THIRD DAY--ODSEY TO EDLESBOROUGH, BY BALDOCK, LETCHWORTH, ICKLEFORD,
LEAGRAVE, AND DUNSTABLE
The rooks had been talking in my sleep much too long before I started
next day. Their voices and the blazing window-blind described the
morning for me before I stirred. I could see and feel it all; and if I
could write it down as I saw and felt it this would be a good book and
no mistake. The long grasses were dewy cool, the trees lightly rustling
and full of shadow, the sky of so soft a greyness that it seemed an
impossible palace for a sun so gorgeous. The thrushes sang, and seeing
a perfect crimson strawberry, I picked it, and found that it was as hot
as a strawberry can be, and therefore at its sweetest and richest.
[Illustration: Deadman’s Lane, Baldock.]
Winding a little more than before, and still closely attended on its
right by the Great Northern Railway, the road entered Baldock, or
rather it approached that town, and then, refusing to be a main road
any longer, turned off before the Toll Bar Inn to the right. Thus it
dipped into the northern edge of the town close to the railway and the
station, as a long, sordid lane called Bygrave Lane or Deadman’s Lane,
past the gasworks, past the “Stag,” the “Swan,” and the “Black Eagle”
in a row. This was the abode of the “Sand Boys,” who sold sand all over
the country, and bought bones and rabbit skins. It is also the reputed
scene of the death of Gypsy Smith’s wife and his own conversion. Past
the nobly named public-houses the narrow street became a lane, rutted
and half green, and edged on the left with nettles of wondrous height
and density. The railway was closer and closer on the right; on the
left was a new cemetery behind tall railings. At length the railway
passed under the road. I was now again between high, extravagant hedges
of thorn and wild roses. The road was wider, but rough, half green and
half rutted, and in places divided into two by a thicket of blackthorn
standing in the midst. A nightingale was singing among the roses above
some old chalk pits.
After a road from a level crossing had come in on the left, I kept
straight on along the right side of a hedge dividing the railway from a
big field, and past the left edge of a shallow chalk pit. There was no
road here, but several tracks went through the long grass, and mistake
was impossible. On the right two paths went off to some of the new
houses of the Letchworth Garden City, and to a building gigantically
labelled “IDRIS.” This was, I suppose, the temple of this city’s god,
though the name, except as the Welsh equivalent for Arthur, was unknown
to me. They say now that Arthur was a solar hero, and when in doubt
men might do worse than to worship the sun, if they could discover
how. At Letchworth they were endeavouring to do so. The sun was not
benign or even merciful in return for these efforts. He responded by
telling the truth with his most brilliant beams, so that the city
resembled a caravan of bathing machines, except that there was no sea
and the machines could not conveniently be moved. At the end of the
big field I crossed a new road and entered among the elders and thorn
trees of the edge of Norton Common. Here there were several parallel
paths, and on the left behind a hedge was a garden-city street called
“Icknield Way.” This represented the line of the road, but whether this
or the path on the other side of the hedge was more on the old course
I cannot say. Past the houses “Icknield Way” ceased to be a road fit
for perambulators and became a rough track, chiefly used for carrying
building materials. It followed along a hedge and past a sand pit,
in one place a little hollowed out. It was miserable with the rank
grass of newly “developed” districts. After a road came in from under
the railway on the left, it began to curve away north and leave the
railway. Once more it was between hedges; but with all its vicissitudes
it had remained a parish boundary all the way from Slip Inn Hill near
Odsey. It was going uphill, and presently I could see not only the
corn, sainfoin, and houses growing round about, but in the south-west
the line of hedged and wooded hills above Ippollitts, Offley, and
Pirton. Letchworth was still in sight, like so many wounds on the
earth and so much sticking-plaster. But, though behind me, it was
fascinating, like all these raw settlements. It is a curious pleasure
to see them besieged by docks and nettles, and, as sometimes happens,
quietly overcome by docks and nettles. They look new until suddenly
they are unvenerably old. Letchworth may turn out to be an exception,
but as I hurried through it, some back gardens, some forlorn new
roads, and the tune of “She’s off with the wraggle-taggle gipsies, oh!”
sent my thoughts mysteriously but irresistibly to the desolate new-old
settlements I have known.
