Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, but not in Washington

So … Washington. Not DC and not the President, but the small village that describes itself as nestling gently in the side of the Chanctonbury Ring. Maybe it did once. Today it huddles alongside the A24, like a dog kicked out of a car at speed, sprawling and shivering in the wake of the incessant traffic.

I really wanted to like Washington after my positive experience of Adversane. I wanted to because it is a central feature of the book and the first tale which features a series of locations. But I couldn’t.

Anyway, back to the book. The tale Martin Pippin tells is of the King’s Barn and it has a number of places within it: Wapping Thorp, the Huddle Stone, the Bush Hovel, and the Guess Gate. Wapping Thorp has entirely disappeared, Huddlestone now exists only as a farm business and Bushovel is but a cottage in a former ancient woodland recently visited by an archaeological TV programme.

Guess Gate is a cottage too, and the Doves and the Hawking Sopers remain as place names only. The Doves (now Monks Gate) and the Hawking Sopers present differing views of the world to the young King who sets out to find his fortune. The Doves want him to become a contemplative monk and the Hawking Sopers (a bit of a tautology as Soper means falconer) want him to dance and hunt and carouse.

The King’s horse throws all its shoes and he goes to a forge in Washington to have the poor beast re-shod. I don’t want to spoil the story for those who haven’t read the book, so suffice it to say it includes a vow of silence, nudity, extreme filthiness, cross-dressing and physical abuse!

So, in a way, the effect of the A24 upon Washington fits quite well with the story, although the end of the tale is redemptive and the traffic noise is not! We thought about walking up to the Chanctonbury Ring, but it was as muddy a day as can be imagined anywhere outside of Glastonbury in festival week, so we decided it would wait for another visit.

I could not find a forge, although there are thatched cottages, one of which houses Chardonnay, a superb restaurant deeply marred by the blaring presence of the road which runs about 200 metres past the double glazed windows of the dining room. I had a smoked mackerel salad that was as good as anything I have eaten in Michelin starred establishments, duck confit and a wonderful chocolate and ginger pot for pudding… but the traffic and constant beetling of vehicles along the A24 made it an experience enjoyed against the prevailing conditions.

Alan Garner in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, talks about an ancient location which has become a modern housing estate as being ‘garlanded about with moss and mean dwellings’ – the phrase always stayed with me, and now I have found a location to which I can apply my own version: not moss and mean dwellings but racket and ruined vistas.

So much for Washington. I hope future visits are more appealing!

Martin Pippin quest: Adversane

Adversane on a raw, windy day in December bears little resemblance to the village Farjeon writes about. The cottages from which the children would have come to play are still there, although with several rather sinister looking vehicles parked outside. The road is busy: no parent would allow young children to become absorbed in a game alongside the traffic that roars past now.

There’s a conference centre, several liveries, and studs and riding schools. At least three gardens have trampolines and two have treehouses, showing that there are still plenty of children, although the conkers on the ground on one of the green areas in the village suggest that they aren’t allowed to play out in the way that Farjeon describes, with mothers calling from windows in the evening light for children to come home to ‘warm milk and cool sheets’ – about as delicious a description of the summer evening diminution from awake to asleep as I have ever read.

Adversane is definitely low-lying. The willows make it clear that the water table is high and both sides of the road along the village have humpy low ground and black swamp puddles. There’s a selection of ponds to choose from, but this seems most likely, to me, to be the duckpond Martin Pippin travels over to banter with Joan, Jane, Joscelyn, Joyce, Jennifer and Jessica.

Maybe in April Adversane looks like the idyll Farjeon depicted, but between Christmas and New Year it’s bleak and bland. Bleak in the way the wind whistles, the ground squelches and the traffic blares through it. Bland in its unemphatic landscape, its intermittent (when traffic free) silence and its lack of obvious community centre.

Except for the pub. The Blacksmith’s Arms offers a glimpse of the past – not just a glimpse, more of a long reflective backwards stare. It’s beamed and plastered, flagstoned and panelled and smells of beer and long-departed ashtrays: the malodour of many misspent youths, wasted middle years and gently declining old ages. I grew up in pubs like that, and everything—from the gravy that trickled onto my plate of liver and bacon with all the languor and richness of honey, to the expressionless face of the well-kempt barmaid who’s seen it all before—took me back to childhood in a rush of clattering emotions like dropping a bucket down a well.

