Turville Heath

Turville Heath is the scattered rural setting of Edward Mayhew’s childhood and eventual home, a place whose familiar paths outlast changes in its people and way of life. Set among woods, common land, and the valleys of the Chiltern Hills, it anchors Edward’s early independence and his old age. In later years, the landscape becomes a map of memory: on walks near home he imagines Florence Ponting moving through the same countryside, and returns in thought to the life their parting left unrealised.

Setting and landscape

Turville Heath is described as less than a hamlet: a thin scattering of cottages among woods and common land on a broad ridge above Turville village. Its position distinguishes it from the more urbanised north-eastern end of the Chilterns, nearer London. At the south-western end, south of Beacon Hill, the countryside was more or less unchanged in the period of Edward’s birth. The narration looks ahead to a motorway that would cut through the chalk and carry traffic towards Birmingham, setting the prospect of later development against the rural landscape of Edward’s childhood.

Near the Mayhew cottage, a steep, rutted track ran through beech wood and past Spinney Farm to the Wormsley valley. The valley is presented as a secluded landscape, held for centuries by the Fanes, a farming family. Its tracks and woods form more than a picturesque background: they are the spaces Edward uses to withdraw, think, and later revisit the past on foot.

The Mayhew cottage and rural life

In 1940, the cottage still drew its water from a well; water had to be carried up to the attic and poured into a tank. Family lore connected Edward’s birth with a practical change to the house. As the country prepared for the possibility of invasion, the local authority treated the birth as an emergency in hygiene. Older men dug and channelled mains water from the Northend road, and the supply reached the cottage in September, as the London Blitz began. The account places a small domestic improvement against the scale of wartime events without making the remote countryside a place untouched by them.

The Heath also shaped everyday travel and work. Edward’s father, Lionel Mayhew, was headmaster of a primary school in Henley and cycled five miles there in the morning. At the end of the day he walked his bicycle back up the steep hill, its front basket carrying school papers and homework. In 1945, he bought a second-hand car for eleven pounds, an unusual sight on the narrow chalk lanes; petrol rationing nevertheless often sent him back to his bicycle. The account’s details of hill, lane, and distance show how the family’s life was tied to the surrounding countryside and to the nearest town.

Edward’s childhood and return to the countryside

Edward’s childhood at the Heath included both family routines and increasing separation from village companions. As he advanced at Henley grammar school, homework and his father’s strict expectations curtailed his after-school roaming with other boys. He had known the woods through games, camps, and traps, and he also knew their wildlife, including the flowers of the Fane family’s land. At school, he learned to conceal some of this country knowledge for fear of seeming a yokel. The landscape he knew intimately thus became something he was both attached to and careful not to display.

At sixteen, after learning of his mother’s accident, Edward began taking long walks that helped clear his mind. He went along Holland Lane, a sunken chalk track leading downhill to Turville, continued through the Hambleden valley to the River Thames, and crossed at Henley into the Berkshire downs. These walks gave physical form to the separateness he experienced at home: the countryside offered room to think, while his sense of being apart from others remained private.

After leaving Florence on their wedding night, Edward returned to Turville Heath and would not explain himself to his father. He made his sisters, Anne and Harriet, promise separately that they would not mention Florence again. On his long walk home from Henley, he deliberately avoided the route she had taken the previous year. The landscape here registers not only retreat but active refusal: Edward does not follow her footsteps, and his silence becomes part of the separation.

Later life and remembered paths

In 1980, Edward moved back to the cottage to care for his father, whose Parkinson’s disease was advancing rapidly. After his father died at home in 1983, Edward remained there as a tenant; his sisters were the legal owners. At first the cottage served as a bolt-hole from his small flat in Camden Town. In the early 1990s, he moved to Turville Heath to live alone. Its surroundings had changed socially: agricultural labourers and craftsmen had given way to commuters and owners of second homes. Edward found the neighbours friendly enough, and the area remained a setting for an active life rather than a sign that he was unhappy.

Even in his sixties, Edward kept up long hikes. His daily walk took in an avenue of lime trees; in good weather, he made a circular route to see wildflowers on the common at Maidensgrove or butterflies in the Bix Bottom nature reserve, returning through beech woods to Pishill church. He thought that he, too, would one day be buried there. These repeated routes connect his present to the country childhood that had shaped his knowledge of the area, while the nearby church gives his walks a horizon of mortality.

The paths also hold his memory of Florence. At a fork deep in a beech wood, Edward imagines the spot where she may have paused to consult her map on an August morning, intent on finding him; at a view over the Stonor valley, he wonders whether she stopped to eat an orange. He can admit, at last, that he never loved anyone else as much or found anyone who matched her seriousness. The countryside does not undo their separation, but gives it places to recur. As Edward walks the landscape she once crossed, the Heath becomes a durable record of both his attachment and his failure to call after her.