Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
Leaving Scoulton Mere behind we were again in a land of flat heaths of
wide extent, and of sheltering hedges of dense Scotch fir. It was a country
of the most pleasing face but, apart from that, no use for any purposes
save those of the motorist and the rabbit-breeder. That it had been well
used by the latter evidence was soon apparent on the roadside in the form
of a gang of men, with nets, dogs, and ferrets, pursuing their operations
on such a scale, and so completely in the open, that they must surely have
been authorized rabbit-catchers and not poachers. Still the thought
occurred to me that, in bygone days and in far-distant North Wales, we
always found from the advertisements that ferrets, who are the poachers'
best friends, were to be obtained more easily from Norfolk than from any
other part of the country, and that they knew their work very well when
they arrived. In fact, there is a huge head of game in Norfolk, and where
that state of things exists, there poachers will be. Theirs is a lawless
pursuit of course, but Lord! as Mr. Pepys would have said, what good sport
it must be "on a shiny night in the season of the year," and what a vast
and intimate knowledge of animal and bird life these poachers must possess.
If it was a rabbit-catcher's paradise it was a motorist's paradise also.
There was no possible danger to human beings, for, after the
rabbit-catchers, there were none; after the fir hedges had been passed the
road became an unfenced ribbon of tawny grey running through the bare
heath, with no other roads debouching into it, and no cover of any sort for
a police trap. There was no reason in life against a good spin at top speed
except that superstitious regard for the letter of the law which not one
man in a thousand really has. The car simply flew forward; the speed
indicator marked 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and even 50 miles an hour; the road
seemed to open wide to our advent, to stretch out its arms, so to speak, to
embrace us; the motion, smooth, swifter and swifter still, even as the
flight of the albatross that stirreth not his wings, and absolutely free
from vibration, was, in a single word, divine. Suddenly, a few miles in
front of us, a dusty cloud hove in sight over the road. "There," said my
friend, half in jest, but only half--for a motorist's paradise is at its
best when solitary--"is one of those beastly motor-cars. What a foul dust
it is raising!" So it turned out, on rising and looking back over the cape
hood, were we; not that it mattered, for no wayfarers had been passed or,
therefore, powdered, for many a short mile--I had written "a long mile"
from force of habit, but it would have been inappropriate. Was the other
car meeting us or going in the same direction? In the same direction
surely, for though the cloud of dust was coming nearer to us, it was not
approaching very fast. So we determined to pass as soon as might be, and
"giving her a little more gas," we were very soon "on terms," as a racing
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account