22 NOVEMBER 1957, Page 10

Landscape Lost

By H. E. BATES TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when we came to live on this village green, a farm labourer earned tenpence an hour; a crazy yellow wasp of a bus ran no more than two or three days a week into the nearest market town, though many a country- man never went beyond his parish boundaries during the entire course of a year, except perhaps to buy himself a pair of winter boots after hop- picking; and in an endless solitary perambula- tion one roadman kept our deep lanes neat through the long cycle of snow and primroses, cow-parsley and golden hornbeam leaves.

We were really rural; we really lived in the country. Not isolated, though tucked away, we sat practically in the centre of a triangle made up of three great parks and their. mansions. Our square- towered village church stood separated from us on the crown of a little hill among cherry orchards where sheep grazed. The land about us seemed, at certain seasons, to be one great pheasant-scape. An ancient game called goal-running was still played by local teams and men bore such names as Flannel and Codger.

There was, as I remember it, a certain immensely pleasant untidiness about the land. Woods were deep, smouldering, dark and, it seemed, unviolated; and vigilant gamekeepers con- stantly patrolled with deep bags and lowered guns behind high hedgerows. In the village paper mill, where paper had formerly been made for those great presses, Kelmscott, Ashendene and Dove, paper was still being made by hand, stout as calico and as smooth as birch-bark, and in many colours.

The next village, to the boundaries of which we were joined by a magnificent double avenue of elms, was equally untouched and pleasant; some would say -more so. It sat on the fringe of one of those virgin stretches of common land that are really 'ancient forest : a place of open heath broken by knolls of pine, copses of Spanish chest' nut, much holly and immense fluttering silver poplars. White cotton-grass waved among lilac stretches of heather in summer-time. It was so little touched by man that sometimes in hot years its foundations of peat started burning, the fires run' ning underground, in a slow blue smoulder, impossible to put out. In winter and spring bushes of gorse stood everywhere like lighted Christmas trees, to be followed by yellow whips of broorn.

In those days I was-fond of telling readers of the Spectator that there had been a revolution, drastic and swift, in the countryside; as indeed there had. I confess I was unprepared for another' Today the three great houses have disappeared' completely wiped from the face of the land except for a late peach-wall or two, and much of their parkland timber with them. The church has gout. knocked to a stony skeleton by a doodle-bug that dropped on it one July evening, like an evil hornet' The avenue of elms has gone, looking very much as if another doodle-bug had ploughed it asunder, Almost half the woods have gone and in one of the few remaining copses the local rural district council engages in the pleasant pastime of dump' ing raw sewage. The paper mill, though flourish' ing, no longer makes paper. Our roadman hat gone, replaced at certain seasons of the year bl a mechanised gang that, in the course of a de gives our narrow lanes a sort of Teutonic haircut and abetted each May-time by a solitary figure who arrives with no other purpose than to elt,1 down every spray of kex, that most lacy and enchanting of roadside flowers. Above all, out village street is now as firmly paved, kerbed and concreted as Piccadilly.

In the next village the revolution has take°, much more evident and more material form. The local rural district council, encouraged by the county council, who are next year going to g1'16 us yet another nasty bang in the eye about rates, and doubtless further encouraged by that myster- ious body The Ministry of Town and Country Planning, has gouged the heart out of the com- mon, cut down several acres of trees and put and their place an arrangement of brick, concrete and wire called a housing estate that resembles an army barrack block. Nor, it seems; do -their de- signs end there. There is yet plenty more common left to be carelessly planned and played with.

These changes, small no doubt in themselves but merely a sinister part of a vaster pattern, recall a remark of Mr. John Betjeman's : namely that in all too short a time Southern England will become as ugly as Northern France. To this I take exception. For it seems plain to me that unless we are all mighty careful over the next quarter of a century Northern France will, on the contrary, become as ugly as Southern England. Each year the arteries of suburbia widen, spread and pump into this Kentish landscape of ours so many more red brick corpuscles of houses, estates, and sub- topian development that presently people escaping to the countryside must inevitably, it seems, have no countryside to escape to.

In the suburbanisation of this, still the most exhilarating and varied of all our counties, a strange fact sticks out : namely that this prosper- ous countryside is littered with empty houses. End- less numbers of country cottages, of the kind for which in the uneasy Thirties everybody was searching, stand waiting for tenants and buyers. Everywhere they stare out at you from behind their ghostly sale notices, their ghostlier thistles.

As I probe for the reason behind all this, and cannot find it, I am impelled to think of another ghost. Driving away on a late October day from this village green I had necessarily to brake sharply -in order to avoid what I thought at first was a pure white cat, sitting motionless in the car's path,, in the middle of the road. When I stopped and alighted it blinked at me for the better part of a minute with half-blind, dopey eyes, with a sort of pouchy hangover, and then flew away, - It was a young, white owl; and as it flew away to disappear into the black branches of a turkey oak I felt half-persuaded that it might well be the ghost of the young man who, in the shape of myself, had come to live in a countryside thSt he considered, and hoped would remain, a paradise. Strangely enough I had once also seen, in that same place, a pure white squirrel, but at that time it had not seemed to me either a sign or portent of the shape of rural things to come. It too had simply disappeared, as so much of my treasured landscape has since done, lost like a ghost in the wind.