[Illustration: The Ford, Ickleford.]
[Illustration: Ickleford Church.]
At the hill-top the road made westward, a shady hedge on the left,
sunny sainfoin on the right, and arrived at Wilbury Camp. The north
side of the camp touched the Bedfordshire border. The high, irregular
earth walls overgrown with thorn trees made an uneven and much delved
enclosure, where it was impossible to distinguish gravel pit from camp,
and through this hollow and among its thorns went the path I took
instead of along the southern hedge and wall, which appears to be the
canonical Icknield Way and the parish boundary. Across it goes the hard
road coming from Brook End over Wilbury Hill and down to Walsworth. On
the other side of this road it was a wide, many-tracked, green way,
winding through open cornland down to the trees of Ickleford; and on
its left, at the convenient distance of two miles, the tower and roof
clusters and trees of Hitchin replaced the spots of Letchworth. There
were hedges with elms for the mowers to rest under, and on the right
was the white wall of a chalk pit, with roses and privet overhanging,
and black bryony and elder growing below. The way descended to be
crossed by two lines of railway a few yards apart. Between the two
it was grassy and elm-shaded. Beyond the second the road forded the
River Hiz, and even waded in it for thirty yards or so. Ickleford
village had a green with chestnut trees, a “Green Man” and an “Old
George,” and a church wall decorated regularly all over with an incised
design of saws, swords, handcuffs, crowns, etc. The road passed St.
Catherine’s Church and the “Green Man” on its right, and went out of
Ickleford at “Ickleford Gate” on the Hitchin road. This it crossed and
went against the course of the River Oughton, which flowed and turned
a mill a little below upon the left. At first it was a green-edged
road of good surface, with hedges and telegraph posts, making for the
downs, for Telegraph Hill, Deacon Hill, and Tingley Wood, between
Pirton and Lilley. But at the mill, its modern use gone, the road was
once more a broad, green way dipping with many ruts down among the
willowy buttercup meads of the Oughton. Doves cooed; blackcaps poured
out their cool, fiery wine of melody; and the cattle meditated about
nothing under the elms. The road was rising again, crossed the Pirton
and Hitchin road at Punch’s Cross, and entered through the gate of
an oat-field, travelling along its hedge and out by another gate. At
Punch’s Cross it became a parish boundary, which it ceased to be at
the River Hiz. Up on the right above the ploughland lay Tingley Wood
and a beech clump. On the left charlock and corn divided by elms and
hedges extended to a wall of low wooded hills. Out of the field the way
was a green-hedged lane entered under the rustling welcome of beech
trees. Then it became part of the main road from Barton-in-the-Clay
to Hitchin, and at the turning southward to Offley a boundary between
Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. This part of the road was partly on
a terrace along the side of a hill sloping to the south, and there
were roses and traveller’s joy buds in the hedges. At one point the
land on the left had apparently been too steep to enclose at its lower
side, and the hedge was at the top of this steep portion, which was
therefore a broad, rough triangle of open turf beside the road. Beyond
this the way had good grass banks or level margins with hazel and
thorn hedges, and ash or elm trees above them. It was drawing near to
a rough and thorny chalk hill called Deacon Hill, and as it was bent
on climbing over this range, the modern road left it, and, going
westward, avoided the heights above three hundred feet. The Icknield
Way took a south-westerly course, and mounted steeply up as a green,
almost rutless lane between high hedges. It was green and even as soon
as it left the hard road, and now for the first time made a real bold
ascent of the chalk. It looked more like a part of the Ridgeway, but
for the high hedges, than the unadventurous road that I travelled
from Thetford. There were daisies all over it, and roses hung upon
either side. Nearing the hill-top it narrowed, and had steep banks on
the left with brambles and thorns over them. But right to the top it
kept those high hedges. Below on the right lay a neat, green-hedged
vale and a long, gentle slope covered with woods or horizontal lines
of trees up to a straight low ridge. Telegraph Hill, which the road
crossed, is over six hundred feet high. It is difficult to understand
why it should make this climb instead of circumventing the hill by a
sharp curve southward. It never again does such a thing or rises to
such an altitude. At the summit a green ridgeway leaves it. It was
easy to glide into this and wind with it to Lilley Hoo and Lilley. The
track was a hedgeless, green band among thistles and isolated thorns,
glittering dark hollies, and ash trees. Here and there the sheep rested
in the shade of a little bramble and thorn thicket, where an oak or ash
buried its trunk, and roses climbed. The clear, high tinkling of the
bells on still wandering sheep was almost as gay as if the bells were
on dancers’ feet. The turf on the track was the finest, and was bounded
by a tussocky line on one side, if not both. And so it serpentined on
the high, flat back of the hills, always among old, isolated thorns or
small, clear-cut thickets.
