The Lovers of Pound Hill Read online

  It saddened him that there was money to be made and he longed to make some, but it needed not only capital but endorsement. The heritage people would find a way if they took it on. They would put up a visitor centre and open a shop selling tea towels and there would be a paying car park. Miles could not compete with an investment like that. It was a case of people before property all over again and it seemed he was stuck with it. Filth, was what he thought it all. Plain filth. ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass,’ said Dorcas, and suggested that he get an ice-cream van and sell lollies and whirly-whips at the foot of the Hill. She then watched with delight as he did exactly that. His fury at having a visit from Health and Safety who immediately shut him down was highly satisfactory.

  This morning she had him well wound up before the expected visit of Molly Bonner, by telling him that the county heritage people had voted to take on the upkeep of Curling Castle – the part of an Iron Age fort that remained on the Brandon Estate some ten miles away – without requiring a penny from the owners. Miles turned quite pink and Dorcas was quite pleased and composed a letter on his behalf to complain. She knew very well that Miles had not done right by her but there was precious little she could do about it except enjoy this status of gadfly. She suspected, as the years went by, that her once kindly nature was turning into something sour and sharp or troubled – as troubled, it seemed, as everyone else’s appeared to be in Lufferton Boney.

  Contemplating these things, Dorcas waited for Miss Bonner to arrive and looked around the room. How different things might have been, she thought. How Robin would have laughed at his brother for all this miserly prudery, for had he not promised that one day – when they were married – he would carry her up to the Gnome of Pound Hill and make sure of their family’s future expansion? Or, at least, she smiled, make sure of her future expansion. Now she patted her very flat stomach with her ringless hand (the engagement ring was to be made smaller and, mysteriously, never came back to her). No, she had not grown rounder with the years, if anything she had grown more angular; her nose was becoming decidedly beaky, her lips, once nice and curved and full seemed to be shrinking, and her cropped hair, that had once been thick and dark brown, now showed flecks of grey. She might not yet be thirty but a body responds to love, she thought, putting her hands back on the keyboard, and if a body does not receive love it dries up and eventually floats away like dust. Which is what, she guessed, she was doing. And with no real desire to stop the process … But for now and for a while she had something amusing to occupy her: Miles’s pursuit of the Gnome of Pound Hill. She hoped Miss Molly Bonner was not going to scupper that little diversion.

  The expected knock came. Miles took a deep breath, squared his thin shoulders, marched out to the hallway and opened the door. Whereupon he blinked.

  ‘Mr Whittington, I presume?’ The visitor looked up at him from the step and laughed a bubbly laugh. Miles did not. ‘May I come in?’ said the visitor.

  She brushed past Miles, who remained totally silent and gaping. He turned. Molly gave him a smile of unsurpassed good humour and put her head on one side as if questioning where she should go now. Just at that moment out rang the querying voice (for she knew how to raise her voice when she wanted) of Dorcas Fairbrother from the sitting room.

  ‘Miles – did you want to call it a penis, or would you prefer something a little more vernacular? John Thomas, perhaps? Winkie? No – no, winkie sounds a little bit small and it’s not at all small, is it? I mean that’s the whole point of writing this letter – because it’s absolutely huge … Big winkie? What do you think?’ Dorcas, convulsed with silent laughter, could not go on.

  Hearing this as if from a far-off land, Miles struggled to talk over her piercing voice with equal loudness. Instead his voice was but a squeak. ‘Not now, Dorcas,’ he said. ‘We have a visitor.’ And he gestured towards the room whence the voice had rung.

  Obediently Molly stepped along the passageway and through the door, just as Dorcas began to call out anew. ‘Sorry, Miles, didn’t quite catch that – which adjective did you …?’ Then, mercifully, she ceased to speak. Someone vibrant and full of vitality had entered the room.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said, ‘I’m Molly Bonner. And I just love the idea of a Big Winkie. Puts that butch old Gnome in his place. Fancy advertising himself like that.’ Both women laughed.

