Everyman's England Read Free Page B

praise its esoteric charms before all.
    The tall stack of a busy flour mill, the bulging horror of a gasometer and the painted funnel of a cargo boat in the harbour, and everywhere that lifeless feeling of four o’clock in the afternoon – that is how I remember Silloth. Few people walked the streets, its hotels and shops looked dead and a cold wind sweeping in from the Solway Firth kept the papers dancing in the gutters and drove me away from the sea-front. I decided to leave Silloth and walk to Maryport. If I have wronged Silloth I apologise, but rather would I have wronged it than have chanced spending a night in the town…
    From Silloth the road runs, twisting very little, along the great sweep of coast to Maryport. Here and there it cuts through the folds of the land that reach down to the sea, forming tiny bluffs that sometimes shelter bungalows and domesticated railway carriages and omnibus bodies. The ubiquity of the railway carriage is a characteristic of these times. It has always been a great mystery to me how these heavy compartments have reached some of the places which I have seen them gracing. Yes, gracing, for some have been so tricked out with bright paint and bedecked with brighter flowers, set about with well-kept gardens and crowned by crooked chimney pots that they have a gnomish air of concealing a host of delights. At one time if a man wished to eschew the transient and wicked pleasures of the world and give his life to the contemplation of his navel and lofty thoughts, he bought himself a hair shirt (I have always thought that this item must have been remarkably short to allow the practice of his first exercise) and retired to some isolated cave in the midst of a wilderness, from whence he would emerge at intervals to place lost travellers on the right road for Bath-Sheba, Ilion or Alexandria, or, if there was bad weather about entertain them in his cave for the evening on goat’s milk, dates and the fantastic story of his youth, until the storm had passed. Today, if a man has a craving for solitude, he buys himself some of the Great Western Railway Company’s discarded rolling stock and, by some method of which I am not aware, gets his railway carriage taken to the edge of the Cumberland fells, and there spends the rest of his life cultivating his polyanthus and godetia, smoking a pipe and sometimes chatting over the fence with the A.A. man in a way which has no sign of the rancour which might be expected from the A.A. man’s usurpation of his ancient privileges towards lost travellers. Some of these modern hermits still keep goats, but the hair shirt has gone out of fashion.
    When I left Silloth bright sunshine was filling the Firth with blue, leaping shadows, and tiny catspaws chased one another over the water. In the distance was the hazy outline of the Isle of Man, and I knew from the piling cloud masses that before I reached Maryport I might find myself encompassed by a snowstorm and discover the dark shape of Skiddaw inland hidden by a grey canopy. To my left were fields, brown patches of wasteland and the marshes, or mosses as the natives call them. Behind the fields, hedged about by stone walls, and across the long stretches of marsh, rose the faint outline of the Lakeland fells. I thought of Wastwater and brooding Scafell, and I remembered a hot day in the May of King George’s Jubilee year. There was to be a Jubilee bonfire on top of Scafell and for weeks before the day there were piles of wood in Wastdale, Borrowdale and other convenient places, with little notices requesting walkers who were going to climb Scafell to take at least one piece of timber with them to the bonfire. The request sounds simple. Actually it is a work of no little honour and devotion to climb Scafell, hugging to your breast a young tree. Although the path is clear and not difficult, it is long and exhausting, and before the peak is reached a man is glad to have his hands free and sometimes