Free Fellow Passenger by Geoffrey Household Page A

they weren’t such damned fools - for they had all had good classical educations - as to believe that revolution settled anything beyond the temporary question of who was going to pay the taxes and who was going to spend them. Even in my few months of youthful craziness I agreed with them. What I was after then was the unity of Europe. My communism was a mere exasperated protest like that of poor Cecil Reyvers.
     
    My short stay as a wild man of the woods in Cranborne Chase was intensely unpleasant. It rained. I caught a cold. And although my chosen square mile was uninhabited it had disadvantages. There was some kind of school nearby, and small, excitable boys were always popping up in unexpected places. Fortunately they never for one moment kept their mouths shut, and gave me ample warning of their approach. There was also a gamekeeper, eternally playing nursemaid to pheasants and partridges, and accompanied by dogs. I gave up attempting to use the ground in daytime. I made myself a chimpanzee platform in the heart of a glorious evergreen oak, stocked it with stolen sacks to give some warmth and only came down at night to do my foraging and cooking.
     
    There was not much to cook - a few carrots from cottage gardens and the eggs and squeakers of wood-pigeons. Their nests were plentiful, and often within reach of a ravenous climber. I just managed to endure ten shivering days, but could stand no more of this forest euphemistically called temperate. I still had no really convincing beard, and abandoned the project. Instead, I gave myself a bald head - it took hours of experimenting with a safety razor to arrive at the effect produced by nature - and sideboard whiskers down to the lobes of my ears. These connected with the growth of hair which starts close under my eyes, and changed my high-cheekboned, narrow face to a square one.
     
    This gypsy-like appearance was out of keeping with the original character, so I thought myself into a more swashbuckling part - the frank and loud Bohemian, easily sure of hospitality and with a taste for free beer rather than stolen milk.
     
    I had spent nothing, so, when I took the road, I had some nine pounds in my pocket thanks to the generosity of Mr Reyvers and my companion in the service cellar. This wealth was reduced to three when I had bought an army pack, a few oil paints, a folding easel and a couple of canvasses in Shaftesbury. I preserved the portfolio of sketches in case I were ever asked to draw. I can’t. I draw as primitively as a child of six. But someone in authority once told me that the child’s was the correct approach to abstract art. So I decided that abstract art would be my line. I did not expect my work to interest a dealer - unless I signed it Howard-Wolferstan - but hoped it would be good enough, in any emergency, for a baffled public.
     
    I felt reasonably confident, for the newspapers had dropped me. They and the public were obsessed by the search for a gentleman who had ingeniously drowned his wife in four inches of water, and I don’t suppose the average reader, confronted by photographs of both of us, would have cared or remembered which was which. Meanwhile, I wandered north through Wiltshire, sleeping rough, eating cheap and discreetly wasting time until it should be assumed that I had left the country.
     
    On the fourth day I came to a village green where a cricket match was about to begin. A tent was set up, the pitch marked, and the home eleven waiting for the arrival of their opponents. I settled down on the grass to watch, for it is a game I have always enjoyed. Sheer skill. No violent and unseemly exercise. No freezing with cold or getting rubbed in the mud. And it has about it the atmosphere of fiesta - not of red and gold, but of green and white. Cricket, paradoxically, is the English diversion most likely to be appreciated by any lover of the Spanish way of life.
     
    This was the perfect afternoon for it, warm and windless, with the wicket