POTTER’S FIELD

Ask Hoskins. Ask George Ewart Evans. Ask Oliver Rackham. Ask Richard Jeffreys. (Well, he’s definitely dead, so there might be a problem there, and the later books tend to be more flight of fancy than straight information, but he’d agree, that’s for sure).

Ask them what? Oh – about the names of fields. Nobody ever knows where they come from. They’ve been there for ever, and they get passed on faithfully (apart from the dodgy spelling and the consequent re-etymologisation), but nobody knows when they started or why.

That’s the English countryside for you: timeless.

Of course, that’s just romantic nonsense. There are maps – good, reliable, surveyed and triangulated maps, not just Spede or Saxton or Leland or Camden – that demonstrate clearly how this ageless beechwood was specifically planted with a view to serving the Arts and Crafts furniture trade, which was, of course, going to last for ever and be just as important in a hundred years’ time as it was now. To say nothing of the shipbuilding industry’s need for oak.

And we all know about the Enclosure Acts, which turned the smallholder into the farm-labourer, providing Hardy with a full cast of disgruntled bit-players (the gruntle being, as I’m sure you’re aware, an obscure agricultural implement used exclusively by small-holders).

That’s intention – but what about chance? Move the sheep for a few years because it’s a shorter walk to the pub, and you’ve got a wood. It starts off scrappy, with furze and thorn, but the other seeds blow in, the immigrants, take advantage of the shelter, put down roots, and birch and holly and ash and finally oak create an immemorial forest. You lose the flowers, of course, because they’ll only grow in sheep-cropped, rabbit-nibbled grass. Nonetheless…

With time-lapse photography over a few centuries, you could see it all ebbing and flowing, to say nothing of the dead villages that sank into the ground like their inhabitants at the time of the Black Death, and, of course, the housing estates that sprang up like mushrooms in a wet autumn after the war, and in the sixties and seventies, and now, too, but more in little patches, like King Alfred’s cakes (they’re a type of mushroom, don’t worry!).

And yet, and yet… when I look across a field of wheat or barley (no oats or rye required round here in the soft south) to the wood beyond (which may be no more than a copse, but could have been being coppiced for a few hundred years) and see how the golden sheen on the wind-waved crop makes the shadows under the dark green leaves on the trees that much darker – if you want the trick of drawing convincing foliage, you have to show the shadows underneath, where the leaves aren’t – and whether you work in colour or not, you have to capture the range of shades: from light greeny-grey willows to the blackness of holly (I know holly leaves are shiny, but they’re also crinkled, so very little of the surface will actually be reflecting the light towards you) – when, as I say, I look at all that, and then look at a picture by Constable, or Crome, or someone else from the Norfolk School, two hundred years ago now I have to remind myself, or Gainsborough’s feathery poplars, or the background in Stubbs, or any of the other images they put on the front of Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, or Butterworth’s Rhapsodies, or Finzi’s songs – then I think: It hasn’t changed at all. That’s the same field-corner where the dogs and I shelter from the noontide heat, where the reapers did the same while the women brought out small beer and bread and cheese.

And that was the field-corner where I saw the man that afternoon – late afternoon, or was it early evening? – hard to tell in the summer – shirt-sleeves, rough trousers, leather boots – a bundle nearby, other clothes, a uniform maybe, bright red, Carnaby Street military, late sixties, the sort of thing that sexy girls were wearing then (when I saw them from a distance), or the more extreme glam rock bands. He had the face fuzz for one of those, very Sergeant Pepper – but then I did, too, back then, though I looked more like Franz Josef I than George Harrison with the ’tache and the mutton-chops.

And he was talking to himself. Quite loudly. Once upon a time, you knew where you were. Talking to themselves? Quite loudly? Care in the community! Watch out for the samurai sword! But since the mobile phone… Take the mutterers in our churchyard. They’re desperately trying to communicate – but not with the dear departed. It’s one of the few places in the village you can get a signal.

“She should be here by now – if not, then she’s faithless!”

Maybe he was an actor, rehearsing. Was Winterbourne Opera, in the next valley, doing La Fille du Régiment? Barely a barn without its Bellini, nowadays, Mozart at the Manor, Grétry at the Grange, Donizetti on the dungheap…

Whatever, as they say, I didn’t want to get involved, so, as I hadn’t yet unleashed the dogs, I slipped back out of the field on to the by-way.

I didn’t really know about by-ways till I came to live in South Wiltshire. Elsewhere, you find footpaths, which are blocked by nettles and brambles, or bridleways, which are knee-deep in mud. A by-way is an old road that nobody’s bothered to surface because it’s not as important as the highway. Often it’s a short-cut between places that nobody wants to go to any more. In South Devon, they do have asphalt on, because otherwise they’d be rivers of red mud, but the chalk of the Plain means you can get away with clouds of dust in the summer and slippery white slime in the winter. By-ways are a challenge to the macho motorist who doesn’t mind getting a few honourable scars on his four-by-four.

