Home Alone

The sunshine mocks the situation: hard to believe the country is in crisis when the shackles of winter have been cast off and the cries of peewits battle the bluster of the sharp wind on this bright spring morning high up on the Sussex Downs. It's Sunday but in the village of Firle, nestling down below, St. Peter's church is quiet; and in the Ram Inn there is no bustle of preparation for the Mothers' Day hordes.

Self-isolation is the order of the day; but with dogs to walk and three teenagers suffering from sporting cancellations, estrangement from friends and schoolwork at home, a remedy for early onset cabin fever is prescribed. Even at this hour of the day we are not alone: already, there is a mountain-biking Mamil, all rictus grin and crimson flush, a pair of horse riders trotting with dogs in tow and a group of Nordic Pole-wielding walkers taking up the width of the way; social distancing is required. Although we don't have exclusivity, it is still glorious: the panoramic view to Crowborough in the north, Hastings to the east and Seaford at the southernmost point is breath-taking; and squares of chalky fields pave the path to Lewes, cradled by the Downs further to the west.

However, relative solitude is never easy to maintain and by the time we reach the apex of Firle Beacon and turn to retrace our steps, it is clear that many more are seeking respite from confinement. Rows of windscreens now glisten in the car park that marks our starting point and very soon there are groups of walkers using the breadth of the downland to maintain the recommended two metres distance. Next time, we need to be earlier or take our constitutional in a less popular spot - or come to terms with the fact that we can only be alone at home.

Blue and Green

Exactly a year ago, when I was writing about the obsolete word apricity - used to describe the warmth of the sun in winter - I was admonished by a correspondent who pointed out that, as meteorological winter did not begin for another week, I could not have felt the winter sun. My response was that there was frost on the ground, it was bloody cold and therefore, to my mind, it was winter and what little warmth the sun gave me was apricity.

Walking in the countryside around Alfriston yesterday, I could not make the same claim. Yes, the sun's rays were shining down but it did not feel at all like winter. With December just around the corner, it was a mild morning and, with the exception of the odd cold day, typical of how the weather has been for weeks, now. Worryingly, it is as if the climate became fixed in early October.

It all made for an idyllic walk as we left Waterloo Square in the centre of Alfriston and headed down to the Cuckmere River to follow its winding course away from the village and toward the sun. Apart from a cloud of smoke from a tree-feller's bonfire, the sky was clear blue and the gentle downland surrounding the valley a vivid green. This is the landscape that inspired the author Eleanor Farjeon to write the hymn Morning Has Broken in 1931; it could have been on such a day that she penned the line, "mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning".

Despite the weather putting a spring in our step, the path on the western bank was well trodden and muddy so, as we arrived at our turning point - the Litlington White Horse high above us on Hindover Hill - we crossed the river for the less heavy-going eastern side. The firmer ground underfoot and the sun at our backs both hastened our return to the village for a midday retirement to the pub.

The Old Songs

This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Bob Copper, the most well-known member of the Copper Family of Rottingdean. The family’s earliest mention in the parish records dates from the 1590s, although they were probably living and working in the area as farm labourers, carters, shepherds and publicans much earlier.

The Coppers’ tradition of unaccompanied singing of traditional Sussex songs may stretch back just as far, but it was in the late 19th century when James ‘Brasser’ Copper, and his brother Thomas, were discovered singing their rural repetoire by Kate Lee of the Folk Song Society. James wrote down the songs that he knew for the society but continued to pass them down orally to his children, Jim and John. In 1936, Jim recorded dozens of songs in a handwritten book that he dedicated and passed on to his son, Bob.

The songs – whether created or collected - are filled with the richness of local life on the seaward side of the Downs, or draw on universal themes of the rural working class. The Seasons Round charts the ever-turning agricultural calendar:

Now harvest being over bad weather comes on,
We will send for the thresher to thresh out our corn.
His hand-staff he'll handle, his swingel he'll swing,
Till the very next harvest we'll all meet again.

Others tell of farmers and fishermen, lads and lovers, shepherds, soldiers and sailors. Claudy Banks, the first song that ‘Brasser’ transcribed for the Folk Song Society, is a ballad that tells the ageless tale of a returned sailor not recognised by the true love he left behind.

In the 1950s, the Coppers came to wider public attention with Jim and John regularly giving high-profile performances with their respective sons, Bob and Ron. Recorded and broadcast by the BBC, they attracted the attention of the American field collector of folk music, Alan Lomax, who had moved to England after being named in the United States as a communist sympathiser. Jim and John both died in the mid-fifties and when the Folk Song Society’s successor, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, released the LP Traditional Songs From Rottingdean in 1963, the Coppers’ place in the emerging English folk renaissance was firmly established.

In the 1970s, Bob further cemented the Coppers’ reputation with a trilogy of books documenting the family’s vocal tradition, the first of which, A Song For Every Season, won the Robert Pitman Literary Prize of 1971. After brother Ron’s death in the late seventies, Bob heralded a new dawn by broadening family involvement to include his children, John and Jill. The definitive modern collection of their recorded songs, Come Write Me Down, was released in 2001 and by the time of Bob’s death in 2004, at the age of 89, the performing family had swelled to include John and Jill’s respective children. The Copper Family still perform regularly, and carry with them to every gig Jim’s handwritten songbook from 1936.

