Title: Yet softly tread the leaves

Author: Resford Eliza (alias for Elizabeth Davies youngest daughter of Clive Davies, Squire of Hawkley Hurst)

Publisher Name: Vantage Press.

Date of Publication: 1981

ISBN: 0533045169

London Library Shelfmark: 84/06666

For those who are unable to obtain a copy (for the publication was a limited edition and is now out of print) then the following relevant snippets to set the scene or indeed to whet your appetite?

Copyright remains as stated above: -Which according to Vantage Press in New York resides with Eliza Resford, we have received a very nice letter from Eric Wilson their Director of Publicity about our request to publish relevant extracts. Elizabeth is now resident in Canada, so I have taken the liberty to produce a book review related to the evacuee period only, please obtain a full copy if you wish to cover the whole period, Cliff Douthwaite.

Please note that Elizabeth never refers to Hawkley or the Hurst by name and indeed in her book indicates she has changed names of those mentioned, assume this is to avoid any feelings good or bad?

Elizabeth relates the start of the family fortunes, when my grandfather (Mr. Davies), in 1856, had climbed down the wharf steps at Liverpool to be rowed out to the westbound baroque Quatre Bara he looked up at the anxious fares gathered to say farewell. He never doubted, as the thrust of the oars carried him out to midstream, that his home and his ties lay behind him in the grey morning mist, and whatever adventures or duty waited ahead. His trunk rested forward, at his feet, a hand case of documents, introductions and instructions. He barely twenty-two years old, the son of a Welsh minister was going out to seek his fortune and that of many others who had singled him out for the job. However he came back to England to die, and though, later, my father (Clive Davies, Squire of Hawkley Hurst) was trained for a life of work far off in a Pacific island, he also intended to retire in England. It was his dream to become an English landed gentleman.

Thus, it was that in 1912 my parents came from the pacific looking for a suitable place and decided on the little village of Hawkley in Hampshire

The village of Hawkley is near Liss and lies in a still remote area on high ground where the South Downs end in a series of tree covered slopes known locally as hangers. Nearly all the trees are beeches, and my earliest memories are of walks among their smooth trunks, whose roots, covered in moss as they dive into the ground.

To maintain this splendid residence with its outlying farmland, some thirty workers were employed. There were six gardeners alone. All of them were known more or less intimately known by us as a family.

There were four farms on my father's land. One of them, the home farm, supplied us with all our milk, eggs, and ham. Once a week, the cowman made butter. Blue milk came out of the separator and frothed its way into buckets. He poured the cream into a wooden churn and turned it by hand. We could hear the sloshy noise inside change to a rhythmic thud. When he unscrewed the lid, I could see the yellow knobs of butter floating like scrambled egg in the rest of the buttermilk. He formed bricks of butter, smacking and banging with wooden pats until all the liquid had been squeezed out and quite a lot of salt squeezed in, and they stood on a marble slab in the larder. There was no refrigerator, but blocks of ice wrapped in sacks were fetched during the summer months from Petersfield the nearest town and kept in a lead-lined chest.

Autumn brought a sadder event, the beginning of the shooting season. Since spring, the keeper had reared little families of pheasants in the woods, under chicken hens. These devoted foster mothers were kept inside their coops for weeks set in rows on either side of the path. They stuck their heads through the bars, pecking at grain sprinkled in front of them and clucking at the chicks who ran in and out. The little brown pheasants grew fast. By October, they were ready to be killed by gentlemen whom my father invited each Saturday through the winter. They came in tweeds and clumping boots and cloth caps. Farmhands and later the older evacuees put white smocks over their clothes to distinguish them. They were the beaters who went into the woods with sticks and made a noise. When the frightened birds or rabbits rushed out, the waiting shooters aimed at them. Towards midday, hampers of food and cider with a white cloth and napkins were sent to some farm or cottage. When the car came back, it brought a pile of dead birds, hares and rabbits.

In the north-eastern corner of Hampshire, in a region of wooded slopes and wild commons, lies a scattering of hamlets. People used to call this area the Switzerland of England; perhaps it did resemble the woods and farms that lie between Geneva and Lausanne near the lake. The chalk soil fosters a variety of rare flowers. Pockets wild stock managed to survive there ignored tales by the surrounding invaders. In my early childhood, farms and cottages, with children walking three or more miles to school, were dotted over the region.