My village has several by-ways running through it. This one went on northwest to Old Sarum, where Salisbury used to be, and was reputed to be a Roman road, though the rubble and hardcore impacted into its surface looked distinctly more modern. But that’s what you do with the useless bits of the past: put ’em down and trample on ’em, to make a firm surface for the future.

As I was going on down the by-way, on the other side of the hedge, I heard the fellow in the field, the member of the King’s Road militia as I thought of him, still lamenting, and I also noticed a funny smell. Or should I say a strange scent? Living in the country, you can’t avoid smells, and you get to know the difference between them quite quickly; pig-slurry is my least favourite, but unfortunately it seems to be the field-dressing of choice for miles around. This smell was almost a scent – but a scary one. A bit like gone-off flower-water mixed with the scent of the flowers themselves: heady, but dark and over-ripe, like when you put a whole luscious strawberry in your mouth before you notice the mould on the underside.

Whatever plant it came from was somewhere in the hedgerow, which was a thick one by its own nature. It didn’t seem to have been brutally hacked by a tractor, in the modern apology for old-fashioned hedging and ditching, which clears the lines of sight for motorists at the cost of multiple punctures from thorns and the clogging of ditches with the uncollected clippings, and there was none of that careful, two- to five-yearly work of part-cutting the upright stems and bending them over to produce another crop of vertical shoots which you could then interweave to keep the cows in the field and out of the corn, whatever Little Boy Blue might be up to.

To tell the truth, I’d never really noticed the hedgerow before, because I took the shortcut home across the field – as did most people. You could see that, because their feet had beaten a path through the grass that was visible all the year round, even if the farmer was late in his mowing. I don’t know how many a day it needed to do that, but it was enough if a few did it regularly.

There are calculations you can do about hedgerows: the number of species in a given length gives you a rough age. But I only know the plants I know: blackthorn, whitethorn, hawthorn, guelder rose, service tree, elder, ash, holly, woody nightshade, bramble, some of them with amazing sexy scents, like the hawthorn or may-tree, but all much earlier in the year. There were things here I didn’t recognise at all. Especially the flowers I thought were the source of the scent: trumpets, like Morning Glory or bindweed, but blowsier and floppier, like wild clematis, you know, traveller’s joy, that turns into old man’s beard in the autumn. With Morning Glory, you stare down the funnel of the flower, like a blue whirlpool, and there’s this wonderful gold-white light at the end of the tunnel. These began with a rich, deep, glowing reddy-purple and finished up with sheer darkness that seemed to draw you in.

I don’t think I’m given to sudden changes of mood, but touching these flowers and looking at them closely and inhaling their scent, I began to remember things I didn’t want to. I’m not saying what. You’ll have things like that, too. Imagine you’d put away in a drawer everything you were ashamed of and regretted, the things you wished had happened and never did, the things that happened and you wished never had, chances wasted, opportunities lost, promises broken, words said, words unsaid, all in a jumble of self-reproach, and you opened that drawer by mistake one day, when you were looking for something else: that’s what it was like.

Small wonder that I ran away. The dogs like running, and they joined in, though even they seemed strangely subdued. [It takes a lot to subdue my dogs.] Still, it was safe, there wasn’t a road at the end, just another by-way, to take me home.

It must have been a week or so later in the shop that I came across Norman, the village historian. If this were Midsomer, or an Agatha Christie village, he’d have been murdered long since, because he knows everything about everybody – in the past. The raw material of social history: who stayed, who got out and why, where they went, what they did, how they ended up. He could probably tell you whose houses were knocked down to make the rubble and hardcore on the by-ways. If he weren’t older than me, I’d give him my collection of till-receipts, so he could make a study of consumer purchasing trends in the early twenty-first century.

“Norman,” I said, “what can you tell me about the field up by the copse?”

“Potter’s Field?” he said.

“I suppose so – the one you take the diagonal short-cut across. I don’t know its name.”

“One or two things of interest – but I’ll need to look them up. Why don’t you call round this afternoon?”

So I did. He had the Journal on microfiche – old-fashioned technology, I thought to myself, no easy search, but he knew his way round his material, and how to find his place on the fiche.

“Summer 1842, murder – jealousy, they said. Soldier. Hanged at Winchester. Surprised it doesn’t turn up in Hardy somewhere – most of his stuff comes from the local papers.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, it seems a little strange, but – suicide, you know, not that uncommon among farmers – but normally you’d expect they’d do it in their own barn, just before the bankruptcy auction – only – there seems to be a kind of habit of hanging oneself up in Potter’s Field. I’d not noticed, until you asked me about it, but over the years there seem to be more than you’d expect. Here’s another – not hanging this time – so-called shooting accident – but nobody round here was ever that stupid, falling over with a loaded gun.”

