PAUL WHITEHEAD recalls his journey of rural self-discovery. 1971, definitively.
It began in 1971. In those days we were the New Romantics, the early hippies who travelled on foot, or by bicycle, bus or train, and attempted to harmonise ourselves with the world of Nature, and with the minds which had apparently converted with her.
Our hero of the day was William Wordsworth, and his poem, Tintern Abbey, inspired us to walk the Wye Valley and try to capture the atmosphere of his own intimations of immortality.
At Paddington Station the police took us into a private room, where our pockets and rolled-up sleeping bags were searched for marijuana. There was none. "Travel light", the old sages say, "and you will get there. There is the way, and there is the way, but only the way is the way."
These words informed me that whichever way I chose would not be an easy one. Wordsworth had written what to us in those days was glorious and inspiring verse - a little florid in part, but still of great interest - without recourse to altering his perception by artificial means.
Coleridge, his friend, indulged in opium; we had decided to be like Wordsworth, and aspire to lofty heights by purely natural means, namely, being in the presence of landscapes of beauty, breathing the clean air of the Welsh border country, and sleeping next to the earth.
Our first night was spent in an old wooden "guard's van", in the railway sidings at Chepstow. I was lodged between a hard seat and a window, sharing the seat with "Tim", who drank canned beer until four in the morning. David slept on the floor, as did Gerald, who had left his job as a petrol pump attendant to join our quest.
That morning, after rousing ourselves and walking along the tracks to an exit at the station, we walked into town and breakfasted at a cafe, there purchasing bread, cheese, apples, milk and biscuits, and beginning the walk north. The cliffs and the river, as seen from the bridge in Chepstow, formed a magnificent backdrop as we walked away from it expectantly.
David and I had discussed at college with other students the "inspirational" element in Wordsworth's poetry, and how we wished to attain a momentary glimpse into what one might term the Spirit of Nature and of Peace. Some of us thought we had experienced something similar to Wordsworth's intimations - that fleeting flash of communication with the world, or so we thought.
At that time I knew little of Clare, the poet with a quieter manner and one who expressed such feelings and insights with a subtler (and surer?) touch, as can be discovered in his "Child Harold" poesie. In 1971 it was Wordsworth's footsteps we wanted to retrace. Today, I am unsure if we set out to follow a precise route once described, if at all, by the poet, but I know we wanted to stand on the banks of the Wye as he might have done, and gaze down on its waters and dream on its banks.
We wished to tread the footways to Tintern Abbey, there to read the poem of that name, and attempt to commune with Nature, as the poet had done.
We walked the rough grass hills, criss-crossed with stone walls, outside Chepstow; we were intrigued by this, the first section of our five-day exploration, though we hoped to find, and walk along, King Offa's Dyke.
Offa - or, rather, his men - constructed an earthen bank along the length of the border between England and Wales, in order, we believed, to keep marauding hordes of Welsh bandits out of England. Or was it the other way round? Was Offa Welsh or English? We neither knew nor cared, we just wanted to walk his dyke.
The dyke in 1971 was overgrown with trees but was still quite easily negotiated for many miles. It ran through lush woodland near the banks of the Wye. I wanted my imagination to enjoin with other minds, the ones who had designed and managed the construction of the dyke hundreds or thousands of years before, to feel how Wordsworth might have felt, to expand on what he had written, and maybe - maybe - merge with this countryside and his thoughts.
What fancy, here at the start of the seventh decade of the debauched 20th century, where schools had taught us to work in offices and factories, or study the two professions which Jean-Paul Sartre's despised "bourgeoisie" pushed their sons into, in this country at least - accountancy and law.
The wheels of commerce had not passed this way. The woods unspoilt by the science and business parks which were to encroach upon the landscape in southern England 20 years later, the waters clear and bright, sparkling as they must have done for thousands and millions of years; the footpath on Offa's Dyke a quiet place, where we could roam at will, undisturbed by the sounds and deadlines, and declines, of late 20th century city life.
