Everyman's England

by Victor Canning

Overview

Recollected observations of England between World War I and II
 
In this series of pen–portraits of England, commissioned by the Daily Mail in the 1930s, the pattern and color of the "great fabric of English life" from Cumberland to Cornwall is vividly conjured. The heartwarming, humorous, and often irreverent observations of sleepy villages, pastoral scenes, and busy industries provide a delightful insight into life between the wars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780715653883
Publisher:	Duckworth Publishers
Publication date:	09/24/2020
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	984,365
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Victor Canning is best known as a thriller writer who wrote more than 60 books.

Read an Excerpt

Everyman's England

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By Victor Canning

Summersdale Publishers Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Charles Collingwood, the Estate of Victor Canning
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85765-405-2

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CHAPTER 1

NORTHWARD HO!

I travelled from King's Cross to Berwick-on-Tweed in a sleeper on the night-express for no other reason than that I like to read in bed and, at the same time, feel that I am being rushed forward at a tremendous speed. To have your shoes cleaned and your hair trimmed while you read the paper is, somehow, to have scored off life. Minutes, valuable minutes, have been saved by this multiplicity of attention. Just why you should bother to save minutes hardly affects the joy of saving them. To read or sleep while a train rushes you through the night gives the same joy. To anyone who doubts that man is indeed a noble, capable creature, more than ready to conquer the irritating exigencies of life, and a being far removed from the rest of the animal world, I would recommend a journey in a sleeper.

The compartment itself is a compact of all that man holds most dear. The bed (though it does not provide for those who roll in their sleep) is comfortable, and there is generally a spare blanket on the rack above the bed if you feel you must have four blankets. Into one wall of the compartment is fitted an elaborate chromium-plated device which, after various knobs and levers have been pulled out and cursed, shows itself to be a wash-basin, fitted with hot and cold water taps. If you run too much water into the basin, it gracefully overflows on to your pyjama trousers from the jolting of the train. When you have washed, if you wish to write a letter, the basin will obligingly convert itself into a table without pinching your fingers more than three times. Hung about the compartment are enough hooks and racks to shame the untidiest of men into hanging up his clothes instead of dropping them on to the floor. That the clothes sometimes drop off in the night can be no fault of the hooks, but is due to the movement of the train and the carelessness with which they have been hung, or so I like to think.

But the greatest joy is the array of switches over the head of the bed. A man has an excuse for not sleeping if he is tempted into operating them all. Such is our delight in mechanical contraptions that there are few of us today who can resist the digital appeal of switches. One switch puts on a light over the wash-basin, another brings on a bluish reading light from a bulb over the bed, and yet another operates the general compartment light. When you have finished playing with the lights, you can begin to experiment with the levers which control the heat – three positions – and those which affect the conditioning of the air. When light, heat and air have been arranged to produce a satisfactory effect of comfort and well-being, there is still the little bell-push for the attendant.

You summon him, just to see if the bell does work, and then when he comes you have to order morning tea because you have not enough assurity of manner to say calmly that you were merely experimenting with the bell-push. And you hate tea in bed.

By this time you are wide awake, and you are no longer interested in the book, so you decide to lie awake in the dark, watching the lights from small towns and the windows of country houses as they swirl like meteors across the little heaven of the carriage window. Beneath you the bed sways gently and the wheels beat out a tantalising, never-changing rhythm. You finally go to sleep wishing that you had travelled by day, for then you need not have watched lights stream across the dark rectangle of the window, but could have sat watching ever-changing scenery, or have been diverted by the man opposite who turns out to be a traveller in farm tractors and not, as you had hoped, a vaudeville actor on the way to another date.

My train brought me into Berwick, in the early sunshine of a morning which had somehow strayed from June into March, over the lofty, straddling viaduct designed by Robert Stephenson. There are three bridges over the Tweed at Berwick, dwindling in size like the three bears: the large railway bridge, then the new Border Bridge, its whiteness making the others look rather shabby, and the Tweed Bridge, the smallest of the three, but by far the oldest.