  Dorcas was both astonished at the visitor and astonished at the laughter between them. She had longed for this moment to arrive. Longed for it. She had imagined a tall, thin spinster with an earnest expression and an odd assortment of garments, mostly cardigans, of earthy hue. She had expected the woman to be shockable, or at least, sensitive, and for the whole silly thing to become a farce and a failure. Now here was Miss Bonner, of approximately the same age as Dorcas, with nothing of the earnest expression or earthy hue and certainly no shockability about her. Suddenly Dorcas was having trouble with her diction. Fleetingly she wondered why Miles had not informed her that Miss Bonner was young. He must have known it from looking up her family tree. But Dorcas realised that he probably only searched for her bloodline, not her birthday. This must be so, because he looked just as surprised as Dorcas.

  Both women ceased laughing and Dorcas attempted to sound businesslike. ‘Miss Bonner?’ she said, sounding quite hoarse in her attempts to sound serious, ‘Are you—’

  ‘I am,’ said Molly Bonner happily. ‘Miss Bonner the archaeologist’s granddaughter … My grandmother always turned Miss Bun the Baker’s daughter into that when we played Happy Families.’

  Dorcas smiled, feebly. This was not going to progress in the way she had expected. Dorcas had expected to run rings around both Miles and Miss Bonner, to wind them up, to have a bit of fun. Now she felt ashamed of herself. It was mean, unkind, sour. She must revert to being a nice person again. She must. It was never too early to begin to avoid becoming a sour spinster. Life dealt its blows and you must survive them, she reminded herself, and take pleasure in the little happinesses. And today – she looked at Miss Bonner the archaeologist’s granddaughter in all her colourful glory – today might have brought her quite a big happiness. She would try again.

  It was as if the newcomer could read her thoughts. They both seemed to draw breath and to make a decision to like each other. The two women shook hands, Molly firmly, Dorcas firmly, and they smiled.

  Miles was still standing by the doorway and gaping. That was nice, thought Dorcas, he’d scuttled himself. The visitor, removing a pile of old parish magazines from a little Victorian armchair and putting them carefully on the chair that faced the window and the sun, sat down. ‘Don’t mind, I hope,’ she said. ‘But these boots are killing me.’

  Miles, who had swallowed and swallowed and now felt in command of his speaking faculties again, arrived back in the centre of the room only to see the visitor’s slender outstretched leg, quite naked from well above the knee and with the boot half dangling from its foot. He immediately lost the power of speech again.

  ‘Nice boots,’ said Dorcas, admiringly.

  ‘No gain without pain,’ said Molly.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Dorcas, with feeling. The two young women exchanged a conspiratorial glance. Against the ancient faded petit point covering of the chair, the newcomer looked as radiant as a tinkerbell fairy. Dorcas gave up all thoughts of mischief and decided that she liked her. It really was very acceptable to have a little vanity where footwear was concerned. Painful footwear was part of being a woman, like childbirth. How Dorcas would love a pair of boots like those.

  ‘I think,’ said Molly Bonner, ‘that aphorism might be applied also to the situation here?’ She slid her eyes sideways to indicate Miles and then looked back at Dorcas. Dorcas, still smiling, nodded. If this young woman was a prude or a protectionist she disguised it surprisingly well. But then, the only thing Dorcas knew from their correspondence was that Miss Molly Bonner was an archaeologist, her bona fides all provided, and she had money. Lots of money.

  Probably
, thought Miles feeling both sour and wistful, the girl had more money than he would ever have. It pained him even to consider it.

  All villages, no matter how small, like all families, have their secret scandals, their hidden skeletons in their polished cupboards. Lufferton Boney was no different. The village was not entirely proud of its ancient monument and it might have remained more or less unacknowledged for hundreds of years had not its presence been abruptly betrayed by an upstart squire in the early 1800s. The Gnome of Pound Hill, quietly forgotten by all decent, Christian folk, spoken of only as legend by the locals, was cleared of its grasses, emptied of the waste that had been dumped upon it over the centuries, and outlined in beautifully hewn lumps of local sandstone, the correct shape taken from a mediaeval woodcut that the upstart squire located among the papers in his attics (now lost). Since he was an upstart squire and had little pedigree of his own (money from emergent industries bought him the place) he thought having such a grand piece of landskip on his manor somewhat made up for the lack. And it did.

