Paths from a White Horse

As an introduction to an author of whom I had been hitherto ignorant, this one was a gentle and pleasant surprise. In April 2012 I was in the Salvation Army shop in Histon, near Cambridge. I believe us males, when pushed by wives or by circumstance into such stores, are known always to make a bee-line for the CD racks or the bookshelves. This wintery February day was no exception for me as I made for the far end of the warm mustiness within. My eyes scanned the row of books before me,. I checked out the covers on the few volumes which had been chosen for special display. As I did so, a rather fine-looking tome caught my gaze – a hardback with a deep green cover with the unmistakable image of the Uffington White Horse emblazoned upon it. I was looking at the cover of Peter Vansittart’s “Paths From a White Horse”, his memoirs.

I paid my 50p and felt enriched. All things associated with this iconic figure deliver to me warm feelings of connection.  Never mind that I had no idea who this man was, shame on me ( * … but see below). But the opening paragraph of the memoirs made sure I knew I was in good company. Here was a man who knows was it is like to have this creature embedded in his consciousness.

“1923: I was three. A White Horse lay bare and solitary, cut into a hillside. It changes whenever I return to it, like a book, painting, friend, but remains fixed in my imagination, a reminder of the multiple transformations that enthuse life. All is provisional. Memory contracts and enlarges as if in a dream that does not cease in the morning”.

Vansittart’s words resonate. Being North Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) bred, and with various members of my extended family living in villages in the Vale of the White Horse, how could they not? The image of this unique creature was and is everywhere: on milk bottles, vans, church magazines, dry cleaners’ shop fronts, cafes. Living away from the downland on which the hill is dominant, my early experience was always of the printed image, which beguiled me.

 It was to be many years before I could stand on the hill itself, for reasons which I still hardly understand. But travelling on the A420 from the age of six, in the truck  laden with pigs and driven by my father to the slaughterhouse at  Stratton-St-Margaret, I had glimpses on the unmistakable contours of the hill. On good days, I could make sense of the fleeting outline of the beast itself, always incomplete, always demanding a closer look. My father is not here to tell me why he never took time to take me to get that closer look. I had to wait for boarding-school days. But I have a lesson from Vansittart when I read this:

“Adults seemed strangely unaware of the White Horse, or reluctant to mention it. Here, already, was the first of the countless secrets that helped to awaken me. The Horse, existing without breathing or eating, though, in days of shadow and sun, it sometimes appeared to move, seemed mysteriously more real than an actual white horse assiduously cropping the pastures.”

In those few words, I am given permission to believe absolutely in the value of symbols.

White Horse Hill, Uffington June 2010

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* .. or perhaps not. This is the intro to the obituary by the Daily Telegraph

Peter Vansittart, who has died aged 88, was among the most prolific writers of historical fiction, with 15 such novels to his credit; but while he attracted much critical acclaim his books achieved only modest commercial success, none selling more than 3,000 copies.

“My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all,” he ruefully observed. “This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others.” >>> more

Read more in; Peter Vansittart Biography – Peter Vansittart comments: – London, Owen, York, and Historical – JRank Articles

Sanctus from the Missa Luba

 It is possible that you have to be of a certain age to know about this music, or at least, to know how people became aware of it in the late 1960s. It is a haunting and other-wordly sound; a Latin Mass based on traditional Congolese songs. It came into popular mainstream through the 1968 Lindsay Anderson movie “If…”, with Malcolm McDowell’s character Mick Travis playing it over and over , his personal soundtrack to an ethereal, adolescent cool in the buttoned-up world of the traditional public school. 

I remember finding a copy on a 45rpm single in the HMV record shop in London’s Oxford Street. I was 6 years out of boarding school, but had seen this movie whilst still ensconced in that peculiar world. I had to buy that disc, just for the memory, and I have it still.

About “If.. – the Movie

Thoughts After Thoreau

First written May 10th 2012 in Kelling, Norfolk

On recommendation from an old friend, I have taken to listening to Radio Four’s “Something Understood“. This week’s programme was dedicated to the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.   ( Link to synopsis here )

In listening, I enjoyed hearing that Thoreau achieved a balance, a middle ground, in the cabin he built near Walden Pond Massachusetts, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The austerity evolving from ideas of transcendentalism always risks a disappearance into an abyss of anarchy otherwise. Yes it is true that too much attachment to civilisation and its “progress” eats away at the soul, but it is very necessary to be intelligent about how this is all managed in the time-bound state.

I was taken by the extract from the essay “Life Without Principle” which mentioned the “panting of the steam train” which interrupted his sleep and was a reminder of the push of progress and “business”.

That was then. Now, as I stand in my garden and rake the ground to prepare for the runner-bean sticks, I hear in the distance that self-same “panting”, by now a friendly “chuff-chuff” and short tooting whistle as the North Norfolk  Poppy Line steam train takes holidaymakers on their short journey to the beach and pubs of Sheringham.