He let me look at the screen. As I read, I wondered.

“Why’s it called Potter’s Field? No pottery in the village – wrong kind of clay. Personal name?”

“I’d never really thought – I’d assumed that – but there may be another reason. Biblical. Look it up. It’ll do you good.”

Norman was a churchwarden. I thanked him, and took his advice. I’m always glad to increase my knowledge. Not that I subscribe entirely to the Socratic doctrine that bad actions result from inadequate understanding. I have a lot of faith in reason, but it’s still only a tool, and however carefully you use your chisel, an invisible flaw in the grain of the wood can produce a disastrous consequence. And then you have to ask yourself (or someone else) where that came from – and the answer will be a bad summer, or a boring beetle, or something else imponderable and unpredictable and in the long run inevitable – inevitable in its real sense, not to be avoided. Destiny and fate imply purpose and design, and I’ve read too much Richard Dawkins to have faith in those notions.

Reason told me that the connection between Potter’s Field and the unpleasant things that happened there was mere chance. A secluded spot, with a pleasant view; several people each year drive to a New Forest car-park with a length of broad-gauge rubber tubing in the car. But I still didn’t like walking past that bit of hedge. If I crossed the field, I ran. And the dogs enjoyed that.

Wherever you live, time passes. It’s just that you notice it more in the country. Lack of leaves is the price you pay for broader views. You see the structure, and you lose the shelter. And one clear winter’s day I fancied going down the by-way, so I could carry on towards the water-tower, and see the southern edge of the snow-sprinkled Plain.

It was the scent I noticed first. Sweet and sharp and uplifting, like a mixture of honeysuckle and elderflower, with an edge of flowering currant in it. Several summers together, when I’d walked on the other side of the village, down another by-way without thick hedges, I’d been surrounded by a wonderful scent, whose source I couldn’t locate. It seemed to rise from the fields of wheat and barley around, though I knew that couldn’t be so. Eventually, I put it down to meadowsweet, thick clumps in the set-aside meadow, and in the ruts on the by-way itself. But I found the origin of this scent with ease: white thornflowers on bare branches in the middle of winter. Most unexpected.

I asked Norman about it as he was buying his Twiglets. He said he was busy, trying to find out when Mabel Blanchett had had a bath. [I repressed the obvious urge – flippancy is not actually curable, but it is susceptible to clinical management and palliative treatment, like keeping your fat mouth shut.] However, what I described was a well-known phenomenon: the Glastonbury Thorn. He suggested I should look it up.

I did: Joseph of Arimathaea, it seems, took to the road, bearing the Holy Grail (and, according to some sources, the spear with which the centurion Longinus pierced the side of Christ); the Grail (and probably the spear) disappeared into Arthurian legend (some of which gets localised in Brittany, but also, of course, in Wessex, and especially at Glaston, where they found Arthur’s grave, and the inscription: Hic iacet rex Arturus, Rex quondam rexque futurus); finally (presumably), weary of wandering, Joseph planted his staff in the earth at Glastonbury, and it began to sprout, just like Tannhäuser’s, and produced a thorn tree which flowered on Christmas Day. [My 1906 Baedeker tells me that a Puritan fanatic cut it down, but it takes more than an axe to kill a good thorn tree after a millennium and a half of growth, and there was certainly a tree with a label on last time I went to Glaston – which wasn’t for the festival.]

So – where did mine come from? Chance? Like the “fire-weed” along the railways, rose-bay willow-herb that is, or Himalayan balsam by the waterways? Not likely. That sort of thing needed much more traffic. Even if some pilgrim – or, perhaps more realistically, a botanically inclined, Anglo-Catholic, tubercular nineteenth century curate – had taken a cutting, why would they plant it there? More tempting (and I know just what I mean by tempting) is the hypothesis that Joseph himself, walking along the Roman road, leant his – magic? – staff against the hedge that even then had begun to grow – perhaps against a tree which was a grave-marker, there are often graves beside Roman roads, near Beacon Hill south of Newbury, in the middle of Stevenage New Town, for goodness’ sake! – yews line many a by-way on the high chalk – and – and…

Nothing to do with reason, of course. But reason scrabbles on many a slippery slope. So now I felt happier, walking down the by-way, crossing over Potter’s Field. Until, one summer’s day, I came into the field, let the dogs off – and saw the man I’d seen a year before. Still talking to himself. Cursing. Shaking his fist at the sky – no, at Heaven. That’s definitely what he was shaking his fist at. He was standing right by the hedge. I could smell that scent again, though it was only faint where I stood, at the entrance to the field. I called, and beckoned to him. I’d like to think I cut an imposing figure: knee-britches, long beard and hair, the hair tied back, so it might almost have looked as though I was wearing a dress-wig with a queue, eccentric land-owner perhaps, the sort of person you pay attention to, if you’re a soldier. Whatever. Anyhow, the dogs did their bit, gambolling around and barking to be fussed or played with. It was probably their presence that moved him to pick up his bundle, with the scarlet coat, when he came over to me – never leave anything on the ground where dogs can get at it! [Though cats are worse for marking.]

