Beach
In May 1941, a few weeks before my third birthday, my parents moved from Greenway Farm in Westbury on-
Beach spread-
Later I became convinced that the information Lesley Watts found so necessary to pass on was the names of the fields comprising the farm and which became a major part of our lives.
In May 1941, a few weeks before my third birthday, my parents moved from Greenway Farm in Westbury on-
Beach spread-
Part of rural mentality is to accept the given without question, and in this case we never asked whether other farms and similar field names. One peculiarity of the farms in Beach was that their fields were not contiguous, but dispersed throughout the hamlet, maybe even beyond its boundaries. Upland Farm was not the worst in this respect, but six of its fifteen fields were outlying and as these had names, it was assumed that the fields of other farms lying between them also had similar names. Nevertheless the only names I ever heard other farmers use were of the type, the big field or the five-
Beach was bounded in the south east by a hill with a trig point at a summit, a part of the Cotswold scarp. We called it Lansdown, but to my father it was ‘The Peak of Derby’ though I never heard anyone else use this name. Although people spoke of Hanging Hill, no-
The northern boundary was marked by a small brook (The source of the Nile) that flowed through Grandmother’s Rock and joined the river Boyd (Fisher King) perhaps a mile before Golden Valley. The disappointing thing about this brook was that fish, plentiful in the Boyd, would not live in it, neither was there much water vegetation. The western boundary was the ill-
Beach was in the parish of Bitton, a village at the end of Golden Valley known for its paper mill where the paper for the wonderful old cream-
In almost all respects, Beach was overshadowed by its neighbours and few inhabitants of either Bath or Bristol had heard of it, even though the 'Big House' belonged to the Butler family and Churchill is reputed to stayed there at some time during the War. A prototype model of the typhoon fighter plane crashed into one of our apple trees, and airmen were billeted on us for several weeks, but this was not headline news.
Despite its present obscurity, the name of Beach shares with a handful of other places in the environs of Bath a distinctive honour. It appears very prominently in the first true geological map made anywhere in the world; William Smith's circular map, a forerunner to his more famous map of the geology of England and Part of Scotland.
In the top left hand segment (at about 11 o’clock) the name Beach appears in large letters just over the county boundary in South Gloucestershire. Of the surrounding villages only North Stoke has comparable prominence.
This was a hamlet with fifteen houses,
two miles long and one mile wide,
spread out.
Once, they said,
there had been six inns
and no church,
but none of that is certain.
What was certain though,
was that within two years,
three young men,
eldest sons,
were called to meet their maker.
Haresfield, Rushgrove,
yes, there’s magic there.
Cowleaze, Fairwells,
sounds to linger on.
Imagine from the air
that map of green and brown
and each one with a name
known only to its own.
Hedges and walls, not fences, mark them off.
If one should be removed,
a myriad things, or none, named or un-
are dispossessed
and one or other name, or both, or none,
must then be lost.
Not two miles away
surrounded on three sides by hills,
an brick hut
in a wood
with a water hammer.
Someone had set it thumping and left it alone.
To us it seemed like the soul of the echo,
because there was an echo in those hills
like a phantom fullback,
darting this way or that,
and clutching your voice to retrieve it.
But I suppose the point was
that unless you had seen that round iron dome
thumping day and night,
filling the hills with sound
then dying,
you might not believe it.
Further down the valley, where it was always Sunday,
grew two great Cedars.
Cedars of Lebanon with fronds like down-
Fortunately Solomon had not seen them,
or, if he had,
in his wisdom
had left them alone.
When I was seven or eight years old,
I was given a shilling for my birthday.
A beautiful coin;
just the right size to be what it was
and to mean what it meant.
But I dropped it.
Lost in the grass
and gone without trace.
Had I been asked,
"What do you use it for?"
"What did you spend it on?"
I could have said,
"I used it to buy time."or
"I bought time with it ."
A single square of time,
with sunshine, grass and clover stalks;
buttercups in bloom and silver falling.
