The Boy with a Cart

THE BOY WITH A CART STEYNING IN SUSSEX is one of the lovelier small towns of England, nestling as it does among the downs. E. V. Lucas describes it as "the little grey and red town which huddles under the hill." Its church today is basically Norman with fine zigzag mouldings and the weighty dignity of the best Norman work. The nave roof is disproportionately high to the eye outside, but "when one faces the curiously chequered square tower, an impression of quiet dignity is imparted." The main street winds and rises, and its curve reveals where the heavy farmwagons once lurched as they breasted the incline. Its houses are varied with gable and roof, bow window and Tudor, red and yellow, and notable for their strange and characteristic weatherboarding; and they are as Lucas says "quaint and ingratiating." The town remains placid and unhustled, and the American Louis 1ennings wrote of it, "There is plenty of time for everything in Steyning." Life in Steyning cannot always have been so leisurely. The sea has now receded, but Steyning was once a harbour town. For 550 years it sent two members to Parliament. There was a time when it had a mint. A mile away stands Bramber castle as a memorial to forgotten grandeur. Steyning has even greater notoriety in English history, for it was the disputed possession of the land round about which brought William the Conqueror to England. Before that, Alfred the Great had estates there, and his father Ethelwul£ was originally buried there. And, years before that, had come there a lad named Cuthman. Legend told how Cuthman had tended his father's sheep. One day when called to dinner, having no one to watch them in his absence, he drew a circle round them with his staff, adjuring them in the name of the Lord not to break through it. When he returned, the sheep were still securely within the invisible fold, and he regularly repeated the procedure on future occasions. When his father died, he decided to leave his homeland with his old mother, making a primitive cart to pull her in. So they went, guarded by the hand of God. One day the cord broke, and Cuthman replacd it with a rope of elder withes. Some haymakers in a nearby field laughed at them, only to find their crop instantly destroyed by a heavy storm; and to this day that particular field has been threatened by similar unpredictable storms. Finally the improvised cord broke, and Cuth284 1965 The Boy With a Cart 285 man regarded this as a divine sign that they should stay at the place they had reached, which proved to be Steyning. There he built a hut for them to live in, and turned from that to build a church. But while it was in process of building the shifting of a beam imperilled the whole fabric. The young man was in some despair when a stranger appeared and showed him how to remedy the damage. The remedy was swiftly effective. "Who are you?" said Cuthman. "I am He in whose name you are building this shrine," replied the stranger, and disappeared. The church was completed, and Cuthman lived out the rest of his life in its shadow, and was buried within its orbit. Aristotle, whose judgment of dramatic technique was sounder than his metaphysical theorizings, declared that an episodic story is bad dramatic art. But there are certain dramas, legitimate of their kind, which demand an episodic treatment. Such an one is Peer Gynt~ the whole purpose of which is a study of the whole of Peer's life, requiring that we shall see episodes from different stages of that life. Shakespeare's chronicles inevitably fall into the same pattern. They have their unity; but it is a different sort of unity, evidenced in the subtle parallelism between the situation in which Richard banishes Bolingbroke, and the situation Bolingbroke himself has to face when he ousts Richard, or in the character contrast between Hotspur and the young prince Harry. The mediaeval mystery play which moves from the day of creation to the day of judgment is simply a chronicle on a...