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  CHAPTER 17

  DORCHESTER

  There are some questions which do not need an answer. How long has Dorchester been a town, is one of them. Nobody knows, and nobody cares. It is enough that Dorchester exists without questioning its origin.

  I know – and you will know too, if you have ever been to Dorchester – that its old British name was Dwrinwyr, meaning the settlement by the dwyr, the dark waters of the Frome, that its Roman name was Durnovaria, a prettier name, I think, than the other, and that in time it became Dorchester. Even when you know these things, you still know very little about Dorchester except that at various periods it has been inhabited by Britons, Romans and now the English.

  I visited the town with a friend of an enquiring nature. His eagerness for knowledge is remarkable and his capacity to obtain it by his own research negligible. If he reads this he will not be offended, for he covers his laziness with the plea that it is better to learn from the lips of others than by reading from books.

  We stood outside the Antelope Hotel and I said to him: ‘Would you care to go to the pictures?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought you might like entertainment.’

  ‘I came here to see Dorchester, not the films, and I want instruction. You’ve studied the guidebook, haven’t you?’

  ‘In a way. I’ve looked at most of the pictures.’

  ‘You’ve been lazy. Well, you’ll have to lead me to the various places of interest and read about them from the guidebook. Where shall we go first?’

  ‘There is a picture of Maumbury Rings which looks interesting.’

  ‘That will do.’

  We found Maumbury Rings on the south side of the town. It is a wide, grass-grown amphitheatre, constructed by the Romans during their occupation of the town. Here they had their games and sports.

  The town presses closely about this Dorset coliseum; a railway line hems it on one side, a police station on another and a road studded with Belisha beacons on a third. Despite these crowding signs of a later age, the old arena still retains its dignity and grandeur. From its ramparts we had a good view of the town, a spread of red-brick and grey houses, mixed up with the dark crests of trees. In the foreground were the railway station and the bulk of a brewery. Beyond the brewery, and less intimidating, rose the steeples of various churches.

  ‘I notice,’ said my friend, after I had finished reading about the Roman amphitheatre, ‘that the grass of the arena is very much worn in places.’

  ‘I suspect the small boys of the town. This maybe, is one way they get their own back on the Romans who bother them during lessons. They come here and play cricket. The glory of Rome has gone when small boys play ball where gladiators fought and died.’

  ‘If I know anything about boys,’ came the reply, ‘they probably played ball in the arena when the Romans were here and kept a sharp lookout for angry gladiators instead of policemen. Tell me, did the townspeople never use this place after the Romans for their own sports and festivals?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. I think the most popular form of entertainment held here were the Hanging Fairs. Public executions drew huge crowds. In 1705 as many as ten thousand spectators assembled here to watch the strangling and burning of a woman for the murder of her husband, a Dorchester tradesman. Her name was Mary Channing –’

  ‘A relation of yours?’

  ‘There is no h in my name,’ I replied haughtily.

  ‘A pity. They certainly had a pretty taste in entertainment. I think the burning after the strangling was rather unnecessary. I wonder what kind of man the official strangler was. It’s diverting to imagine that perhaps he was a meek man, fond of his children and with no more ambition than to grow prize cabbages. I suppose he did it with his hands?’

  ‘Did what?’ I was watching the movements of a pair of gulls of the arena.

  ‘The strangling.’

  ‘The guidebook says nothing about that.’ ‘Would you go to watch public executions if they happened today?’

  ‘I might go to one, but I certainly should not make a habit of it. Nor would many people, I think.’

  ‘You’re wrong. We haven’t changed a great deal from those days. If men and women were hanged in public there would always be a crowd, and a nucleus of regular spectators who never missed a hanging. There must be something satisfying to watch someone losing life while you still retain it.’

  ‘It sounds beastly to me.’

  ‘It is – but bestiality is good box office. The smell of carrion is enough to bring the vultures. Have you ever seen a crowd outside the gates of a gaol waiting to read the notice that some poor devil has been duly hanged and sent to his Maker? It affords very unpleasant material for speculation on the animal antecedents of mankind. They can’t see anything, they can’t hear anything; but there they are, waiting in a crowd, just waiting.’

  We left Maumbury and went on to Poundbury, a vast, oblong entrenchment outside the town and not far from the Artillery Barracks. Older than Maumbury, Poundbury’s origin is lost in the dimness of the past. Successive civilisations and races have used it, but the people who first raised its ramparts and dug its trenches might have never lived for the little we know about them.

