Puck of St. Catherine's Hill

I mentioned our recent North American visitor a few posts ago.  At one point the conversation came round, via cookery, to weights and measures, and the late unlamented imperial system with its 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone, 8 stones to the hundredweight, and 20 hundredweights to the ton.  Not to mention gills, pints, quarts and gallons, or yards, chains, furlongs and miles.

I can't believe we used to have to learn all that at primary school.  I can still reel off obsolete magic numbers like "1760 yards to a mile" and "112 pounds in a hundredweight", as if they were universal constants. Working in a shop, before decimalisation and before electronic tills and scales, required a nimble mind.

Which reminded me of my mother, who used to work in a shoe-shop, and how she would bring home old coins for me that had turned up in the till.  Before decimalisation, Victorian pennies were commonplace, worn smooth and black from their adventures, and every now and then a fat Georgian "cartwheel" penny would roll out of someone's purse: a full ounce of copper minted in 1797, and still legal tender until 1971.  People used to use them as kitchen weights. Once, someone handed over a William III silver sixpence -- dated 1696 and as exotic as a piece of eight -- in exchange for their court heels or slingbacks.

You had a real, if unconscious sense of the continuity of history, going down to the sweet-shop with an assortment of old metalwork chinking in your trouser pockets. Pounds, shillings and pence had a noble lineage that included storied ancestors like the farthing, the groat, and the golden guinea.  But I don't think anyone missed them, once they were gone, and the simplicity of the new mental arithmetic meant our collective national brain could relax and take a permanent holiday from twelves and twenties.

The forty years since decimalisation have seen a steady erasure of that sort of link with the past in Britain.  If you happen to live in a historic old town then the ancient traces may appear to be there, but this is illusory, as the "grandfather's axe" paradox is being enacted around you: all the parts of everything have certainly been replaced at some point over the centuries.  We live in a world of permanent makeover, where 50 years counts as old.  The block of flats where I spent my adolescence, built in 1950 and as solid as a nuclear bunker, has already been demolished, the site levelled, and built over again.

There is a patronising view in Europe of the USA as a "young" country with little history, a view reinforced by American popular culture -- I think of comics and cartoons, with their obsessive repertoire of spooky mansions, gothic graveyards, ghost towns, and abandoned mines.  In reality, such places would be how old, now? 100, 200, possibly even 300 years? Well, I think most of us living in Britain would be hard-pressed to find a building within 50 miles that could get a walk-on part as a haunted house.  There aren't even many graveyards now where you can find a gravestone older than 150 years.  We are becoming a "young" country, too.

So "ancient" is probably more of an idea than a place on the map.  After all, everyone has ancestors going back to Eve, but hardly anyone still lives in Eve's village.  We're all migrants, tourists, and blow-ins.

The next day, I stood with our American visitor on top of St. Catherine's Hill above Winchester, and pointed out the landmarks, like a native guide.  The Iron Age fort, the Norman cathedral built on a Saxon site, the mediaeval hospital and plague pits, the undated Miz Maze -- possibly ancient, possibly some antiquarian's folly -- and the chalky tops where the detectorists find Roman coins, and where we find skylarks, peewits and golden plovers.

I began to feel like Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England, but we were within earshot of the Twyford Down motorway cutting, where 5 acres of ancient downland and 500,000 years of history (not to mention 65 million years of geology) were dug away, in order to smooth the path of traffic from Southampton to London.  It is conventional to huff and puff about this, but we live on a crowded island, over-stuffed with remnants and relics.  We must accept that the Twyford cutting, too, is our history, for the simple reason it is what we did next.

In its day, I imagine, the hillfort above the cutting must have been equally appalling.  Dug out by slave labour, an eyesore of heaped chalk rubble and palisades, it was a place of domination and brutality; mutilated human remains have been found in the ditches.  No doubt its construction violated immemorial holy springs and groves; there will have been protests.  Short-lived protests, no doubt.  In their turn, venerable Saxon abbeys were demolished to raise the Norman cathedral -- more domination and brutality. Later, toxic slums were cleared to build housing estates, and ancient fields were ripped open, scattering flints and coins and Roman roof-tiles, to provide those estates with water and electricity.

Who can regret any of this? To go forward you need to build, and to build you need to clear ground, whether it be a crumbling castle, a block of flats, or irrational weights and measures.  Whether this also necessitates slaughtering and disinheriting the previous inhabitants, and then writing them out of history, is another question.  On the evidence, however, this does seem to be the English Way, and a substantial part of our legacy to the Now-Not-So-New World.

Trackway and Camp and City lost,
  Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
 And so was England born!


Puck's Song, from Puck of Pook's Hill, by Rudyard Kipling