THE ICKNIELD WAY

The Icknield Way is one of those ancient routes in England, one that people, goods, and cattle have used for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. In my mind, and perhaps in reality, it was used by dinosaurs when our islands were part of mainland Europe. Only some of its tracks remain, some missing, some lost, some covered in tarmac, and some left to conjecture. There is a magical aura surrounding it. 

Around its path lies the history of Great Britain through the ages, from the Palaeolithic through the Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages. After such a long and tumultuous history, its time within the Roman Empire is so close to us and short that the Roman occupation here seems almost like nowadays.

Great routes, like the Icknield Way, must have had many feeder lanes to make each civilisation work. And these lanes sometimes now take the form of deep tracks where hooves, wheels, and hobnailed boots loosen the chalk surfaces for rain to wash away the crumbling chalk to deepen the roadway.

 

It was near the Icknield Way that I was looking for a house. 

Passing by a steep bank, above which stood a lovely four up four-up-four-down brick-built farmhouse, was a water overflow from the house’s rainwater tank on which it rested. The house was for sale. 

The owner was an old farmer who had applied for permission to build a bungalow out of sight but not far away for his pig man. He had neither man nor pigs, but obtained permission to build. He moved out, and I moved in. 

The sight with its sunken road was undulating but not unusual, separating itself from cornfields by old hedgerows, were mistletoe grew on a bush instead of usually high on an apple tree.

The drains emptied into a deep hole in the chalk, but not with bath water, as there was no bath or bathroom in the house.

An owl liked to rest among cabbages.

I created a kitchen garden there and my first experimental vineyard.

To prevent fruit theft from the usual crowd of birds and animals, I also established a fruit cage - one with a netting roof that could be folded up and put away for the winter, as the area was pretty bleak, wind-swept, and prone to heavy snowstorms.

A feature of the surrounding countryside was spasmodic rows of Scots pines, trees that decide on their own shape and which branches to develop and which to leave to die and fall. 

They had been planted originally to provide nesting cover for partridges and to make the birds fly high for King Edward VII and his friends to shoot them down.

I had some more newly-planted Scots pines in the garden under which I would record in paint the glorious East Anglian skies and the giant sinking suns.

Beneath the Scots pines I would imagine and paint those who passed by in ancient times and those in families with their animals who might rest and huddle around a fire beneath the trees. 

These were of moments past, depicted with my present imagination, with no hard historical evidence. 

Then, one sunny day, I was planting strawberry runners in the fruit cage when an object of blue/green verdigris caught my eye. It was a broken Roman fibula, the pin/brooch that held up the toga.

Here was a metal object outside my imagination of olden times. How, when, and why was a piece of jewelry belonging to a Roman or Anglo-Roman doing in my fruit cage? 

I contacted the local society that specialised in such matters. They were not interested.

When selling the house, I gave my fibula to the new owners. Perhaps I should have left it in the ground where I found it for someone from a future age to have the pleasure of discovering this item from a past age again. 

 

A LIFE OF TANGENTS

On reaching 100  years old I thought that I might write a short summary of my lifespan, mostly of art, wine, travel, and garden - the details of which can be found in my books, articles, my blog (www.webpageroberts.blogspot.com) and the yet-to-be-published Autobiography in Words and Pictures. 

After a country upbringing of untutored art, and reaching Wellington College, I was offered a safe wartime retreat as a refugee in the USA - and took it, as my mother, with most of us at that time, feared that Mr Hitler might well take the country and subjugate our people. She wanted one of the family to live. 

From the USA I returned to England in 1942 when old enough to join the RAF as a trainee pilot. Then, in waiting for a training vacancy I worked as a farm labourer and then as a prop-swinger. 

For operational experience during flying training, I was posted to several RAF stations. 

One of these was to fly in Coastal Command Warwick aircraft from Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall, over the Bay of Biscay with a lifeboat slung beneath to drop on six parachutes to bailed-out aircrew. 

My job in the second pilot’s seat was to look out for the dangerous German Condor aircraft flying out from Brittany. They could have made mincemeat of us.

At another station, I flew in the fully armed-up tail turret of a Lancaster bomber on an engine test from RAF Skellingthorpe, near Lincoln, to Scotland and back - checking the drift and on the lookout for enemy aircraft. 

