the more determined to make her love me, although I did not really love her; but I was never successful.
Whether it was the Napier with the gleaming brass-framed windscreen, or the much more modest Citroën which succeeded it at about this time, whatever we were travelling in was a pretty close fit for the five of us, even with the picnic baskets and our overnight suitcases strapped on the carrier at the back. (I can’t remember which it was and anyone else who would know, or care, is dead.)
There was Mr Lewington, the chauffeur from around the corner in Fanny Road, who was driving us down to Devonshire and then bringing the car back to London – all attempts by my father and mother to learn to drive themselves had been attended by what might quite easily have been fatal results (my father had demolished the façade of a garage; my mother had left the road on Barnes Common and travelled some distance overland before coming to a halt). There was my father who sat next to him, from which position he was better able to keep an eye on the behaviour of other road users, pedestrian or otherwise, and if necessary stand up and rebuke them for some actual or imagined infringement of the rules of the road; and in the back, besides myself, there was my mother and Kathleen, usually known as Kathy, a sweet girl of fifteen or so with long auburn hair down to her waist who had replaced Lily and now ‘helped out’ with such chores as taking me to school. Kathy wore ordinary clothes. My mother had given up any high-falutin’ ideas about uniforms when Lily left and anyway I was now much too old to have a real nurse. Kathy was as excited about the trip as I was, never having been out of London before. There we sat with a travelling rug over our knees made from what looked like a leopard skin but was really a very costly length of woollen material from Paris, bought by my father with the intention of making from it a model coat, but pinched by my mother who had it made into a rug. In front of us was a second windscreen, a sheet of metal-framed glass, that would be as lethal if shattered in an accident as the front one would be, that could be folded down to form a picnic table when the machine was at rest. There was no such thing as safety glass in common use. In winter it was jolly cold in our open motors, even with the ‘lid’ up, and then everyone except the driver and me, because my legs were too short, was provided with what were known as Glastonbury Muffs, huge boots lined with sheepskin, each holding two feet. If it was really cold these boots had a sort of pocket in them which could be used as a receptacle for a hot water bottle; but I do not believe we ever went motoring with hot water bottles.
Branscombe was just over a hundred and fifty miles from Barnes by the direct route. Usually, when travelling with my father, we did not follow the direct route, he being as curious about what lay on either side of the direct route to anywhere as I myself was to be, years later. At Staines, we got down to admire the river and talk to a waterman of my father’s acquaintance at one of the boathouses. (He knew every waterman of any consequence between Putney and Henley.) At a place called Virginia Water we visited some exciting ruins brought all the way from Leptis Magna in Tripoli, and an even more exciting waterfall full of enormous rocks.
Then we drove on between miles of rhododendrons and across commons (over which, years later, in 1940, I would crawl on all fours armed to the teeth with ‘token’ wooden weapons because all the real ones had been taken away to give to the ‘real’ army after Dunkirk), my father with his quarter-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey ‘Touring’ Map at the ready to deal with any navigational problems and, as a member of the Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Association, with both badges on the front of his motor car (the RAC’s was grander), returning the salutes of the patrolmen of both organizations (according to whose area we were passing through), men with wind-battered faces, wearing breeches and leather gaiters, who were either mounted on motor-cycle combinations or, in some more rural parts, on pedal cycles. If they failed to salute, members were advised to stop them and ask the reason why.
Among the interesting things we saw on this early June morning was a nasty accident, with splintered windscreens and lots of blood, which, although Lewington slowed down so that we could have a better view, I was not allowed to see properly, my head being turned the other way by Kathy, much to my disappointment. We also saw traction engines and enormous machines called Foden lorries, fuelled with coal and belching steam and smoke and red hot cinders; and a ‘police trap’, set up by a couple of constables armed with stop-watches, one of whom had emerged from a hedgerow in which he had been lurking to flag down a luckless motorist for ‘speeding’. Until November 1931, the speed limit in Britain for all motor vehicles was officially twenty miles an hour. And we saw lots of tramps, most of them, like us, heading west, one of them a diminutive elderly man wearing a bowler hat and a wing collar, who was helping his equally elderly wife to push a very old-fashioned, high-wheeled perambulator with all their possessions in it along the road. And once we saw a team of huge English carthorses pulling a wagon with an enormous tree trunk on it.
At one point we came to a magic place where a road forked away from the one on which we were travelling, a place that I never forgot and was therefore subsequently able to identify, although it was years later. There, sheltered by trees was a grass-grown open space, with a number of low, barn-like buildings disposed about it. Some had slate roofs; some were thatched; some of the more important-looking ones – that might have been part of a farm – were built of cob, a mixture of clay and straw, and had enclosing walls of the same material, which were also thatched or tiled, as they had to be, otherwise they would have melted away in the rain, something I had never seen before.
And it was here, at this moment, as if to set a seal on my memory of it, a memory that would endure for the rest of my life, and embody so many feelings that I could never express, that my father half stood up in the front of the car and shouted over the top of our windscreen, ‘Hilda! Look at those buildings! How they’re built! That means we’re in the West.’ And he was right. For this was Weyhill, the Werdon Priors of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, famous for its ancient six days’ fair beginning on old Michaelmas Eve (10 October), one of the most ancient in Britain, to which a line in The Vision of Piers Ploughman, c.1360, ‘To Wy and Wynchestre I went to the fayre’, perhaps refers. Horses, sheep, cheese and hops were the principal things sold at the fair and as many as 150,000 sheep once changed hands here in a day. The second day of the fair (old Michaelmas Day) was the great hiring-day for farm servants and labourers in this part of Hampshire and the adjoining districts of Wiltshire, the carters appearing with a piece of plaited whipcord fastened in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool. For many years now I have watched the at first gradual and later the accelerated decay of these strangely beautiful buildings and, recently, I have witnessed the final destruction of the best of them.
We continued our journey across Salisbury Plain. There were sheep on every horizon now, and from time to time we passed clumps of ugly buildings. (My mother said they were military buildings left over from the war.)
There were more sheep around Stonehenge and I remember hearing the skylarks overhead, so high that I could barely see them, and running my hands over the surfaces of stones so huge that I could scarcely apprehend them. The only other visitor was a vicar in a dog-collar who had driven there with a pony and trap, and I remember thinking how much funnier we looked with our smart clothes and our shiny motor car in such a place than he did with his old suit and his rather yellow dog-collar, and his pony and trap.
A little further on we turned off the main road and followed a track that led past a number of grassy mounds, and there we had our picnic, not in the motor car using the collapsed windscreen as a picnic table but as we always did, unless it was raining, on rugs on the grass.
It was a memorable picnic, even though picnics arranged by my mother and father were always memorable. It is not just family pride that makes me say so. They really had a flair for picnics. Everyone said so.
There was a big pie, whether it was veal and ham with eggs embedded in it (not extruded through it as they are today) or pork is of no importance. I only know that like every other pie at every other picnic for which my father provided pies it had a design embossed on the crust (acorns and thistles were popular), and was the most delicious sort of juicy pie imaginable. And