Great trees towered above, beneath their branches were little wooded groves, where young trees entwined with the exposed roots of their elders. Rain fell and departed and we came upon a bluff above the river. We ate our bread and cheese and sat before the view, the river coursing through the hills.
We were a like-minded foursome. Tim was studying something in Scotland. He had long hair and seemed to enjoy this land, so we accepted him as one of us. Gerald wanted more from life than filling cars with petrol - he looked happy enough, so we felt it right that he was here with us.
David? Like me, he was studying English, Ethics and Geography at North East London Polytechnic, a strange mixture of subjects, and people, to be sure. We felt our futures were out of our hands, safe in the guardianship of unknown forces, which would look after us in the years to come and keep us from dangers.
At the end of one day we reached Tintern Abbey, and found a very old empty cottage; from its bedroom windows we could see the Abbey across the river and meadows. It was surely haunted? Wooden beams crossed the ceiling, wide boards the floor, and the stairway smelt musty, and creaked.
We gathered flowers and grass upon which to lie and sleep, and soon we fell into our dreams. Sometimes I would wake, expecting ghosts in the dark to brush by. Morning came; sun across the meadows to the Abbey, slight mist overhanging the fields and hills of this unspoilt region. Here we could settle for life! Till the soil, grow vegetables, fish for food, walk in the mountains, exhilarate with the sweeping panorama spread before us.
Our delight at reaching the abbey was tempered by two factors. Life itself is an education, and so was our visit to this place; there was an entrance fee, and we were pauper students, who seemed to be able to afford an occasional glass of beer but not entrance to Tintern Abbey - and the ruined building was surrounded by barbed wire. This latter insult against culture was the cause of much complaint and heart-wrenching among us; one of the principal reasons for us being here was enmeshed in barbed wire, a symbol of all that we disliked, and which further hardened our attitude. Indeed, a visit to Tintern Abbey was one of the three "experiences" we had hoped to enjoy, the other two being Offa's Dyke and a walk to the top of the Black Mountains.
We cursed officialdom and the world of business, which here (we reasoned) had reduced an object of desire to a valueless remnant. We were nonplussed, we seekers after honesty and the uncluttered life, we penniless neo-Romantics aghast at the reality exposed to us.
Oh, visions of what is, and what was to come; miserable commerce, making drab the fantastic; the claws of our detractors clutching at our faces, seeking to throttle our noble emotion!
David had written on subjects like these, and his intimate knowledge of the situation was no surprise. His worldview ran parallel with mine, and I knew we would touch it again during the hours to come by the riverside. We talked, and I lazily gave him the opportunity to entertain me for the afternoon. The subject: Tintern Abbey and the Old Romanticism.
Arise ye poets and ye warriors of old, and give us assistance today and forever.
Lunch was a meagre sandwich and small beer in a mean pub. The lean streets were getting busy with cars and we turned north or west to somewhere, to head for the Black Mountains.
I swore at those who had vilified the holy ground of Tintern Abbey, but later, on top of a hill overlooking the Wye Valley, I read Wordsworth's poem about the ruins and began to forget our experience. This is often the best way to avoid getting permanently dispirited about things we don't like - forget about them.
So, Tintern remains forever a poem and a view from an old cottage.
We were not to be disappointed in our wish to experience something of what our cherished poet had felt. During a warm and sunny afternoon we climbed higher and higher, reaching for the blue above the ridge which forms the top of the Black Mountains.
The view to England swept eastwards, fields and hedgerows and lanes neatly laid out, villages in miniature. We stood and we sat, breathing the crisp air, sun playing on our long hair, all cares now gone in these four young men.
The clean wind swept around us and I felt for a spark of insight which might one day produce a poem worth writing. I am not sure I received one, but we felt happy and inspired to no small degree, and moved off to look for a youth hostel in the mountains, where we would spend the night.
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
I stood with your host of golden daffodils
We all know because we have read so many times
that they were floating on a cloud.
Or was that you?
Because you are dead now,
Perhaps you are the rain we felt on our skin
last March when we played our guitars
On the deep mountainsides, when it was snowing up there.
Today, 26.10.71, it is cold and grey
And a light-brown Autumn.