  We walked around the top of the entrenchment, the wind from the valley of the Frome whistling by our ears. A hare started away from the round barrow in the centre of the camp and disappeared behind the rifle range by the river. The river was running in spate and the meadows were cut and quartered by long arms of flood water. Behind us lay the town, clinging to the hill above the river, solid, respectable and secure, its grey streets filled with the noise of country traffic, clerks working in offices, boys bent over their desks, shopkeepers making up their accounts and arranging their windows… all busy in a life which was hundreds of years removed from the life which had once animated Poundbury and made it a scene of activity. Fires must once have burned in the camp, women in skins cooked and men worked their flints and bare children run tumbling and playing across the grass. Some of them lay buried deeply beneath the smooth turf, uncaring that a few yards from them and vibrating their dry bones every hour or so ran engines along the railway tunnel which pierces one side of the huge mound. Someday our civilisation will be a memory and a ruin and a new race of man will disturb our bones in their resting place as they tunnel and bore. The graves of the dead without name can be ravished without sacrilege. Close to Poundbury, down the valley towards the town, runs a line of pylons, slender and beautiful in their long-reaching perspectives. One day their rusted frames will be dug from the alluvium of the Frome and puzzle wiseheads as Poundbury puzzles wiseheads today.

  ‘There was some sense in building a camp up here,’ said my friend. ‘It must have been easy to see your enemies coming, and when there were no enemies in sight what better thing to do than admire the view. Perhaps they built it here for the view more than for protection against the enemies they had. We don’t credit these ancient peoples with enough artistic sense.’

  ‘Well, all you need to do today is admire the view. You needn’t bother about enemies.’

  ‘No? Others are bothering though.’ He nodded towards the rifle range and I saw small brown figures stretched out on the grass and heard the thin crack of rifle shots.

  ‘Today we are more civilised. Only some of us keep an eye on enemies, while others admire the view. In the old days you had to do both things yourself.’

  As a rule I do not like museums. There is always far too much to see and not enough time. If you make up your mind to go and look at one section, say the natural history section, you are constantly aware of the temptation to wander away and look at the ceramics or the geological exhibits. It is hard to disabuse the mind of its conception that the first duty towards a museum is to see everything in it, and the gentle race from case to case and from hall to hall is, in itself, an exhibition of man’s pitiable febrility of mind.

  I wanted to avoid Dorchester’s museum. My friend would not allow this.

>   ‘If a town goes to the trouble of collecting antiquities from the neighbourhood, and a curator spends no little amount of time, generally for a negligible salary, arranging and cataloguing exhibits, the least one can do is to go and look at them. Besides, who knows what may not be learned in a museum. I once got a very good recipe for an excellent cheese pudding from a man I met in the British Museum.’

  ‘I don’t mind visiting the museums, if they are as you say. From my experience most of them never rise any higher than a few collections of flint arrowheads, some doubtful pieces of terracotta pottery, and cases of foreign birds brought back from his world tour by the local squire.’

  I was taken to the museum, and I am glad now that I went. Dorchester’s museum is quite different from any other. It is small enough to prevent a man from surfeiting himself with the exhibits, it is well arranged, and has less unlabelled exhibits than any other museum of its size that I know. Most important, its exhibits are interesting and nearly all concerned with Dorset and Dorchester. If you buy the official guide you can, with a little patience and a great deal of satisfaction, see illustrated, from the cases of exhibits, the story of mankind in Dorset (and therefore in England) through the ages. If you do not care to trace the history of man through the Neolithic, the various Bronze and Iron Ages up to the coming of the Romans, then you can go and stand on the tessellated pavements, found from time to time in Dorchester, which are laid in the main hall, or stare at the collection of man-traps and try to decide of which one it was that Thomas Hardy wrote: ‘It produced, when set, a vivid impression that it was endowed with life and exhibited the combined aspects of a stork, a crocodile and a scorpion.’ A queer beast.

  Nowhere did I see any of the useless abracadabra which is often turned out of the large houses of the county and, for want of a better home, presented to the museum, and I would have spent more time in there if I had been allowed to by my friend. With true tourist energy he professed to have sucked the marrow from the museum bone within half an hour and was impatient to be off.

  ‘I have had enough of the past. Let us go out into the present again,’ he protested. So we did. But the past still clung to us, for we found ourselves having tea in a building which had served as the lodgings of the hated Judge Jeffries. Today, where the infamous judge bullied serving wenches and thundered at frightened men, there are no sounds more alarming than the rattle of teacups, the polite, subdued chatter of tourists and the innocuous music of a gramophone. He held his Bloody Assize in a room at the Antelope Hotel around the corner from the teahouse. I wonder if the people of Dorset flocked to the hanging fairs then to see the last moments of men and women they loved.

  Judge Jefferies was not the first to bring mass tragedy into the lives of the Dorchester people. An older, more terrible enemy than any man visited them more than once. Three or four times the town was fired and burnt to the ground almost, and I think these fires explain Dorchester’s anomalous architecture features. In a county whose most characteristic buildings are the colour-washed thatched cottages, it is strange to find that there are very few such cottages or thatched houses in Dorchester itself. Except for one or two buildings there are few old houses in Dorchester. Thatch was good fuel for fire, and the primitive firefighting implements must have made poor show against the blaze that burst from roof to roof. A contemporary writer describes Dorchester after one of these fires as ‘a ruinated Troy or decayed Carthage.’

  Some of the old hooks used for tearing the thatch off the cottages, and the primitive water pumps are in the museum. Men were quicker in inventing the means to fight one another than they were in fashioning weapons to combat fire.