  By the time the upstart squire bought into the landed gentry the Age of Enlightenment was surely over. The squire was free to make a feature of the Gnome in the landscape, much as one might build a grotto, and he spared the blushes of no one. The originators of the design, none knew for certain who they were, had not sought to spare any blushes as they cut through the turf to the chalk and flint, so why should a mere squire? The figure he discovered was more than one hundred and fifty feet long and, apart from his cap, which stood very upright, the Gnome was perfectly and shockingly naked. In the words of the squire of the time, he was equally upright in areas other than his cap – and a very fine example of My Lady’s Whim. Decent local folk looked away and kept their eyes downcast when going about their business, but incomers were delighted to see such vulgarity. It was known to be a very good place to bring a party of young ladies, who could be relied upon to swoon sweetly upon their first sighting (and their second, third and fourth, too) of the figure.

  If the locals hoped that the fame of the figure would wither and be forgotten, they were disappointed. In the years following its rediscovery a legend grew up, that the figure had magical properties for the relief of barren women. The locals now had something else to avert their gazes from: the couples who went up the hill to find out if the Gnome would oblige them in such matters. Some, though not the collector of rhymes and fairy tales James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820–1889), suggested that the function of the Gnome made it likely that the nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill going up the hill was based on its supposed powers. Whatever the truth of it, the village bent beneath the weight of its notoriety – and the publican of Ye Olde Hollybushe, as it was then, grew rich. Reviving young ladies with a little brandy and water and burnt feathers being one of his specialities.

  But then came the agricultural downturns of the century and with the advent of a fresh, young, no-nonsense queen, the old squire was buried and a new squire arrived who had no truck with such pagan amorality. The Gnome fell almost entirely from sight and from use. The villagers breathed a sigh of relief and went back to being unremarkable again. Until, that is, a certain Arthur Bonner, archaeologist, arrived with his party of helpers in March 1914. In his quiet way he was seeking a touch of glory and he had chosen the Gnome not in spite of, but because of, its notoriety. Arthur Bonner thought there was a great deal more to the figure than met the eye – so to speak.

  Molly’s grandfather was certain the Gnome was genuine but not understood. Arthur Bonner told the Royal Society his theories – but he wanted to investigate fully before he would enlighten them, or anyone else. The Gnome was not a prestigious site and permission was given. He raised the funds to make the clearance and the investigatory dig, and set about it. He used a party of local helpers initially but they had scarcely begun their work when the rains came down. It was said that the vicar of St Etheldreda’s had thundered against the vulgar thing from his pulpit and urged his parishioners to invoke their saint and pray for bad weather to stop the dig, and she had obliged.

  The story was possibly true for St Etheldreda was a saint much prized by Lufferton Boney though no one could remember exactly why. Some said it was to do with her releasing all the bondsmen from her land, some said – though less firmly – that it was to do with her happy mixture of love of life and piety. The church contained an anachronistic depiction in stained glass of a wondrously handsome and fair husband of Etheldreda, Egfrith, whom she had married to please her father, but to whom she refused to yield her virginity. His handsome, manly fairness with the sun shining through him on golden days, gave many a village girl something to fantasise over when the parson held forth on Sundays, and many a young woman was moved to whisper that Etheldreda was a bit of a gudgeon and that if she’d had half a chance … Some saw St Etheldreda’s as the great bastion against such a pagan and vulgar monstrosity as the Gnome, the building (fifteenth century and built over something much older) facing up to the figure as if it would like to box its ears. Well, supernatural or not, there was no doubt that the rain did wash away the first encampment of the Bonner party and they could not begin to set up again until April.