Downland: part three

Arriving at Firle Beacon, exposed to the full westerly current as it travelled across the landscape to meet the land mass, this was Ridler at his most free. Away from the cell’s dimensions of the caravan, the narrow minds of the village, the puritan judges of a world stiff with conformity, he was alive. The ochre sun, now drowned in the horizon, coloured the very top of the spiralling clouds above him. He discarded his jacket and shirt and - bare-chested, arms spread wide, head thrown back – felt the strong, warm breeze on his stigmatised skin. Below him, the panoramic vista he had grown to rely upon: the wheat-packed fields mapping away from him to the cloud-mirrored ridge of the Weald; the county town of Lewes, cradled in the creases of the surrounding hills; the tied villages, standing firmly at the centre of their feudal estates; and the Tower, that single turret of sturdy split flint that so mocked his own Englishman’s castle. The solid and unchanging landscape of tradition, of England. Ridler, himself born so English, had made himself so foreign; and now he felt connected to this pastoral idyll, this England, but not to its people. He inhaled deep and long through his nose and exhaled loudly and capaciously from his mouth until his breath became first a bellow and then a roar. A roar of affirmation, a roar of freedom, a roar of innocence: he could not be blamed for the way the Writer’s brief stay had ended. Way down in the village of Firle, had anyone looking up been able to see or hear clearly, they would have made out a variegated bestial figurehead on the bow of the Beacon, sailing away in the fading light, proclaiming the clarity of his conscience.

Replacing his jacket and shirt, Ridler draped a scarf over the top of his head and held it in place with a battered, broad-brimmed felt hat he had taken, with the scarf, from his jacket pocket. Tying the scarf under his chin, in such a way that only eyes, nose and mouth were visible, he began the climb down to Firle picking his way carefully down the gradient. He could see the car lights on the Lewes Road, fuller now but still a dull, lazy amber, and a cloud of steam as a train was leaving Glynde station. These – the road and the rail - demarked the two lines he would need to re-cross before he could feel less threatened. When he would be walking in the cool and quiet of the tree-lined lanes that led him home, he would be happy. As he descended, the stiff breeze of the Downs subsided and the flat land rose to meet him.

Downland: part two

Below him, to his right, Ridler could still make out the bulk of the tithe barn at Alciston and the lights from The Rose that were beginning to flicker through the pervading gloom. The thought of sitting, musing, a pint of Tamplin’s on a rough wooden table in front of him, appealed. To gaze out of the propped bar door into the warm summer evening, exchange a nod – perhaps a word – with others as they arrived would be the simplest of pleasures; but the reality would be far from this fantasy. Glances, stares, suspicion, alarm, hostility, anger, violence: walking into the bar of a public house would guarantee a starting point at any of the increments on this scale of reaction. Further away he could see the village of Ripe; in the pub there he might be begrudgingly tolerated – not that he had ever tried to test the idea. Perhaps even in the inn at Chalvington to its east, the response would not escalate beyond the stares; but away from home, even a few paltry miles, would make all the difference. Ridler walked on; surefooted, upright and bareheaded. The local pubs had embraced the Writer when he first came to Downland but his turmoil inside had begun to show on the outside and – like Ridler - he had become a spectacle to be judged.

Nearing the Beacon, Ridler felt a sense of relief: he needed to be out on the Downs, needed to be nearer the sky, be able to feel the air, be able to see the world as far as he could, but he always had a sense that no sooner than he felt free, the counter of confinement tugged at him and he had to return to the fetters he had forged for himself. For over twenty years, he had had to live with the limits of his decision to become a spectacle. He had no regret: he and Gladys had lived well during those years – but a price had to be paid. And he had quickly learned that price. Despite all the attention, the gazes of fascination at the World Fair, there was also opprobrium. In Times Square, he had not seen the man as any different from the amused and opened-mouthed throng who parted as he – literally head and shoulders above them - and Gladys, sightseeing, moved through them. Not different until Ridler felt a smart on the side of his face, felt the droplets of blood on his chin and saw the man, flick-knife hanging lazily, mouthing angry words back at him as he melted into the crowd. Never since had he put himself so close to so many people; and never since had he ventured out without scarf and hat to conceal. Except here - the Downs – where the warmth of the summer air, like balm to a wound, caressed and soothed his skin.

Downland: part one

The Downs. The solemn, swollen hills; the perpetual sward of the south, stretching from Winchester in the west to Eastbourne in the east. Undulating, by turns it slopes and sheers to the sea in the south; the covering of ancient woodland cleared millennia ago, ovine-manicured grassland now dominates. At the eastern edge, its northerly face gazes down onto the villages under its shadow and to the distant settlements of the Weald. The Downs: the grass below, above, the vaulted sky. The Downs. And on a day in June 1958, between its silhouetted escarpment and the orange-tinged archipelago of late evening altocumulus cloud, a tall figure could be seen. Avoiding the main path, occasionally obscured by gorse, it was restlessly heading west, intent on descent before the sun finally set. The open landscape of chalk and grass spread before him, the benign breeze faced him; the intersection of stile-less farmers’ fences his only obstacle. He had seen no others since before he had begun his climb when he crossed the Lewes Road and his form, illuminated in the half-lights of a speeding Morris Oxford, had startled the driver into swerve and skid. More anxious than usual on this day to be off the Downs, Ridler’s object – the Beacon – was still some two miles distant. For the past year, he had avoided the nightwalking that had sustained him during his first seven in Downland. Now, he preferred only the interregnum - dusk and twilight - but the risk of capture in the gaze of others was always present. It had been like this before, but in those years from the summer of 1950 he had found some acceptance and, from it, a freedom. The Writer had changed that a year ago to the day and Ridler had barely understood; but he had resolved to remove the risk of a repetition of the events of that previous June.