Play farmhouse, renovated church. Had that been a kind of play, too, the religion of the renovated church? Did the renovators share the old terrors? Or was this faith something quite different, something touched with the sense of history, the assurance of continuity, the sense of something owed to oneself?
When you looked down on the plain from the viewing point in the windbreak on the hill, you could see Stonehenge to the west and the beginnings of the town of Amesbury to the east. The River Avon ran through Amesbury. There were chapels and abbeys here too, beside the river, wide and shallow at this point. Amesbury — now a military town, with little modern houses and shops and garages — was an old place. It was to a nunnery in Amesbury that Guinevere, Arthur’s queen, the lover of Lancelot, had retired when the Round Table had vanished from Camelot, all of twenty miles away at Winchester. A sign on the road from Stonehenge, just before you entered Amesbury, celebrated the antiquity of the town: with a coat of arms and a date, A.D. 979.
The historical feeling that had caused that sign to be put up had also brought about the restoration of the chapels and abbeys of Amesbury, as well as of the church that lay across the lawn from my own cottage: history, like religion, or like an extension of religion, as an idea of one’s own redemption and glory.
Yet there was an uncelebrated darkness before the foundation of that town of Amesbury in A.D. 979, as recorded by the sign. More than five hundred years before that, the Roman army had left Britain. And Stonehenge had been built and had fallen into ruin, and the vast burial ground had lost its sanctity, long before the Romans had come. So that history here, where there were so many ruins and restorations, seemed to be plateaus of light, with intervening troughs or disappearances into darkness.
We lived still on one such plateau of historical light. Amesbury, founded A.D. 979. History, glory, religion as a wish to do the right thing by oneself — these ideas were still with some people in the valleys round about, though there had been some diminution in personal glory, and the new houses and gardens were like the small change of the great estates of the last century and the beginning of this century. These people — though they had come, many of them, from other places — still had the idea of being successors and inheritors. It was because of this idea of historical inheritance and succession that many new people in our valley went to the restored church. The church had been restored for people like them; it met their needs.
In this they were different from Bray, the car-hire man, who had lived all his life in the valley. Bray never went to the church, and was scornful of the motives of those who did. And the churchgoers were also different from Jack, who had lived the best part of his life in the cottage over the hill and, while he was vigorous, had celebrated the seasons with rituals of his own. On Sundays Jack worked in the morning in his garden, and went to the pub at noon; in the afternoon he worked again in his garden.
THE CHURCH stood on an old site. I could believe that. Beyond the churchyard, and more or less hidden by the church itself, the old flint churchyard wall, and trees on the other side, were the sheds and buildings of the dairy. Did they also stand on an old site? I had no trouble believing that they did. Because the world — in places like this — is never absolutely new; there is always something that has gone before. Shrine or sacred place before church, farm before farm, on the site of an old ford set in a wood, first “walden,” then “shaw,” then Waldenshaw. A hamlet between the water meadows and the flinty downs; a hamlet, one of many, on the river highway.
New to the valley, overwhelmed by the luck of the near-solitude I had found in this historical part of England, the solitude that had done away with my stranger’s nerves, I had seen everything as a kind of perfection, perfectly evolved. But I had hardly begun to look, the land and its life had hardly begun to shape itself about me, when things began to change. And I had fallen back on old ideas, ideas now not so much of decay, as of flux and the constancy of change, to fight the distress I felt at everything — a death, a fence, a departure — that undid or altered or threatened the perfection I had found.
It could have been said that the perfection of the house in whose grounds I lived had been arrived at forty or fifty years before, when the Edwardian house was still fairly new, its family life fuller, when the ancillary buildings had a function and the garden was looked after. But in that perfection, occurring at a time of empire, there would have been no room for me. The builder of the house and the designer of the garden could not have imagined, with their world view, that at a later time someone like me would have been in the grounds, and that I would feel I was having the place — the cottage, the empty picturesque houses around the lawn, the grounds, the wild gardens — at its peak, living in a beauty that hadn’t been planned for. I liked the decay, such as it was. It gave me no wish to prune or weed or set right or remake. It couldn’t last, clearly. But while it lasted, it was perfection.
To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty. Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper and was an ancestral inheritance, something that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas of a world outside men’s control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century — estates of which this Wiltshire estate, where I now lived, had been the apotheosis.
Fifty years ago there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now my presence was a little unlikely. But more than accident had brought me here. Or rather, in the series of accidents that had brought me to the manor cottage, with a view of the restored church, there was a clear historical line. The migration, within the British Empire, from India to Trinidad had given me the English language as my own, and a particular kind of education. This had partly seeded my wish to be a writer in a particular mode, and had committed me to the literary career I had been following in England for twenty years.
The history I carried with me, together with the self-awareness that had come with my education and ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of glory dead; and in England had given me the rawest stranger’s nerves. Now ironically — or aptly — living in the grounds of this shrunken estate, going out for my walks, those nerves were soothed, and in the wild garden and orchard beside the water meadows I found a physical beauty perfectly suited to my temperament and answering, besides, every good idea I could have had, as a child in Trinidad, of the physical aspect of England.
The estate had been enormous, I was told. It had been created in part by the wealth of empire. But then bit by bit it had been alienated. The family in its many branches flourished in other places. Here in the valley there now lived only my landlord — elderly, a bachelor, with people to look after him. Certain physical disabilities had now been added to the malaise which had befallen him years before, a malaise of which I had no precise knowledge, but interpreted as something like acedia, the monk’s torpor or disease of the Middle Ages — which was how his great security, his excessive worldly blessings, had taken him. The acedia had turned him into a recluse, accessible only to his intimate friends. So that on the manor itself, as on my walks on the down, I had a kind of solitude.