land, the way is still there, underneath, so that if you have a feel for the countryside the undergrowth does not halt you. The badgers lead you. As you walk, feet firm and safe, you part the bracken to either side and after you have passed, it folds back again, leaving no sign of your passage.
Here, on our stretch of the coast, man has not yet brought his conceit. It is as it always has been. Gulls sweeping on their way, a buzzard sailing in the sky, foxes safe from the Hunt, birds arriving tired after a long journey, others ready to leave, swallows, white-throats, chiffchaffs, fieldfare, snipe, the long list which we welcome and to which we say goodbye. Our stretch of the cliff has a savagery that frightens the faint-hearted.
‘Why isn’t there a decent path cut out along the cliff top? Absolutely disgraceful.’
‘All right in the summer, I suppose?’
‘I wouldn’t live here if it was given me.’
‘How wonderful if uranium was discovered!’
‘There’s going to be a coastal path. You can’t escape it, you know!’
‘This is marvellous. An August day in Cornwall and no one to be seen.’
There they are, the philistines and the individual they would like to destroy. Mass enjoyment, mass organised walks, mass anything if it can score a victory over the sensitive; thus the philistines, barren of feeling, plod their dreary way, earnest, dull, conscientious, honest, misguided – I pity them. So did Jane. But Jane, like ourselves, was infuriated by their conceit.
Every day of our lives was spent in unison with this coast, the rage of the gales, salt smearing our faces as we walked, east winds, south winds, calm summer early mornings, the first cubs, a badger in the moonlight, wild violets, the glory of the first daffodil, the blustering madness of making a living on land that faced the roar of the ages. These were the passages of our year. Glorious, hurting, awakening us to the splendour of living. But the philistines. They nose. They want to disturb. Yet they are blind to beauty. They glance at our coast as they rush by. They want to see a path on the map. That is their object. Everything must conform. No time to pause. Hurry, hurry, hurry . . . we have another two miles to go.
Once there was an uncommunicative young man who spent a month on behalf of some Ministry, mysteriously hammering on the rocks of our cliff, making a map and taking samples from the results of his hammering. His presence immediately alerted us to the possible dangers of his activity. Was he looking for uranium? Or tin? Or some other metal vital for industrial progress?
And only a few weeks afterwards, on a hot June day while we were digging potatoes, an aeroplane had droned to and fro all the day long over our heads, towing a boxlike contraption several plane lengths behind. It angered us. And while Geoffrey and I plunged our shovels up the rows, and Jeannie and Jane knelt picking up the potatoes and putting them in the baskets, our conversation buzzed over the possible threat the box might represent. It also, of course, provided a diversion from our monotonous task. Jane seized my shovel, at one stage, stood in the middle of a meadow and with the mock fury of a native who had seen a white man for the first time, pretended to hurtle the shovel at the plane like a spear.
Her response, however, to the young man with the hammer had been mischievous. He was shy and desperately earnest and although both Jane and ourselves tried to get him into conversation as he went to and fro his rocks every day, all we were able to extract from him was a ‘Good morning’ and a ‘Good evening’.
It was Easter and on the Sunday the young man arrived to perform his hammering on some lonely rock beneath the cliffs. It was beneath Jane’s section of the cliff and before climbing below, he had dumped his haversack in a meadow that sloped steeply from Jane’s cottage. He was, however, unaware that he had dumped it exactly in the middle of the area in
Here, on our stretch of the coast, man has not yet brought his conceit. It is as it always has been. Gulls sweeping on their way, a buzzard sailing in the sky, foxes safe from the Hunt, birds arriving tired after a long journey, others ready to leave, swallows, white-throats, chiffchaffs, fieldfare, snipe, the long list which we welcome and to which we say goodbye. Our stretch of the cliff has a savagery that frightens the faint-hearted.
‘Why isn’t there a decent path cut out along the cliff top? Absolutely disgraceful.’
‘All right in the summer, I suppose?’
‘I wouldn’t live here if it was given me.’
‘How wonderful if uranium was discovered!’
‘There’s going to be a coastal path. You can’t escape it, you know!’
‘This is marvellous. An August day in Cornwall and no one to be seen.’
There they are, the philistines and the individual they would like to destroy. Mass enjoyment, mass organised walks, mass anything if it can score a victory over the sensitive; thus the philistines, barren of feeling, plod their dreary way, earnest, dull, conscientious, honest, misguided – I pity them. So did Jane. But Jane, like ourselves, was infuriated by their conceit.
Every day of our lives was spent in unison with this coast, the rage of the gales, salt smearing our faces as we walked, east winds, south winds, calm summer early mornings, the first cubs, a badger in the moonlight, wild violets, the glory of the first daffodil, the blustering madness of making a living on land that faced the roar of the ages. These were the passages of our year. Glorious, hurting, awakening us to the splendour of living. But the philistines. They nose. They want to disturb. Yet they are blind to beauty. They glance at our coast as they rush by. They want to see a path on the map. That is their object. Everything must conform. No time to pause. Hurry, hurry, hurry . . . we have another two miles to go.
Once there was an uncommunicative young man who spent a month on behalf of some Ministry, mysteriously hammering on the rocks of our cliff, making a map and taking samples from the results of his hammering. His presence immediately alerted us to the possible dangers of his activity. Was he looking for uranium? Or tin? Or some other metal vital for industrial progress?
And only a few weeks afterwards, on a hot June day while we were digging potatoes, an aeroplane had droned to and fro all the day long over our heads, towing a boxlike contraption several plane lengths behind. It angered us. And while Geoffrey and I plunged our shovels up the rows, and Jeannie and Jane knelt picking up the potatoes and putting them in the baskets, our conversation buzzed over the possible threat the box might represent. It also, of course, provided a diversion from our monotonous task. Jane seized my shovel, at one stage, stood in the middle of a meadow and with the mock fury of a native who had seen a white man for the first time, pretended to hurtle the shovel at the plane like a spear.
Her response, however, to the young man with the hammer had been mischievous. He was shy and desperately earnest and although both Jane and ourselves tried to get him into conversation as he went to and fro his rocks every day, all we were able to extract from him was a ‘Good morning’ and a ‘Good evening’.
It was Easter and on the Sunday the young man arrived to perform his hammering on some lonely rock beneath the cliffs. It was beneath Jane’s section of the cliff and before climbing below, he had dumped his haversack in a meadow that sloped steeply from Jane’s cottage. He was, however, unaware that he had dumped it exactly in the middle of the area in
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