Our village of Hawkley lay on a shelf, halfway down a wooded slope. Behind, the hill rose to a thousand feet, and below, the flat, duller country of towns, railways, and commerce stretched to the sandy gorseland of Surrey. Two hundred years ago, Gilbert White lived in the area and based his Natural History on it. Before he died, Jane Austen was growing up nearby, and after the Second World War, a number of writers, thinkers, and social rebels came to live in these solitude’s. Ancient rights of way kept the whole region accessible to walkers. Paths, dating back from centuries, wound through the woods and over the commons on top. On our shelf, cut off by a steep hill and a hairpin bend from main roads and change, some two hundred souls were born, lived, and were buried each in their turn and according to their social standing.

Round the upper green stood the church, the school, the public house, and the store. Close by was a community hall and the cricket field. The blacksmith's forge was on the lower green, where the hunt met There was a pond where the cart horses stood pawing at the brink, stretching down to suck noisily at the muddy water.

We lived in a social hierarchy, at the top was my father (Clive Davies), the squire at the bottom, farm labourers; and in between, nicely graded, all others. First the major. He had a short driveway and only kept nine servants apart from two gardeners; and even one of them had to chauffeur. Still, he had a field or two and his children went to private schools. Then, the gentlemen farmers; we had two of these, but hardly counted because he lived behind a hill and seldom made Church. The other was going down badly. His children talked village accents, and the boys' jackets were stretched tight across hips. They came to our parties, and I felt sorry for them. A little a but definitely "gentry," was the vicar. The vicars came to tea on cycles.

Next in the social scale came the farmer making good. Thomas Dean wore sideburns; he whistled and puffed as he walked. His wagons were freshly painted blue, with T.W. Dean painted on the sides. His son rode to hounds and his daughter ran the Girl Guides. They lived in a pretty house surrounded by their farm and prospered. However, they were not "gentry," so, if we invited them, we asked them alone.

After this, the social descent was rapid. A couple of school teachers the pub keeper, the store man, a few farmers, not even of Thomas category, and the rest were labourers, woodcutters, thatchers and old age pensioners

Mr. Pride kept the store, with two bow windows on either side of the door. His white apron hung to his ankles and he stuck a pencil behind one ear. In a corner, Mrs. Pride looked through a grill at us. She was the postmistress and folded the telegrams into their orange envelopes. Since this was the only store for three miles, and there was no bus, it was filled with everything from china cups and work boots to Tunbridge Wells wafer biscuits and preserved ginger in real Chinese pots for the more refined customers.

Behind the store and looking on to the cricket field, was a disused army hut called the Club or the Institute. People could meet there to play billiards and to drink a limited amount of beer. It was an effort on my father's (Clive Davies) part to keep men from spending all their time and nearly all their money at the pub. In charge of the Club was one of those fierce looking, stern voice men whose twinkling eyes entered straight into the heart of a child. Mr. Wilson was serving at the battle of Jutland when his ship was sunk by the Germans. His injuries lasted all his life, and he gradually lost the use of his legs altogether. He had learnt the cobbler's trade, and he was employed, I suppose, by Clive Davies, to look after the Club

My father was the people's warden of our parish. We had a succession of vicars, mild, unimpressive men who had no influence on my life that I was aware of. They were there, I thought, to help the villagers and to run the Sunday services. They were chosen by my father. There wasn't much choice because the vicarage was awful and the area remote. Much later, my father handed over the choosing to the bishop, and a new vicarage was built which vicar’s wives accepted more easily.

We were intolerant of other viewpoints; Roman Catholics were suspect; we had no friends among them. Nonconformist groups, in spite of our forebears, were considered very second-class ways of being a Christian, essentially for the lower orders in those hideous chapels. Over the horizon lay Hindus, Buddhists, and Moslems, all wrong or mistaken, and one day to be brought over to our side by the missionaries we helped and personally knew. An endless stream of these devoted evangelists came to visit us and to lick the sores of deprivation received in foreign lands. There were bishops, deans, and canons, and poorer missionaries from China, Tibet, and Africa.

The village church, which played such a role both physically and symbolically in our lives, had been built in the mid-nineteenth century replacing a far older one, of which only the steps remained. It is of that strange style with what some call a Belgian tower. Happily, to the somewhat massive work of pillars and arches, an Italian mason had carved all kinds of fruit, flowers and animals high on the capitals and these were my aids to long prayers and sermons. In my early childhood, it was the usual thing to go to church, and from the age of five, I was considered old enough to sit through the sermon. Attendance was slipping a bit already, but most families in our tiny village had at least one representative at morning or evening prayer. From our customary pew near the back with the piece of carpet on the seat telling everyone else not to sit there, I could see anything of interest that might shorten the hour of worship for me: who was late; who dropped their collection money on the floor; and what flowers were on Mrs. Perkin's new hat. The saints in the windows were of little help because they were all so stiff, but I hardly had time to make up stories about the stone carvings when, like a trumpet call, the vicar was ending his sermon.

