Let me take you away from all this...away from quantitative easing, from those rather disturbing Olympic mascots Hemlock and Mandible, and from the unpredictable wrath of Eyjafjallajökull - to a far-off time when almost nobody had a television (and there was certainly nothing worth watching even if you did...) and most families didn't have a car or a telephone. I remember it. Going any distance must have taken more forward planning than I could possibly have been aware of on one particular day, in my short trousers and sporting a rather stylish cardigan and aged about seven. How it came about that all of us met at a bus stop on the Wolverhampton Road in Tividale one Saturday at a pre-appointed time - parents, grandparents, me - with the sun miraculously shining (just as it is this sweltering Whitsun) I've no idea. I seem to think that Dudley came into it somewhere and then, perhaps - inexplicably - Stourbridge, where we waited patiently for yet another Midland Red bus while a pannier tank steam locomotive went single-mindedly about its business, clanking up and down a line behind some railings. Was it Stourbridge? I couldn't say, but that smudge of memory is preserved somewhere like a midge in amber. Finally, after immense effort, we got to our destination - Kinver.
Clent was almost on the doorstep, Kinver required an expedition. What strange names our favourite weekend escapes seemed to have, quite unlike Oldbury or Blackheath, whose meaning was immediately apparent. Where do these odd names come from, I hear you ask?... Clent, rather disappointingly, is "the rock" or "hill" in Anglo-Saxon. But Kinver is more intriguing. You may have seen it called "Kinfare", the old name in the nineteenth century. But "Kinfare" is not a rune that you can easily read unless you go back to the previous linguistic stratum of this very old island of ours, to Celtic. The name comes from something like "Cunobriga", later Old Welsh "Cynibre", "dog + hill". Clent has on its perimeter the spectacular Wychbury hill fort, where uncanny things are said to happen, but Kinver has an Iron Age promontory fort right at its heart, perched five hundred feet up on the massive sandstone ridge of Kinver Edge. Inexplicable happenings up there too, allegedly...
The old town of Kinver itself is still lovely, so near to the urban sprawl and yet largely unspoilt, despite the best efforts of contractors with road drills paving and re-paving the main street over the past few months.
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It's not hard to imagine it during the Civil War or even in the late Middle Ages. Topographically it has everything you'd want for a perfect photograph - the River Stour which rises in the Clent Hills and flows alongside Kinver High Street, and by the side of the Stour - and dependent on it for water - runs James Brindley's eighteenth-century Staffordshire and Worcestershire, a "contour" canal that winds through peaceful valleys from Stafford to Stourport, and is quite stunningly good-looking at Kinver. High above all this is St Peter's on Church Hill. It's a pity that the one thing that put Kinver on the Edwardian tourist map and brought many weekenders here from the Black Country no longer exists, the Kinver Light Railway, an electric tramway which was opened in 1901. It might have made our journey easier in the 1950s, but by that time the railway had disappeared without trace.
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Kinver had a High Street of tradesmen, tea shops and pubs, notably Ye Olde White Hart which you'll see on many a Victorian postcard. I don't recall our spending a lot of time there when we got off the 'bus. I think we just headed straight up Stone Lane, quite a climb to the foot of Kinver Edge. From then on it was only a matter of time before a tray and cups appeared for the Tea Ceremony. I doubt if I'll ever make it to being 100% pukka English, since I can't stand tea - I couldn't then and I can't now. I was a Tizer and Vimto man through and through. I remember getting pretty bored very quickly, having no playmates, so my Dad took me to have a look at the sandstone caves of Holy Austin Rock, which was a fair climb. From that day to this I'd not been back up to see them. In those days there was also a tearoom where you could buy drinks, which in the 1950s tended to be advertised as "beverages and minerals" - not a thing any human being would ever actually say, of course. The tearoom was called the Rock Café - a sensationally cool name for a very old-fashioned place featuring a tea urn. But then all this was before skiffle and Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line", let alone "Heartbreak Hotel".
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And so I've come back today on my own in search of troglodytes, a nice name for what must have been a pretty tough reality - living in a cave. The whole area, birchwoods and ferns, sandstone bluff and Holy Austin Rock, now belongs to the National Trust. The cave houses themselves, which had been abandoned, have been kitted out as they would have been when they were last lived in, and fortunately there is a painting of those last inhabitants to help with the layout - the kitchen range, furnishings etc. It wouldn't have done to be claustrophobic or to reflect too much on the tonnage of soft sandstone above your head. The men living here worked in an ironworks in Kinver, which was briefly blighted by industry in the Victorian era. The views are excellent, especially from the charming café with garden on the upper level - you can see across to the high rise flats of Stourbridge or Brierley Hill. I'm glad to note that the Vine Inn, next to the canal locks, is still with us. It was a damn close run thing for Kinver, but in the end industrialization didn't happen.
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There is another Kinver, up by the parish church of St Peter - which, by the way, has the best views I've seen from any graveyard anywhere. I'm talking about the long flat area of dusty heathland that slopes gently up to the Edge itself. It's the area I remember best and the one which we usually came to in later, more affluent years when we had a pre-War Ford 8. Ah yes, the slither and crunch of warm cucumber sandwiches yielding to your bite and the tang of cheddar - Bored as usual, but more resourceful now, I would wander off in search of that legendary beast the adder, sometimes crashing at speed through the bracken in the vain hope of scaring one into breaking cover. In fact it wasn't until I was in my fifties that I actually did get to see a snake in the wild, or rather dozens of them, when I was fly fishing at Silligrove Lake in the Wyre Forest. I think - I hope - that they were grass snakes, moving all around me, basking on tree stumps, swimming past me in the lake, slipping swiftly through the grass with a hiss which either they or their scales made. Snakes have a way of gliding through the water with their triangular heads proudly raised which is rather unnerving. But it's not all beer and skittles for your
serpent d'eau (as the French more accurately call them): I was told that big trout are really quite partial to them...So the upshot was that I never did need a dose of anti-venom for my foolhardiness about poisonous reptiles, and Kinver remains for me a blur of heat on a summer afternoon, with what Iris Murdoch, remembering her own happy childhood, calls "the holy trinity of love" - Mum, Dad and me, and my Gran and Granddad there as a bonus, plying me periodically with melting ice creams from a distant van. I hope Heaven is a bit like that.
© Dennis Wood 2010
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