[Illustration: On Telegraph Hill.]
But this was not the Icknield Way, which went straight over Telegraph
Hill, and steeply and deeply worn, down to a green lane on the other
side, where it was joined on the left by another track descending
from a little tumulus with two thorns on it. The green lane winding
south-westward was broad, but the spread of the beeches on its left
side was broader and roofed it wholly; the turf was better when this
line of trees came to an end. Suddenly a chalk pit on the left narrowed
it, and this narrowness had been continued on, and used for wheat as
far as the next turning. Thenceforward it widened, and had rough hedges
of elder and nettles, holly and ash, between it and the undulating
corn. In front bulked the smooth ridge of Galley Hill. Past the turning
to Offley there were four or five tracks parallel but on different
levels, with an embanked one in the centre. Soon it was again on the
turf of the Downs, curving around the right base of Galley Hill, the
open land on the left, hedges and fields on the right; past the hill
there were two hedges and ploughed land on either hand. Hereby was the
entrance into Bedfordshire. Then it came almost at right angles to the
straight mound of Dray’s Ditches, but turned to the right along it,
followed by the parish boundary into the Luton and Bedford road. If,
instead of going alongside the ditches, I had gone straight ahead upon
the line of the way, I should have struck this road at the sixteenth
milestone, and at the opposite turning to Leagrave which I actually
took. The boundary, on the other hand, went on over the main road
towards Houghton. The road down to Leagrave was an ordinary hedged road
with narrow, green edges. After passing a little copse on the left I
turned on the same side, by an ash a century old, into a broad green
track to Limbury. It had hedges, but that on the left strayed away
round a huge rushy space. Beyond this was the clean orange wall of a
sand pit, and then a green field, and then the tree-tops, and the crowd
of roofs and the tall chimneys of Luton, and in the midst a tower above
all the rest. But the hedge returned and the way narrowed, and it had
to cross Leagrave Marsh and the tiny Lea. There was a choice of road
or path. Entering the brand-new, jerry-built, slated cages of combined
Limbury and Leagrave Marsh, I turned to the right along Limbury Road,
and found on my left the Icknield Way, giving its name to an estate and
a new street.
Leagrave Marsh was evidently a pleasant little ford village before it
became what it now seems to be--a safety-valve for Luton. The harsh,
new streets led me to a rushy common threaded by the Lea, and bounded
on my side by a road that crossed the stream with a bridge. At one
side of the bridge the “Three Horse Shoes” faced over the common and
along the water; ponies, traps, and dogs were clustered at the door
in the sun. Their owners were either inside, getting hot, or lying
on the grass over the way. But one driver was taking his horse and
trap through the stream close to the bridge; and the whipped foam was
shining and the spokes flashing. Some boys were paddling a little way
above; and above them the village geese were nibbling among the rush
tufts. In and out among horses and traps, men, dogs, boys, and geese,
the martins were flying.
