THE HOME FROM HOME 81

shire to gipsies. He had run away from home when
he was a boy and walked for two days without food;
then he stole a loaf from a baker's van and ate it
behind a hedge. The next day he got a job at a dairy
farm. The farmer asked him whether he could milk
a cow; he said yes, and the other men milked his cow
for him until he'd learnt to do it for himself; and the
farmer never knew.

On either side the Ridge Way the fields were being
harrowed, the horses disappeared over the swell of the
down, the men singing in the pale autumn sunlight.
Once when one of them came parallel with the other,
he called out: "Old Molly George has a night out to-
night." A flock of crows was picking at the turf
beside the White Horse. A man was ploughing in a
cup of land so far below that he was the size of a grain
of oats; the brown-turned earth grew in size, the olive-
coloured unturned earth diminished until there was
only a thin lozenge in the middle of the field. The
crows were flat below, wheeling in mid-air at the
height of a cathedral spire. The man sang as he
ploughed, his voice as loud as a gramophone in the
next room, but I could only catch one word—"angels".
When the lozenge disappeared, I could see him lead
his horse to the hedge and a thin fume of smoke came
up but dispersed long before it reached me. He was
burning weeds.

It was winter now, snow in London, the fierce noon
sun on the clearing, yellow fever in Freetown, behind
on the way to the Coast the mist was rising from the
forest, drifting slowly upwards, 'like the smoke of
burning weeds below the Ridge Way. We turned
away from Major Grant and Miss Kilvane, from the