We were returning from there one afternoon and had reached the crossroads in the middle of Wilton, a few yards from our own house, when a man driving a fast horse in a high two-wheeled tax-cart shot out of the side road, and tried to cross in front of us. His horse was not quite fast enough, and there followed a terrific crash. Horse, cart and man were hurled to the ground. After a second’s pause our horses set off at a headlong pace up the Wilton street. The impact with the other cart had smashed to splinters the pole of our carriage, and this now swung between the horses, cutting their flanks with every lurch and driving them to madness. The driver found that when the pole was broken, he had no control over his horses, and he conceived the magnificent last expedient of leaping off the box to go to their heads. He jumped: and was of course left behind in the road with several broken limbs. My brother Frank was in the carriage and he now climbed on to the box to take the reins, but found that they had fallen to the ground and were dragging among the horses’ feet. There was nothing to be done. The horses put down their heads and stampeded. I shall always remember the frantic clatter of their feet, and the sight of them reflected in the windows of the houses we passed. They looked quite small.
This drive seemed eternal, though it really must only have lasted about a couple of minutes. A pair of horses running away between two rows of houses makes a noise which is surprisingly deafening; and in the middle of this hullabaloo, we sat in our landau, very stiff and dignified, no one saying a word. People flew to their windows as they heard us approach, and then they followed, running up the street behind us. The crash came at the next corner. The horses were killed: the carriage was broken to bits, and we were conveniently thrown on to the one patch of grass which was to be found beside out route. After the racket and rattle, there now came a sudden hush. We found ourselves lying in a heap on the ground, and as we looked at each other, we saw to our surprise that we were all alive. But both my parents had been badly hurt. My mother had broken her shoulder, but she did not lose consciousness for a minute. Papa had fallen on to his head and for a few moments he lay quite still and stunned; then he woke up to find himself in the arms of Whatley the builder—the first of the townspeople to reach the scene. I believe that a fit of fury is very commonly the first reaction to concussion of the brain, and this now seized my father, who angrily asked Whatley for a cup of tea—a drink he never tasted. It was an absurd anti-climax, and so indeed seemed the end of that most spectacular series of accidents. After that prolonged runaway and that terrific smash, there were no lives lost, only a few broken bones. But I think that this was the last of our deliberately planned expeditions.
The pleasure one derives from sightseeing varies very much with one’s companion. It was my father who gave the tone to all those early expeditions among the Wiltshire downs; and since then I have found that all my memories of sightseeing are coloured with the personality of my travelling companions.
Zita James and I have made more than one motor tour in different parts of England, and she is an extremely scholarly and accomplished sightseer. Into the back of the car is packed her Travelling Library, which consists of a single bookshelf enclosed in a case. On these excursions, made with the definite purpose of visiting beautiful parts of the country, this case contains a row of Guide Books, mostly dating from the eighteenth century; and with these books as our companions, she and I have seen the country together in a very pleasant and unusual manner. The old Itineraries give the names of the owners of important houses on either side of the road; and so one immediately is thrown into the society of two hundred years ago. Other old Guide Books are the Catalogues Raisonnées of art treasures in certain great houses, which were compiled in large numbers in Horace Walpole’s day. These contain many engravings and plans of the houses and grounds in their eighteenth-century condition. We sometimes found that our old Guide Books acted as passports into places we could not otherwise have visited. I remember one particular evening, we were mistakenly told that a very beautiful Yorkshire garden was on view for the Queen’s Nurses’ Fund. We left our car at the gate and walked more than a mile across the park, laden with huge tomes filled with drawings of a most elaborate series of water gardens. It seemed a very long walk, but the prospect of those formal cascades and fountains on terraces one above the other was enough to make us forget the weight of the books we were carrying. We arrived to find the gardens were not being shown after all, and we blundered into the presence of the owner of the house who was extremely surprised to see us and was at first inclined to join her dogs in shooing us away. But those heavy piles of books melted her heart, and when she looked over our shoulders at the enchanting pictures which had drawn us so far, she completely relented and allowed us to wander about the gardens until night fell.
Zita’s sightseeing equipment does not only consist of Guide Books. She has a genius for picnics, and loads the car with bottles of out-of-the-way and delicious fruit drinks, and with knives and forks, plates and glasses. In the