When waiting at RAF Hornchurch for training in America, I volunteered as a slater - being part of my war effort. Given an hour’s training and a mate to climb the ladder to supply me with rather poor quality Welsh slates, I mended several bombed roofs in Plumstead, south-east London.

I was later awarded my wings after final training in Oklahoma, USA - when the war in Europe had just ended but not in the Pacific. I was not wanted there, so returned to England and grounded. 

I then became a Photographic Intelligence Officer and then invalided out of the RAF with TB. 

TB returned when I was a medical student. There was no cure at that time. 

Living in two council rooms I bought and rebuilt a bombed-out house in London, went to art school and theatre design school, designed for TV and theatre, painted scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and also painted landscapes for exhibitions and sale. 

To extend my artistic knowledge I bought a clapped-out builder’s flat-back van and converted it into an unusual mobile lodging, and travelled Europe for three months and three days meeting people, viewing landscapes, and enjoying art and theatre. I covered 5,227 miles - not without mishap. 

In 1958 I set out on a world tour of a year’s drawing, then exhibiting my work in both London and Japan. With notes and drawings, I wrote the book Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World. 

A tumbledown thatched cottage that I had bought before leaving on this voyage to have roots to return to, I burnt to the ground and designed and helped build a one-bedroomed house in its place. 

After selling the house to Francis Bacon in 1965, I bought a Thames-side warehouse in London’s Limehouse and, with the help of a Pole, converted it to two studios.

After marriage and now taking care of my two children, I moved to Cambridgeshire, then Hampshire, creating a garden for BBC2’s Gardeners’ World, sculpted three large dead elm trees into animals and birds that had been connected with the ancient Icknield Way nearby, wrote a weekly newspaper column on wine, followed by some 700 articles for newspapers and magazines and 14 books. Then divorce. 

I returned to London to exhibit paintings, got married to a lovely wife and later worked for six years on my blog, and Autobiography in Words and Pictures, which has now reached to over 150 episodes. 

A culmination of my 100 years was a party we gave at a pub frequented by myself and fellow airmen in the war. There, 150 people from home and abroad, family, friends, acquaintances and neighbours, met and thoroughly enjoyed an evening to celebrate.

A card of congratulations signed by King Charles III and Queen Camilla attracted much attention as few had seen one before. 

And that’s about it - a life of tangents, taken at opportune times, described here without detail, and in the minimum of words. 

                                                                            

LIFE AS A REFUGEE IN THE USA

 

I was 15 and had just crossed the U-boat-infested Atlantic in a liner on my way to meet and live with a small family in Connecticut, USA. They had sent word to the Women’s Voluntary Services in England to ask for a young male refugee from the highly possible German victory and conquest of England. 

I had been used, even at that age, to looking after myself in a cottage during school holidays. So I had already learned to be independent. 

My future hosts, Mr and Mrs Killorin,  came aboard the Duchess of Richmond in Montreal to claim me. 

I recall that as we made our way by car south through Canada and then the USA, we ate at a place where my new-found hosts noticed where a famous journalist and notable, called Dorothy Parker, was writing at a table. I had not heard of her. We continued south. 

Our relationship was not easy, thinking that because our common language and ways of life were much the same, which is not the case at all. We were foreigners to each other. 

As my kind lady host worked in some capacity at the local and famous Taft School, I was enrolled at that August institution. 

But other than gaining my numerals (a logo for one’s sweater) at soccer, it was soon apparent that my strengths were not related to academia. So I was transferred to a State School for mechanical training.

I went there by yellow bus each day, mixing with quite a different bunch of boys to learn how to draw cog teeth on wheels. Humour and interests there were on the crude side, but I was made welcome, not just because I was a refugee from a war-torn country, but because the headmaster thought I would make a suitable match for his rather plain daughter.

This involved escorting her to balls and providing her on such occasions with a corsage (paid for by my hosts as I had no money). Fortunately, the Torrington Trade School was some distance away which was inconvenient for my hosts but convenient for me.

My mother did eventually manage to send me a small amount of money, so I was, at last, able to buy ice cream (of which the Americans are particularly fond). I made good friends locally with mostly boys of my own age, but most importantly, for this callow boy’s outlook on life, there was an older misfit who lived in the loft above his family’s garage who became a lifetime influence on me. He played the clarinet, carved in wood, and drank neat Bourbon.

