Learning "were" is as good as "have been"

  For Barry Leach

But I had never seen the Solway.

And then, resting on a rocky

ledge above Crag Lough, I sudden-

ly realized, what I had long con-

cealed from myself, that I was ill

.. and so home, and spent a week

in bed, and read Guy Mannering again.

But after I had been up two days

(for I was determined to go), I was

taken to Blindburn in the Cheviots,

north-west of Alwinton, and after

lunch I walked, over the old Roman

Dere Street, down the Cottonhope

Burn to Byrness, over the fells by

the Blackhope Nick to Kielder ..

on again next morning up the Lewis-

burn valley, and over to Becastle

Fells, a killing struggle, over peat-

hags and bogs and clefts, making ev-

ery mile as two; and at last, from

Sighty Crag, I saw it, a sheet of

twinkling water and a long reach of

desolate sand, the Solway Firth;

  

and at the same time I heard the

bubbling of a spring nearby among

the moss, and slaked my thirst

with its cool dark water; for my

throat was parched with the long

weary climb. After which I felt 

as I daresay the Israelites felt

when, from a hilltop, they viewed

the Promised Land, that it wasn't

very different from anywhere else;

still, it was something to be out 

of the wilderness.

                  .. and dropping lightly down the

                  fells I met a shepherd, the first 

                  human face I had seen for eighteen 

                  miles, and so to Bewcastle, where 

                  I found, against all probability

                  (for it is a lonely steading) an-

                  other man, in the middle of a field,

                  delivering lime from a lorry. So I

                  asked him for a lift, and he took 

                  me to Brampton, whence I gradually

                  found my way home. He drove a lime-

                  lorry now, he said, but he had once

                  lived far away in Northumberland,

                  and had spent his childhood in the

                  village of Powburn, where his uncle

                  was the policeman. So I told him

                  that I had been born in the parish

                  of Powburn, in Glanton, and from

                  that time we were intimate friends.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Lord Dacre of Glanton

The Solway Firth

  [fragment]

June, 1945

The Wartime Journals

Richard Davenport-Hines

  editor

op. cit.