Morton in the marshes
Michael McMahon
IN 1924, feverish, depressed and in Palestine, far from his native land, the travel writer H.V. Morton found himself overwhelmed by a sudden wave of home-sickness in which
. there rose up in my mind the picture of
a village street at dusk with the smell of woodsmoke lying in the still air and, here and there, little red blinds shining in the dusk under the thatch. I remembered how the church bells ring at home, and how, at that time of year, the sun leaves a dull red bar low down in the west, and against it the elms glow blacker minute by minute. Then the bats start to flicker like little bits of burnt paper and you hear the slow jingle of the team coming home from the fields. When you think like this, sitting alone in a foreign country, you know all there is to know about heartache.
Morton resolved to return to the country of his birth, to explore it, and to write about what he found. The result was In Search of England, an exquisitely whimsical travelogue that captured the spirit of the nation, the hearts of his contemporaries and the imagination of some, at least, of every generation that has drawn English breath since the book was first published in 1927. My own copy is of the 27th impression, made in 1941; many more followed — Methuen have lost count — and it was most recently reissued as a paperback in April 2000.
That a 75-year-old English travel book should still be in print — and, indeed, in use — suggests that there must be some thing remarkable about In Search of England, whose author was, in the judgment of Jan Morris, 'the master of his genre'. But it also suggests something about the way we think about England itself. Morton saw the natural and man-made landmarks he describes so evocatively against a background that has now gone for ever — destroyed, in no small measure, by the motor car that made his pilgrimage possible.
Durham Castle crowns its hill like an armoured knight. and the city of Durham crowds round Durham hill — a tight mass of houses and a main street no wider than a country lane — clustering around the fortified height as serfs might cling to the baron's keep for protection.
It's still like that today, but now, clustering round the base of 'that lovely rock with its church whose roots go back to the first English Christians', is a tangle of concrete tentacles that stretch out from the nearby motorway and reach into a carpark and shopping complex that has been dug into the very hill itself.
There are no such blights upon the England that Morton went a-searching for, and one of the joys of his book is that it corresponds to the mythical England of our own idealising imagination: an England that is all the more painfully attractive to us for being just out of reach. It was only just in reach for Morton, who knew that the old order was changing even as he wrote. In Berkshire, he met 'the last bowl-turner in England', who exercised his craft 'exactly as they did in the days of Alfred the Great'. Near Penzance, he came across 'one of the last of the Cornish packmen' carrying a miniature department store on his back and offering its contents at the doors of farmhouses that were even then becoming rapidly less remote. In Rutland, where 'there is something old-fashioned in the air, I think, not congenial to the hurlyburly of modern life', he recorded the last sighting of a farmer wearing a smock.
Last summer, I set out over the marshes below Stiffkey, in Norfolk, with my In Search of England in my pocket, so that I could read Morton's description of it in situ, and see if — or by how much — the place had changed. Two old boys were sitting on a bench by the main track. One had just turned 90, he told me; his friend would do so soon, if he was spared. I told them what I was up to, and they asked me to read to them from my book. I read them the passage in which Morton meets an old woman who says she's one of the last cockle-gatherers that will be seen in those parts.
She wore a black shawl over her shoulders and a sou'wester that buttoned like a Kate Greenaway bonnet under her chin. Her toothless little mouth was pressed primly in below a smooth apple face etched with a million fine lines, and....
Both men interrupted me at once. 'That was ol' Becky!. they said. They were absolutely sure of it. I had gone in search of H.V. Morton's England, and on a windswept field of sea lavender I had found it.
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