I did not learn music but made a wooden instrument rather like a balalaika, and sampled Bourbon. (When I was later in the USA I located him living at a house in the open countryside repairing antique furniture. He had almost forgotten me.)

Concerning the Bourbon, I once drank too much, and although my friend’s garage loft was some distance from where I lodged, I do remember crawling home, mostly on all fours, and getting into my bed to witness the entire room spinning around me. Since then I have been tipsy at times but never so sozzled as then.

My hostess tried, without much success, to employ a maid. One was to give me breakfast before I left the house early to catch the yellow bus to school. One morning a candidate maid, smelling of alcohol, was attempting to fry me an egg but forgot to place the frying pan between the broken egg and the gas ring. 

I was, as the Dutch say, a “puber” and learning about life. 

For sport, a golf course green was at the end of our garden where I constantly tried for a hole-in-one with a number 9 iron, without success. In a dried stream on the course lived a viciously armoured snapping turtle which was well to avoid (you wouldn’t pick up a golf ball near this creature). Beyond the rough, poison ivy flourished in the countryside, ready to inflict horrendous rashes on the skin of the venturesome - acquired, even from the smoke when it was burned in a bonfire. 

Winters were cold and snowy, causing drifts around the house so deep that we would sometimes have to cut our way out.

I was given an old pair of skis that were tied to the shoes with string, creating disastrous outcomes. So I turned them into a successful toboggan.

I tended the garden for my hosts and made some money by knocking on doors and selling magazine subscriptions.

When I was old enough to return to join the RAF in 1942 I welcomed the day, having been so grateful to the Killorin family who took me in and befriended me. 

DOGS

Most of us like or love dogs - well, well-trained dogs anyhow. 

And they serve a wonderful service to the incapacitated, lonely, desirous of love and much else. 

Because of these attributes, we make allowances for the smell that comes with training puppies, the sometimes boisterousness, the annoying barkers, the molting hairs, the yapping, the fighting, not to mention the biting and the very occasional killing of sheep and people.

It is lovely to both onlooker and owner to see the devoted glances given by the dog to its owner - sometimes expecting food as a reward. 

But, of course, there are snags. They sadly don’t last that long, and the vet would have them suffering from countless ills - for which the owner pays extravagantly. Some bills I have read about are astronomical and, like rockets, rise inordinately. 

Many dogs are plain ugly, yet owners seem to dote on them, regardless of looks. Handsome or ugly, theft is a problem.

They serve their purpose in towns and cities, but really need the countryside for the exercise they demand and their owners enjoy - regardless of the weather.

And when a dog has a real purpose in the form of a job to do, it is a happy creature and much admired. 

When I first went to Holland, dogs were used to pull churns in small wagons for milk distribution to households. 

When I lived and was brought up in the country, our two dogs were working dogs but also lived with us in the house.

One, Bunty, was the rat-catcher and fox-scarer, and Ben had an eye for our chicken farm’s business. 

If an order came in for a fat bird for roasting, my father would select one by eye (all free range in those days) and indicate to Ben which it was. Ben would then catch it and press it to the ground with his paws for my father to pick up. 

We bred from the dogs and their puppies were much sought-after. 

Now that most owners pick up their pet’s mess to be disposed of, is a huge advance. 

I don’t know what it is like now in Paris, for instance, but it was not so long ago that one might miss the sights for having to pay regard to the excrement on the pavement.

By and large, they are wonderful creatures, and all ages seem to love to pat and stroke them.

We have a dog that needs no attention, is quiet, sits watching everything, needs no food or water, is loved by children, and is cold in the winter and warm in the summer. It is a bronze dog, full-size and almost solid bronze, smooth in bits and sharp in unexpected places. It is very heavy. 

It guards a few old tennis balls. Ugly? Some people think it is a sheep. Loved? Yes. much. 

This dog of ours has a history, a pedigree, a provenance, and a past.

When Menache Kadishman was an art student in London, I suppose in about 1970, he took a dog in plaster form, to art dealer Freddy Mayor’s London gallery hoping to sell i

Freddy, who had wonderful taste in art, told Kadishman that he could not sell a plaster, but would have the dog cast in bronze and then offer it for sale. 

This was duly done, and dog, now in bronze form, surprisingly languished at the gallery.