This is the ”glory”  which Thoreau sought:  to see “mankind at leisure for once”.  The circle comes around, the hard prices have been paid, and the essence of human endeavour seems not so aggressively unhappy: it becomes a matter of attachment to the right bits, if one is to survive realistically and not as some kind of mad Eremite.

I reflect also in the same essay, on his discussion of the man walking in the woods being perceived either as a “loafer”  or as “industrious” . Will he enjoy the  beauty of the woods, or will he despoil them in the name of “business”? Making the earth “bald before its time” of course brings about this inevitable result  caused by too much industrious and enterprising endeavour.

This reminded me of Hopkins’ poem below      ( and yes, Hopkins is found among  myriad others, who were attuned to the essence of what was coming, as the industrial age developed apace,  and saw  its insidiousness weaving into the old rhythms of existence).

Binsey Poplars, felled 1879
Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

But actually, Hopkins was more of a Romantic than an Environmentalist. Poplars last only about 60 – 100 years or just a little more depending on type, and the ones at Binsey were replanted immediately. They  have similarly since been cropped and managed, as is required for trees which are prone to canker and other pests. I also read somewhere, that the wood from the Poplars in Hopkins’ day was taken and used for brake shoes on locomotives on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. So I guess this would have further dismayed the Romantic.

But I am sure Hopkins would have enjoyed the sound of similar steam trains wafting across the fields from Weybourne yesterday afternoon.

John Craske - A Delicate Life

I am reading a book by Julia Blackburn, who spends her time between Suffolk and Italy. Her book pursues the life and art of one John Craske, local man to Norfolk: fish- and sea-connected born 1881 and who after the 1914-18 war at the age of 36, fell into some kind of mental stupor, from which he hardly recovered.

c. John Craske Postcard Painting
- The Duigan Collection

The book, suitably enough, is called “Threads” and is a meditation on loss and memory, with scenes local to North Norfolk, and reports of conversations in her pursuit of this man’s story.

John Craske spent most of his “saner”  time from 1923 painting images of the sea, and later, when too ill even to stand, he took to his bed and embroidered instead of using paints for these images. They are extraordinary in detail.  He is more or less forgotten, and Julia Blackburn has written in an affectionate and often moving way about her attempt to find traces of him in the memory of local people, and in museums / homes where his work remains scattered, abused and forgotten.

More about John Craske is here.

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In homage to John Craske, I made the picture below. It takes the shape of one of his boats, on a sea of my own making. The top bit was chiselled by God over time – it is the grain and the colour of the wood I am using.

Brown / White Study

The Cruellest Month

London Bridge 1896 

The adage “April is the cruellest month” proliferates at this time of year: we are exposed to the greatness of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land through this popular line expressing distress at the prospect of springtime and renewal.  When pushed to find another famous line from the poem, I find most folk who have some acquaintance with the poem will recall the image:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge..

The crowd flowing over London Bridge is taken straight out of Dante. Eliot’s notes at the end of the poem  acknowledge this, referring to Canto III  (“sì lunga tratta di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto
 che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta”). Eliot saw this crowd every morning, and I feel sure sometimes was part of it, in his commute to LLoyds Bank in Lombard Street.

In Dante’s Inferno, these souls are forever trapped in limbo ( but see * below ), since they have lived in a moral neutrality, just half-alive in this life, and so having no hopes of death. Death, of course, is just a step on the path to unified consciousness. Such souls have no hope of this, and so their death undoes them. “I had never thought death had undone so many”. and they are left in a void, symbolised by the Waste Land. Folk in the Waste Land do not participate in the great cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth toward that elusive unified consciousness.

There is a great beauty in such fragments. Eliot weaves into the poem, bits from Western and Eastern culture and philosophy. It is a “heap”.

The Waste Land - Images from a Walk 1998

I like the image of a “heap”. Looking at the heap, you can see the occasional glint of hope, amongst the dross. Each glint, each shard of light, references a major body of traditional thought, culture, legend,
myth and belief system. cf Dante, the Bible, the Upanishads, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Buddha, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Webster etc. etc.  and leads you onwards. But the poem also – and primarily – stands uniquely by itself, enabling an emotional response such as those evoked by the idea of a “flow” in those few lines.

And so, amongst lines evoking isolation and despair, there are also instances of a perceived and exquisite harmony – eg a small section  from Line 257 in Lower Thames Street and Magnus Martyr Church .

The Church of Magnus Martyr

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold

Sadly of course, in our modern era, all that river-facing activity has gone. How much of it was it there in the 1920′s? I don’t know, but it was there in the poet’s imagination. And it maps anyway to a time when Lower Thames Street was full of folk from nearby Billingsgate Market (the old one, of course),  where fish was traded and the place teemed with life and purpose and which looked out towards the water, sea and hope. So these rich images are now only echoes of a past of promise and fortune against a present dullness.  And so the voices which speak of the cruelty of April are locked against the opportunity to renew towards a life of promise.

