It was not I who chose Ulverton as the ‘happy spot’ for my final innings; it was the skein of family connections that pulled me to this place. My wife’s second cousin, Mrs Mary Holland, had lived in the village for almost all her married life; although her husband was long dead by the time I settled here, she was so enamoured of the place in which she had brought up her family, that she had vowed to stay on and not retire, as was the wont then, to a widow’s decline in Weymouth. Our friendship began through tragedy: having lost her darling son, Daniel, to influenza in his first term at Eton in the same year as my own brother was appointed housemaster there, in 1886, relationships were established more closely than would otherwise have been the case, for the stricken mother needed all the support we could give her; mine being of the post-marked variety, until my leave gave us the opportunity to visit her in 1893. I well remember the carriage mounting that last hill north of Ulverton, cresting the bare, nibbled flanks of Frum Down, and giving us all of a sudden that enchanted view of the verdant river, the clustering trees, the black thatch of ancient roofs and the simple grey stone of the church, that bespoke all our exiled dreams, and seemed to embody all our fairest fancies! Apart from the odd straggling copse, and the neat lushness of Ulverton House, all about was naked and desolate, even repellent (how ignorant I was then of the springy exhilaration of our bare downland!) — but this only served to heighten the charms of this remote village. We were stricken by love, and vowed to make this ‘our’ England on the final return from India. Alas, our plans were only half-realised, as it were: dashed by dysentery and death — and sometimes I find the association dreadful in my solitude; Mrs Holland too now lying beside her husband and her son near the Saxon yew of our secluded churchyard, their tombstone recording their allotted spans only a little less mutely than the grassy mounds of the labouring generations, whose stones are as bereft of art as their lives.
When I am depressed in spirits I play Chopin. I am famous for this: my cottage being on the main street, facing the high flint wall of the churchyard, the open windows of summer mean that any passing souls are vexed by my missed notes, or stirred by my harmonies. On that day, that August day fourteen years ago, as the thirty-two young men of Ulverton clambered aboard the bus and waved their proud farewells, and were trotted out of sight, to some distant and unimaginable vista, each dressed as if for a church outing, or a visit to town with their beloveds, I played my heart out. Mrs Holland sat by the window and listened, tears welling in her eyes through the B Minor Sonata, as the cries of the young men sounded in the street, their younger siblings shrieked and whistled, their mothers and fathers waved and kissed and blew their noses, and the bus momentarily darkened the room as it passed.
‘It will only be a small affair,’ said Mrs Holland. ‘My dear husband used to play this.’
I said nothing and played on.
Ulverton had more volunteers than any other village on the downs. The rhetorical flourish with the sabre had played its part, for everyone said how ‘the Squire hev done us proud, then.’ I continued to work shoulder to shoulder with the men he had forbidden to attend the meeting. At least, that is how I interpreted their absence. In the way of things here, no one questioned this privilege, because no one saw it as such; believe it or not, those lucky few with their noses to the chalk were seen as exhibiting extreme unselfishness. They were making their sacrifice for the sake of knowledge and discovery. The talk of treasure-hunts dwindled in the tap-rooms of Ulverton. That healthy air of ruefulness which I had so valued in the English countryman and countrywoman evaporated in those early months of the war: loins were girded, and spines stiffened, and the deadlier face of patriotism shown, in a way I found thoroughly alarming.
There was only one pariah, one Untouchable, in our pastoral haven — and that was Percy Cullurne. ‘Craven’ was the least insulting, and the most printable, of the many qualifications made upon his good name that summer and autumn. He, in his turn, lapsed into near silence, seeming not to feel the sting of the verbal sticks and stones, and the odd scrawled contribution to fellow-feeling upon his cottage door, and the various small missiles aimed at him by the dwarf regiments, goaded on by their zealous parents. It might have turned out otherwise: a hundred years earlier, he would no doubt have been the hero of the hour, carried shoulder-high around a burning rick. But the vans of Socialism, odious though they were, had only trundled ineffectually through our village by 1914: perhaps owing to the memories of the older folk, still vivid, of the terrible results of rebellion, and a general relieving of hardship and poverty, there was little connection made between the ranting from the vans and the famous last words of John Oadam [alias ‘Captain Bedwine’ of the ballads — see The Book of Downland Songs, 1923]; little attempt to relate the tenets of the placarded strangers with the fenced-off woods and the touched cap, that deference as ingrained as the soil in the furrows of their hands.
Not that the members of the ‘team’ were happy with this arrangement — I mean, their enforced sacrifice. I don’t want to give the impression that they were burning to be off into foreign parts, and slaughter the Hun: no, it was far more owing to an uncomfortable sense of exclusiveness; a coat that carries well in Pall Mall, but not amongst the labouring brethren of rural England. Exclusiveness, or difference, without material satisfaction — that is too close to the outsider complex. Every aside in the Half Moon, or the Malt Shovel, or the Green Man, or the New Inn; every little silence at their leaving; every knowing smile or wink in the lane; each military or patriotic reference in the Harvest Home songs of that summer’s end; every slow, laborious reading-out of the newspaper before the assembled family or the tap-room company became a jab, a prod, not just to the conscience but to that feeling of belonging so essential to the otherwise lonely human animal. Our village was more full of eccentrics then than now, but even the most awry of minds was inextricably woven into the common fabric, just as the trees in the wood grow more individual the more familiar one becomes with the mass. Matters have changed: our great roads are thronged with motor-cars and lorries, the wireless tinkles, the telephone connects us with far-away towns. Ulverton is slowly losing its sense of remoteness; each day brings the world nearer, darkening my room with its passing, pruning us of our odder growths, blowing away the strong rich scents that come of stagnation. The nearest high scarp is no longer the edge of the world, and heads barely turn when the toot of a motor-car sounds at Church Corner. Is this to be regretted? Time, dear reader, shall arbitrate upon that question — not I.
Let us remain with that group of men huddled upon the high hills of chalky England in the late summer of 1914: let us try to imagine their position, and feel their discomfort: let us equate it with our own moments in life, when someone has done something that reflects a light back upon us, in which we are uncomfortably exposed to our conscience, and to the imagined grievances of others. Then in the penultimate week of August the bell tolled a death-knell; and slow and dull and remorseless it sounded across the downs. Each man cocked an ear, paused in his delicate work. A far shout from a stubbled field, and a cart rocking with its corn-load stopped. Two great whirring reapers in a field below us plodded on, their magnificent harnessed teams oblivious to human misfortunes — but the drivers turned in their seats to look down at the village, and the women paused by their stooks, lifting their bonnets to gaze. Tiny figures were to be seen hurtling up various tracks, childish shrills sounded, the harvesters in the fields came together in knots and dispersed, and soon enough Sidney Bint, the baker’s small boy, came panting up the side of the mound, and the name of Jimmy Tuck resounded shrilly over our little scooped world. A pale lad with a stutter who had done me some service by mending the stone outhouse roof at the bottom of my garden — making of it a study wherein I sit now, in the scent of buddleia, just as I did then through those golden evenings — Jimmy Tuck died at Maubeuge on August 21st, blown apart by an artillery shell.