When my eldest son was born, I bought dog for my ex-wife as a present. She, in turn, gave it to the firstborn 

who didn't like it and gave it (or sold it) to his brother. This son needed money, so I purchased it from him. Now I have bought dog twice. After all, it is a family dog and happy with us.

And should it ever be sold (God forbid) it should go back to the Mayor Gallery from whence it came.

Dealers in those days (Freddy anyhow) were usually friends with their clients who, when necessary, would only sell artworks back to their dealer - generally at a profit. And Freddy had such a wonderful eye for art that anything that went through his gallery was top-class. He only dealt in the best, and with honesty - unlike what we hear about practices in the art world of today. 

But art is a business, and times have changed.

Our dog, though born and bred in England was, so we hear, cast in bronze again in Israel - which sometimes happens to bronzes.

That’s the way of the art business now. And making more casts makes more money. 

At least we have the original - and it might be aware of it. 

PHOTOGRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE

It was 1945. Germany had been defeated. I was in America’s Oklahoma to be awarded my wings and commission. Only experienced pilots were now required for the conflict in the Pacific, so I found myself on the stripped-down, grey-painted Queen Elizabeth liner bound for England. 

As newly promoted officers had to learn to be and act as officers, my first posting was to Harrogate where young RAF pilots were taught to behave like gentlemen. 

It was then that we were offered various airforce tasks, there being enough pilots for the ongoing Pacific conflict and peacetime needs. 

I had flown in Warwicks on air/sea rescue missions over the Bay of Biscay during the war as a trainee pilot, so opted for air/sea rescue on the water - and was given a position, barely known to me, of being a Photographic Intelligence Officer. 

The headquarters for this skill was RAF Medmenham. Here wartime operators were the first to identify V2 German rockets being assembled at Penemunde - a momentous discovery.

I was taught to use a stereoscope - two simple clear lenses set in an equally simple metal stand. If positioned above two areal photographs taken one directly after another, the result of these, when placed almost together showed up as a landscape in three dimensions, thus providing much more information than two-dimensional photographs.

During the war, reconnaissance aircraft, like spitfires and mosquitos on our side, and ME 109s on the other, took many series of photographs over sights of military interest of each other’s territory. The results of these photographs, taken from high altitude, revealed secrets of great importance to the interpreters.

Armed with this knowledge, I was posted to another commandeered grand country house, RAF Newnam Courtney, and given a stereoscope and a series of German areal photographs taken of an oil installation in the northern Caspian. 

Military hardware needs fuel for war and the Germans wanted to know where it was extracted from the earth and its whereabouts. We had captured many of their areal photographs of oil installations. 

With my stereoscope, German areal photographs and now with my three-dimensional view of the installations revealed, I had to work out the complex’s capacity, transport links, expansion prospects and general infrastructure. Why? 

There are, sadly, always wars or conflicts of one kind or another going on, and countries with the best intelligence have the greatest chance of survival. 

When great conflicts come to an end we tend to think that they will not happen again - wars to end wars and all that stuff. But they do. So we might as well prepare for them, however insignificant this information may seem at the time. It might always come in handy. But let’s hope that it doesn’t.

Grobble Up the Beasties

I had forgotten the expression “Grobble Up the Beasties” since many a year. Now, thanks to a dream I have not only recalled it from the depths of my brain but also almost to have solved it - but in dreamland.

The expression was always thought by the British to be Dutch and that it was in common use in Holland. But ask a Dutch person and they will have no idea what nonsense the silly English will believe. Even my wife, Margreet, conversant in several languages, has no idea of its meaning, thinking that it has an Afrikaans sound to it and might have something to do with insects. 

My revelationary dream was as follows: I was offered the view of an ancient map on vellum, beautifully hand-drawn, showing the coast of north east Scotland. I was delighted to find that three small fishing villages on the indented coast, and close together, were the harbours of Drobble, Oppa, and Debeesty.

Could I have solved the conundrum or part of it?

So might the phrase have referred to fishing, fish, weight of catches, or processes such as smoking? And if so, how did the expression spread through the UK and the English speaking people, thinking it to be commonly-used Dutch? 

Of course, it was all a dream, but at least I might have dreamed of the partial answer to its origins. But I somehow doubt it.

Another dream might tell me more. 

MY GRANDMOTHER (GRANNY)

 

How little we know about our own family during our and their lifetime. When they are dead we somehow want to know more and regret not having questioned enough.