Your poems are hidden on my bookshelf,
The whistling gasfire burns with our music.
You were read last night,
And I thought of you on your walks.
The Abbey at Tintern,
the salty muddy flows of the Wye,
You never saw the railway track just there
but even now it is no longer here; we saw
a damp and stony lane where you sat beneath
your tree to write your poem.
It will change again
It is never the same.
Although it shines the sun
Gives way to rain.
The clouds up in this valley
Turn inwards in dark vein.
I found this poem years later and it confused me a little. We didn't have any guitars on the trip, I have never played the instrument, and when we visited Wales it was summer - there was no snow. Rather, I had fashioned the poem out of the experiences of two visits to that country - one when there was still snow in the mountains - and wrote it while sitting in front of a gas fire in Darlington. To confuse matters further, I had introduced fanciful aspects from my imagination - the guitar playing, the tree where Wordsworth sat - we had no idea where he sat, and if he sat beneath a tree at all, but we guessed he must have done, so we selected a tree - or did I just do that in the poem? I forget, though we probably imagined that the poet had mused beneath the branches in our little world, near Offa's Dyke.
The next day - that is, the night after sleeping on the Black Mountains - we walked to the lowlands of Wales, found another empty cottage, and walked into a village for evening refreshment. I cannot recall the village name, but it must have been very old, as there were castle ramparts or walls in the place.
Sitting in the pub or sipping a beer, we were surprised when the police arrived. Were we hippies, they asked? Well, yes, sort of. Had we left some of our belongings in an old house - yes. Well, we had better go and collect them and not imagine we could come to Wales and sleep in any old empty house we happened upon. These police people were helpful and polite, almost to the point of being friendly - in fact, I believe they were friendly in their own way - but they had their job to do, they said.
The landowner didn't want us in his derelict rooms, and that was that. They would have to be left to the bats and rats, and the wet rot eating its way through the building, which today is probably fallen down and decayed into the ground, except for a few pieces of soft brick wall.
I am reminded of London and other big cities, and even small towns like Guildford, where the homeless sleep in car parks and shop doorways, and all the while there are empty houses - some of them empty for years - around many a corner. It is a curious aspect of life, this, though we are told that common sense must prevail in order to suppress anarchic tendencies.
I must confess, we were not feeling particularly like anarchists that time in Wales, and the people I have seen sleeping in doorways are not exactly on a revolution. Still, you had to see the landowners' point of view - the land was his and nobody else's, and soon every young hippy in the English cities would be on the trek into Wales, heading for his falling down cottage, and causing the local police a not inconsiderable amount of manpower and logistics problems.
Unperturbed by this turn of events, we accepted a ride with the police to the cottage and retrieved our rucksacks and bags. The local ordinary folk had warmed to us in the pub and, back in that establishment, someone offered us the floor of a house he was building.
Through the darkness he drove us and soon we were asleep on the cold, hard concrete floor he had recently laid in his new bungalow.
Morning: the kindly man returned with a flask of tea and egg sandwiches, and we were forced to reflect on our situation.
Being "hippies", we had already practised what can be called "unconditional appreciation" of people, accepting passers-by as we found them and being as little non-judgemental as possible, and expecting heaven or hell in return. This attitude of ours had made others cringe before its naivety, but it stood us in good stead, and we wandered on as if in a dream.
The man who brought us food and drink; we had conversed with him in the pub as if he was a life-long friend, as indeed he might still be! And, in return, he had offered us his kindness and all he had in the circumstances - a piece of flat, cold concrete. But what a treasure that was, that piece of hard ground; and the miser with his old empty cottage lies deep inside his bunker, awaiting the next attack.
One afternoon, we came to Hay-on-Wye, a small country town closer to the headwaters of the Wye. The tidal sea waters did not come here; the river was broad but shallow, littered with smooth, weathered stones, and here and there some deeper channels of the river allowed the water to bubble and gurgle as it rushed through.