But I did not know that then.
Between Rushgrove and Haresfield
lay a grassy path called Killboylane.1
In summer we would walk this way to school
past other fields,
and other farms,
the withy bed,
the wheat-
We must have been too deep absorbed to think
that, somewhere on this path,
part overgrown,
a boy lay dead.
Three questions might be asked.
Where, when and how,
but weren’t.
Again the wheat-
(the sun-
and flower there still,
but we walked by
and they left us behind.
And what they make me think is this,
one day will be a time
a place,
a reason;
only mine.
She was only five
and she walked out from behind a bus.
Her parents died that day
and again very much later when their plane crashed into a hillside
coming in to land in low cloud.
"Do you believe in Ghosts?"
"I don’t think so."
"Then what was that you saw at the foot of the stairs
one night in your sleep?"
"A man and a woman
holding an old-
and starting to climb."
"So why should your voice fail to sound
as you slunk back to bed?"
The village was haunted by the ghosts of old houses
The tumble-
the old lime kiln
and here the barest of outlines,
noticed only because lilacs never grow wild.
A site never mentioned,
though each year came a time to remember
When you wondered
how long would it take to lower the house
to its foundations,
or when it happened,
supposing somebody needed the stones,
which of course they would not
because stones grow in this ground,
stunting the main crop,
it seemed to be saying that flesh outlived bone.
Then we remembered laughter
and children lost in the garden,
drifting on two kinds of time;
the time of stones, that goes forward
and lilac time, that goes back.
Paths through the fields
are paths through our lives
that only on mushroom days
do we ever leave.
Those paths that have taken so many men
and so many journeys
even to keep them open.
The disadvantage is
that they may entrain,
that we will not raise our eyes and look;
but he did
and we followed.
He used the name like one who has seen the world.
The shape, so familiar,
a land-
in the narrow prow of the field,
beyond the isthmus where the path crossed,
Life-
pure white.
What act of breeding created it
filling the light like an angel
never descending,
but gone now, as others have,
over the flooded earth
to find land
and to bring back either the golden leaf
or the merry leaf
in its beak
according to our choice.
This was a place built for a purpose,
but what that purpose was
bears little relation to freedom and light and air,
although it depended on them,
but other men’s gold or joy
has been bought here
and laid down
layer upon layer.
They were sweethearts, soon to be betrothed
who signed the pledge renouncing Satan and his works,
(at least the ones they understood)
until that harvest time
he passed the Inn, turned, and after agonised debate
entered those gates for lemonade.
We should be certain here that love for lemonade is not a crime
In fact it draws us in, gets us involved
as in that torrid time
it did to him.
That part was not in doubt.
The one who told her
hoped only to stop his fall.
He lost his chance with barren reason then,
but took the daughter of the vine instead
and died of drink, she of a broken heart.
But stranger still
that self-
held charge of boys and girls
while parents slept.
Having a bath in front of the fire on a Saturday night.
A once-
in the galvanised tub.
The patchy flecks of zinc,
(fingered hands of metal pointing different ways)
and so distinct.
Galvanised, they said, but,
surely not.
Surely it must have been granulated in;
those granules scattered down,
and in some witches kitchen,
rolled on with a red-
Hidden away at the top of the hill,
hard green sand dunes.
Ideal for a Sunday School treat
(or a small local war)
except it was rather like taking a mystery tour
to your own front lawn.
Shapes that might have been made by men digging flints,
or earthing up bodies
then left to lie still.
There was also a statue of George and his dragon and horse,
naming the battle.
How you can see it,
men waving their swords and running from tummock to tummock
and shouting,
"You’re dead!"
or heart beating in hiding.
It was then we learned
that nothing happened close at hand.
Wars that count were fought on fields
with names like Naseby,
flat like Marston Moor
and fighting men were laid in Christian graves,
not pagan mounds.
Oh Good Lord!
have you not met the Fisher King?