We are not even sure about the origins of my mother’s mother. We seem sure that she was Irish, perhaps a farmer’s daughter or even a hairdresser. Whatever, she was a beauty, somewhere meeting my grandfather who, at the time, must have been a budding surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, in London. 

As a boy I recall being with her at our Silchester home when she was titled (lots of “m’Lady” and your “Ladyship” from Constance our country-bred live-in maid), always dressed in black, very grand and widowed - her husband, Sir Frederick Hewitt, having died as a famous anaesthetist some years earlier. 

She left two tangible items about which I will write in a bit. 

I know that we were all a little on edge when she came to stay. And “James, to the inceneraria” I recall her saying to me when I was disposing of some rubbish or other.

One day I had earlier shot or snared a rabbit and returned to deal with it at home. When Granny saw the animal she rolled up her grand sleeves, paunched, skinned and cut up the creature to be ready for the pot. We were aghast. Did this indicate that her upbringing in Ireland was in a farmer’s or butcher’s household? We don’t know. 

War came and went. When walking on the pavement with my mother in London’s Soho were some surly-looking youths were standing. She brushed them aside, saying: “aside scum”. They stood aside. 

I then lived in two small Council rooms in Pimlico, offered to me when discharged from the RAF with TB, and Granny at that time was a permanent resident in a room at the Regent Palace Hotel, Piccadilly. 

I would invite her for the lunch she always enjoyed of smoked haddock cooked in milk and butter. She had a good appetite, so I gave her plenty, and I never disagreed with her. So we got on well. 

At this time I was at art school and had a strikingly beautiful Anglo-Indian student as a girlfriend. My cousin, John Scott, fell for her and wanted to marry her. I was delighted. 

As his mother, who had lived in India at the time of the Raj, and Granny, who thought the marriage to be quite inappropriate (I heard “the touch of the tar brush”mentioned)  contrived to breakup the liaison.

John Scott, a party-loving Scottish army officer and personable fellow who, like me, took the easy path, now had adversaries and, although he was his grandmother’s favourite grandson came under her critical influence. 

She told him: “John, if you marry this girl I will not leave you the money I had in mind but only the interest on it”. He decided against the marriage.

When Granny died, he, like the rest of the grandchildren received a paltry sum each. She was never going to do otherwise. So we laughed to think that John had lost his girl for the price of a weekly chocolate bar. 

As I have mentioned, Granny left two tangible items of her life that I know about. The first was a jewel that seems to change hands around the family. One day, a niece’s son told us that this particular piece of a diamond E set in purple enamel and surrounded by larger diamonds was a jewel that King Edward VII gave to either his mistresses or mothers of his children.

Now Edward VII enjoyed the company of pretty ladies, and Granny was much in Court Circles. She had three children, my aunt, whose first husband was one of those Raj soldiers who became a Brigadier, my mother, who married an athletic but wounded officer of the ’14-’18 war (my father), and Wyndham. 

Wyndham was a King’s Scholar at Eton, raced cars, was a rally driver, married several times (mostly to Parisian models) and lived mainly and grandly in France. He looked uncommonly like King Edward VII.

Wyn was often in trouble, a brilliant engineer, and sent to Australia to return as flight engineer to Kingsford Smith who, in his Avro 10, tri motor aeroplane was the first to deliver Christmas mail from Sydney to Croydon Aerodrome in 1931 after a record-braking (17 days) journey with an all Australian crew. (Wyndham, being English, was photographed leaving the aircraft but barely mentioned.)

The second item left by Granny is a gold-topped palmyra cane given to Grandfather, we think, from some eastern potentate as thanks for anaesthetic services.

The gold top is engraved with Sir Frederic’s name and another, Tommy Nottingham. We can only surmise that Mr Nottingham was a close friend of Grandma’s after her husbands death.

My wife, Margreet, now uses the cane for exercises to help integrate a shoulder replacement joint.

 

In Granny’s hotel room hung a piece of velvet on which were pinned favours for charities of good deeds that are pinned on you when you donate to their collection boxes. So she was always prepared and at no expense when leaving her room each day to walk up Regent Street to her bank where the doorman would provide her with a copy of The Times for her to read there. 

She also volunteered her services to charity organisations were she sold donated trinkets - some of which possibly ended up in her room. 

I cannot recall how she died in her old age, but I do remember a bus mentioned and a strong wind.