  After tea we walked about the town, forgetting the guidebook and content to wander. We found ourselves lazing by the river with a flotilla of ducks rivalling the roar of a tiny weir with their quacking. Trees came low over the water and, across the valley plain, cattle stood silently in the meadows like dark shadows against the wall of the sky. We followed the shaded walks that mark the site of the old walls that once fortified the town and suddenly we were standing before the bronze figure of a seated, bare-headed man, staring into the gathering mist of the twilight. We stood for a while, remembering the man who brought so much fame to the town and the county which he called Casterbridge and Wessex. His love for the county was no flamboyant, boisterous affection. It flowed in a deep spirit, steady as the hills of Wessex and as pure as the air and water that move across the country. The quiet streets of the town, the hedge-sides laced with a border of flowering cow parsley, the long downs broken by patches of gorse and the rudely-cut figures from a past age, the copses in the hollows of the hills and the small clouds of sheep along the ridges all bring back memories of his works. Dorset belongs to Hardy as surely as Exmoor is Blackmore’s and Cumberland Walpole’s. His statue stands, a silent symbol of a respect which will endure for generations. The tragic Tess and the pathetic Jude are not the only phantoms that live again in the blue evening mist of the Dorset evenings, and Dorset was in need of no statue to keep the memory green of her poet and lover.

  We went down the main street into the life of the town. There were lights now in the shop windows, there was movement, the quick happy movement of the end of the working day, on the pavements. A notice in a grocer’s shop caught our eyes and we stopped and looked at one another and the same thought passed between us.

  Maybe you are not fond of cheese, and recognise it only as something that comes tagging along at the end of a meal to be toyed with while you exercise your teeth on biscuits. Do Camembert, Gruyere, Gorgonzola, Cheddar, Cheshire, mean nothing to you; is there no poetry, no music in the sweet roll of their names for you? Have you never thought that a meal would never pass through its tedious courses to leave you alone with the cheese? Then what follows cannot interest you.

  Dorset Blue Vinny Cheese – the notice said, and we had never tasted it. We decided to repair the deficiency in our cheese education, and entered the shop.

  Dorset Blue is not a cream cheese. It is made from the skimmed milk, and the curds do not press so well as the curds of richer cheeses made from unskimmed milk, so that the ‘vinny’ soon attacks the interstices of the cheese, giving it its characteristic blue marbling. Sometimes the blue marking failed to appear and the only remedy, at least in those days when every cottage and farm had its own beer barrel, was to wrap it in a cloth and hang it under the bung to catch the drippings. This invariably improved the taste and brought on the marking.

  The shop man did not want to sell us any cheese.

  ‘You’m come at the wrong time of the year,’ he said. ‘It’s made during the summer and it’s nearly all gone by the end of the autumn. It doan’t keep long and the piece I’ve got is hardly vit to be put on the table. I should have had that notice out of the window but we’ve been so busy, and I forgot it was there.’

  He could not persuade us from our cheese. Good or indifferent, we wanted it and we had it. It was obvious that it had lost its first glory.

  ‘You know why they call it “vinny”?’ asked the shopman as he wrapped it up.

  ‘No,’ I said as I took it from him.

  ‘It’s because of the markings. They’re like blue veins and vinny is the Dorset way of saying veiny.’

  We walked out of the shop and my companion turned to me.

  ‘Did you believe that?’

  ‘About the veins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why not, it sounds a very likely reason.’

  ‘Not at all. Vinny means no such thing as you would know if you had ever made a study of philology. Philology is not a matter of guesswork, it is an exact science. Finew is the Anglo-Saxon for ‘to become’ or ‘make mouldy’. From finew we get finewed, meaning mouldy. Now no philologist will dispute that the West of England dialect has a trick of substituting v’s for f’s, so we get vinnewed and finally vinney, and the name of the cheese comes from its blue mould, and not from the veins.’

  ‘How do you know all this?
You’re not a philologist.’ ‘I know, but I like cheese, and before we decided to come to Dorchester I guessed we might be getting some Blue Vinny so I did, or rather, had done for me, a little research work. You can’t appreciate a good cheese only by the taste, you must know all about its name and how it’s made. You knew how it was made, but I knew about its name. Now let’s go back to the hotel and see about its taste.’

  If you want to know what Blue Vinny Cheese tastes like go to Dorset and get some.

  CHAPTER 18

  BIDEFORD

  When’er I tread old By-the-Ford

  I conjure up the thought

  ‘Twas here a Grenville trod

  And here a Raleigh wrought.

  This is better poetry than one would expect from a postman, and if it has a little breathlessness then it shows how truly the postman who wrote it has worked his own personality into the lines. So sang Edward Capern, a remarkable man of the nineteenth century, and a very good postman, who was known as the Devonshire Burns. Capern was a Tiverton man, but he was Bideford’s postman for many years, and Bideford has decided to adopt him.

  That his thoughts as he climbed the Bideford streets and hills were often of Grenville and Raleigh, I do not dispute, yet if I had to do much walking up and down the hills my thoughts would soon pass from matters historical. If you live in Bideford long, I suppose, you get used to the hills and Capern probably took them in his stride.