The “Papist Way” was a hard road winding between wheat and beans for half a mile. Then it crossed the Wallingford and Cholsey road, and was interrupted by the railway embankment. Its course on the farther side of this seemed to be marked by a division between barley and potatoes to the left of the present road. This line was continued through Pancroft farm-yard, from which a path went south-westward along the hedges to Lollingdon. This was over black, rushy lands haunted by pewits. The road a little on the left, leading also to Lollingdon Farm, was on better ground, winding westward under the wooded swell of the round hill called Lollingdon Hill. The farm had a big home meadow with ash and poplar enclosing it, almost as if it had been a quadrangle with cloisters round. There were many thatched farm buildings in the corner, and a fine walnut tree and a beautiful abundance of poppies and dusty nettle and dusty mallow against the walls. The road had an elmy hedge on its right, but nothing on the left between it and the oats that reached up to the beeches of Lollingdon Hill-top. The long grass and knapweed and succory by the roadside were blossoming with white and meadow-brown butterflies, which flew away from their stalks as ducklings swim away from their unamphibious foster-mothers. The butterflies flew after one another, sometimes a white after a brown. The sun was perfect for them, there being fewer clouds than there were eight hours back—for as I walked I heard a pleasant, gong-like bell strike two at Aston.
Aston Tirrold and Aston Upthorpe make a square of roads with many lanes and paths crossing from one side to another. In the square are big houses and small, and their gardens and old, nettly orchards, and many sycamores, elms, chestnuts, and acacias in the gardens and along the paths; there are even some small fields within it. Running water goes through it. Here you pass a mud wall, there a hedge, here a boarded, there a thatched, and again a tiled, cottage. At some of the corners and in the churchyard stand lime trees. If a happy child had all the ingredients of old villages to play with, it would, if it were ingenious, probably combine them thus. The farms are all outside the square but close to it. The churches are near the edge but within it. I hardly believed that anybody remained alive in the village until I failed to open the door of Aston Tirrold Church. Aston Upthorpe church was a small tiled building with a stupid little spire stuck on yesterday, to show that it was not part of the neighbouring tiled farm and outhouses. The village hid itself well on both sides under its elms. From the east it seemed all trees and orchards, from the west only the new thatch of a rick betrayed it.
My road led along the south side of the village and commanded a simple, perfect piece of downland—a bare, even wall of down with an almost straight ridge, which was also bare but for one clump; along the foot of the wall ran the main road to Wantage; up from it, an old trackway, very deeply worn, rose slanting and showing one old steep green bank, up to the ridge and over; and at the point where the trackway crossed the main road the turf was carved by a chalk-pit.
Blewbury.
A broad track and several parallel paths went fairly straight without hedges, westward through the corn to Blewbury, passing close under the south side of a bare, sudden hill—Blewburton Hill—and the ramparts of a supposed Danish camp. Blewbury was like Aston, with a streamlet, many trees and orchards, and a towered church standing in the midst of several paths and roads. The clock was beating slowly with such gigantic and ancient peace inside the church that I did not enter. It was as if some hoary giant were sleeping inside away from the sun, if indeed he had not been there for some centuries. Outside the church lay a dilapidated and weed-grown pair of prostrate effigies. If it were not disturbing the sleeper in Blewbury Church I should suggest that these effigies might be taken in. They are much to be preferred to the clean effigies which have never borne the weather of God or the pocket-knives of men; but if they are left outside much longer they will hardly pass as representations of two human beings lying on their backs.
