Powys - Autobiography

T HE part of Derbyshire which centres round the Peak is like the boss of a shield. Dovedale must be included in the circumference of this Omphalos of England; and with some largess of extension, like the elaborate margin of a Homeric shield, the little pastoral villages around the country-town of Ashbourne might be regarded as coming into this formidable circle.

Swift and furious are the waters of the Dove; and rough and wild are the rocks and shallows, the rapids and the falls over which its rain-swollen torrents run. The steep and very often cavernous precipices that mount up on both sides of this swift stream, a stream that might be compared to a falcon in doves feathers, arrive at a greater measure of the tremendous and the awe-inspiring than the comparatively confined limits of this particular stretch of scenery might at first glance have seemed to imply.

At any rate to the eyes of a small child the rocky valley of the Dove was nothing short of a Tremendum Mysterium. One of my earliest memories was the dim feeling of immensity produced by that grassy hillto my mind now, for I have not seen it for more than fifty years, resembling a conical tumuluswhich rose, and I presume rises still, in the neighbourhood of Dovedale. How magically sagacious is childhood in its power of arriving at boundless effects through insignificant means! For though this eminenceand its name was Mount Cloudcan certainly have been no towering Alp it will always remain to me synonymous with sublimity. Many aspects of childrens days are silly enough; but how often the whole course of our subsequent history becomes an attempt to regain this sorcery, this power of finding the infinitely great in the materially small!

Since the overwhelmingly larger number of the things that come back to me from those early years are shameful, destructive , and grotesque, I am inclined to make the utmost of the one solitary constructive activity I can remember, which was a passion for erecting, at the edge of the shrubbery by the drive, numerous replicas of Mount Cloud, composed of damp earth-mould covered over with moss.

It is a criminal blunder of our maturer years that we so tamely, and without frantic and habitual struggles to retain it, allow theecstasyoftheunbounded to slip away out of our lives. Another idolatrous fetish that became a medium for an oceanic in-pouring of this unbounded and has left an even greater dent in my mind than the construction of all those microcosmic Mount Clouds was a wooden axe made for me by my father out of the trunk of an ancient laurel-bush. Well do I remember the cutting of those laurels from which this enchanters weapon fell into my hands. I had been absorbed all the morning in the most wicked pleasure then known to me, although not the wickedest possible to me, of transferring tadpoles from the pond in the field to the puddles left by the rain at the side of the drive. Now my father always followed, in all moral and casuistical problems, certain primitive rules that had descended to him from his father: such as, for instance, when you took birds eggs out of a nest, to add to your collection, alwaystoleavetwo; or when you caught a fish with a hook never to let it remain flapping and gasping on the bank, but always toputitoutofitsmisery.

But that an offspring of his should derive God knows what perverse satisfaction from taking the inhabitantsluckily tadpoles were all the little boy could catchof a dark, cool, deep pond and placing them in shallow puddles, was something so outside his experience that he had no mandate on the matter. It was therefore the merest coincidence that by noon that day, when he had so strewn the paths of the little spinney at the end of the garden with cloven laurel-boughs that a sweet savour of aromatic wood, in this cruel hewing and wounding, was carried across the lawn, my father should have been moved by a natural desire that his son should behold these deeds of devastation and glory in his begetters skill and strength.

Thus the tall figure of the Vicar of Shirley, in black trousers and grey flannel shirt-sleeves, might have been seen that day dragging his protesting son away from his puddle-colonies and conveying him by force to his own devastated spinney. Oh, how hard it is to live in Arcadia and not meddle with some species or other of autochthonous aboriginals! But aye! that axe of laurel, whose blade and handle were both of the same sweet-smelling wood, and from whose whole entity emanated such a glamour of fairy-story enchantment, that long after, when I was a boy with catapult, butterfly-net and fishing-rod, it often used to come over me that I had lostfor ever and for ever losta mystery that would have guarded me all my days. To get back that laurel-axe from that garden spinney at Shirley would now be to get back the full magic power of that timeless fetish-worship by the strength of which the quaintest, most ordinary objecta tree-stump, a pile of stones, a pool by the roadside, an ancient chimney-stackcan become an Ark of the Covenant, evocative of the music of the spheres!

The country immediately round Shirley was pastoral and undulating, not wild or terrific like that Vale of the Dove. At the same time it was as far removed from any influence of town or city as if it had been among the furthest Hebrides. The little village of Shirley was reached by a narrow lane leading due East, if I am not mistaken, out of the broad highway that ran between Ashbourne and Derby, and it lay, so I have always imagined, just about the point where Charles Stuarts army of picturesque rebels turned back to Scotland, back to their lamentable defeat at Culloden, in place of advancing boldly upon London.

Between the Derby Road and the Vicarage drive-gate, for our house was the first human dwelling reached by this lane, grew a tall pine-tree, one of the sort which my father was in the habit of teaching us to call Scotch Firs. Near this tree, which offered an appropriate objective to many a nursery walk, was a small stile, leading by a short-cut across the fields to the historic highway, as it swept on, where the Highlanders had relucted to follow it, towards the valley-built town of Ash bourne.

Our house itself, as I recall it now, was a square whitish-yellow building surrounded by shrubberies and closely-mown grass. It was comfortable, rather than pretentious, but in the light of later acquired feelings about such contrasts, it was an absurdly big place to house a man in, even a man who was the father, as he became before we left, of five children considering that the village, of which he was the parish priest, never in his time exceeded two hundred souls.

Since I was born here, and lived here till I was seven, it is singular that I have absolutely no recollection of the parish church. As far as my memory goes my father might have been a tall, powerful man in black clothes who did nothing but trim laurel-bushes, traverse hills, valleys, woods, lanes, spinneys, copses, at an incredible speed, and tell my two brothers and me, as we sat beside him after tea on the dining-room sofa, an interminable story about two mythic personages called Giant Grumble and Fairy Sprightly. All I can remember now of this never-completed tale was that its villain, the devil of the piece, was always a scientific pedant, called by the narrator