From the carriage window I had a view of the wide, grey-green Tweed rolling in spate to the sea. The right bank of the river was flat and cut into meadows, brightened by the fresh colours of new houses, while the other bank rose sharply to an eminence, darkened upstream by patches of trees and gorse that still showed yellow points of bloom. Downstream, below the bridge, the hill was covered by the houses and streets of Berwick.

Berwick has a medieval air; its red roofs, the thin twists of smoke curling up from hidden chimneys, and the friendly clustering and pushing of the houses up the steep slope reminded me of illustrations of Hans Andersen's fairy stories. I would not swear that the chimneys are crooked or that there are quaint turrets poking through the smoke, though I felt that the chimneys and roofs knew all about Hans Andersen and that it was only a regard for the convenience of the inhabitants which kept them from a crooked way of life.

The town has that somnolent air of a border town whose inhabitants have long forgotten the need for armed vigilance, for the men and women who walk in the streets are the descendants of folk who used to spend the best part of their lives fighting top reserve their independence and livelihoods. For centuries Berwick was an excuse for fighting between the English and the Scots; first one had it and then the other, and between 1147 and 1482 it changed hands as many as thirteen times. It has a record for sieges which almost equals that of Jerusalem, and probably no other town in England has seen as much fighting. But Berwick, especially in the thirteenth century, was worth fighting for; its Customs receipts then were reckoned to account for almost a quarter of the whole sum collected in England. The only tangible trace of its stormy history today rests in the old walls which are in a state of preservation that rivals those of York and Chester. The walls are mostly Elizabethan, though there are the remains of an earlier Edwardian fortification.

This information about Berwick's walls I have, obviously, obtained from a guidebook. Alone, I am quite incapable of differentiating between an Elizabethan, Edwardian, or back wall. Exactly in the reign of which of the Edwards, who preceded Elizabeth, the earlier wall was built, my guidebook (and various others I consulted) did not say, and I am not well enough versed in the Scottish and English pre-Elizabethan Edwards to decide. If the mystery worries any reader I can only refer him to the British Museum.

It is a long time since soldiers manned the bastions and sentinelled the ramparts, and where pikemen thrust down at the invaders, the children of the town now play ball, and the old men walk quietly in the sun exercising their dogs. As I got out of the train and stood on the railway platform it was hard to imagine that where the steel rails now run and porters shout to one another, once stood the great Berwick Castle, and that on one of its towers, in 1306, the Countess of Buchan was shut up in a wooden cage to spend six years exposed to the public gaze to expiate the sin of exercising her prerogative, as a daughter of the house of Fife, of crowning the Scottish kings. She had, with a hastily improvised crown, made Robert Bruce King of Scotland at Scone. Six years in a wooden cage would make a man morose. With a woman it would probably produce a very bad temper, and I can imagine that if there was any shouting of taunts at the good lady she probably gave as good as she got.

When you go to Berwick you must walk down Station Street, close by the station, and look at the house on the right corner at the top of the street. It is a large, square, grey house, and as I came abreast of it a pigeon flew over it with a clapping of wings which made me look up and see what otherwise would have been easy to miss. A stone coping ran along the top of the house and at each corner and, so it seemed to me, wherever there was space for one, stood a bust of a man. For a moment I stared at this decorated roof-top and then through the clear morning air I was aware that the faces which looked down upon me were vaguely familiar. I stared hard and then, despite the weathering they had undergone, I was sure that I was looking at Robbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott and other well-known figures. There they all were perched up on the roof-top. Dickens, Byron, the Duke of Wellington ... basking in the sunlight and enjoying the view.

How did they get there, and why? Did the builder of the house have an opportunity to buy a job lot of busts and use them to decorate his house? For a moment I was determined to knock at the house door and discover the reason, and then I hesitated. It was just breakfast time and I knew what kind of a reception I might get from a busy housewife if I interrupted the cooking of porridge and ham and eggs with questions of busts and Robbie Burns. I wish now that I had not faltered for my curiosity is growing every day and sometimes threatens to keep me awake at night. I know that someday I shall be dragged back to Berwick for the single purpose of satisfying my curiosity.

