V. Naipaul: The Enigma of Arrival

In this way of seeing at that time what I wanted to see I was a little like Jack’s father-in-law, who ignored the new fence that cut at many places into segments of his run across the droveway. He ignored the new gates (they were few) and stuck to his run, creating stiles and steps and padded passing-places over and through the barbed wire, working in his old way, rolling blue plastic sacks around the barbed wire and then tying them with spiral after spiral of red-blond raffia or nylon.

The odd zigzag of the old man’s run was now revealed, as were its widest limits: from the pheasant cages on the muddy, shaded lane on the far side of the hill with the new barn, down that lane, across the droveway, and all the way up a scrub-bordered field to the old wood on the northern slope. On a field gate there, one day in my first summer, I saw a number of crows spreadeagled and rotting, some recent, some less so, some already reduced to feathery husks. It was strange to link this fierce act with the bent old man, who moved so slowly; but when his mischievous eyes came to mind, his swarthy-white gypsy skin, his strong, sly face, the act fitted.

A whole life, a whole enduring personality, was expressed in that run. And so strong were the reminders of the old man’s presence, So much of his spirit appeared to hover over his run, over his stiles and steps and those oddly placed rolled-up plastic sacks, even those he had rolled up and tied long ago and were shredding now, plastic without its shine, blue turning to white, so much did all of this speak of the old man moving slowly back and forth on his own errands, that it was some time before it occurred to me that I had not seen him for a while. And then I understood that what I had been seeing for many weeks past, many months past, were his relics.

He had died. There had been no one to record the fact publicly, to pass the news on. And long afterwards, on the fences growing older themselves, those plastic wraps or pads continued to bleach and shred away. Still with us, like the other debris at the bottom of the valley — the roofless walls of the ruined house, the antiquated farm machinery below the young silver birches, the other machinery and discarded timber and metal below the beech trees at the back of the old farm buildings, the metal bracket in the loading window of the superseded, crumbling barn.

And it was a good while later that I got to know that the old man had lived and died in Jack’s house, and that he was Jack’s father-in-law.

B UT BEFORE I got to know Jack I got to know the farm manager. I suppose (because Jack lived in one of the agricultural cottages attached to the farm) that the farm manager was Jack’s boss. I never thought of them in that relationship, though. I thought of them as separate people.

The farm manager made his rounds in a Land-Rover. He had a dog with him, sometimes on the seat beside him, sometimes looking out from the back.

We met on the rocky lane that led up from the bottom of the valley, where the old farm buildings and cottages were, to the new barn at the top of the hill. This was the steepest climb of the walk, and I treated it as the exercise part. It came at the right point, near the end, and it was just long enough and taxing enough to make me feel the muscles of my legs and to set me breathing deeply. It was on this hill that the farm manager stopped one afternoon to speak a friendly word — humorously offering a lift, perhaps, for the last fifty yards. He was a middle-aged man, with glasses.

The lane was narrow; I had on more than one afternoon had to stand aside to let him pass. I had at first seen just the Land-Rover, the vehicle. Then I had seen the man inside, had become familiar with his features, and the contented rather than watchful look of the dog with him. I had assumed that he was the farmer, the owner or lessee of these well-kept acres, and I had accordingly given him a “farmer’s walk” when he got out of the Land-Rover at the barn and walked in to see how the grain was drying out or whatever it was he was going to check. I had endowed him with a special kind of authority, a special attitude to the land around us. But then I discovered, from the man himself, that he was not the landowner. And I had to revise my way of looking at him: he was only the farm manager, an employee.

His inspection drives covered part of my walk. The lane beside the windbreak led down to the public road. In the sunken ground across this road was the cow or dairy section of the farm. Behind the cow sheds were the water meadows and, in the distance, the willows and other trees on the riverbank. At the side of the road, at the entrance to this farmyard, there was a wooden platform three or four feet high. On this platform milk churns were placed, for collection by the dairy van. After this, the public road went past a thatched, pink-walled cottage and some plainer houses of flint and brick. Then came the yews and beeches of the manor. This was where my walk ended: a wide entrance in the dark-green gloom, and then the bright lawn in front of my cottage.

This was the part of the public road which, when I had come out onto it after the first four days of rain, had set me a puzzle: whether to turn to the right or the left. Now, if the manager’s Land-Rover came from behind and passed me here, I knew where it was going. Past the yews, along the beech-hung road high above the river, and then down to the little settlement at river level where the white-walled thatched cottage was being done up, and where an asphalted lane, progressively more broken, led past a number of small houses, some with raised monograms, to the wide, unpaved droveway.

My feeling for that wide, grassy way had grown. I saw it as the old bed of an ancient river, almost something from another geological age; I saw it as the way down which geese might have once been driven to Camelot-Winchester from Salisbury Plain; I saw it as the old stagecoach road.

But it was near there — the present encroaching all the time on something more than the past, encroaching on antiquity, sacred ground — that among the small houses I had not paid much attention to, in a small, neatly fenced plot with a paved drive and a low little bungalow and an extravagant, overplanted garden, full of tall flowers and dwarf conifers and tall ornamental clumps, it was there, on the paved drive, that I saw the Land-Rover one day and on other days. This, then, was where the manager lived and where his inspection drives ended: a little bit of suburbia at the very edge of antiquity. Yet I had taken the house for granted; in the gradual shaping of the land around me, the neat house had taken longer to come out at me, to be noticed. The antiquity — so much vaguer, so much a matter of conjecture — had made its impression more easily: I was ready for it.

Almost immediately, starting on his farm round, the manager would have driven down the deeply rutted droveway past the almost bare bank welted with ancient furrows. His thoughts no doubt of woods and fields and crops and cattle, seeing different things from those I saw, he would have driven down the straight length of the droveway now bisected by the barbed-wire fence he had himself put up or caused to be put up; past the roofless stone house with the tall sycamores, the old hayrick shaped like a cottage and covered with black plastic sheeting; past the caravan in the shade of the scrub and trees on one side, and the two rows of hives incorporated now into the barbed-wire enclosure on the other side; past the old farm buildings (with the new hay shed, though) and the cottages, one of which was Jack’s; past Jack’s garden and goose ground, up to the new metal-walled barn.

This was the manager’s run, almost circular. It was also Jack’s; and it was partly mine.

I had seen Jack at work in his vegetable allotment, the plot beyond the cottage front gardens, at the beginning of the slope towards the farm’s cultivated fields. I had noticed the odd elegance of his trimmed, pointed beard. And though, in his allotment, his personality was at once clearer than the personality of the other farm workers (whose personalities were at least half expressed by their tractors or their tractors’ tasks, steadily, swath by swath, altering the color or texture of a vast field), Jack had at first been a figure in the landscape to me, no more. As no doubt I also was to him: a stranger, a walker, someone exercising an old public right of way in what was now private land.