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.