material. she gave a natural monotony and a natural charm. she showed us a village girl curtseying seven times to the crescent moon; children playing with the old mill machinery after the cheap loaf had killed it; labourers at a tug-of-war over a brook; a cavalier and lady of the old manor-house; a crossing stream, a beautiful garden, a village kitchen, a recipe for christmas pudding and one for sloe gin, and many things from old parish accounts. but nobody bought her books. if she had given them to some journalist to mince, spice, warm, and dish up, he might have made a book of the season from them, and by now it would have been dead. hers will last somehow or another as long as an old wall.
i lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before i fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. it was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. long i lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. he was muttering: the all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. in the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. the midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. i am alone in the dark still night, and my ear[281] listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more. i have been glad of the sound of rain, and wildly sad of it in the past; but that is all over as if it had never been; my eye is dull and my heart beating evenly and quietly; i stir neither foot nor hand; i shall not be quieter when i lie under the wet grass and the rain falls, and i of less account than the grass. the summer is gone, and never can it return. there will never be any summer any more, and i am weary of everything. i stay because i am too weak to go. i crawl on because it is easier than to stop. i put my face to the window. there is nothing out there but the blackness and sound of rain. neither when i shut my eyes can i see anything. i am alone. once i heard through the rain a bird’s questioning watery cry—once only and suddenly. it seemed content, and the solitary note brought up against me the order of nature, all its beauty, exuberance, and everlastingness like an accusation. i am not a part of nature. i am alone. there is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without. once there was summer, and a great heat and splendour over the earth terrified me and asked me what i could show that was worthy of such an earth. it smote and humiliated me, yet i had eyes to behold it, and i prostrated myself, and by adoration made myself worthy of the splendour. was i not once blind to the splendour because there was something within me equal to itself? what was it? love ... a name! ... a word! ... less than the watery question of the bird out in the rain. the rain has drowned the splendour. everything is drowned and dead, all that was once lovely and alive in the world, all that had once been alive and was memorable though dead is now dung for a future that is infinitely less than the falling dark rain. for a moment the mind’s eye and ear pretend to see and hear what the eye and ear themselves once knew with delight. the rain denies. there is nothing to be seen or heard, and there never was. memory, the last chord of the lute, is broken. the rain has been and will be for ever over the earth. there never was anything but the dark rain. beauty and strength are as nothing to it. eyes could not flash in it.
i have been lying dreaming until now, and now i have awakened, and there is still nothing but the rain. i am alone. the unborn is not more weak or more ignorant, and like the unborn i wait and wait, knowing neither what has been nor what is to come, because of the rain, which is, has been, and must be. the house is still and silent, and those small noises that make me start are only the imagination of the spirit or they are the rain. there is only the rain for it to feed on and to crawl in. the rain swallows it up as the sea does its own foam. i will lie still and stretch out my body and close my eyes. my breath is all that has been spared by the rain, and that comes softly and at long intervals, as if it were trying to hide itself from the rain. i feel[283] that i am so little i have crept away into a corner and been forgotten by the rain. all else has perished except me and the rain. there is no room for anything in the world but the rain. it alone is great and strong. it alone knows joy. it chants monotonous praise of the order of nature, which i have disobeyed or slipped out of. i have done evilly and weakly, and i have left undone. fool! you never were alive. lie still. stretch out yourself like foam on a wave, and think no more of good or evil. there was no good and no evil. there was life and there was death, and you chose. now there is neither life nor death, but only the rain. sleep as all things, past, present, and future, lie still and sleep, except the rain, the heavy, black rain falling straight through the air that was once a sea of life. that was a dream only. the truth is that the rain falls for ever and i am melting into it. black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. in a little while or in an age—for it is all one—i shall know the full truth of the words i used to love, i knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: “blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”
