England, my England

PERSONAL COLUMN KENNETH ALLSOP

`Bugger off! !I' Through the sparkling sun the voice bashed like a black thunderclap. He was a field away, a bull-sized figure apparently doing a solitary tribal dance, arms flailing the air, snow puffing up from pounding boots.

Across the road from my Hertfordshire house a footpath goes over the one-time single-rail line, long since beechinged into desuetude, to a convergence of the Quin and Rib rivers. Beyond is Broady Meads, a lovely place to walk, a remnant of fen, flat and emerald, tufted with yellow sedge and threaded with deep rushy dykes. Snipe are there in the autumn and geese sometimes drop in. There are always mallard there, occasionally widgeon, and a heron lumbers up from one spot or another of its fishing beat.

On this Sunday sheep were grazing in the far corner, and my wife, young son and I, with our beagle and two dachshunds, turned the opposite way so as not to disturb them. We filed along beside the railway track, up which I sometimes also go, 'to Buntingford in one direction or Puckeridge in the other, a quiet cleft between meadows and trout brooks and thickets, its cinder permanent way now flossed with grass and wild plants. This time we turned west below a knoll and followed the spongy perimeter of the marsh. The frozen flood water, under a white crust from the night's blizzard, crunched underfoot like brandysnap. The dachshunds furrowed along, miniature snowploughs, the beagle lolloping ahead, its nose quivering at the bouquet of rich country smells. On the snow were the spatulate prints of a moorhen's huge feet and the dot-dish Morse code of a rabbit's passage. The dykes were iced over: no wildfowl. There was no stir of anything, except a fluttering party of bullfinches—until that bull-bellow and the dis- tant Cloggies' solo in the snow.

I felt irritated at being yelled at, at the uncouth interruption to our inoffensive outing, and I waited until he came charging up. He was a massive man, cuirassed like an arma- dillo in tweed. Beneath checked cap, his face was a bright pink, falling in wattles over his short collar. The following exchange ensued.

He: `Go on, you lot, bugger off out of here, back to $vhere you belong.'

/ (with dishonest pomposity): 'Will you be good enough not to use that language in the presence of my wife?'

He: 'You get off. This is private property.'

I: 'I was getting off until you stopped me. What are you so bad-tempered about? What harm are we doing?'

He: 'This is a shooting preserve. I'm the gamekeeper. Who the hell do you think you are, just walking in and disturbing the birds?'

I: 'There aren't any birds to disturb.'

Ile: 'No, because you put them up.'

I: 'No, I didn't. There wasn't a single duck on the whole marsh. The dykes are frozen. If you knew as much about birds as you should, you'd know that, if they were feeding here earlier, they've long since flighted.'

He: 'Don't you give me none of that! I know your class of people. You think you can go anywhere over anybody's land.'

(Doubt about this. Which class? Was he mis- reading into my response an arrogant upper-

class disdain for him and his muddy yokel- dom? Or was he referring to my peculiar appearance: in high suede boots, canvas cap with fur ear muffs bought in Greece, and leather zip jacket from Maine, like an elderly rocker?) I: 'Does your master know you go about bullying people?'

He: 'My guv'nor's satisfied with me. We've bought the railway line, too, and see you keep off that. We intend, let me tell you, to keep the likes of you off. And I've got witness of you being here, including a policeman.'

I: 'Good. Bring them over and we'll have a party.'

Bubbles at the corner of his mouth now. `You get off!' he screeched again. `Go back to your own garden, if you've got one.'

`Good afternoon,' I said, 'And you really must try in future to be a little more courteous.'

Of course, it was all asinine and juvenile, but I found myself brooding about the prin- ciples involved in the encounter. Trying to be objectively honest, I admit that I would savour the idea of owning Broady Meads. Although I wouldn't sterilise it for duck shooting, I would love to keep it intact as a nature reserve, to enjoy the sight of the birds coming and going in safety. But that, I suppose, would be partially a selfish pleasure, for nor would I—for different reasons—want interlopers and their dogs clamping all over my private turf.