The Icknield Way went between the new houses and across the Midland
Railway and so down a field rotten-ripe for building into Oak Road,
which leads from old Leagrave into the Luton and Dunstable road. This
road interrupted my way, which went formerly as a footpath straight
across it and into the main road a little west of the Half-way House,
between Dunstable and Luton. This path was ploughed up and its course
only in part noticeable among the crops. The Luton and Dunstable road
now looked like a river and the footpath a tiny brooklet whose drying
up made no difference to the main stream. But in Robert Morden’s map
of 1695 the “Icnal Way” is a clear, good road past Leagrave and into
Dunstable, while the road to that town from Luton is parallel with the
“Icnal Way,” and apparently the same as the road and footpath running
half a mile south of the present road and just south of the Hatfield,
Luton, and Dunstable branch of the Great Northern line. This main road
was a substantial, broad, straightforward highway running along level
ground and parallel to the downs on its left. There were a few beeches
in its low hedges, and the margins of grass were of the ordinary width
and rich in dust. Three or four miles of the clear hills, here and
there crowned by trees, curved alongside and then slightly across my
course. Opposite the turning to Houghton the lime works of Blow’s Down
broke the green wall with white.
[Illustration: Dunstable Downs.]
As I entered Dunstable there was already a touch of night in the
light, and it fell with a sad blessing upon the low-towered church
and the sheep grazing in the churchyard up above the road on my left.
The crossing of the Icknield Way and Watling Street makes Dunstable.
Watling Street was wider and had the town hall, the post office, the
bigger shops, and the chief inns. The Icknield Way, known first as
Church Street, then as West Street, was the more rustic, humble, and
informal, and beyond the crossing it had trees by its side; and this
seemed natural and just. It had become thoroughly suburban before
leaving the town and coming to the smooth high downs on the left, where
children were playing and girls walking about above a field of barley
and charlock beside the road. On my right there was a wide border of
level down turf and no hedge between it and the corn. The downs, or I
should say the Chiltern Hills, proceeded majestically southward, but
six or seven miles away advanced somewhat to the east, half clothed in
woods, until the bare Beacon Hill stopped steep and abrupt above a high
plateau of cornland which fell away into a broad, wooded lowland on my
right. Round this Beacon I could see that my road would bend; I thought
I could see the ledge it must follow. In that lower land on my right
there were several rises. Such was the smooth, easy sweep of Toternhoe,
close to Luton; such the wooded heave upon which rose the dark,
noble tower of Edlesborough Church; and such the terraced hill near
Edlesborough, with a few thorns on the slopes between the terraces, and
at its foot a long, neat orchard of late plums or “prunes.” The broad,
wayside strip on the right hand sometimes showed the old course of my
way much below the level of the present road; and after Well Head this
lower course was beyond and below the modern hedge. On the left, at
Well Head, I noticed a little hill on this side of the main ridge very
prettily terraced, with thorns on the slopes between the terraces. At
Well Head a deep, smooth-sided cleft winds away to Dolittle Mill, with
the first waters of the Ouse. A similar cleft a mile or so beyond, at
the Cross Waters, close to the entrance into Buckinghamshire, carries
water to the mills of Eaton Bray. As I came out of Dunstable I thought
there could be nothing there equal to the sweep of the downs before
me, ending in the wooded Ivinghoe Hills and the Beacon. But when I had
gone more than half-way towards the end of the sweep I looked back and
saw that the downs behind me were equal to those I was approaching, and
even advanced a little out of the straight like the others, ending also
in a promontory above Dunstable. The air was now still and the earth
growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its
clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped,
so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing
nothing of earth. And this dark earth appeared a small though also a
kingly and brave place in comparison with the infinite heavens now so
joyous and so bright and out of reach. I was glad to be there, but I
fell in with a philosopher who seemed to be equally moved yet could
not decide whether his condition was to be described as happiness or
melancholy. He talked about himself. He was a lean, indefinite man;
half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was
before him like a ghost. He told me of just such another evening as
this and just such another doubt as to whether it was to be put down
to the account of happiness or melancholy. He said that he had
been digging all day in a heavy soil, often jarring the fork against
immovable flints, lifting more often than not a weight of clay only
just short of the limit of his strength. He had thought and thought
until his brain could do nothing but remain aware of dull misery and
the violent shocks of the hard work. But his eyes saw the sun go down
with a brief pomp of crimson soon covered up by funereal drifts, and
these in their turn give way to a soft blue, full of whitest stars
and without one cloud. They saw the far hills once more take on their
night look of serene and desolate vastness, and felt the meadows of the
valley become dark and uncertain, the woods much duller but distinct.