I met an old man lounging over the parapet of Berwick's newest bridge. He was one of those men who look so old that it is difficult to imagine that they were ever boys, and who have, you feel, a grand scorn of anything which is young. His clothes had that drab colour and indeterminate look which indicate, but are no longer affected by, the passage of time, and he was shouting down emphatic but unintelligent remarks to a youth who was painting a rowing boat on a landing stage below the bridge. The youth ignored him completely, not I felt from any disrespect for his age, but because he did not suspect that he was being addressed. A stiff wind was blowing out to sea and shredding the old man's words into silence. Seeing me the old man stopped his shouting and spat into the gutter. I took this as a mark of friendliness and, seeking to raise his civic pride and ingratiate myself in his good favour, I remarked on the beauty of Berwick's bridges.

'They're troublesome in the summer,' he replied.

'In the summer?' I wondered what mystery there was about them which made them troublesome in the summer.

'Not for an old skin like mine,' he went on happily. 'Midges like young blood.'

'Bridges,' I boomed, 'not midges.'

He shook his head and eyed the youth painting the boat. I saw that I was losing his attention, so I asked him loudly whether, despite the official inclusion of Berwick as an English town, he considered himself Scottish or English.

'Wha's that?' he asked, screwing up one side of his face.

I repeated my question, shouting almost.

He shook his head sorrowfully. 'I'm awfa' dull o' hearin',' he confessed.

So I came closer to him, determined to bring some coherence into the conversation, and bawled my question until I could have been heard at Spittal on the other side of the Tweed. He laughed and scratched the stubble on his chin.

'We're neither,' he said, 'we're Berwickers!'

And Berwickers they are; Border people who, until recent years, never knew whether they belonged to England or Scotland, for the town used to change hands with a frequency that, despite its dangers, must have become monotonous for the citizens, and between 1551 and 1885 it was a neutral town belonging to no country – a town, county and country all on its own so that Great Britain was England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Berwick-on-Tweed. Now it is part of Northumberland, but the men and women are 'Berwickers' still.

With the sunlight on it Berwick is a wealth of red, grey and gold. The red pantiles of the old houses flash in the warm sun, and the grey lengths of the grass-topped ramparts and bastions, relics of its fortified days, which surround the town, take on a dignity and beauty which make one forget their ugly, medieval purpose. Everywhere there is a continual air of friendliness and kind curiosity. In larger towns the stranger passes unnoticed; in Berwick there is time and space to mark him for attention. As I walked down Hatter's Lane, a typical Berwick street of red-roofed houses, holed by dark doorways that lead back to dim courtyards, a man approached a group of shawled women and enquired by name for someone living in the street.

He was accorded no perfunctory directions. The women with common assent formed themselves into a bodyguard and escorted him, volubly, up the street to the house. Here, one obligingly opened the door and called to Mrs So-and-so, meanwhile the others grouped themselves about him, and perhaps fearing that he might want to shirk the interview at the last moment, assured him that this was where Mrs So-and-so lived. It was not until he had made his preliminaries with Mrs So-and-so and had been invited into the front parlour that the other women withdrew, their faces happy at the accomplishment of their obvious duty towards a stranger.

I spent a morning walking about the streets and gradually the placid, contented atmosphere of the town began to steal about me until I felt that there was no world outside of this grey and red town over the river, that all the haste and turmoil of the world, the madness of internecine quarrel and wordy pact-making had no significance, and that the main purpose of mankind was to lean against a shop doorway, uncaring whether customers came, talking to the man across the way and occasionally bidding Mrs Sinclair or Mrs Jarvis good morning, or better still, if one ached for action, to lead a dog along the grass-topped ramparts and feel the sea breeze upon one's face and smell the salt in the air ... Even the Great North Road which crosses the new bridge seems to lose its hurry and bustle through the town, as though the drivers sense the gentle spirit of calm that drenches everything and unconsciously slacken their pace below even the statutory thirty miles an hour.