You could see him further down the road
like the pelican that dips its beak in blood.
You could see him where the river bends
and
in the corner
where the stream, elsewhere so shallow
becomes deep enough to swim,
where sand collects and shelves toward the dark.
Someone has drowned there,
or so they say
hoping to warn us.
Someone has met his death
by water.
"Give me a light to lighten my darkness."
But this was an electric light
with bare wires under a car,
and it darkened their lightness.
Fairwells, Farewells?
That’s the one I find hard to remember.
The field by the crossroads
where he last drove his horse and cart
that ran, out of control.
Son he was called,
to distinguish him from his father.
Just past Fairwells it happened
and they said
it need not have been so bad,
but for the dry stone wall.
In those days, in the spring, young men,
full grown,
but not too old to sing,
would often enter ploughing competitions.
Here you ought to note,
no point in entering at all,
either in ploughing or in singing
if Alec Watts should throw his hat
into the ring.
The field, a curving western hillside
destined to become a cloth of gold,
where the Judges
rustic men of substance
hold the furrowed lines
in one embracing view.
But, in their ancient wisdom
what criteria of promise,
or achievement, did they use?
The skill to overturn a maidens heart
and lay her smooth and yielding;
or the wit to seek for fortune
one spade deep,
or enter into some old promise
with the earth?
But, for those
Who stood outside the ring,
the only things we saw
were neat straight furrows
and a tidy headland.
"Did you take her to the bluebell woods?"
he asked, but not as an old voyeur
for he had been there and he knew.
He came to this village after the war,
an evacuee,
or a boy who could not be kept,
and he married the mother’s daughter,
(or so he thought!)
and they lived in a quaint little house
and walked in the bluebell woods;
a lover and his lass,
brother and sister,
Hansel and Gretel,
der and das.
This was not the Nile,
that had been flowing, as far as we knew,
from its source in the hills
for more than six thousand years,
but our own stream
and it never occurred to us
that it had a source,
at least one that we should find,
until we learned of those explorers in Africa.
There was the same feeling, of course,
going beyond the edge of the known.
though the journey took no more than an afternoon.
What did we see?
To summarise;
exploring this stream meant
paddling its length
looking for pools where danger lay,
or where fish might hide between narrow banks
overgrown by nut, brambles, hawthorn and ash,
opening out to those holiday places where cows came to drink,
then plunging on,
in to the dark unknown.
Finally, and I shall always remember this,
the stream emerged from an open meadow,
utterly foreign,
but we could only marvel at what happened next
where the ground started to climb
and in a small hollow, surrounded by bushes
the water emerged;
uncaring spring.
We had found it, and not found it.
The mystery had eluded us.
We had travelled from not knowing that anything had a beginning,
to knowing that some things have no beginning
and returned home
whole,
balanced,
stronger and more complete
than
if beside the spring
had found the Virgin Mary
with her infant child,
or over a rise,
a silver lake lay shining in the sun.
The old-
as long as those who saw them working live.
You who never saw one, and will not do now,
should know of summer; harvest;
sheaves built into stacks to dry,
and how, one autumn day
a wooden fort appeared
foursquare as a boar brought in to stud; the busy grin.
If complexity of sight and sound and smell is life,
this lived.
The soul was called the drum
I never saw one, or how it worked.
But all could see the lapping wooden tongues regurgitating straw,
the pipe for blowing chaff, that curved and fell,
a dusty, rising cone.
The Thresher ruled!
Kneeling by the drum, he took each sheaf in turn.
And did he cross himself?
Then with his penknife cut the string
like cutting chickens throats,
and did they cry?
Well if they did, no sound escaped above the throbbing hum .
For those who stood no higher than a sheaf of corn
the one task safe from pitchforks, turning belts and wheels,
watching the wooden shutters where the grain emerged
to let the heavy stream flow through each hand;
seven gates that poured our tens of years
from fat to lean.
What part in this was played by cider,
hot sweet tea?
