“Reader! Go and do likewise.”
It was a rusty and dusty inscription read mostly by the bellringers standing under the tower, and one of the most dismal certificates of life, marriage, motherhood, religion, death and the philosophy of relatives that I have seen. It was cheerful afterwards to read the name of Peter Parrot on a tombstone out in the sun.
Aston Clinton.
Past Buckland Church, I turned to the right and almost at once to the left along a road which went through a hayfield and then became a borderless hedged road, but with parallel marks as of traffic on the left. It came out opposite Aston Clinton Church into Akeman Street, a main road of elms, chestnuts, and telegraph-poles, going through a typical “peaceful” village street, with a smithy and a “Rose and Crown,” “Swan,” and “Palm in Hand,” an advertisement of petrol, a horse’s brass trappings gleaming under a tree, and in the park on the left hand a peacock proclaiming the neighbourhood of a large house. I had to turn to the right along Akeman Street for a quarter mile before turning out to the left into a road with houses facing the park. They were poor cottages, a little sordid and all jammed in a row, and three public houses amongst them. Past these houses the road was a dull, straight one under elms, with a clear view over a level beanfield to the Downs and their trees, with bright tops and dark, misty shadows below. Presently a brooklet appeared alongside the road among willow-herb and overhung by alder, elder, and willow, and at the beginning of Weston Turville it provided entertainment for half a hundred ducklings. The road went through the midst of Weston Turville and among inns on both sides and down the turnings, a “Vine,” a “Chequers,” a “Plough,” a “Six Bells,” a “Black Horse,” a “Chandos,” and a “Crown,” followed not much beyond the church by a “Marquis of Granby” and a “Swan”—but these were at World’s End. It was a village with here a house and there two or three round a square of streets, with the manor-house and elmy church tower outside it to the south; and between the houses there were intervals of garden. I noticed a little house lost between the great bare trunks of half a forest of trees in a timber merchant’s yard. I found an inn which had a straight settle facing a curved one of elm with a sloping back and reasonable arm-rests. There were quoits on pegs under the ceiling, and above the usual circular target for darts; the open fireplace had a kitchen range placed in it. The floor was composed of bluish-black and red tiles alternating.
I did not make certain how the Icknield Way went through Weston Turville, though a possible course seemed to turn left on entering the village and go by Brook Farm and Malthouse Row, and a little west of the old manor-house and by the “Vine.” Unless it took some such course, it could hardly have got to Terrick and Little Kimble, but must rather have gone straight on through Stoke Mandeville, Kimblewick, and Owlswick and into the road now marked “Lower Icknield Way” at Pitch Green. I went past the Weston reservoir to World’s End, and then over the Wendover and Aylesbury road only a mile north of Wendover, having clearly in view the obelisk on Coombe Hill, and a little later the towered Ellesborough Church looking ghostly in the sunlight under Beacon Hill. The hay was cut on both sides, and the road wound between broad borders of thistles and nettles. Near Terrick I saw the first meadow crane’s-bill of that season and that country—the purple flower whose purple is the emblem of a rich inward burning passion. At the very edges of the roadside turf the white clover grew. In the hawthorns a blackbird sang.
Soon I came to Kimble station on the Aylesbury branch of the Great Western and Great Central Junction Railway, and some new houses, one of them named “Beware of the Dogs.” Under the railway I turned left to Risborough and Longwick, not right to Hartwell. And now the road settled down to a fairly straight course for about ten miles, with meadow-sweet and rose in its low hedges and a view over the wheat to the Chilterns. It was usually about a hundred feet lower than the Upper way, and from one to two miles north of it. It was crossed by hardly any road more important than itself, except that from Thame to Princes Risborough. At this crossing, outside “The Duke of Wellington” or “Sportsman’s Arms,” a street organ played “Beside the Seaside” and other national anthems. Little more than a mile beyond I entered Oxfordshire. I left the road to see Chinnor Church, half a mile south, which looks southward on the juniper-dotted hills skirted by the Upper way. The most notable thing in the church was an oval tablet near the screen inscribed with the words:—
Beneath
lie
the remains of
William Turner
Esqre
who died 23rd March
1797 aged 61
“Here the wicked cease
from troubling and
the weary are
at rest.”
The word “here” my fancy took quite literally, and I saw a skeleton cramped behind the tablet protesting to the living that there, inside the wall, denuded of flesh and of all organs, nerves, and desires, a wicked man ceased from troubling and a weary one could be at rest; the teeth of the skeleton shook in their dry sockets as it, now a hundred and ten years old, uttered those sweet words: “Here the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.” Some of the dead outside bore formidable monosyllabic names, such as Wall, Crook, Saw, and Cocks. At the “Royal Oak” I listened for half an hour to information and complaints about the heat, which was at the time about ninety degrees in the shade, and then went out to make the most of the heat itself, which I could well do, having myself, as a good critic has pronounced, an unvarying temperature of about forty-five degrees (Fahr.).