{"id":4163,"date":"2019-04-04T15:43:13","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T14:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.com\/?p=4163"},"modified":"2019-04-04T15:43:13","modified_gmt":"2019-04-04T14:43:13","slug":"holloways-hideouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/holloways-hideouts\/","title":{"rendered":"Holloways & Hideouts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ines Cavill on another Search for Rogue Male<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI chose southern England, with a strong preference for Dorset. It is a remote county, lying as it does between Hampshire, which is becoming an outer suburb, and Devon which is a playground. I knew one part of the county very well indeed……\u201d\u00a0 Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, 1939<\/p>\n

\u201cA track worn down by the traffic of ages and the fretting of water and in places reduced sixteen or eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields.\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, 2012<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is 80 years since the publication of Geoffrey Household\u2019s enduring thriller Rogue Male<\/em>. His cult novel perfectly distilled the suspense wrought from a hunter turned prey, inspiring 8 decades of storytellers including Fritz Lang\u2019s 1941 film Man Hunt<\/em>, David Morrell\u2019s First Blood<\/em>, Frederick Forsyth\u2019s Day of the Jackal<\/em> and the 1976 BBC screen adaptation. Peter O\u2019Toole stars in this as Household\u2019s would-be assassin who fails to shoot Hitler, escapes torture by the Gestapo and flees back to the UK pursued by the sinister Major Quive-Smith (played by John Standing). Peter O\u2019Toole said in 2007 that it remained his favourite of all the films he had worked on, and Rogue Male<\/em> continues to fascinate\u2014Benedict Cumberbatch has most recently secured the rights to the book he describes as one of \u2018the most treasured of English novels\u2019 and will produce and star in a new film that\u2019s in development.<\/p>\n

Born in 1900, Geoffrey Household was educated in the West Country and Oxford. In his twenties, he worked throughout Europe from Bucharest to Bilbao (from banking to bananas!) and started an early period of literary work in New York including screenwriting for CBS. But by 1933 he was back and broke in England, spending time walking the countryside of Wiltshire and Dorset until international sales work for an ink manufacturer gave him the scope he wanted to travel and write. His first of 36 books, the novel The Third Hour<\/em>, was published in 1938 but it is the following year\u2019s Rogue Male<\/em> that would prove to be an instant best seller\u2014it was even issued as a morale-boosting Services and Forces special edition\u2014and his genre-defining masterpiece.<\/p>\n

Rogue Male<\/em> is unforgettable for its pace and plotting but also the tangible descriptions of place that breathe authentic life into the story. As when the hunted hero seeks sanctuary in \u2018the green depths of Dorset\u2019 and arrives just after midnight \u2018…on the ridge of a half-moon of low rabbit-cropped hills, the horns of which rest upon the sea, enclosing between them a small, lush valley. The outer northern slopes look down upon the Marshwood Vale….\u2019<\/p>\n

From here he drops down into the network of holloways\u2014\u2018these trade-worn cantons of red and green upon the flanks of the hills are very dear to me\u2019 locating a thick hedge accessed from old lanes leading back to the ridge \u2018in the heart of this hedge, which I had been seeking all the way from London, the lane reappears. It is not marked on the map. It has not been used, I imagine, for a hundred years\u2019. Inside this \u2018double hedge\u2019, guarded by \u2018sentinel thorns at the entrance\u2019 he digs out a den and goes to ground until a shocking final confrontation with his hunter, Major Quive-Smith.<\/p>\n

These vivid details and tantalising clues have periodically compelled a search for Household\u2019s original hideout. Christoper Roper wrote about one\u2014\u2018Geoffrey Household\u2019s Lost Lane\u2019\u2014for this magazine in 2003. He was enthralled by Rogue Male<\/em>\u2019s stunning descriptions of the Marshwood Vale\u2019s secret places when he moved to North Chideock and could recognise the \u2018small lush valley\u2019 on his doorstep and the contours of the hero\u2019s hideaway in nearby holloways like Hell Lane, \u2018I shared the book with lots of local friends, all were impressed by Household\u2019s meticulous knowledge of topography and one neighbour said the book was so realistic he could picture the Nazis coming over the hill and through his window!\u2019<\/p>\n

The nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deacon continued this quest in the summer of 2005 approaching the distinctive crescent of hills from the south with bill hooks and sleeping bags ready to take shelter for the night deep inside an ancient track like Rogue Male himself. Macfarlane went on to explore the origin and nature of these holloways in the 2012 prose-poem \u2018Holloway\u2019 and defined his topographical muse as \u201cA sunken path, a deep and shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run have harrowed into the land\u201d.<\/p>\n

Both these explorations concluded that Household might well have disguised the exact location of the runaway\u2019s lair as cunningly as his ingenious protagonist. But there is rumour of another theory that I set out to hear last month with the storyteller Martin Maudsley. We met with George Streatfeild at Denhay Farm to be taken to see the site his father John had believed to be the novel\u2019s central location. George told us about the beginnings of the farm as we followed him out of the farmhouse towards the dairy. \u201cDaddy bought Denhay after he retired from Navy\u2014though he would forever be known locally as \u2018the commander\u2019\u2014and back then in the fifties, it was 250acres of bogs, brambles and bunnies\u201d. This was already sounding a lot more like Household\u2019s literary landscape than 21st Century Dorset.<\/p>\n

We were approaching the crucial ridge from the North as Rogue Male does when he is heading towards the sea after sleeping in fields around Powerstock via \u2018a remnant of the old Roman road from Dorchester to Exeter\u2019 with his rickety tandem bike \u2018the beastly Combination\u2019. The field rose steeply up Denhay Hill leaving the cows below, inky rooks wheeling high above, storm-proof primroses at our feet, the remains of an old farm road and derelict cottage to one side and the high line of the promised crescent ahead with sea sparkling beyond. George describes how a network of tracks crisscrossed farms from the coast to the depths of the vale, \u2018We\u2019re still finding the beach pebbles that were picked up and dumped by empty carts on the tracks when they were on a return run from the sea…\u201d.<\/p>\n

We turn to look back north over the sweep of the vale\u2019s distinctive small fields edged by hearty hedges with occasional handsome oaks, left as George explained for each \u2018chain\u2019 of the hedges that were laid in winter when the cows were inside. Towards the top, the soil changes from heavy clay to Bridport Sand, the kind of ground that lends itself to high-sided holloways, and there running down a small valley on a par with Household\u2019s description is the groove of a once substantial track. Had \u2018the commander\u2019 come closest to cracking the code of literature\u2019s most tantalising lair? Its previously unkempt double line of overgrowing hedge trees have been cut right back, but it definitely has potential\u2014and still enough cover to shelter us and George\u2019s German wire-haired pointer Brychan from a heavy shower.<\/p>\n

Martin collects folklore and says the uncanny qualities of holloways have always generated their own tales\u2014the deep grooves in their sandstone sides were once attributed to scratches by Dorset\u2019s \u2018Colepixies\u2019……<\/p>\n

Geoffrey Household died in October 1988 aged 87.\u00a0 His son wanted to scatter his ashes in the holloway that inspired his father\u2019s classic novel, but he too could not be certain of its exact location in that maze of old tracks and chose instead a hill-top view of the Marshwood Vale.<\/p>\n

On Wed April 24 Bridport\u2019s Film Festival \u2018From Page To Screen\u2019 is showing The BFI\u2019s reissue of the 1976 version of Rogue Male which has been re-mastered from the original 16mm film negatives.
\nThere are just 28 places for this special event. Tickets are \u00a310 from the Bridport Arts Centre Tel. 01308 424 204. Rendezvous 1 pm in car park behind Symondsbury\u2019s Manor Yard to explore the nearby holloways with Martin Maudsley before a \u2018secret\u2019 screening.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ines Cavill on another Search for Rogue Male \u00a0 \u201cI chose southern England, with a strong preference for Dorset. It is a remote county, lying as it does between Hampshire, which is becoming an outer suburb, and Devon which is a playground. I knew one part of the county very well indeed……\u201d\u00a0 Rogue Male by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-4163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts","tag-ines-cavill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}