IF you love the quiet of the country—the real quiet which is not silence
at all, but the blending of a myriad scarce-perceptible sounds—you will
get it in Windlecombe, heaped measure, pressed down, and running over,
year in and year out.
The village lies just where Arun river breaks the green rampart of the
Sussex Downs. To the west, the lowest cottages dwindle almost to the
water’s brink. Northward and eastward, the highest buildings stand afar
off, clear cut against the blue wall of the sky; while in between,
filling the deep, steep combe, church and inn and every kind of
dwelling-house, little or big, huddle together under their thatch and old
red tiles, with the village green in their midst, and a thread of white
road rippling through them all and up the steep combe-side till it is
lost in the sunny waste of the hills.
But there is no way through Windlecombe. From the market town four miles
off, the road is good enough; and good it remains until it reaches the
highest human outpost of the village. But there it suddenly changes to a
mere cart-track, soon to vanish altogether in the green sward of the
Down. And therein lies Windlecombe’s chiefest blessing. Far away on the
great main road, when the wind is southerly, we can hear the motor-bugles
calling, and see pale comet-beams careering through the night. But these
things come no nearer. At rare intervals, perhaps, a stray juggernaut
will descend upon us, and demand of some placid rustic the nearest way to
Land’s End or Aberdeen, returning disgusted on its tracks when it learns
that there is only one road from here to anywhere, and that the road it
came. But these ear-splitting, malodorous happenings are few and far
between. At all other times, Windlecombe wears the quiet of the hills
about it like a garment. The dust of the highway has no soaring ambition
to whiten the hedgerows, or fill the cottagers’ cabbages with grit. It
still keeps to its ancient, lowly work of smoothing the path for man and
beast; and our children can play in it unterrorised, our old dogs lie in
it at their slumberous ease.
How wild and quiet the place is, you can only realise by living in it
from year’s end to year’s end, as has been my own privilege for longer
than I care to compute. For how many ages a human settlement has existed
in this wooded, sun-flooded cleft of the Downs, it is impossible to
hazard a guess. Windlecombe is mentioned in _Domesday_, but the stones of
the old church proclaim it as belonging to times more distant still. Be
that as it may, its clustered roofs and grey church tower have long been
reckoned in the traditions of wild life as part and parcel of the eternal
hills. Birds frequent Windlecombe as they haunt the beech-woods that
hang upon the sides of the combe. They use the rick-yards and gardens,
the very streets even, as they use the glades in the woodlands or the
verges of the brooks. You may come out of a winter’s morning and see a
heron flapping slowly out of your paddock, or listen to a pheasant’s
trumpeting on the other side of the hedge. And in early summer you can
sit on the garden bench, and, looking up into the dim elm labyrinth
overhead, watch a green woodpecker at work, cutting the hole for his nest
straight and true into the heart of the wood. That the thrushes sing all
day long from Michaelmas to Midsummer Day, that in June you cannot sleep
for the nightingales, that there is never an hour of daylight all the
year round when a lark is not carolling against the blue or stormy grey
above the village—these things you take as part of your rightful daily
fare, and are content.
But life in an English village derives its charm only in part from its
intimacy with wild Nature and all her wonders and beauties, indispensable
as these are to the daily lives of most thinking, working men. There is
no error so disastrous, humanly speaking, as that which leads a man to
seek happiness or sublimity out of the beaten track of his fellows.
Neighbourhood, the daily interchange of thought and word and kindly deed,
is a necessity for all healthy human life, and the natural medium of all
true advancement. And nowhere will you find it of such sturdy growth,
rooted in such nourishing, yet temperate soil, than in the villages of
modern England.
Yet here it is necessary to discriminate, to mark conditions. If one’s
duty towards one’s neighbour assumes a real and prime world’s importance
in village life, it is equally true that all men are not alike fit to be
villagers, nor all villages to be accounted neighbourly. It is an
essential part of the life I would describe in these pages that both the
people and the place should depend for existence on the day’s work; work
done, as far as may be, on the soil from which all sprang, and to which
all some day must return. The show villages, the little lodging-letting
communities that are to be found here and there, must be excluded from
the argument. Nor can men of private means, however modest, find a
natural place in the true villager ranks. Where to all men life is a
series of laborious days, tired evenings, dreamless nights, you, lolling
in the sunshine, or playing at work, or more fatal still, working at
play, will be for ever a public anomaly. You will get civility, a
patient, dignified tolerance from all. But you will not have a neighbour:
though you live until your feet have graven their mark into every stone
of the place, you will be a stranger in a strange land.
For my part, such as my work is, I have done it, every stroke, in
Windlecombe for half a lifetime back, and may claim to have fairly won my
villagership. And what it is worth to me—how it is sweetened by daily
touch of kind hearts and grip of clean hands; what the country sunshine
means, filtering through the vine-leaves of my workroom window; and what
the song of the robin that sits on the ivied gate-post without, or, in
winter-time, comes fluttering and tapping at the old bull’s-eye panes for
crumbs; how the daily walk, in wood or meadow or by riverside, brings
ever its new marvel or revelation of unimagined beauty; and how, above
all, the lives of the quaint, courageous, clever folk, in whose midst
Destiny has thrown me, overbrim with all traits human, delectably mortal,
divinely out-of-place—these, and many other aspects of villagership, I
have here tried to set down in plain words and meaning, believing that
what has proved of interest and profit to one very human, always erring,
often doubting soul, may do the like for others, though journeying by
widely sundered tracks.