The work of taking stacks of straw apart
was not so hard as all that passed before.
The feeling when the farmer wiped his brow at harvest time,
the satisfaction of a job half done,
was not here now.
Once the Thresher fell into the drum.
We don’t know how high priests ascend to heaven,
but that he did.
Another time, the false teeth went alone.
For you who never knew them, and will not do now;
two ears that brought forth thirty-
threshed clean.
Those far scenes, not as distant as this newer sight.
Gone are the men and sweat,
dogs chasing rats, the thrill
of sheaves becoming bedding straw;
the mounds of sacks.
And was there corn in Egypt?
Is there still?
So it has come to this,
you are not dead then,
Oh Kitchener Axford!
I thought my boat
had no mooring lines,
no anchor chains to drag,
but there was one,
Kitchener Axford.
Our paths crossed for just a few years
beyond the school-
(dust of our dust).
Everyone else grew
but you must not.
Your name belongs there.
The future has no place for it.
It must remain
tied down in long-
We are the same age then,
you and I,
but where my fifty extra years
made a hurried path to now,
yours did not,
but sloped slowly up
through the late forties
into the early fifties
and then
doubled back.
Can we say,
"Your country needs you"
twice fleshed there?
And that from 1914 or thereabouts
an accusing finger, or a finger of despair, points out
into the fast receding future.
He lived down the road.
The next place on the left,
a wooden hut, on someone else’s land.
Thomas Hook.
Tom Hook.
He went off to the war
walking to camp at Liverpool,
along the railway track
(that’s what he said)
and came back changed.
And what we used to do;
throw apples on his roof to hear him swear
but, next day, pass him in the road,
"Mornin Tom."
"Ow be!"
As far as we could see
he had no envy of the big house where the gentry lived
that had not only water, but taps to draw it from,
and touched his cap
and said
"Good mornin ma'am"
"Yes, it's more so!"
Tickled pink, he must have been
to hear those words,
remember them
and pass them on.
There were others, but this one stands out.
He was old, but appeared to be ageless.
A man who had sold his soul to the spirit of late summer
and cheeks once red, though cheerful, were pale as dumplings
Harry Rowley!
It suited him well,
a man from an older time.
Now he and his type have probably gone to ground
or sell and buy other things.
True to his name
there was something wonderfully froglike about him,
with a queer ancient hat, his voice and his odd plastic smile.
He was a dealer, known to be shrewd.
It was said that people like him, and his clients,
unable to count in numberless sums,
sized up the worth in pieces of silver
and sealed the deal with a nod and a word.
You could see them at market
playing a kind of chess with cattle for pieces.
When he came, my father and he walked the fields, as they put it,
"to look at the beasts",
Then sat with us at dinner.
to eat apple pie with custard or cream.
Later the lorry arrived
and the back wound down
to make an attractive track.
Always the animals tried to refuse,
though bars aided their hooves.
Shouting occurred and swearing perhaps (kindly meant)
and then they were gone. Sold on
to other farms
and to live among their adopted friends.
(sometimes the trade turned).
Nevertheless the wooden slats
seemed to spell the single word,
pain.
And all around,
although we could not detect it,
the sweet and unmistakable smell of fear.
Who was thy neighbour
He lived down the road.
The next place on the left,
a wooden hut, on someone else’s land.
Thomas Hook.
Tom Hook.
He went off to the war
walking to camp at Liverpool,
along the railway track
(that’s what he said)
and came back changed.
And what we used to do;
throw apples on his roof to hear him swear
but, next day, pass him in the road,
"Mornin Tom."
"Ow be!"
As far as we could see
he had no envy of the big house where the gentry lived
that had not only water, but taps to draw it from,
and touched his cap
and said
"Good mornin maam"
"Yes, it's more so!"
Tickled pink, he must have been
to hear those words,
remember them
and pass them on.
One day he went to prison.
Failing to pay his tithes.
He wasn’t long inside
just a short sharp shock;
"and they give I a bath
t’were enough to kill I!"