So this quest starts promisingly: I meet my eleven-year-old self in memory in a way I never expected and she brought with her a sidelight to the book I had never considered. While the children were playing on the green and their mothers were heating milk and shouting from windows, where were the fathers?

Right where I was – in the pub. And the story rounded out for me in a new and fascinating way. I was where the missing part of the cast had been, and that almost made me a part of the book.

Well, here’s a new idea!

On the other side of several little surprises, like being nominated for an award and then being shortlisted for the same award (many thanks to all who voted) I was reminded to go back to that book of childhood memory: Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, that I mentioned in September.

It’s a really peculiar book, part local folklore, part children’s story, part tales within a tale (like Chaucer) and part play (like J M Barrie) and with a sophisticatedly mercurial protagonist linking the plot, sub-plots and sub-sub-plots.

What’s utterly strange about the book is the parts do not add up to a whole. The eponymous Martin tells six tales – one of them truly surreal: a dream sequence that could have been written by a psychiatrist dealing with a romantic psychosis – to persuade Gillian to marry Robin who loves her. But several of the tales, not just the psychiatric dream one (which includes a drowning, an abusive father and a daughter who appears to be both autistic and reclusive, in modern terms) are reversals of romance; they deal with the unfulfilled, the unconsummated and the unbearable forms of love. Not exactly what you’d expect from a children’s book.

I first remember reading it when I was seven. Between seven and eleven I kept the book with me most of the time, which was odd, because it was a school library book and I was constantly being sent notes through my class teacher to ask me to return it. I then wasn’t allowed to borrow it again for 24 hours and if anybody else got their hands on it during that time I would suffer for a fortnight before it appeared on the shelf again. You might have thought my parents would have bought me a copy but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In truth, my book-reading was pathological – they may have felt it was better not to encourage my obsession.

So, a couple of years ago I bought a copy. Not the library copy, which had some kind of line drawings adapted from the original, but the December 1926 edition with the lush original paintings by C E Brock, RI. Brock was obviously in his conflicted phase at the time he drew these; wavering between his prim Victorian approach and his detailed (and somewhat grotesque) coded sensuality – look at Proud Rosalind’s hands on the Red Smith’s weapon!

Anyway. I re-read it. And a penny dropped with a big, 1926 style clang, not a modern tinny tinkle. The book is set in Sussex. And I live in Sussex.

So I have a quest for 2012 – to try to find every place that Farjeon mentions in the book; I already know some: Nyetimber is Newtimber, one of my favourite haunts, for example. But others I have never heard of, and it will be an exercise of history and ingenuity to locate them. The first place name in the book is Adversane, so that’s where I’m starting. At the time Farjeon wrote it had a thriving community with a strong local folklore (or so she claimed). Now it has a pub and a breaker’s yard (or so Google claims). I shall go and find out for myself and I shall do it between Christmas and New Year!

I am intending to rope friends into this bizarre pastime, so if you fancy a bit of sleuthing, along with a trip to a remote Sussex hamlet, let me know, and I shall sign you up for Pilleygreen or Earthen Wood, Tegleaze or Malecomb …

Um.

Sorry I haven't been around much. Life you know, and all that ...

Actually you don't know. So, OH has had operation. All very successful but having a somewhat intense and bored man underfoot 24/7 is not conducive to deathless prose - or any other kind that wouldn't normally be ****ed by a pre-watershed censor.

Lovely little van was totalled by driver who fell asleep at the wheel of his BMW. My van written off, BMW towed off, driver (sober and unrepentant) went off to work a night shift and self ****ed off and in process of trying to buy a new vehicle will very little money, or - to be frank - interest in the proceedings. It's my view that writers generally (excluding the Papa Hemingway school and rogue journalists like Jeremy Clarkson) are not mechanically inclined. This one certainly isn't.

In the meantime, "Minding ..." has been nominated for an award. Yes really. It's a votable award so you can play along if you wish: click here and register your preferences for all kinds of things from TV presenters to tools - all with a horticultural leaning, obviously and entirely without puns.