We went out into the fresh air and light to greet and be greeted by each according to their social standing. Walking back to the lunch that others had stayed home to prepare, we thought it a shame to see a cottager digging his garden on a Sunday morning. Later, they were even starting to play football. True, the field was too far from the church to disturb us. All the same....

The routine of Sunday never changed. After lunch, a story read by my mother a good tale by Charlotte Young, Scott, or Frances Burnett, my introduction to the classics, digested with pieces of chocolate from some secret cache. Then a walk to one of the farms, to see a newly laid hedge or a repaired cottage. My father took great pains to modernise his workers' homes. Each had a flush toilet and bath installed; though many of the bathtubs were only used for storing coal.

At Hawkley Hurst things changed rapidly during 1939. When London evacuated ten boys from a dockside area (it should be noted that Battersea is hardly dockside!) came to live in our house. Later, we all settled down to the bombing raids, many children went home after 2/3 years and were replaced by adult evacuees, the sick and elderly, or by those who had lost their homes due to the German bombing blitz.

Much later after the war, the health of my mother was sinking. Now came the agonising decision to sell Hawkley Hurst, our home; agonising, that is, to my father, I do not think that it meant the same to anyone else. For him, at seventy-eight, to leave the estate that he had dreamed of as a boy and realised as a man was a deathblow. The usual difficulties of post-war England, common to every landed gentleman, could not be expected to spare him. Already, weeds were springing up in the driveways, and though the grounds still looked well kept, but no younger men came re replace the ageing gardeners. Added to my father's grief was the affront that no one wanted to buy his home. For months, pictures of the Hawkley Hurst with its Elizabethan facade stared back from glossy magazines.

The "new" home was a Queen Anne period houses that once been the vicarage. It looked straight out on to the hangers and sort of house my mother would always have liked to live in had it been situated in a small town. The butler folded my father's clothes, last time, into new cupboards and retired. All those workers who been with us for so long were now pensioned off and left to finish days in tied cottages, rent free. To live, all at once, right in the village from which we been separated by an eloquent two mile walk, was in itself a novelty.

Last summer (1960?), we went back to Hawkley Hurst, my sister and I. At first we simply stood there while the changes sank in.

The man who had bought the place from my father had died, and at his hands, the house had died too. It stood up, gaunt and naked, in a tangle of brambles, bushes and vines. He had stripped off the fragrant creepers; a deep crack ran down the south wall by my mother's bedroom where the roses used to crowd; where, reaching down with my brother holding me tightly round the waist, I could pick a yellow bud to put them on the dressing table.

In the pond (shown left in 1940 and restored to this state by 1985), two last goldfish swam in perpetual shade from the overgrown trees where catmint, roses, lavender and lilies had hung reflected in the water. In view of the pending auction, they had hired Norman, the gardener's boy, himself now a grandfather, to put back some sort of order. Three lawns had been recovered. The rose beds were trimmed and cut into their diamonds and triangles. Beyond them, the birds were singing above the wilderness, the hidden steps and walks. I never heard such singing. Soaring over the tangled garden, most of the trees remained. I could see the same faces in them; for they had been my friends when I played alone there, year after year.

Not that we were exactly surprised or even upset. Change is part of the fabric of life. It was natural that an existence such as we had known should come to an end. Nevertheless, standing there, listening to the wind playing the same tunes in the old trees, we felt the sadness of contrast. Something that had known perfection in its way had been snuffed out.

We filled our baskets with blackberries and drove away. Outside the gates, a postman's van blocked the lane. When he came out of the cottage and we looked at each other; I jumped from the car to clasp his hand. Tears stood in his eyes. Why Miss Elizabeth!" Then, urgently, "You got on all then?" putting the letters under one arm and reaching for his kerchief.

Twenty years before, he brought letters to my parents we talked for a while. What do you talk about for five minutes after twenty years? Then we drove away in opposite directions and it is all over.

They came to make films in the place that was my home; they shot the walks and empty halls. Peter Sellers used a corner of the court for a convent.

 But the chief actors in the drama had left long before….