AND ANOTHER THING
Why the Queen is right to choose the Hodder Valley as a last dwelling place
PAUL JOHNSON
Ari item of news which arrested me last week was an announcement in the Times that the Queen's favourite place in the whole wide world is the Hodder Valley in Lancashire, and that she would rather like to end her days there. This surprised and intrigued me. Surprised because I have never seen myself as someone with similar tastes to the Queen. I am an average Englishman, almost a statistical archetype of English ordinariness, with no taste for grandeur, ceremonial, racing, horses or, since the death of my never-to-be-forgotten Parker, dogs. Yet the intriguing fact is that the Hodder Valley is my favourite place too. I am unlikely to superannuate there, for my wife Marigold is a Londoner who believes civilisation begins to collapse somewhere north of Watford. On the only occasion I took her to the Hodder Valley she said, 'I had no conception that any- where could be so cold.' So I will not end up there. Nor, for that matter, will the Queen — the Duke will see to that. But we can both have our dreams. It is our country.
It is mine in two senses. When people ask where I come from I say I was born in Manchester, but bits of my family originate in the Trough of Bowland. No one ever knows where that is. The Forest of Bow- land — forest in the sense it was once a protected range for deer: there are few trees there — is a vast tract of indescribably wild and romantic country in the western Pennines, some miles east of places like Morecambe and Lancaster. Few people go there. Why should they? There is nothing to do except walk and listen to the silence and the brown burns flowing and the haunting cries of the moorland birds. The Hodder has its source in the northern reaches of the forest, behind Wolfhole Crag, skirts round to the east, trickles through a mountainy hamlet called Staid- burn, heads south alongside a Roman road, and eventually bumps into and circumnavi- gates a formidable ridge called Longridge Fell. Then it tumbles into a peaceful valley and joins a placid stream called the Ribble and so to the sea at Preston.
All this country is familiar to me because I walked over it and painted it for many years while I was at school. Stonyhurst is a magnificent Elizabethan-Jacobean house surmounted by twin towers on which sit fierce golden eagles. It was built by remote Catholic squires who never surrendered their faith to the Southerners. They finally yielded their house in 1794 to the Jesuits, who had hitherto been obliged by the wicked penal laws to educate the sons of the papist gentry abroad. It is not strictly true that no Protestant has ever set foot in the place — Cromwell had his HQ there immediately before the murderous battle of Preston — but certainly in my time it was hard to find one within a range of five miles. The school was on the slopes of Longridge Fell, and the finest stretches of the Hodder were at our feet. I spent the years 1940 to 1946 there and loved almost every minute. They say that Jesuit schools were harsh in those days, and certainly some of the weaker boys whined a little. Gerard Manley Hopkins was unhappy there too, but to me it was a paradise.
The Hodder is both a sombre and cheer- ful river, depending on the weather. On sunny days it crashes and thunders through countless rapids and cataracts, rattling immense dark-chocolate brown boulders, sending up rainbows of spray and creating miniature Niagaras and deep golden-brown pools at their foaming feet. These 'roughs', as we called them, make natural bathing- places, with water-chutes galore and full- Unpleasant picture of Diana making unpleasant remark to Tiggy. fathom-five depths to dive in. Especially in the summer term, grand feasts of the Church were celebrated by what were known as Good Days, in which we took cooking picnics to the Hodder, built roar- ing fires and fried sausages and bacon on its banks before plunging into its icy waters. These cataracts were spine-chilling and bruising and, I suppose, dangerous, but they were hugely exciting and we did not care. In those days children were not pam- pered and fussed over by social workers or legislated about. We knew the Jesuits loved us and were answerable to God for our well-being. We trusted them and they allowed us to enjoy the wilds and to roam all over the fells where, almost within living memory, there had been wolves and wildcats.
Across the rich valley where the Hodder joins the Ribble lay not indeed a mountain, but what Dr Johnson would have called a `considerable protuberance' known as Pen- dle Hill. It is a haunted place and was right- ly made the focal point of Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Lancashire Witches (1848), which is set in these parts and intro- duces some of the nearby crumbling old homes of the ancient Catholic squirearchy, such as Houghton Hall. I must have drawn Pendle Hill in watercolour as often as Cezanne painted Mont Ste-Victoire. It has an osmotic and elusive profile, rather like the Matterhorn, difficult to get exactly right. Indeed it is mysterious altogether, because, if you climb it, the monumental bosom of the hill suddenly dissolves into flat fields and you never, as it were, get to the top. But from its highest point northern Lancashire, that misty, chilly world of per- secution and suffering and fidelity, of priests' hiding-holes and hanging raids at dawn, of masses said furtively in cellars and attics, of the secret whiff of incense and the muffled chink of Holy Communion bell, of the ever-waiting rack and gibbet — all this is spread at your feet. And wandering through it is the silvery ribbon of the Hod- der, most blessed of streams to me. It is, perhaps, a surprising world for the Queen of England, Supreme Governor of the Anglican Church and, I suppose, the lead- ing secular Protestant on earth, to wish to dwell in while preparing to meet her God. But in my view her instincts are sound and it could well be that in this delectable valley a celestial light will illuminate her thoughts and lead her back to the true faith.
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