All very well to smile
how did you think it was?
Gentle maids with soap-
saying
"There, there Tom"
and "Welcome home."
rather like that other Tom
whose soul ascended white;
but he had years to run before that came to pass.
If you wished to make a place
that everyone would notice,
you could do worse
than find a round, isolated hill
and plant a walled copse of trees on top.
Then if you wished to be alone,
you could do worse
than walk there among them.
"And what is this room,
dusty over the dairy in the old limestone farm house;
long, wedge-
"This is the cheese-
And it became The Cheeseroom, which it remains.
Now, when the contents of all others
are parcelled out into their bin-
the Cheeseroom remains,
one corner that cannot be emptied, and yet
there are no ghosts there.
"Off with its head!" yelled the Queen,or was it the Duchess?
Which may have explained why the grandfather clock mechanism
was stored on its side, awaiting repair
and meanwhile, teaching the principles of escapement,
not so easily learned. And what happened then?
My sister distributed all of those models of Alice,
including the Duchess, to friends in her class,
only to find they were not hers to give.
We remembered the riddle,
'what I give away I keep,' etc.,
but this was a gift
and God had not, at that time, revealed
the secret of gifts that may not be passed on.
She did not know this and, in consequence,
the Duchess was extremely severe.
Of course, the Cheeseroom, low at the back,
was the place to avoid in the dark, but, as I said,
there were no ghosts in the Cheeseroom,
except one, walking asleep, climbed into a trunk
filled with smothering cloth,
but the lid would not close.
Alice, of course, encountered it all,
though we did not know this.
From one side you grow and one shrink,
and get out of, or into,
many a tight situation, even in dreams.
She did not know this,
and neither did we,
but, as I said,
There were no ghosts in the Cheeseroom,
even then.
From there
once in a lifetime
you could see the Welsh mountains.
Snowdon, Plynlimon, Cader Idris
and the Black Mountains, Waun Fach, Pen Allt-
Either the light brings them near,
or something else,
as though a carpet rolled out
makes a special path
which says
"these are yours".
When they come
do not confuse the burning range
with a wall of mist in the valley floor.
Another day frogs lay dead on the road,
but the third sign never appeared
unless something that looked like a distant tornado
was coursing the Severn
one evening at hay-
Any sentence containing the word 'real' retains exactly the same meaning if this word is deleted. A.J. Ayer (attrib).
Yes, we had found this word ‘real’ and crossed it out
and then 'hey presto'
as if my magic,
nothing changed and nothing remained the same,
but is this also true of 'unreal' or 'folly'?
So here was Brown and this was his folly,
and it was our folly was to go there at night.
We heard the night sounds,
but I will leave these to your darkness-
as for us, this was a journey with no end or beginning;
only a hillcrest with the tower
rising from invisible ground to never existent sky.
"In your opinion then, was this tower square,
that is, did it have the four usual sides,
or were any missing,
and can you see another one like it here?"
"Your Honour, I must object!
My client was observing at night
with neither a torch nor guide
he could hardly be
expected to answer such questions;
the tower is no more to him now than
a shadow in mist. "
"Objection sustained!"
So that was it then!
It had been nothing,
only a name
and is now less than a dream,
or, to put it another way,
we had crossed from the reality of day
through uncertainty to a kind of solidity,
which, although it possesses no fixed point for comparison,
has become everlasting.
And, because such places exist,
if you take any sentence containing 'folly'
and strike it out,
then half of your lifetime crumbles away.
"Never trust an elm," we were told.
We believed and did not; leaving the broad spreading branch
for the cuckoo to launch its deceit.
However there was one thing they trusted the elmwood to do,
to preserve our body and soul against the life to come
(though still hoping the trump would blow soon).
But this has gone out of fashion
and the elms have grieved and died.
Yet it is reported that from those dead stumps,
green shoots sprout.
It seems that the elms have done for themselves,
what for us
they would not.