The woods immediately below him on the hill-side thickened and appeared
more wild and impossible; the road winding up between them like a long
curl of smoke was wholly concealed. Slowly the solid world was whittled
away. The lights of the small town half-way across the valley, towards
the hills, came out.
[Illustration: Beacon Hill, Ivinghoe.]
As an owl in the woods announced the triumph of night with one large,
clear note, he straightened himself slowly and painfully among the
clods. It would have been easier to continue his toil than to do this,
but he did it, and then cleaned the prongs of his upright fork with the
toe of his boot, prolonging the action as if he either hoped to arrive
now at some significant conclusion with its help or feared the next
step that had to be taken. When he could no longer clean the prongs he
raised his head and looked out beyond the woods over the valley to the
far hills. The quiet, the magnitude of space, the noble lines of the
range a little strengthened his spirit. He remained still. The surface
of his hands was dry to brittleness; he was stiff and yet unsatisfied
with the result of his labour; he felt the dulness of his eyes; and no
thing or person in the world or out of it came into his mind with any
conscious delight or quickness; yet he still looked along the ridges
of the hills from one end to the other, from star to star, without a
thought save the sleeping, underlying one that he was growing old.
A motor-car climbed nervously up the invisible hill-road, the lamps of
it darting across a hundred little spaces between one tree and another
of the vague woods. It left the silence stronger than ever.
The man leaned with his chest upon his hands, which were upon the
handle of his fork. Only a few years ago--either three or four--he
could not have ascertained by any searching of memory--he had been
young, and treated with contempt or with pitiful kindness by those
of more years. But now he had come by unknown ways to feel that he
differed from mature men, not by anything positive that could be called
youth, but only by some undefinable lack which condemned him to a kind
of overblown immaturity. Thus when he consciously or unconsciously
demanded a concession such as might be due to youth for some act or
attitude, he met, in the individual or in society in some corporate
form or other, a blankness or positive severity at which he recoiled
with open but as yet uncertainly comprehending eyes. Of young men he
was now sometimes jealous; of middle-aged men afraid and no longer
defiant. Towards the contemporaries with whom he had shared thought
and experience for some years he felt jealousy, if he seemed to have
outstripped them in the unwilling race; fear, if it was himself that
lagged; and towards only one or two a fair and easy freedom, and that
only intermittently. Therefore no more destitute and solitary man
looked that night on the stars. Yet they were as bright and the hills
under them as noble as those we saw to-day on the road from Dunstable.
Suddenly he awakened and thrilled to the sound of a woman’s voice
singing alone somewhere away from where he stood. He forgot who and
where he was. He was no longer weary and muddied by self-supporting
thoughts. His imagination went out of him and grasped each note simply
and boldly. Where there had been nothing, there the liquid voice
mounted in its beautiful, unseen form amidst the darkness. The singer
was among the dark trees, probably in the climbing road to one side
of him; the curve of that ascent, always a thing of simplicity and
nobleness, was now glorious, romantic as it soared out of the valley to
the clear heights.
Either the singer was walking slowly up or she was riding, but no
footfall or turn of wheel was to be heard. It was a powerful voice,
confident and without care. It leapt up with a wild, indolent flight,
for one short verse of indistinguishable words, in a melody exulting in
the wildness of love and pride of youth, and then fell upon silence.
