Because Jack was sick. Though she said he was working again he was not well. And intermittently all that summer, for two or three weeks at a time, even on those sunny days which in previous years he would have celebrated by working bare-backed in his garden, the smoke rose from one of the chimneys of the cottage like a symbol of his sickness, like a sign of the cold he felt, the sick man in his room. While the new farm workers, young men with young wives, drove up and down the big fields in their new tractors, and went out in their new or newish cars after work.
Jack’s wife commented gently, ironically, on the changes. But she seemed more and more to accept that Jack’s hold on his job, his cottage, and his garden was going, and that her own time there was coming to an end.
His car stopped beside me one day. It was the first time I had seen him since the previous autumn. His face was waxen. I knew the word, from books. But never till now, seeing what it described on a white face, had I truly understood the word. All the brown of Jack’s face, all the sun to which he had exposed himself in his garden, had gone. His skin was white and smooth, and it seemed to have the texture and false color of waxen fruit; it was as though a bloom, as on a plum, covered the living skin. His beard was trimmed and neat. Yet even that had a waxen, even waxed, quality. Not many words; quiet words of greeting, friendship, reassurance. His obstreperous eyes were quiet too. Wax. And the smoke came out of his cottage chimney in the autumn and in the winter; and then it stopped.
THE LANE that led up the hill to the new barn and then down to the cottages and old farm buildings, the lane beside the windbreak of beech and pine and the subsidiary hedge of field rose and hawthorn, had grown rough and broken. You could easily have turned your ankle on it. The new farm management began to have that lane mended.
Men and machines came one week, and a level black layer of mixed asphalt and gravel was quickly laid down, in a few days. The black color and the machine finish looked new and unnatural next to the tufted grass of the verges. But the surface that had been so quickly laid down was meant to last: as if in pledge of that, the yellow board of the road makers was set up on the public road, just before the lane, and one end of the board was cut into a directional arrow.
I didn’t like the change. I felt it threatened what I had found and what I had just begun to enter. I didn’t like the new busyness, the new machines, the machine lopping of the hawthorn and wild rose which left them looking damaged. And I didn’t want that new surface on the farm lane to hold.
I looked for cracks and flaws in it and hoped that the little abrasions and water erosions I noticed would spread and make it impossible — fantasy taking over from logic — for the machines to lay down a new asphalt mixture. Of course I knew my fantasy was fantasy: though the farm was set among ruins of many sorts, reminders of the impermanence of men’s doings, there was another side to men’s work. Men came back, men went on, men did and did again. How small the caravels were that crossed the Atlantic and intruded into the evenness of history on the other side; how few the men in those small vessels, how limited their means; how barely noticed. But they went back. They changed the world in that part forever.
So though the new asphalt layer was crushed here and there into dips by the tractor wheels; and though the rain, running down the hill, sought out every weakness and crack in the dips and dug out minute bits of asphalt from between small stones and then dug more deeply into the loosened surface, and the irregular edge of the surface was undermined by water running down in little channels (miniatures of the larger channels of which our valley was a relic) between the hard black crust and the soft, grass-covered earth, though there were these things that made me feel that the lane might be reduced again to the rocky, uneven condition in which I had first found it, yet the lane was made good, and then made good again, and withstood the winter, which came fiercely that year.
There was a blizzard on Christmas day, with the wind blowing from the northwest. I found, when I went out in the early afternoon, that the snow had been blown into a drift in the windbreak. A bank of snow, then, beside the lane; and in the lee of every tree trunk, every sturdy twig, every obstacle, there was a sharp ridge that indicated the direction of the wind.
The shape and texture of this snow drift reminded me of a climate quite different: of a Trinidad beach where shallow streams — fresh water mingled with salt, salt predominating or lessening according to the tides — ran from tropical woodland to the sea. These streams rose and subsided with the tide. Water flowed now from the sea to the pools of the woodland river, now in the other direction. At every low tide the streams cut fresh channels in the freshly laid sand, created fresh sand cliffs, which then, when the tide began to rise again, fell neatly, segment by clean segment, into the rippled current: a geography lesson in miniature. To me as a child these streams always brought to mind the beginning of the world, the world before men, before the settlement. (Romance and ignorance: for though there were no longer aboriginal people on the island, they had been there for millennia.)
So the texture and shapes and patterns of the snow here on the down in the windbreak and in its lee created, in small, the geography of great countries. Like the little rivulets that ran between the steep grass verge and the new asphalt crust of the lane. And this geography in miniature was set, as I thought, or as I liked to think, in a vaster geography. The valley of the droveway between the smooth low hills spoke of vast rivers hundreds of yards across, flowing here in some age now unimaginably remote: a geography whose scale denied the presence of men. There would have been a brimming river or flow all the way from Stonehenge (and the plain beyond) to Jack’s cottage and then along the droveway with the beehives and the caravan and stone shell of a house and farm manager’s bungalow and suburban-style garden; there would have been a river all there, a flat gray flow, debouching into or filling the valley of the present river, a remnant, small-scale, human, beside which I sometimes walked and where people now fished for trout, released by keepers. In that vast geography created by the miniature landscape, and the fantasy of the droveway as river channel, there was no room for men; that vision was a vision of the world before men.
Beyond the brow of the hill the wind was keen; shelter was no longer provided by the hill or the windbreak. A livid gray sky, a gray but warm dirtiness, hung over the great plain, where the barrows were like pimples: the stone circles lost in the snow, blurring the view at the edges, no sight of the colored artillery targets. At the bottom of the hill, among the farm buildings (made monumental by the snowfall), was the dead cottage of Jack: snow lying on the ground about it (the droveway there normally so muddy and black) like a great clean thing, like a remaking of the world.
The snow made for hard walking. But weather like this in this usually mild valley revived in me a wish for extremes, though it was the cold and the damp and the wet that had carried away Jack. His damaged lungs, in that damp valley bottom, had denied him warmth even in the summer. (Something else, of course, if there had been no cold or damp, would have carried him away.)
On my early walks, after having my fill of the Henge and the barrows, I had looked for hares on one slope. Then, on another hill, at another season I had looked for larks, trying to keep them in sight as they rose and rose, lift upon lift, and watching for them as they dropped down. Now I looked for deer. A family of three had appeared in the valley, coming from no one knew where, and surviving in our well-tilled, well-grazed valley, dangerous over large tracts with military gunfire, crossed at many places by busy highways, surviving among us no one knew how.