What happens when four women walk into a conversation begun by Hilaire Belloc in his book The Four Men and a Farrago more than a century ago? As I retraced the first section of Belloc’s famous Sussex journey, starting from Robertsbridge to Old Heathfield, I wanted to explore some of the questions and issues that thread through the conversations in Four Men, but from a 21st-century and female perspective.
Belloc feared greatly for Sussex and for the old ways that he felt were being lost. He seems to dread change and question whether Sussex could ever recover itself. More than a century later, has it? And can it still?
For the course of this journey across Sussex, I had invited a series of women to join me. Interesting women with different perspectives and experiences of life. Belloc’s four men talk, argue, remember, sing and tell stories as they cross the county. What would we talk about along the same lanes? Where would we agree with him, and where would our experiences lead us elsewhere? As it turned out, we talked about home and belonging, community and the changing world around us. Sometimes our thoughts echoed Belloc’s, sometimes we found ourselves heading in quite another direction. This then is part of that conversation: with Belloc, with each other and with Sussex itself.
My four women
For this section of the walk, I was going to be joined by three women for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration, namely:
- Samantha Norgate – Business Development Manager at Claire Nash Solicitors with a background in the charity sector as a Business and Community Fundraising Coordinator.
- Claire Nash – Solicitor and Managing Director at Claire Nash Solicitors and founder of her own firm.
- Annick King – Vice President of Crowborough Rotary and member of the WI.
Was it coincidence, or a reflection of Belloc’s brilliance and his understanding of human nature, that the women who joined me on this walk so clearly echoed so many of the qualities of the characters in Belloc’s book: Grizzlebeard, the Poet and the Sailor? The resemblance was never exact. Each woman crossed between those qualities, as people do, including myself. But it was striking that our company should offer such different ways of approaching questions Belloc had placed on the road before us.
The four men
In Belloc’s walk, Grizzlebeard brings age, wisdom and an awareness of mortality; tSailor brings experience of the wider world, travel, an untethered confidence, adaptability and the freedom to move on; and Poet? He brings imagination, instinct, emotion and a feeling for the spiritual, each offering a different way of understanding the landscape and life. Myself (Belloc himself) was the narrator.
Walk details
For the full details of the walk itself as well as a closer look at what we found had physically changed on the way and what hadn’t, visit:
Robertsbridge to Brightling:
When Belloc set off from The George Inn in Robertsbridge he was in the company of Grizzlebeard. I was alone for this first section.
The questions Belloc brings to the road
As Myself sets off, melancholy travels alongside his affection for Sussex. He wants to return home to the west of the county while there is still something familiar to return to. He knows that the landscape and society he loves are changing. Old trades and traditions seem to be dying. His answer, at least in part, is to walk. By noticing, remembering and recording, he leaves a portrait of a place he cannot hold still. Yet that portrait is coloured by affection, nostalgia and imagination. How real was it really?
Following him, I wanted to consider what our own accounts might reveal about Sussex today and our relationship with it. In a place that has changed so much, do we still feel a sense of connection to it? How important is a connection to place anyway, what creates it and what are our 21st century fears for the county?
As I was to discover along the way, much of the landscape of this section of the walk felt substantially and significantly unchanged since Belloc’s journey and this left me wondering: when does change become loss, and who gets to decide what is worth preserving? Localism may feel like a current trend but it was clearly something Belloc felt passionately about over 100 years ago.
Where we belong
The night before I set off, we had celebrated my mother’s ninetieth birthday so time and mortality were already close to the surface of my mind. I was acutely aware that every generation encounters the same brevity of life, and suddenly walking through Sussex felt like a privilege. My own relationship with place has involved repeated returns, like an inescapable wheel: to Horsham, where my grandparents lived; to France, where my ancestors lived centuries earlier; and to the East Sussex towns that I have recently learned are threaded through my family history. Sometimes the connections to these places feels so powerful. But would these places exert the same pull if I knew nothing of the people who came before me? Is that feeling actually just a mirage that grows from a need to belong? And belong to what?
My companions offered other ways of understanding home and place. Sam, who joined me at Brightling, still feels the pull of her birth county although she has lived here for many years. Sussex holds memories and strong emotional ties. Its woods, Downs, poets and painters have become part of her emotional journey. Belonging has grown through years of living here, not connection by birth.
Claire and her mother, Annick, joined us at Punnett’s Town. For Claire, Sussex represents stability and opportunity. Having moved frequently when she was younger, she is comfortable with home being wherever she places her hat. But she loves her community here. Her anchor is down, held by family, community and business, without any need to declare that it must remain there for ever. To me, this felt like a slightly disconnected connection but it clearly works very well for Claire which left me wondering if I need to reconsider how I feel about place. Whether you can really belong temporarily. Do I hold Sussex too much in reverence, a bit like Belloc? Is permanence overrated? Are our small villages actually often more stifling rather than nurturing, and are we holding too tightly on to the past? The night before, my son had suggested that holding on to the things we believe once made us great can hold us back. That thought was still lingering.