That silence bore its part also.
But the listener had no sooner lost the first joy over the insurrection
of melody, begun to consider--whilst waiting breathless for its
return--who she might be, what she was doing now, whether a lover
was walking beside her, when she sang again, higher up the road. The
first note rose up to the highest stars, clear and fresh and having a
power like light over the gloom. Other notes hovered after it at the
same height, and then with one swoop as of an eagle fell to the earth
and silence before even a verse was finished. A low laugh drawn out
very long an instant afterwards confirmed the first impression of the
singer’s ease and joyousness. The man could see her neck lifted eagerly
and her eyes flashing towards the lover or towards the stars, her lips
parted, her breast heaving with deep draughts of the night and passion,
her feet pacing with languid strength. He himself stood still as any
tree in the ebb of the wind.
Oh, for a horse to ride furiously, for a ship to sail, for the wings
of an eagle, for the lance of a warrior or a standard streaming to
conquest, for a man’s strength to dare and endure, for a woman’s beauty
to surrender, for a singer’s fountain of precious tones, for a poet’s
pen!
He trembled and listened. The silence was unbroken; not a footstep or
whisper was to be extracted from it by his eager and praying ear. He
shivered in the cold. The last dead leaves shook upon the beeches, but
the silence out there in that world still remained. She was walking or
she was in her lover’s arms, for aught he knew. No sound came up to
him where he stood eager and forlorn until he knew that she must be
gone away for ever, like his lyric desires, and he went into his house
and it was dark and still and inconceivably empty.
As I turned into the inn and left him he was inclined either to put
down that evening half to happiness and half to melancholy, or to cross
out one or other of those headings as being in his case tautological.
The landlady at my inn was the first that ever told me outright, at
once, and without being asked, what she charged for a bed, and as the
sum was reasonable I was doubly pleased. She was a jaunty, probably
childless London woman not far from forty, who referred to her husband
as “my sweetheart.” She had a skittish, falsetto laugh, whether she was
talking to me about their old horse John and all his merits, or to the
labourers about such and such a “sweet old house” in the neighbourhood.
They were speaking of the coronation bonfire that was building on the
Beacon Hill, and she became important and full of reminiscences of
the Hampstead Heath bonfire, and, thereanent, the Spaniards, Vale of
Health, and so on. She hovered between them and me, anxious to tell
me that much as she liked a country life she missed the gas and the
bathroom of a London house. Now and then she left us all, to talk to
the parrot in a loud voice intended for mankind as well as Polly. Her
“sweetheart” turned out to be a little active man, superficially jaunty
but silent and brooding and hanging down his head. He was sandy-haired
with dull, restless, blue eyes, and had not recently been shaved. His
turned-out feet stepped quickly hither and thither. He was dressed
anyhow and as if he slept in his clothes to ensure a fit; a white scarf
was tied round his neck and his trousers were turned up. He carried a
cigarette either in the corner of his mouth or behind his ear. He was
one of those creatures provided by an almighty providence for attending
on that “noble animal” (such he called it) the horse; but this did not
prevent him from calling his own horse John “old son.” He never carried
a whip, because, he said, he did not believe in hurting “dumb animals.”
A man who knows horses well is equally at home in town or country, and
though this man was as full-blooded a Cockney as his wife, he was, like
her, contented with his three or four years of country solitude; it
was, he said, a “happy life, yes, a happy life,” better than what we
had learnt to call the “bustle and confusion” of London. I asked him
about the Icknield Way, which he knew by that name, and he told me that
it was a Roman road and that he had heard a man could walk on it for
twelve months and come back to the same place again. What that place
was he did not say; probably he meant any place and imagined that the
road made a circuit of this island or belike of the great globe itself.
There could be no better landlord and landlady of a small wayside inn
with one horse, one trap, and one spare bed. The bed was clean and
comfortable, and I fell asleep in it while the stone-curlews were
piping on the downs and a pair of country wheels were rolling by, late
and slow.