On the other hand, around where I live. although there are paths theoretically open to those wanting to get their feet off tarmacadam, in fact many are destroyed by ploughing right up to the hedges. Anyway, frequently the hedges themselves have gone, wiped out to expand prairie farms. There are about 80,000 miles of rights-of-way in Britain but annually that figure shrinks alarmingly and irrecover- ably. In 1967 500 footpaths vanished, some under new buildings and roads, some cut off by landlords who managed to prove they were never used. Read John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain: a running, or rather walking, battle from Land's End to John o' Groats, through an ambush of farmers, game- keepers, army land-squatters and even such state agencies as the Nature Conservancy and the Forestry Commission. His warning: 'Open country is diminishing rapidly.'

The point about Broady Meads—and the old railway line and wood where locals could stroll until it was bought up and barb-wired for pheasants—is that all this country is sealed off to furnish a small circle with a few days in the year popping off birds. I am not anti- sports, and I'm keenly aware that private land ownership is often a blessed barrier to indis- criminate subtopian overspill. Also one glumly

knows that the experts predict cities forty time* bigger by AD 2500, and that every acre at

present unpaved must be treasured—especially when London's Green Belt is being gnawn into for municipal housing, when Professor Colin Buchanan, himself a National Trust member, publicly states that he cannot accept that land in the Trust's possession is neces- sarily inalienable: in other words, it can bis grabbed under compulsory purchase order for 'urgent' town planning requirements.

The truth is, there is much freer access to open range in London than beyond the tube network, or at least than there is in my neck of the walled-in woods. Hyde Park or Hamp- stead Heath offers a liberty of movement un- reachable in rural Hertfordshire, unless you've snapped up a few thousand acres for your privileged peregrinations, whereupon presum- ably you hire a mercenary not only to blast the tripes out of feathered and furred intruders into your pheasants' Welfare State but also to roll down like a Soviet tank upon human gate- crashers. Otherwise, as a common villager, you are squeezed off the surrounding landscape. That hilltop with its copse of hornbeam; the chalk ridge where wheatears flit; that oak wood where badgers live—they may be looked at from a respectful distance but not trodden or touched.

Indeed, why should farmers benignly play host to casual callers? They can't sort out on sight the earnest bird-watcher or dutiful rambler who closes every gate as if it were the airlock on a submarine and tiptoes through the sugar beet without brushing a stalk. But does as good a case apply to a shoot being kept as a leafy, armed fortress? I admit that my illicit forays into local coverts are not innocently passive. Gin-traps, which catch stoats and weasels by the leg in serrated steel jaws, either gripping them until clubbed to death or causing the creature to rip off its limb, are, although illegal, blatantly set in certain estates. It has been my pleasure to pluck out many a one and hurl it to rust in the under- growth. Unfortunately one cannot prevent the unlawful shooting of hawks and owls which continues in brazen contravention of the Pro- tection Act in the autonomies behind the 'Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted' boards.

In the country, that mythical land of vaga- bond escape, one is hemmed on to the concrete B-roads, the village street and the sloshy bridle-. ways minced up by the riding-stable proces-. sions. Barbed wire, iron palings, 'Private Fish- ing' and 'Keep Out' notices, felled trees, loosed bulls and prowling bailiffs and gamekeepers, like prison-camp guards glowering over cradled double-barrelled shotguns, ensure that you're kept 'where you belong': that is, off their territory.

England. my England —ah, a moving abstrac- tion : the freedom of the greenwood . . . to drift with the wind on the downs. I dare say the BBC might. while there is still time, get per- mission (for a fee, naturally) to can some colour footage for the archives : slow, tremu- lous pans up through the glimmering leaves of forests, enticing dolly-shots down mossy paths where primroses bunch under the hazels, dreamy hand-held stuff along gravelly rivers where water voles plop into the silvery gurgle.

That's where the countryside belongs: on the sitting-room telly screen. That's where the undisciplined footloose belong: in their place, in front of the box, poachers by proxy, prisoners with parole cancelled, buggered off back to their privet-hedge reservations.