It was in this little town, David and I later agreed, that we began to form an opinion of how an ideal world could evolve. Our Utopia - bookshops, filled with second-hand books from floor to ceiling - books on philosophy and poetry, our favourite subjects, and much more.
In the town we bought fish and chips and declared the fish to be the finest we had ever tasted; actually, it was probably the light golden batter that delivered the taste and texture we enjoyed. Never mind, in those days we ate sausages without a thought of what went into them and even now I might venture to try that fish again.
We slept by the bank of the Wye, not beneath the stars above us, as we would have wished, but beneath a road bridge, as rain was falling, and awoke to the gentle drip of water and the quiet rushing of the river, and, overhead, the rumble of traffic on our ceiling.
Utopia?
"There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept;
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky"
(Clare, 1865)
The plashing river, low wooded hills, low-density housing, modest volume of traffic, small shops - no great monsters of commerce here, we hoped, no takeover bids reducing business life to drab uniformity and conformity. Many of the parents here, I thought (hoped?) did not channel their sons into Accounting and Law - the twin Pillars of the Establishment, guarantors of an easy, well-paid life from the cradle to the grave, and respectable into the bargain!
Within that Way, the parents could forget the hopes and dreams of their offspring, not always beloved.
Accounting and Law; sons of the Devil, and cousins of the Master of Purgatory - factory work. England desired, and still does, to train its children in a narrow spectrum of education, reducing the horizons of their minds to examinations, training, and working with sums or little pieces of legal piecework, for their lives.
These are safe jobs, a route to prosperity and respectability for those who benefit from the English caste system; yet also, we were convinced, a prison house where dreams lie crushed and dead among the rubble of a lost civilisation; where man may grow old until he lies upon his death bed, wondering - what did I do with my life, where has it gone?
Now I am off again; uncontrolled anarchy of the mind takes me to Dreamtime of the black people of Australia. Sunrise from the aircraft before touchdown at Sydney, escaping the drab streets of London. Dry river beds, carved out of this landscape by the Spirits of the Dreamtime; animals and snakes imprinting their minds and spirits on the sand and arid dunes, and naked hills - and, also, on the land around the clear blue waters of the inland rivers, and in the caves where the spirits live on in sacred places and paintings; in the Blue Mountains above Sydney, and the countless miles of shoreline.
SOUTHERN LAND, NORTHERN LAND
Sitting in a quiet suburban back garden
Trying to forget the office,
The man with the beard remembered
how once he used to write poetry
"But now I'm past 30", he mused,
"The time has gone, but I can still dream."
The summer of '79 is best forgotten.
Fragments of that Spring still cling to memory.
A daughter we never knew
has kept her place inside my heart.
And so to the warm shores of Australia we crept,
and washed ourselves in the gentle sea breeze.
Then the fierce heat burned away,
the deepest blue sky beckoned me forever,
the circling white clouds invited me to wander
through the heat and dust and Dreamtimes.
Some of us Europeans, we too have our
dreams.
We are not all entombed in unspoken laws and regulations.
Down along the rut they walk, somnambulists to the last.
While here, among the hills and ridges of the wilds,
we touch the earth and stars as others never could,
and await the next adventure.
Journeymen to the East we may be.
Hermann Hesse might think we are.
Southern Land, Northern Land,
you encompass us with legends of magic. (28/7/83)
So now you, the reader, know it: - there were once seekers of a truth, who walked the hills and valleys of Wales, who read poetry and sought the spirit of Wordsworth on King Offa's Dyke. The truth we sought was perhaps unattainable, you might say, but we tried and ... did we touch it when we breathed the air beneath the trees?
Paul Whitehead, 29th April 2001
LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE
TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR.
JULY 13, 1798
by William Wordsworth
Five years have past; five
summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. - Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: - feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: - that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, -
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft -
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart -
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. - I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. - That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance -
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence - wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love - oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
Paul Whitehead has been a journalist since 1972. Previously in the newspaper industry, he now writes mainly in the IT and change press.
He has travelled widely, read widely, thought widely and gardened widely (well, he hopes he has done all these things!)
He writes poems and has grown food by the organic method since the early 1990s.