Without Knowing Mr Walkley

of a gold chair buried in its vaults, and of the path by which St. Thomas à Becket walked daily from his cure at Winterbourne in the valley to say Mass in the Palace Chapel—a path which since then has always remained miraculously green. Once again Wiltshire, with its unchanging steadfastness, surged over the outstanding buildings thrown up on the high ground by those passers-by. The stones of the palace were absorbed into the humble houses of the surrounding villages, and for many years its foundations were hidden beneath a tangle of green growth. Only in the past few years has the plan of Clarendon Palace been rediscovered by Tancred Borenius and his wife, whose zeal and knowledge have rescued it from the oblivion to which Wiltshire persists in consigning her migrants.

During the past thirty years, armies of soldiers have crossed Salisbury Plain. During the war, there were several parts of Wiltshire in which one drove for nine and ten miles at a stretch through continuous camps. The ugly ramshackle buildings of wood and tin completely swamped for the time those villages which had always been so remote with their little thatched houses and their large quiet churches. One then felt that Wiltshire must be ruined for ever. But now all those huts have gone. The grass has grown over the scorched untidy ground which they left behind them. Here and there can be seen a fading memento of the war-time settlements of the Colonial battalions which thronged the Wiltshire villages while the war lasted. It may be the faded and washed-out remnant of what was once a big and gaudy advertisement painted on the side of a house, to announce that a cinema would be open three times in the day; or there are regimental badges cut through the turf into the chalk on the downs, in the manner of the Wiltshire white horses. These were a constant interest to the men who cut them, but they are now very erratically ‘scoured’. And then one comes across here and there a war-time cemetery, or the graves of strangers in a village churchyard.

There are, of course, still many soldiers on the Plain, and their camps look solid and permanent, but so must have looked the great Norman castles which have gone. To the people of Wiltshire, the soldiers will always be passers-by.

Wiltshire is now fashionable again, and a great many amusing parties are given here by people who delight to say that the county is now as gay as London, and gay in the same way. They would like it to become a suburb of London, although it long ago refused to become a suburb of Rome. Like the earlier migrants, these migrants of to-day would find the real Wiltshire life extremely boring, and as a matter of fact they never touch it. They could not do so, unless they were content to settle down in a Wiltshire village, to live there year in and year out and to have a great many children in it. None of them wish to do this, and until they do so, the natives will still adopt towards them the traditional Wiltshire attitude of: ‘’Ere’s a stranger. ’Eave ’alf a brick at un.’

A friendly young new-comer to a village in the county made a practice of going to the inn in the evenings to talk with the men sitting in the bar. There lived in the village a rascally old horse-coper, who was very racy of the soil. And one of his friends invited him to come in one evening, to meet the new-comer.

He shook his head.

‘T’ooden do no good to I to be seen wi’ that lot,’ was all he said.

It is still a case of the fox and the fleas.

Copyright

First published in 1938 by Faber & Faber

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