Everyman's England Read Online Free Page A

the largest and, I think, the most beautiful of the British gulls, and to watch it in flight is to become conscious of the extraordinary power and dexterity of wing which these birds possess.
    I have watched a cloud of gulls, perhaps some two hundred, wheeling and dipping over the carcass of a dead pig brought up by the tide while a wind at nearly gale force has been blowing, and in the midst of all their wild swooping, circling and dipping I have never seen one collision or anything which looked like an error of judgment. Man likes to pride himself upon his conquest of the air and his powers of flight. Two hundred aeroplanes mixed together like the gulls would produce a pretty carnage.
    I walked for some time with the company of the gulls and other birds. The grey, wintry sky flashed with the points of their wings and the wind was alive with the noise of their screaming. Flying low along the water’s edge, just skimming the waves, went curlew, redshank, uttering their thin, protesting pipe, and wild duck. The fields on the other side of the road held colonies of fieldfares and lapwings.
    At Salta I came across a farmer leaning on a gate and watching a flock of black-faced Highland ewes nibbling at a feed of turnips. He laughed as I stopped in the lee of the hedge and tried to beat life back into my frozen fingers. The sky had darkened to a deep indigo and once or twice spits of snow came whistling in the wind.
    â€˜Cold?’ he questioned.
    I blew on my fingers and he laughed again and then spoke in the Cumberland accent which is hard at times for a southerner to follow.
    â€˜How would you like to lie out on yon moss for three hours waiting for the geese to come back at night?’ he asked.
    I told him that if geese-shooting entailed such endurance it was not likely to find me among its enthusiasts.
    His eyes were creased at the corners with crow’s-feet wrinkles and were a hard, healthy blue. He stood easily against the wind as he talked, his hands in his breeches pockets, a cap to one side of his head, and his jacket open to show an old woollen yellow waistcoat. I was almost shivering in a top-coat; he seemed oblivious of the cold and the sudden spurts of snow.
    We stood looking over the marsh towards the coast, talking of the lambing season that would come in March, and he explained that the characteristic rounded thatched haystacks of the district were raised on circular stone platforms, about eighteen inches high, to prevent the rainwater that runs off the thatching from soaking into the bottom of the rick. In no other part of England which I have visited have I seen this precaution so generally adopted.
    He lived in one of those grey Cumberland houses which, having no pretensions to beauty, being no more than four walls and a slate roof, somehow seem to harmonise perfectly with the countryside. When men, it seems, make use of local materials, build they never so badly, the stone carries with it the fitness which it had in its natural state and which defeats ugliness even in its new condition. The stone houses and flaked tiles of the Cotswolds, the red-bricked thatched cottages of Kent and the flint-walled houses of Hertfordshire have this beauty.
    When I left the farmer it was snowing heavily. Down on the marsh some men had set fire to the dead grass and reeds to keep down the vermin that find a refuge there. Great streamers of smoke and flame flared away in the wind, twisting and coiling like angry snakes beneath the lowering sky. I stood, forgetting the cold in the beauty of the scene. A dark purple, gravid sky showed long barriers of cloud hurrying in from the sea to pile in great fantastic mounds above the fells inland. The green rock-brake on the stone walls trembled in the wind beneath the bracken skeletons, and a lapwing skirled through the air above me. The lashing tongues of flame were beaten close to the earth by the wind and fled from tip to tip of the clumps of dead grass, forming a string of