AND ANOTHER THING
A Maytime hymn of praise to the glory of God the Creator
PAUL JOHNSON
This common is a spot made sacred by Coleridge and Wordsworth, and especially by Dorothy Wordsworth, who noted its wild flowers and its tender young trees. Only half a mile down the hill is the magic place where (in my view) Coleridge conceived Kubla Khan — 'that deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!' A few of the cedars are still there. I am not, I hasten to add, con- fusing this chasm of conception with the place, 15 miles away, where he actually wrote down the poem, or part of it, before being interrupted by 'a gentleman from Porlock'. Aisholt Common is quintessen- tially West of England, and it took the wild genius of the young poet, two centuries ago, to transform it so effortlessly into Xanadu. So part of the delight of this great poem is that, if you scratch away the Orien- tal veneer, you find broad Somerset beneath.
My memories of picnics stretch back to earliest childhood, when my big sisters and I would simply grab a lettuce and tomatoes and head into the nearby savagery of Bid- dulph Moor, a place so wild that the locals still stoned strangers. At school I was intro- duced to cooking picnics, by the side of the tumultuous Hodder River. These were elaborate affairs. Wood was collected, stone fireplaces built, huge conflagrations sent sparks rocketing up, as cauldrons seethed, and bacon, sausages and eggs siz- zled in the pans. I have been on some rum picnics since those days, including one in Indonesia with a television film crew, where we shared our food with the village girls. They were happy to be flirted with but would not allow our camera to capture their beauty.
Then, during a Geneva summit, I went with the British party on what our local embassy, who organised it, called a 'work- ing picnic', by the shores of the lake. No work was done, as I recall, but there was languid gossiping in the sun, and the spec- tacularly beautiful red squirrels of the Vaud shared our patd de foie sandwiches and caviar and biscuits.
Ireland and Scotland are the supreme picnic countries, where this dangerous form of outdoor banqueting teeters uneasily between delight and catastrophe. In The Irish RM, Major Yeates feebly protests at his wife's propensity to organise ambitious picnics at the slightest excuse, the repast usually ending in a soaking, often in one of those shallow, treacherous West of Ireland lakes. I have seen an Irish picnic finish with a drunken clashing of rowing boats, our host being carted off to hospital with a bro- ken arm and the rest of us lucky not to be drowned.
The Highland picnics were so numerous that I find it difficult to distinguish one from another. On the beach at Rosemarkie in the Black Isle, I discovered an elderly but tuneful piper, who in return for a few wee drams — or rather many wee drams made the North Sea ring with the 'Gay Gordons' and the lament for the 'Bonny Earl of Moray'. There was a sad picnic too, up Glen Strathferrar, after church one Sun- day, a black morning when the papers first accused poor Reggie Maudling, one of our party, of complicity in the Poulson affair. I stayed behind at the lodge to make jokes and try to cheer Reggie up, while my wife Marigold insisted on going with the rest on an attempt at the local summit, Schurr na Lappich. She fell and broke her ankle and ended up in Inverness Royal Infirmary. The Infirmary was the terminus of another picnic, when Kerry Packer, who had flown up after an all-night gambling spree in Lon- don, suddenly collapsed with agonising stomach cramps. (The Infirmary remem- bers that picnic well too, because when Kerry left, much restored, he tipped the nurses £500 each.) The grandest picnic was the one in which we entertained the young members of the Persian royal family and their numerous entourage of courtiers, officials and securi- ty men. One of the last was inveigled by the Crown Prince, then aged about ten, into parting with his loaded revolver, and the glen was soon livelier than at any time since Bonnie Prince Charlie passed through it chased by the redcoats. My favourite American novelist, Alison Lurie, and I sheltered behind a convenient boulder while the bullets whizzed and ricocheted. As a rule, however, the real menace to Highland picnics are the midges. They can be of a quite overwhelming power and pen- etrative ferocity. On many occasions we had to build not one but two gigantic bon- fires, so that we could nibble our food in comparative safety by sitting and sweating between them, murmuring, 'Isn't a picnic fun?' And so it is, all things considered.
After our Aisholt Common picnic, f elected to walk home, and was soon mes- merised by the wonders of a perfect May afternoon. Mile after mile, and stretching in all directions, the tall Somerset hedges were festooned in cow-parsley, like a green bride in her veils. I peeped into woods where the newly dense canopy above let in shafts of sunlight, illuminating a luxurious carpet of bluebells below. And in one wood through which. I walked, every part of the surface was covered in a dense, inches-deep white flock of wild garlic, so virginal and perfect that I took off my shoes and trod gently on the springy blooms without bruis- ing them. I emerged from this wood, which I had seen at its most perfect hour in the entire year — perhaps in a decade — to take in a vast swathe of countryside spread in shining splendour before me. The air was still, the sky a perfect cerulean, the fresh green of countless trees presented itself in dozens of shades, each minutely different from the others, the wild flowers under and in the hedgerows preened and paraded, the fields heaved with growth, and it was as though the whole of nature, in wild but harmo- nious chorus, was singing and shouting to the glory of God the Creator. One does not experience many such moments in a life- time, and this is one I have stored up in my memory, to be brought out for comfort when times are hard and the world cold.
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