CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING THE VILLAGE

        It was such a small place where my youth was spent, so close to, and yet so far from the increasing traffic along the Great North Road. Just as the road to Hertford left the main road at the Roebuck Inn, a smaller road turned off, and after some fifty yards turned again so that it ran parallel with the Hertford road for some time, until a sharp left turn at 'three-one-way' brought the traveller after another half mile into the heart of the little village. It was a tidy road, leaving a little cluster of cottages at Broadwater (part of the parish) and a duckpond which sometimes flooded the road, passing by neat hedges with wide fields on the right, and on the left the Bury estate with hawthorn, chestnut, walnut and beech trees; with little spinneys and tall firs, and holly trees in the hedges. There was the picturesque South Lodge with white posts and black chains guarding its lawns, and a wide white gate where a gravel drive disappeared towards the Bury; a bit further along the road the house could be glimpsed through the trees.

        The road led on to other villages, but the left turn round the estate into our lane brought a sense of security and nearing home, because only those living in or visiting the village would be using it; it led to nowhere else. Here were more trees and woodland, with spring-time primroses, bluebells and white violets. Large horse chestnut trees dominated this stretch of the road, in spring with their tall candle blooms, and in the autumn by falling conkers. Another lodge and a large garage lay back from the road, with nearby part of a mediaeval moat, a secret kind of place with its own life of water creatures, flowering plants and overhanging trees. On the right, fields of corn or root crops atop the steep banks gave way nearer the village to pastures for the milking cows. Another lodge, another white gate, more white posts with black chains around green grass gave the other access to the Bury, while ahead the village green spread before us. Tall elms, their branches seldom still, bounded a large triangular green with less than two dozen cottages round it. A farm along the road, a Victorian school, an inn and a grey flint church, with the rectory just seen through the trees completed the picture.

        Continuing to the broad end of the green a village pump would be discovered. If a traveller wished to explore further, the road across the top of the green around the churchyard would disappear in a farmyard in less than half a mile, while the left fork soon became a narrow stony lane, little more than a cart track, winding back towards Stevenage. In the winter this was often impassable, water draining from the fields flooding and washing away the surface. A countryman would pass by, scrambling along the banks and edges of the fields, for it was a very old track with steep banks, probably a manorial boundary of olden time.

        The same countryman would not have used the road from Broadwater except in the depth of winter. If on foot he would have come through a gate on the other side of the Bury estate, by the long planting (of trees), across a grassy field, negotiated a stile, usually a very muddy spot much frequented by cattle, skirted a couple of fields and a copse, passed by the farm pond and by a twitchell path to the road at the top of the village green.

        This then was the loved place of my childhood; it was indeed crossed by many sweet paths. Here were sunshine and shadow, rain and snow, twilight and starlight; spring, summer, autumn and winter, each with its own benison of flowers and fruits, birds and wild animals. And there were schooldays and holidays, and Sundays with prayer and praise at the little church, the Christian years following one upon another as they had done for many centuries; the festivals of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun and Trinity, with the other rhythm of life and death. The Great War with its slaughter, which we children could not comprehend, was only just over. That we were a generation to be sacrificed in another war was mercifully unknown. The circle of the land claimed us; for the adults the harrowing, the sowing, the reaping; for the children the flowers and fruits to pick; hoops, tops and skipping ropes, days full and never quite long enough. Many years passed before I discovered the words of Thomas Traherne, but nothing can better evoke my childhood:

'The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped. nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust arc stones of the street were as precious as gold ... the green trees ... transported and ravished me. 0 what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem. Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born and should die, but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire ... The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.'

        It is still possible to leave the road at the Roebuck and take the lane around the park if you are on foot, but not the path through the fields. You can take the left lane at the three-one-way and come by the chestnuts to the green, but you will not hear the rustle of the corn or the lowing of the cows waiting to be fetched for milking. Neither will you find the old school or the farm, and there are no old tracks leading from the top of the green. The elms have gone too, but you can sit for a while on the green and think of the generations of village folk who once lived here and are long passed away.

        Some visible history is left in Shephall; a few cottages, a Victorian mansion, the pub, the church and the rectory. The cottages of various ages are not particularly distinguished. The mansion is but mock gothic and has lost the air of grandeur that it had when the estate was occupied by people with money to spend on its upkeep. The Red Lion is but a shadow of its former self, or more accurately its former self is but a shadow in the present building. The old rectory is now an annexe to a school. The church has other worshippers, but it is the only place where there is any sense of things past, any remembrance of the people who lived in this place fifty, one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago.

        And before that? Nothing, surely! What could there be of interest in the seemingly undistinguished lords of the manor, the clerks and priests who ministered in such a quiet spot? What could one possibly find out about those few acres, the handful of domestic plots, the generation after generation of people who cultivated this earth, and built and rebuilt their habitations; who were born, lived out their lives, died and were buried in this tiny corner of England? Reginald Hine, the Hitchin historian, in his 'Confessions of an Uncommon Attorney' so beautifully expressed the task of the local historian:

'... the records of your parish will be scattered over the face of the earth; and even in your own soil you need to dig not one spit deep but two. Small things and tiny parishes slipping more easily through nooks and crannies of time sink deeper into oblivion. When at last the materials are brought up to the light you must work, as it were, in mosaic, no longer an historical artisan but an historical artist, building up if you can an authentic picture of the past, assembling your innumerable isolated facts of every conceivable colour; fitting, joining, compacting them together into a pre-ordained design'.