Read Online A Traveller's Life by Eric Newby - Free Book Online

years later, in 1940, I would crawl on all fours armed to the teeth with ‘token’ wooden weapons because all the real ones had been taken away to give to the ‘real’ army after Dunkirk), my father with his quarter-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey ‘Touring’ Map at the ready to deal with any navigational problems and, as a member of the Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Association, with both badges on the front of his motor car (the RAC’s was grander), returning the salutes of the patrolmen of both organizations (according to whose area we were passing through), men with wind-battered faces, wearing breeches and leather gaiters, who were either mounted on motor-cycle combinations or, in some more rural parts, on pedal cycles. If they failed to salute, members were advised to stop them and ask the reason why.
    Among the interesting things we saw on this early June morningwas a nasty accident, with splintered windscreens and lots of blood, which, although Lewington slowed down so that we could have a better view, I was not allowed to see properly, my head being turned the other way by Kathy, much to my disappointment. We also saw traction engines and enormous machines called Foden lorries, fuelled with coal and belching steam and smoke and red hot cinders; and a ‘police trap’, set up by a couple of constables armed with stop-watches, one of whom had emerged from a hedgerow in which he had been lurking to flag down a luckless motorist for ‘speeding’. Until November 1931, the speed limit in Britain for all motor vehicles was officially twenty miles an hour. And we saw lots of tramps, most of them, like us, heading west, one of them a diminutive elderly man wearing a bowler hat and a wing collar, who was helping his equally elderly wife to push a very old-fashioned, high-wheeled perambulator with all their possessions in it along the road. And once we saw a team of huge English carthorses pulling a wagon with an enormous tree trunk on it.
    At one point we came to a magic place where a road forked away from the one on which we were travelling, a place that I never forgot and was therefore subsequently able to identify, although it was years later. There, sheltered by trees was a grass-grown open space, with a number of low, barn-like buildings disposed about it. Some had slate roofs; some were thatched; some of the more important-looking ones – that might have been part of a farm – were built of cob, a mixture of clay and straw, and had enclosing walls of the same material, which were also thatched or tiled, as they had to be, otherwise they would have melted away in the rain, something I had never seen before.
    And it was here, at this moment, as if to set a seal on my memory of it, a memory that would endure for the rest of my life, and embody so many feelings that I could never express, thatmy father half stood up in the front of the car and shouted over the top of our windscreen, ‘Hilda! Look at those buildings! How they’re built! That means we’re in the West.’ And he was right. For this was Weyhill, the Werdon Priors of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge , famous for its ancient six days’ fair beginning on old Michaelmas Eve (10 October), one of the most ancient in Britain, to which a line in The Vision of Piers Ploughman , c.1360, ‘To Wy and Wynchestre I went to the fayre’, perhaps refers. Horses, sheep, cheese and hops were the principal things sold at the fair and as many as 150,000 sheep once changed hands here in a day. The second day of the fair (old Michaelmas Day) was the great hiring-day for farm servants and labourers in this part of Hampshire and the adjoining districts of Wiltshire, the carters appearing with a piece of plaited whipcord fastened in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool. For many years now I have watched the at first gradual and later the accelerated decay of these strangely beautiful