The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

Hampshire. As a child, I was familiar with two crossings. One, a little over a mile away to the south of and below the Wash Common plateau, was Wash Water, on the Andover Road (the A343, as it now is). This had had a road bridge since before I was born. The other, about a mile to the east, was Newtown Water, where the A34, the main Southampton to Birmingham road, crosses the Enborne. When I was a very small boy, in the early ‘twenties, this was just a ford with a footbridge, and I remember being driven through it in the car. As part of the job of tarring and modernizing that road, the bridge which is there today was built. Whenever I join the volume of traffic which almost continuously crosses Newtown Water now, it really brings home to me how greatly times have changed in sixty years.
    Our nearest friends on Wash Common — apart from Dr Leggatt, Jean’s father, who lived directly opposite — were the Jessops. Mr Jessop was a stockbroker, and they had an only son, Hugh, who was about ten years older than I (grown-up, in fact, to me). Hugh was one of the first pupils at Stowe, the brand-new and rather revolutionary public school which was beginning to make its name under its famous headmaster, Roxburgh. (Hugh later had a distinguished and gallant naval career in the war and then became a silver dealer in London.)
    There were two things that fascinated me about ‘Uncle’ Jessop’s house. The first were the lions. As you went through the front door into the porch, you were confronted (head on, if you were only five) by a pair of jet-black lions carved in ebony. (They were oriental, as I now suppose.) They were each about as big as a big dog, and sitting on their haunches, snarling with open mouths and bared white teeth. Each carried in its front paws an ivory tusk. Although to an adult they would appear very much stylized, they were far and away the biggest and most realistic works of visual art that I had yet seen. I was terrified of them, and always had to be led past, with reassurance. Uncle Jessop, though always kind, was an imposing person with a big moustache and a growly voice, and it occurs to me now that subconsciously I may have rather lumped him and the lions together.
    The other thing was the fountain. Although, as I have said, our own garden was big and delightful, it had no water. Uncle Jessop had a lily pond with a fountain. The fountain could be controlled by a foot-high, upright iron tap in the gravel, and to me this was a source of great pleasure and excitement. You could turn the jet into a circular fan of water, its thin streams, like rain, falling all around to transform the surface of the pool into winking, plopping coruscation. You could then bring it up higher, into the faint semblance, perhaps, of a standing figure, an ondine made all of ascending water. And then, finally - if they’d let you, for you weren’t allowed long; it was too much indulgence of a little boy with mechanism that was not considered a toy — you could turn it into a single, immensely tall spout, which shot up into the air as high as the first-floor windows and fell back onto the surface with a most satisfying smack and splash. I always felt a little guilty about going all the way with the fountain, because you had to plead for it to get a grudging ‘Well, all right, but only for a minute, mind.’ I was not to know that fountains are among the oldest and favourite toys of mankind, and that kings and emperors have played with and delighted in them. (My brother, good pianist as he was, was not quite up to Ravel’s
Jeux d’eau.
I was about nineteen when I first heard that; it evoked an immediate response of recognition.)
    Another neighbour, with whom I was to become well acquainted as the years went by, was Captain Cornwallis. (That is not his true name.) He attracted me - as he attracted many - by his generosity, high spirits and enjoyment of life. Captain Cornwallis (I learned