As he walked towards me, I saw his face changing. The eyes stared less, the features, which had looked stretched and strained, like a motorcyclist going too fast without goggles, relaxed, the mouth became free. As he reached me, he turned as if he had heard something, and looked down to the far corner of the field, where I could just see a white shape waving and, presumably, calling.

“The Devil take her,” he said, “for I’ll not! I’ve had enough of her lies.” And with that, he swung his scarlet coat over his shoulders, leaving his arms free, bade me good evening, and strode out of the field to the East, with the air of a man who had a good way to walk before sunset. The figure at the bottom of the field, who had stopped waving, took a couple of steps forward, then, seeing the scarlet jacket disappear, shrugged her shoulders and slipped back out of the field herself, leaving the dogs and me, who had all of us remained motionless, to continue our walk.

When I tried to consult him, Norman told me he was busy trying to work out why the Henn family had changed houses, since the new one was no better and was directly opposite. I decided not to rephrase the problem for him, and asked if I could use the fiche-reader, promising not to disturb him. But I found I had to.

“It was 1842, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“Potter’s Field. The – the unpleasantness. Jealousy. The soldier.”

“Yes. Summer 1842. The account of the murder. Then the trial will have been in the autumn, I suppose. And the execution may have been in the winter. But probably before Christmas.”

“I’m afraid I can’t find it. Any of it.”

“Here, let me have a look.”

But he couldn’t, either. He tried the rest of the 1840s. Then the late 1830s and even into the 1850s. Tenacious, Norman. If I mock him, it’s probably jealousy. He fills the village hall with his lectures on the past, and my stories only get the proverbial two people and a dog. Actually one person (me) and three dogs.

So, were our memories at fault? Was anything at fault? Two untimely deaths appeared not to have occurred. What was amiss? What had been amiss appeared to have been corrected. Of course, I didn’t tell Norman about what I’d seen and heard and smelt. But I thought about it. I applied my reason, just as you can apply yours. But reason needs material to work with. So I have to share with you what I found out about the name of the field.

After Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, he didn’t go off and have a good time with the thirty pieces of silver. He threw them down in the temple and went off and hanged himself. And the priests and elders blenched at just recycling the blood money, so they bought the potter’s field with it, to bury strangers in.

Why? And where was the field? And where did Judas hang himself? And who was the first person buried in that field? And why did Judas betray the master he had followed for so long? And why do any of us do anything?

I thought about that scent, and how it had made me feel, and what I might have done, if I’d stayed there and breathed it in. And I wondered what trees grew in Potter’s Field, and whether that was where Judas spent his time before he made up his mind to the betrayal, and where he went back to afterwards.

And I remembered that the thorn tree grew in the same place, and I wondered, with a certain amount of terror, whether they weren’t in fact the same tree. But I didn’t go and find out. I remembered that there was supposed to have been a tree like that, once, somewhere in the Middle East, a tree that contained the knowledge of good and evil, and I wondered what had happened to it, and where its seeds might have blown or its twigs been carried. And maybe it wasn’t the serpent after all, but the smell of the flowers.

Of course, I read Dawkins, and I know that all this is nonsense, like reflexology and aromatherapy and homoeopathy. But what I know and what I feel aren’t always the same, and sometimes there’s a way of talking about things and showing things that works in imagination, but not in calculation.

I tend to avoid the field and the by-way around the solstices, both of them. And maybe one day I’ll go up there and find that somebody with a tractor has grubbed up the hedgerow entirely, and then mysteriously crashed their car, or parked up at some New Forest beauty spot and left the engine running.

And when I ask myself, “Why ‘Potter’s Field’?” I think about the refuse from the kilns, not the ashes which blow away or rot down, but the fragments, the pieces of pots that were never quite right and shattered in the firing, the imperfect ones that survived, but the potter himself smashed in impatience and self-disgust. They don’t rot away. They stay sharp and sad in the ground.

And if this story doesn’t do it for you, then go and read Borges’s Three Versions of Jesus, or that one about the American who steals a time machine and goes back with a rifle and ammunition to save Christ from the Cross.

Noon, August 14^th 2008