Meum and Tuum
By STRIX
HAVE an idea, though I may be wrong, that I when autumn comes round the huge panto- mime-casts are partly made up by allotting to men loosely if at all connected with dramatic art the more inarticulate and unrewarding parts. They appear. on the stage only to be worsted. They are thrown off battlements. They are im- mobilised in craven postures by the wave of a wand. They cringe, they scuttle, they vanish, yelping, in a puff of smoke.
With the advent of spring the British land- owner finds himself playing a roughly analogous role. His audiences are smaller, his appearances less regular, his acting unpaid; he is not sub- mitted to physical indignities, he is not required to mop and mow. But he appears on the stage only to be worsted, and what makes this hard to endure is that the stage belongs to him.
There are so many different types of trespasser that it is not easy to think of a characteristic which is common to them all. If I had'to try and do this, I would say that all trespassers believe trees to be very large objects. If you try and con- vince a jolly picnic party that they have parked their car, spread their rugs and got their kettle going in the middle of a patch of beech seedlings, you are not likely to succeed com- pletely. 'I'm so sorry,' they say (if they are nice people), 'I'm afraid we didn't realise they were little trees.'
The best trespassers, by which I mean thoe who do the least damage and cause the least anxiety, are the elderly couples who sit all day in their cars, reading the News of the World and listening to the wireless. But even if they do not leave the News of the World behind them when they go, they and their cars cannot be said to add to the amenities of one's property, and one feels that, for all the benefit they derive from intruding on it, they might just as well have spent the day sitting in a public car-park.
Of ramblers, it can be said with safety that any party numbering more than two will prove to be lost. The larger the party, the crosser and more woebegone its members; and since there are always at least two schools of thought as to where they are and which way they should be going, the land-owner, dispensing navigational aids, is viewed with resentment and suspicion by whichever faction (usually both) is proved to have been mistaken in its topography. • But the great virtue of ramblers is that they are on the hoof; they need to be directed or re- directed, they do not have to be dislodged. It is the squatter-type trespasser who presents the land-owner with his severest test. Two cars, two tents, a collapsible table and chairs, a primus stove, a gramophone, a wireless, three dear little dogs, a number of bottles—what, when he finds this nest of nature-lovers established on a fine Saturday afternoon in a secluded part of his woods, is the brutal kaiak going to do?
Much will depend on what sort of individuals his uninvited visitors area It is a safe bet that they are townspeople and have no idea at all, or anyhow no clear idea, that they are not within their rights in being where they are. The task of bringing this fact home to them is a delicate one. If they are decent about it, and apologise, and offer or half-offer to go away, the land- owner feels a brute. But if, while not disputing his contention .that they are intruders, they ask, whether in a surly or a plaintive tone, what harm they are doing, the landlord is on a tricky wicket.
The answer he would like to return would be on these lines : 'At the moment, as .far as, I can see, you are not doing any material injury to my interests. But if I let you spend the weekend here 1 accept various risks. The most serious is that you will start a fire in the young plantations; the next most serious is that your dear little dogs will worry my lambs or disturb my pheasants or both. I see no reason at all why you should expect me to accept these risks.
'The experience of years leads me to suppose that you will leave litter when you go away. You have as far as I can see no sanitary arrangements. Though it may seem eccentric to you, I prefer birdsong to canned music. If you had asked me for permission to do what you are doing now I should, for the foregoing reasons, have withheld it. It may have been through ignorance rather than lack of courtesy that you have presented me with a fait accompli, but that does not make me any more disposed to accept it. Will you please go away?'
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Now the landlord may deliver this speech afterwards, in his bath, and no harm come of it; but to make it in the face of the enemy would be fatal. The British have a de jure if not a de facto respect for 'private property, and a tres- passer, once convinced that he is trespassing, has a mild feeling of guilt or embarrassment. But if you let him see, even by implication, that in your estimation he is an ill-mannered, in- sanitary, careless, uncultured fire-bug with inade- quate control over his pets and a sympathy for blood-sports, you kindle the ardent spirit of a warrior race and you start a slanging-match.
Never criticise a trespasser. You are bound to come ill out of your encounter with him, earning either his dislike or your own self-disgust or, more probably, both; but you will come much iller out of it if you imply that his conduct is in any way open to criticism.
And, finally, never argue. There is something to be said for the legendary Scottish land- owner who, instead of spluttering 'How would you like it if I came and picnicked in your garden?' got the intruder's address and on the following weekend did go and picnic in his gar- den. -But as a gambit in verbal polemics this classic quotation is nothing like as smart as it sounds. Statistics, I am pretty certain, would show that 95 per cent. of those to Whom in recent times it has been addressed answered, with rich and insupportable guffaws, that they were flat- dwellers; the remaining 5 per cent., laughing even more loudly, revealed that they lived on house- boats.
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