Like her daughter Claire, Annick is widely travelled and had found her thirteen home moves in thirteen years liberating. This, she explained, had allowed her to shed layers of other people’s expectations which felt very refreshing. Returning to her grandparents’ village in France after 60 years, however, revealed the strength of childhood memory: feelings of freedom and safety, familiar buildings and beautifully crafted doors were preserved in her memory in greater detail than she had realised. That felt good and she wondered whether she might call it home. On a later visit, the increased crowds and population unsettled her. This felt very Belloc and his views on the impact of the railway on places like Haywards Heath. For Annick, the village remained familiar, but her response to it had changed. Home, she concluded, was a feeling, not necessarily a place. I like that.
What change leaves behind
Along the road, I kept encountering continuity. At the sawmill, machinery was now doing ancient work. Coppicing continues. At Roots to the Moon Farm just outside Robertsbridge, they are drawing on traditional methods and natural cycles. Some skills have disappeared as Belloc feared, but many others have adapted or been rediscovered. New tools, old skills. That said, you only have to glance at a paper or local Facebook group to know that fears of over development and loss of our heritage now feel more urgent than ever and are bubbling just below the surface of a society that frequently feels very divided. So perhaps focussing on old trades and skills misses the point.
The people beside us
A strong theme that emerged was that what gives a place meaning is what happens between people. Sam spoke about the importance of finding your community, whether in a pub, a club or elsewhere. Shared rituals create familiarity and reassurance, while a pint can bring together people whose professions and circumstances might otherwise keep them apart. Such small encounters give cultural inheritance an everyday life and one of Sam’s fears is the prospect of losing our Sussex pubs. I don’t think views get much more Bellocesque than that.
But communities require time and attention and our conversations returned to listening, compassion and the difficulty of being heard in a hurried world. Technology can open doors while leaving some people struggling outside them. Claire worries about the loss already of communication skills; while we all worried that older people are being excluded by modern technology which is moving so fast.
Annick’s greatest fear is drought; her delight in Sussex’s lush greens sharpened by this summer’s dry weather. But in Dallington Forest I was struck by the landscape’s ability to repair itself. A landscape that 300 years ago was ravaged by iron making, that in WWII was ravaged again by timber harvesting for the war, now tranquil, wholesome and a wonderful example of all that is beautiful about Sussex. How often we expect nature to accommodate us and repair itself? And how frequently does it oblige us, while we seem unwilling to adapt ourselves to its needs. Perhaps Sussex’s greatest quality is its capacity to absorb change while remaining recognisably itself. But does that absorption run deep or is it only surface level?
A man is more himself if he is one of a number
Right at the beginning of Four Men, Grizzlebeard pronounces that “A man is more himself if he is one of a number…”. And Sam is a great advocate of how a companion can challenge us when we need to be challeneged, lend us courage or notice what we have overlooked. Belloc’s road is shaped by company, and ours was too. Each woman bringing a different sense of place and community into view.
By the end of this first walk, I felt more hopeful about the Sussex Belloc feared losing. As Sam and I climbed out of Brightling and turned to look behind us, quiet woods and undulating hills filled the view. Had we concentrated only on the long road ahead, we would have missed the beauty of what lay behind us. and our walk would have been a little poorer for it.
Much of the landscape we walked through and many old skills and traditions seem to have endured, and two of Belloc’s three pubs have survived. Evident adaptation suggests a capacity for recovery I had perhaps underestimated. I could not decide how far ahead we are on the road that Belloc so feared. At times it felt a long way, and others, it felt like we were standing right he was looking through the same lens just in a slightly different light. I wasn’t able to draw a neat boundary between change and loss, nor settle who should decide what survives, although I am so aware of the ongoing frustration that localism is being ignored from above.
Our relationships with Sussex were all deeply personal, shaped by memories that can idealise as well as preserve. Yet common ground emerged: Sussex still offers refuge, stability and opportunity (things Belloc was surely acutely aware of), while belonging is perhaps much more about the people around us. Community gives place its meaning. Perhaps our greatest task then is to keep community as well as communication skills alive, using new tools to practise the old skills of listening and storytelling. The portraits we leave will be partial, as Belloc’s was, but they can capture something of life in the here and now, and that still matters, a lot.
My thanks to my walking companions for sharing their views, experiences and ideas, and making this such a special walk.
If you have enjoyed In Conversation with Belloc & Sussex: Part 1, you may also like:
The Missing Women of Belloc’s Sussex: Robertsbridge to Heathfield