  On Arthur Bonner’s second attempt in early spring the rains stayed away and the dig began in earnest. Or rather the clearing of the intended area began. Villagers stood at the bottom of Pound Hill, some in curiosity, some in dread, and watched as the overgrown site was carefully cleared by a selection of their neighbours. It took time. Bonner himself was said to have decided on the plan to expose the Gnome when he learned that the Ancient Monuments protection people had started poking about and making noises in connection with the Hill. There was talk of an official purchase from the then owner which would have made the permission for such a project much less easy to obtain. In those days Arthur Bonner did not altogether care for the Ancient Monuments people, and they did not especially care for him. Nowadays it would be quite different. Indeed, Molly Bonner had much to thank the conservation powers that be for their agreement to her proposed new attempt on the Gnome.

  In his time Arthur Bonner was seen as a renegade. He was not admired by his well-bred peers for he came from mining stock, and had his choice of site been more important they would certainly not have given him permission when there were other, much more worthy grandees of the profession available: Edward Warren, for example, whose knighted brother Herbert happened to be the President of Magdalen College, Oxford and a very good egg. But the owner of the Hill in 1914 took to Bonner and was persuaded that the Gnome, like any other artefact from ancient times, was something that should be investigated.

  Alas for the project and alas for the world, 1914 was renowned for something a great deal more catastrophic than too much rainfall in early spring; and by the beginning of August, after war was declared, the site was abandoned. Tents were removed, coverings packed away, marking stakes were gradually lost and the impetus of preserving the nation’s heritage gave way to the impetus of preserving the nation. The Gnome himself, though, became the charge (or some might say victim) of yet another enterprising publican. Tommy Hanker (great-grandfather of Peter who now ran the pub) saw the possibilities and privately funded the remaining clearance.

  After the Great War the new owner of Hill View House, who had rather ignored the codicil pertaining to the upkeep of the figure, immediately said that all trespassers would be prosecuted and thought that would be that. But English villagers are a cussed lot. Once they were told that they could not go up the Hill and sit wherever they liked on the Gnome, they adored it and said that they would. They spoke of the figure as their very own heritage that no one should take from them. And a solicitor from the nearby county town (a new thinker) was brought in to do what he could. He surpassed himself and found that the clause stood and that said dwellers and their families in the village of Lufferton Boney could never be denied access to the Gnome. It was theirs by ancient rights and could not be denied them. Not ever.

  Each successive owner
tried to stop the locals applying this ancient tenet but, as anyone with a youthful daughter or son will know, the more you forbid something, the more desirable it becomes … People crept up the Hill by moonlight, nobody prosecuted anybody, and the village remained reasonably well populated. Try to take something away from the English villager and you will have a fight on your hands.

  Miles Whittington knew this very well but Miles Whittington wanted the thing covered up. If you wanted to visit it you should be made to pay. It was too precious a resource to be so public and available. It was also vile. Miles Whittington knew that to plan to cover the thing up would bring protests from all over the nation (mostly, he thought sourly, from those who lived far away and had never visited the place in their lives, nor would, unless they could carry a placard and wear those offensive woolly hats and be against something) so he tried various means to do the deed discreetly. None worked. He asked the council to put a fence around the most visited part of the thing so that it could not be available except by appointment: Turned down flat. ‘You are the custodian of the countryside, Mr Whittington, and as such you should take a pride in the monument,’ said Mr Monk (who lived some eight and a half miles away very comfortably in the county town). Mr and Mrs Whittington senior, two in a long line of owners, had signed all the paperwork accordingly – and Mr Whittington junior must oblige.

  Health and Safety would have none of it: Oh yes, they were very ton of brickish when the ice creams were up for sale but when Miles said that people were deeply, deeply offended by what they saw, Health and Safety said that was not the case as the activities connected with the place were generally conducted by night and therefore hidden, and anyway that was not their department. The police, in the form of PC Brown, community officer, simply rolled its eyes and winked at the prospect of mounting guard. When Miles said that sooner or later someone would die up there, or at least be badly injured in a fall, Health and Safety said that was highly unlikely as the activities allegedly connected with the ancient monument were generally carried out on the horizontal and very low down.