Everyman's England Read Online Free Page B

tiny pyres that flared and wickered for a while and then died to a smouldering, smoky red gleam. The clouds swung lower, swathes of snow slanted earthwards, lodging in the wall crevices, and suddenly I became aware of something apocalyptic, some awful purpose in the play of natural forces, the fire, the snow, and the growl and smash of the sea mixed with the high whine of the wind. My whole being was tensed towards that awful moment when all these powers should break loose and run, maddened and uncontrollable, across the country, the fire roaring and devouring, the wind flattening and cruel, while the soft, pitiless snow followed softly behind them, covering the ruin with its uncharitable mantle. Human life was very insignificant before that display of elemental things…
    All around was a wild, barren beauty, a rude beauty which grew upon me, wooing by direct assault and battering me into admiration, until I was aware only of the crying of the sea-birds, the thunder of the breakers flinging their white crests over the cobble-drafts, and the tossing of the thin spikes of dune grass before the oncoming flames.
    Allonby is no more than a handful of houses, halfway between the two towns. A small stream runs by the side of the road through the village, and as I entered a little old lady was standing on a trestle bridge that crosses the stream, her shawl pulled about her against the wind, while she fed a pair of swans with bread from her basket.
    It may well be that her grandmother was feeding the ancestors of those same swans on that day when Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins came to Allonby. They stayed at the old Ship Inn during their northern tour, described in Christmas Stories. They had been in the rugged John Peel country of Caldbeck, climbing Carrock Fell, when, a mist descending upon them, Collins slipped on a wet boulder and sprained his ankle. After describing other adventures Dickens tells of their reception at Allonby:
    â€œAllonby, gentlemen,” said the most comfortable of landladies, as she opened one door of the carriage.
“Allonby, gentlemen,” said the most attentive of landlords, as he opened the other.
    I did not arrive in the style of Dickens and his companion. I was cold and longing for a hot drink and my coat was wet with melted snow. I pushed upon the door of the inn and found myself in a cold passage-way. After a few shouts the landlord appeared from somewhere in the back of the house and I was shown into a room hung with coloured prints of game birds where a coal fire burned cheerfully.
    Attentiveness must be a trait of Allonby landlords, for very soon I was warm before the fire, my coat was drying over the back of a chair and I was drinking scalding hot cups of tea and attacking a plate of new bread and butter, while the landlord entertained me with an account of his life as a collier in a mine near Whitehaven.
    Maryport in Dickens’s day was a thriving town full of contented people. If he could visit it today, it would probably evoke from him the one literary vice of which he has been accused, an occasional tearful sentiment; sentiment – ‘that odious onion,’ as Birrell called it. Maryport today would call forth tears from any man, were he not conscious of the impotency of tears to remedy such state as Maryport has fallen to.
    In the midst of all the wild splendour of this coast, Maryport is a tragedy. The town is built on and around a hill which overlooks the sea. From the top of the hill you can look down upon the houses which cluster around the dock-side, their grey slates marked by gulls. The streets are narrow and steep, and in places there are zigzagging steps that climb the hillside. It is a larger, darker, unhappier Clovelly of the North. In the harbour fishing boats tilt on the mud at low tide, and at night the white column of the small light at the end of the breakwater shines like a dim candle.
    About the whole town is an air of dejection, as though it were