Everyman's England by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online Page B

sit upon a hummock counting his sheep and occasionally going to search for straying lambs. Sheep have no great resistance to disease and a ewe may die suddenly behind some rock leaving two lambs to bleat for milk. Orphans have to be put to other ewes, and some ewes do not take kindly to orphans. When the lambs are old enough they have to be tailed, then there is the foot-rot and, with the warmer weather, the fly to watch, and then shearing… A summer’s day for a shepherd is no lying in the grass watching the clouds and chewing a straw. He must for ever have his eyes on the flock, watching for that nervous movement which tells of a ewe with fly… and if you have ever seen a fleece working with fat white maggots, you will realise that it is no job for a squeamish man.
    It was at this inn that I got, for a ridiculously small sum, a lunch which more than ever endeared me to Wharfedale, for after a man has had a morning full of beauty there is no better cap to it than a lunch which in itself is a thing of beauty. There was a rich, dark soup which was not only hot but full of the flavour of vegetables, then turkey with thyme and parsley stuffing, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, a fruit tart with a crust it was a shame to break and a joy to eat, a portion of Wensleydale cheese and a cup of as good a coffee as you could expect in England. I found it did not do to encourage the landlord’s tabby with titbits. It misconstrued my lamentable kindness and leaped to the table to feed direct from the plate!
    From Kilnsey I went on up the valley, branching right at Buckden, and climbed to the top of the Pennines through the tiny village of Cray, and it was here, on the saddle that leads down into Wensleydale, with the grim line of Buckden Pike overshadowing me, that I felt the true majesty of the hills.
    Here was no attempt at prettiness; there was none of the fragility of the Cotswolds, or the purple distances of Dartmoor, only the barren sweeps of grass, the thick stone walls and the rough limestone crags. It was impossible to repress a feeling of awe and fear. I was standing alone on one of the great vertebrae of the backbone of England, above me the immensity of the sky and below, a complex, seething world, as frightening as the one above. I thought of Pascal and his imaginative conception of man standing between two immensities, above the universe, infinite and beyond the comprehension of human mind, and below that other universe in which the tiniest insect has all the complexity and activity of man himself. ‘ Le silence éternal de ces espaces infinis m’effraie. ’ I wondered on what mountain-top he once stood between earth and sky and feared the immensities of loneliness and space. Perhaps on one of the crater-scarred tips of the mountains of his own Auvergne.
    To my left and right might lie the turmoil of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but up here was a land which belonged to no county, was a region which owed allegiance only to the winds that ruled it and the cold, pale sky, all colour drawn from it by the bite of winter…
    As I stood with the noise of the Gray Gill fall in my ears, whispering what might have been a protest at my intrusion, a bluster of wind swept down from the Pike and sprinkled me with snow. Here was a place, it seemed to howl at me, for grouse and sheep, for wheatear and hawk, but not for men.
    I took the hint and hurried on my way down into Wensleydale, and now whenever I think of the Pennines I remember Wharfedale and the road that winds up and down by the river until it finally begins that steep climb to the head of the pass, where the most prosaic of men could not but feel that he has escaped ‘from the contagion of the world’s slow stain.’

CHAPTER 5
BETWEEN TWO RIVERS
    It is not always wise to visit the places which one dreams about. I have never seen Mexico, though I have often longed to go there. Who would not want to go to a town with a name like Ciudad Las