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At
the top of the hill, Phineas left the road and crossed the two humped fields
called Peny Brin, Bill Sikes, with a sudden show of interest in the morning,
scattering rabbits feeding among the moon daisies and buttercups, Phineas’s
boots shining like wet tar in the dew. And up into Cutterbach, a stretch of
ancient woodland flushed each September by the Batch Valley Chase, home to
badgers and owls as well as foxes, and fallow deer, relics of an ornamental
deer park and a time when the Strange family and the village were young still.
They were on the very edge of the
wood overlooking the valley, on a ride rutted with the recent weather and
punched with the hooves of horses, when with no hint of its coming, the sun
rose, and hung there, burning the trees on the skyline black, before ballooning
above them as if released, a cock somewhere below crowing as if caught napping
as its light swept across the valley.
Phineas felt it touch his face, warming it like a cow’s summer
breath, fragrant with flowering grasses and meadow herbs and clover. With all
the scents of summer ripening in the valley, under a creamy, blue and white
marbled sky.
He stood looking down at the scene, as if coming on it for the
first time. A field of buttercups seemed to slide, glistening, off the side of
a hill, as if melting under the sweep of the sun, and among the trees above
them the pale fire of rhododendrons. The meadow grasses falling away below him
glinting here and there under frail webs of dew and mist, catching the light
like things hidden. And the river, smoking in the sudden warmth, with the
houseboats, the four paddle steamers that had once plied the home waters and a
Victorian Thames, now tied permanently to the land, held there on their ropes,
and the island called Snails Eye sitting at the heart of the river, where it
bulged on a meander like a lake.
The small black and white farms of the valley among orchards, and
the houses and half-timbered cottages of Batch Magna, a Marcher village, the
cross of St George, flown from the Steamer Inn, a riposte to the red dragon of
Wales above the door of the Pughs’ post office and shop. The cricket field and
pavilion behind the churchyard, and the great, immemorial yew, the centuries in
its vast girth corseted with rusting iron bands, shading a church which bore in
its nave the marks of Norman chisels, and among its gravestones a sundial which
told the time in Jerusalem.
And the tall, star-shaped chimneys and gabled black and white
timbers of Batch Hall, home to the Strange family for over four hundred years,
set with Elizabethan ornateness in what was left of its park, its lawns, under
horse chestnuts heavy with bloom, running down to the Cluny. And the castle, a
fortress once against border incursions and the forces of Cromwell, open now to
Welsh rain and rabbits, the archers’ loopholes in the ruined towers blinded
with creeper, its red sandstone turning to coral in the sun.
The forgotten country, this part of the Marches had been called. A country largely
ignored by the rest of the world, apart from a trickle of tourists on their way
to somewhere else, and the odd company rep who had taken the wrong turning, in
a place with need for few road signs. A valley lost among its ancient wooded
hillsides and winding high-banked lanes, on a road to nowhere in particular.
Phineas had arrived there by accident, after taking a wrong
turning himself, when on a road to nowhere in particular. Falling into the
valley, as he came to see it, like Alice,
and five years later was still there.
He thought occasionally, in a vague sort of way, about moving on,
getting back to what he vaguely thought of as the real world. But there never
seemed to be any particular hurry to do so.
And that of course was the trouble
with the river, as he’d had occasion to point out before, to himself and to
others, sparing no one. Whether boating up and down it, or simply sitting on
it, there never seemed to be any particular hurry to do anything.
Well, now he had the feeling that all that was about to change.
That now, with the General no longer at the wheel, they stood exposed to more
unsettled weather. That the real world, which had always been over there
somewhere, beyond the blue hills, was perhaps about to come to them.
He whistled for Sikes, busy putting up a few panicking pheasants
and the smell of wild garlic as he blundered through the undergrowth after the
scent of fox or badger.
They had walked this wood together in all the seasons. In autumn,
when it ran like a damp fire through the trees, and in weather that had shrivelled
Sikes’s testicles as he padded warily through undergrowth crackling with ice or
got himself buried in snowdrifts along the rides. The winter bareness like a
ruin now in early summer, overgrown with new growth, letting in the sun and
with the sound of birdsong up under its roof.
The sunlight lay among the drifts of bluebells and red campion,
and reached with long slender fingers deep into the wood, where the new grass
and ferns were tender in the shade between trees. And above him, high in the
green and golden heart of an oak, a blackcap opened in sudden song. The sweet,
poignantly brief notes flung, carelessly, on the morning air like a handful of
bright coin.
About the
author
Peter Maughan, an ex-actor, fringe theatre
director and script writer, is married and lives in the Welsh Marches, the
border between England and Wales, and the
backdrop to the Batch Magna novels. All the books in the series feature
converted paddle steamers on Batch Magna’s river the Cluny, and he is a former
houseboat dweller himself, living for a while in the mid-1970s (the time frame
for the novels) on a converted Thames sailing barge among a small colony of
houseboats on the Medway, deep in rural Kent. An idyllic time, heedless days of
freedom in that other world of the river which inspired the novels, set in a
place called Batch Magna.
The Cuckoos of Batch Magna is available for Kindle or print at Amazon.