The south side of Blewbury touched the main Reading and Wantage road, and had several inns: a “Barley Mow,” a “Catherine Wheel,” a “George and Dragon,” a “Sawyer’s Arms,” a “Load of Mischief,” and at its west end a “New Inn.” I was glad to see that the “Load of Mischief” still upheld its sign and name. I feared that it might have been renamed “The Red Lion” or the “Crown,” and have been robbed of its sign. But there was the sign, and almost opposite a window, where I was equally glad and surprised to see an advertisement of “Votes for Women.” The “Load of Mischief” was a woman, of a type belonging to a day hardly later than Hogarth’s, mounted on the shoulders of a man. The man was a mere small beast of burden. The woman was magnificent—a huge, lusty, brown virago—and she was holding in her hand a glass clearly labelled “Gin.” This woman and her ill-chosen spouse were painted on both sides of the sign-board, so that all coming from north and from south should see it. I forgot to inquire whether “The Load of Mischief” was a fully licensed house and sold gin. Probably it was. The sign was not a beerhouse’s defamation of gin. It did not deny that gin was a very good thing. It did not assert anything more than that a big, gin-drinking woman on a small man’s shoulders was a “load of mischief.” How impossible it is—even in this sporting country—to think of a sign depicting a big, gin-drinking man on a little woman’s shoulders. No woman ever painted a sign-board, I suppose, and no woman keeping an inn would put up such a one as “The Load of Mischief.” A woman who drank gin was a load of mischief. On the other hand, a man who made the gin for her, provided that he grew rich on it, became a justice of the peace or a member of Parliament; if his father made it he became a bishop. It is the difference between mind and matter, between brain-work and manual labour. The member of Parliament or the bishop’s father had only to think about gin; he might never have tasted it. The woman had to swallow it and pay for it. Therefore she grew poor while he grew rich. A history of England was once written entirely to show this difference, to insist upon it, and to teach the consumer that he must never forget his duties and responsibilities to the manufacturer, and to remind the manufacturer of his privileges. It was called “A History of England for Shoe-Blacks and Sons of Gentlemen: or, A Guide to Tuft-hunting, Sycophancy, Boot-licking, and other Services to the Aristocracy and Plutocracy, and to Keeping in Your Place.” It was published in 1911, and is used in schools.
When I went into one of the inns there was a woman seated in the taproom drinking beer, a shrill and lean, large-eyed woman of middle age, somewhat in liquor, and with ill-fitting boots, in which she had walked fifteen miles and had nine still to do. Whether or not because he had drunk more, her husband had gone on by train; she said she had “sent him.” She foresaw that it was not going to rain that day. She claimed no credit for the foresight. Her corns alone had the power. In about a quarter of an hour she left. She was a woman that walked fast but stopped often. She carried her hands in the pockets of her black skirt. Not long after she had started the rain fell down upon her, as it did upon the roofs, mackintoshes, and umbrellas of the brewers, publicans, and brewery shareholders.
From the west of Blewbury to Upton there was another mile of broad, green tracks through corn, without a tree between them and the round, smooth downs, with their tumuli clear against the sky on the left hand. At Upton this series of roads from Little Stoke entered the main road, or crossed it, and continued without touching any villages on the way to Lockinge and Wantage. But this further road was a continuation of the line of the main road before it turned north to Upton and west to Hagbourne, and might have been an alternative course to Wantage, or part of an earlier way, perhaps the Icknield Way itself, which some have supposed to go nearer the Downs than the main road now does. As I meant at another time to travel this road and its parallels from Streatley to the Wiltshire border, I returned to Blewbury, and at one of the six inns read James Montgomery’s Pelican Island, a poem of A.D. 1827, in nine cantos. The poem seemed to have been started and carried on under the influence of an ecstasy given to the author by an explorer’s book. In his Voyage to Terra Australis, then not long published, Captain Matthew Flinders had described two little islands, the breeding-place and antique cemetery of pelicans, “islets of a hidden lagoon of an uninhabited island, situate upon an unknown coast, near the antipodes of Europe.” This evidently impressed Montgomery with a strong feeling of solitariness. He imagined himself alone when “sky, sun, and sea were all the universe,” himself a spirit, “all eye, ear, thought”—“what the soul can make itself at pleasure, that I was.” For “thrice a thousand years” he saw none but the people of the sea:—