V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Perhaps the house had been no more than a shepherd’s shelter. But that was only a guess. Shepherd’s huts would have been smaller; and the trees around the plot didn’t speak of a shepherd’s hut, didn’t speak of a man lodging there for only a few nights at a time.

Sheep were no longer the main animals of the plain. I saw a sheep-shearing only once. It was done by a big man, an Australian, I was told, and the shearing was done in one of the old buildings — timber walls and a slate roof — at the side of the cottage row in which Jack lived. I saw the shearing by accident; I had heard nothing about it; it just happened at the time of my afternoon walk. But the shearing had clearly been news for some; the farm people and people from elsewhere as well had gathered to watch. A display of strength and speed, the fleecy animal lifted and shorn (and sometimes cut) at the same time, and then sent off, oddly naked — the ceremony was like something out of an old novel, perhaps by Hardy, or out of a Victorian country diary. And it was as though, then, the firing ranges of Salisbury Plain, and the vapor trails of military aircraft in the sky, and the army houses and the roaring highways didn’t lie around us. As though, in that little spot around the farm buildings and Jack’s cottage, time had stood still, and things were as they had been, for a little while. But the sheep-shearing was from the past. Like the old farm buildings. Like the caravan that wasn’t going to move again. Like the barn where grain was no longer stored.

This barn had a high window with a projecting metal bracket. Perhaps a pulley wheel and a chain or rope had been attached to this metal bracket to lift bales off the carts and wagons and then swing them through the high open window into the barn. There was a similar antique fixture in the town of Salisbury, at the upper level of what had been a well-known old grocery shop. It had survived or been allowed to live on as an antique, a trade mark, something suited to an old town careful of its past. But what was an antique in the town was rubbish at the bottom of the hill. It was part of a barn that was crumbling winter by winter — the barn and the other dilapidated farm buildings no doubt allowed to survive because, in this protected area, planning regulations allowed new buildings to go up only where buildings existed.

And just as the modern prefabricated shed had replaced the old rotting hayrick, so — but far away, not a simple addition to the old farm buildings — the true barn was now at the top of the hill, beside the windbreak. It had galvanized tin walls; it would have been rat-proof. There machinery caused everything to go; and the powerful trucks (not nowadays the wagons that might have used the flat drove-way to the old barn at the bottom of the valley) climbed up the rocky lane from the public road and pulled into the concrete yard of the barn, and the spout from the barn poured the dusty grain into the deep trays of the trucks.

The straw was golden, warm; the grain was golden; but the dust that fell all around — on the concrete yard, the rocky lane, the pines and young beeches of the windbreak — the dust that fell after the grain had poured into the trays of the trucks was gray. At the side of the metal-walled barn, and below a metal spout, there was a conical mound of dust that had been winnowed by some mechanical means from the bigger conical mounds of grain in the barn. This dust — the mound firm at the base, wonderfully soft at the top — was very fine and gray, without a speck of gold.

New, this barn, with all its mechanical contrivances. But just next to it, across an unpaved muddy lane, was another ruin: a wartime bunker, a mound planted over with sycamores, for concealment, and with a metal ventilator sticking out oddly now among the trunks of the grown trees. The sycamores would have been planted at least twenty-five years before; but they had been planted close together, and they still looked young.

J ACK LIVED among ruins, among superseded things. But that way of looking came to me later, has come to me with greater force now, with the writing. It wasn’t the idea that came to me when I first went out walking.

That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.

Jack himself, however, I considered to be part of the view. I saw his life as genuine, rooted, fitting: man fitting the landscape. I saw him as a remnant of the past (the undoing of which my own presence portended). It did not occur to me, when I first went walking and saw only the view, took what I saw as things of that walk, things that one might see in the countryside near Salisbury, immemorial, appropriate things, it did not occur to me that Jack was living in the middle of junk, among the ruins of nearly a century; that the past around his cottage might not have been his past; that he might at some stage have been a newcomer to the valley; that his style of life might have been a matter of choice, a conscious act; that out of the little piece of earth which had come to him with his farm worker’s cottage (one of a row of three) he had created a special land for himself, a garden, where (though surrounded by ruins, reminders of vanished lives) he was more than content to live out his life and where, as in a version of a book of hours, he celebrated the seasons.

I saw him as a remnant. Not far away, among the ancient barrows and tumuli, were the firing ranges and army training grounds of Salisbury Plain. There was a story that because of the absence of people in those military areas, because of the purely military uses to which the land had been put for so long, and contrary to what one might expect after the explosions and mock warfare, there-survived on the plain some kinds of butterflies that had vanished in more populated parts. And I thought that in some such fashion, in the wide droveway at the bottom of the valley, accidentally preserved from people, traffic, and the military, Jack like the butterflies had survived.

I saw things slowly; they emerged slowly. It was not Jack whom I first noticed on my walks. It was Jack’s father-in-law. And it was the father-in-law — rather than Jack — who seemed a figure of literature in that ancient landscape. He seemed a Wordsworthian figure: bent, exaggeratedly bent, going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude.

He walked very slowly, the bent old man; he did everything very deliberately. He had worked out his own paths across the downs and he stuck to them. You could follow these paths even across barbed-wire fences, by the blue plastic sacks (originally containing fertilizer) which the old man had rolled around the barbed wire and then tied very tightly with red nylon string, working with a thoroughness that matched his pace and deliberateness to create these safe padded places where he could cross below the barbed wire or climb over it.

The old man first, then. And, after him, the garden, the garden in the midst of superseded things. It was Jack’s garden that made me notice Jack — the people in the other cottages I never got to know, couldn’t recognize, never knew when they moved in or moved out. But it took some time to see the garden. So many weeks, so many walks between the whitish chalk and flint hills up to the level of the barrows to look down at Stonehenge, so many walks just looking for hares — it took some time before, with the beginning of my new awareness of the seasons, I noticed the garden. Until then it had simply been there, something on the walk, a marker, not to be specially noticed. And yet I loved landscape, trees, flowers, clouds, and was responsive to changes of light and temperature.