Only by the quayside and out by the harbour mouth is that feeling of inactivity dissipated. It is here that the real life of Berwick pulsates, for the Berwickers are fishermen, who draw into their nets not ordinary fish, but that king of fish, the salmon.

'Such a fish! shining silver from head to tail, and here and there a crimson dot; with a grand hooked nose and grand curling lip, and a grand bright eye, looking round him proudly as a king, and surveying the water right and left as if all belonged to him. Surely he must be the salmon, the king of all fish.'

It is easy to picture the awe of lonely Tom at his first sight of a salmon. Even in death there is something about salmon which commands man's respect, to see him in his proper element as Tom did, and mark the lordly glance of that patrician eye was more than enough to make a water-baby suddenly tremble.

In Berwick, from February until September, the salmon is truly king. For the whole of the thirty weeks of the season salmon are caught, talked of, dreamt about, and sometimes eaten by the blue-jerseyed, sea-booted fishermen.

Whenever the tide permits, and they can only work at certain states of the tide, groups of fishermen may be seen at their stations along the river, from the mouth of the Tweed where it swirls out across the bar to the North Sea, to well above the great railway viaduct.

I walked at low tide out across the wet sands and patches of bladder wrack to where one crew was stationed just inside the harbour mouth. There were six men working their wear-net. The method of fishing is very simple. One end of the net is fastened by a rope to a portable windlass on the shore, the net is folded neatly into the stern of the boat and this is rowed upstream until it is far enough from the bank to shoot the net. The boat turns downstream in a circle, the net slipping over the stern as it goes. When the boat comes into the bank the rope on the other end of the net is fastened to another wind-lass and then commences the work of hauling, so often a disappointing task.

Three times I watched this particular crew shoot their net and each time there was nothing in it except a few dead branches and clumps of sea grass. Once, as they were folding the net back into the boat for another shot, a rent was discovered in the mesh. From the pocket of an old man with a greying beard came a wooden needle and thread and the net was repaired as they stood, ankle-deep, in the water. A cold wind blew in from the sea, fretting at their jerseys, and from the sands across the river came the crying of sea-birds, but the men seemed oblivious of everything except the net in their hands. They spoke very little to each other as the old man picked up the meshes and worked his needle in and out with a dexterity that was worthy of a woman. To them, though they would never express themselves so, the nets were sacred and their reverence was evidenced in the care with which they handled them ...

At the next shot they were lucky, and three salmon came flapping and jerking to the sands. The greybeard carried them up the beach in a pannier and we began to talk.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Everyman's England by Victor Canning. Copyright © 2011 Charles Collingwood, the Estate of Victor Canning. Excerpted by permission of Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Cover Page,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
About the Author,
Introduction,
Preface,
Chapter 1: NORTHWARD HO!,
Chapter 2: CUMBERLAND CONTRASTS,
Chapter 3: TOWN OF SURPRISES,
Chapter 4: BROAD ACRES,
Chapter 5: BETWEEN TWO RIVERS,
Chapter 6: THE POTTERIES,
Chapter 7: THE SMALLEST OF THE FAMILY,
Chapter 8: FENLAND TOWN,
Chapter 9: ALL THE WAY, PLEASE,
Chapter 10: NORFOLK,
Chapter 11: CARAVAN ON THE COTSWOLDS,
Chapter 12: NO ORDINARY TOWN,
Chapter 13: BATH,
Chapter 14: THE OTHER OXFORD,
Chapter 15: OFF THE MAIN ROAD,
Chapter 16: EXERCISE WITH A MAP,
Chapter 17: DORCHESTER,
Chapter 18: BIDEFORD,
Chapter 19: SOMEWHERE IN CORNWALL,

Editorial Reviews

"Wonderful . . . elegant, humorous, exuberant essays about random destinations."  —Guardian

"Pin-sharp evocations of England . . . he sees into the heart of things."  —Times

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