20.
His firm were making probes in connection with a pro-
posed motorway. On 15th May I turned up at 7.20 a.m.
on the warmest, sunniest morning yet. The mounds and
holes had disappeared into the barley, and not even
man was abroad. A brown dog was ambling lazily through
the adjoining pasture field two or three hundred yards
away. It was no dog but a full-grown fox. I stood
still, and it entered the field in which I stood. I
realised there was the lightest possible breeze from
the north-west behind me. The fox jogged along through
the barley, casual but exploratory about a hundred yards
from me, having now passed by. It had not passed the
tenuous line of my scent. It stood stock still, turned
its head towards me so that we were telepathically
interlocked for just three seconds, and then padded on
as before, deep in its own concern, to cross the
boundary hedge into Theydon Bois.
Over one and a half years I have never arrived at Doves
to find another human being there. Whatever has
happened to the field, I have never been there to witness
the doing of it. Earlier in 1975, determined barrages
of fences and barbed wire had appeared along the former
line of probes, a diagonal swathe the full and exact
width of the M.11 Motorway. The bulldozers have so far
been precise in their brutal power, approaching the
upper trackway at a fine angle, possibly slicing off a
wedge at the eastern end of what must have been one
living room of Doves, certainly annihilating what were
the outbuildings and yard at that end, then on through
Thomas Dosson's tiny dell, all one rod and eight perches
of it, so perfect till the dawn of 1975.
So the farmhouse which by l800 had almost lost its name,
has one and three quarter centuries later come to a
quick and violent oblivion. I am glad that, quite by
accident, in my own person at least, it became alive
again in imaginative reconstruction. Doves became
enlivened in the true sense, as a house full of people,
not so much by Gaffer Dosson who apparently never lived
there, but by those other unrecorded tenants of this
forgotten corner of the parish, whose fragments of