Dane Court is now long gone, its spacious grounds carved into lots for stockbrokers’ mansions.
My Uncle Dick, a policeman in Essex, had warned my parents against emigrating. It was not the same as accepting a short-term foreign posting. You might be gone for good, never to return, he said. It would very expensive to come back if you do not like it. Canada is cold. You do not like English weather: how will you handle six months of snow? It was food for thought.
In 1963 I became a teenager. The year before, the Cuban missile crisis had brought the world to the edge of nuclear war. In the months before we left, perhaps bearing my uncle’s words in mind, my mother undertook a crash course for her sons in English history. We were driven on day-trip excursions, to Blenheim Palace, where Churchill was born, Longleat, and Woburn Abbey, as well as visits to the city of Winchester, where a replica of what was assumed to be ‘King Arthur’s Round Table,’ unlikely though this is, hung on a wall, and where we admired the statue of King Alfred the Great with upraised sword, a scholar and warrior whose great achievement was preventing the Vikings from farther western encroachment after their invasion in the 9th century. On a wet day when we ate our sandwiches in the car in the English fashion, we visited curious Silbury Hill, the largest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe, the nearby Long Barrow, a prehistoric burial chamber, and Stonehenge itself, all in proximity to one another, and all of which I was to re-visit a generation later with my own two sons. These trips increased my love for England and her history. They confirmed the impressions we had of the beautiful English countryside that we had seen in the photos my parents took of these prehistoric sites, brooding and mysterious, on their 1945 honeymoon.
One such day trip was to Dorset’s windswept Maiden Castle, yet another prehistoric monument, this time an Iron Age fort built around 600 B.C. Covering 16 acres, it is one of the largest hill forts in Europe of this era, consisting of a series of concentric ramparts and ditches to keep out predatory invaders, great fun for children to run up and down on. I have since been there several times, with and without my own children. The fort is located in the heart of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wessex’ near the city of Dorchester, re-named ‘Casterbridge’ in Hardy’s novels. Dorchester was built by the Romans: the -chester suffix comes from the Latin castra, or camp. Maiden Castle was apparently abandoned shortly after the Roman Conquest in the first century A.D. The Dane Court English Prize in 1963 was Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, which I read avidly shortly after winning it, and was lucky enough to teach in a Grade 13 class fifteen years later. I have loved Hardy’s novels ever since.