Note * My old friend Nick Parker ( il miglior studente ) pointed out to me quite rightly that one should be careful with the word "limbo". The ideas expressed here come from observations in the scholarship ( e.g. Elizabeth Drew T.S.Eliot: The design of His Poetry 1950 p99 ; F.O. Mathiesson "The Achievement of T.S.Eliot 1935 p22). But as Nick pointed out, it is not correct to associate these lines with Limbo (capital "L"). They refer to 'gli ignavi' who appear in Canto 3 and not those who are "dinanzi al cristianismo".

Round Towers and Scratch Dials

Round-towered churches are, of course a feature in many Norfolk villages. Having time on my hands on a crisp February day in 2014 I decided it was high time to take a look at another one. I had heard of a small and ancient church not far away and settled on a plan to see it.

St. Margaret's Church, Worthing

The Church of St. Margaret in the Norfolk village of Worthing, just off the road from Holt to Dereham, is associated with the Elmham group of churches. The group is part of the Sparham Deanery in the Diocese of Norfolk. This is an ancient building of great charm, standing in peaceful solitude. It is some distance south west of the village, which has moved steadily away over the centuries. In summer St. Margaret’s must be easy to miss, situated as it is behind the roadside hedgerow. On a cold winter day, the simple outline of the church emerges into view from the road past the village through the leafless trees ahead. A short drive on a track to the left reveals the churchyard gate.


The round tower of St. Margaret’s is barely as high as the nave to which it is attached. It was not always like this. The tower belfry has disappeared, following a collapse lost to memory. But it is substantial for all that, and gives the whole building a unique “feel”. Old as the tower is, built in the Middle Saxon period 900-1000 AD,  the nave is older still. In the quiet isolation there is a sense that this structure has absorbed the secrets of time. There is another sense also, that in deference to this absorbed wisdom, the village itself has moved away to make respectful space for a holiness of silence.

The South Porch - Norman Archway

The south porch reveals reminders of busier and more prosperous times. There is a fine Norman arch with zig-zag moulding which represents a major devotional investment in a modest building which otherwise reflects the humble location it was built to serve. But also, to the left of the door, are the familiar markings of a medieval scratch dial – of the type which proliferate and survive in so many churches. These sun dials were of a specific purpose, before the arrival of mechanical clocks.

Scratchdial - South Porch

A scratch dial ( also known as a mass-dial), is usually in a circular shape, carved into the exterior church wall and used to tell the time of church services. At the centre of the dial is a hole where a small peg ( a “style” or “gnomon”) was inserted to act as a simple sundial marker. Usually they have only three or four radiating sections, rather than a full 360 degree of lines, as it was only necessary to tell the time (or more specifically, the hour) of services, so extra lines were unnecessary.


At St. Margaret’s, the dial is well worn and ragged, but unmistakably bears witness to the diurnal round of worship: active, measured and regular.

The East Wall

But there is more. It starts with the fact that the east wall of the church has no window. It seems that the chancel which would have incorporated a window has long since disappeared, replaced by an expanse of flint supported by recycled stone, and some interesting brickwork which identifies these works as happening within the past couple of centuries. Amongst this re-organised rubble is another scratch dial, this one at head-height in one of the stones. It is better preserved than the south porch example. But here, of course, its presence reflects its redundancy in the centuries of the mechanical clock. But the recycled stone on which it is embedded continues to be useful.

A time for every purpose.

This article is reproduced in the magazine of the Round Tower Churches Society  in their March 2018 edition. A PDF of the magazine can be downloaded here.

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Sundial at Wolvercote: “Redeem the Time”
A few weeks after this visit, I was wandering in Wolvercote village near Oxford, and took this picture of the sundial at St Peter’s church.

This is a modern example of an old tradition. As I understand it, the motto “Redeem the Time” ( c.f. Ephesians 5: 15-21; and T S Eliot “Ash Wednesday“) appears scratched between two ancient mass-dial examples in the tower. Here in this far more visible incarnation those same words are incorporated to follow the tradition of mottoes on sundials. Tradition and circular time in two February days.

Der Lesender Klosterschüler

This wooden sculpture is by Ernst Barlach (1870-1938), the German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. I came across it in 1969 in the novel by Alfred Andersch “Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund” (Zanzibar or the Last Reason), and it made a deep impression on me.  I only saw the actual carvings by Barlach much later in Nuremberg in 2003: these were exciting to see, but the photo in the text book remained iconic in my mind.

The figure, made in 1930 is now in the town of  Güstrow, in Northern Germany,  where Barlach lived until his death in October 1938.   Though a supporter of the German cause in the First World War, Barlach grew to despise the futility of war and developed a pacifist position at odds with the rise of Nazism in the 1920s. His sculptures were seen as degenerate art, but Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures, but protested the injustice, and continued to produce.


From 1933 Barlach’s sculptures were removed from churches and public spaces. In 1936 and 1937 the persecution grew more intense:  Barlach’s galleries were closed, public art collections removed and sculptures torn down. Even his collections of drawings were not allowed to appear in book form. This was tantamount to a complete ban on working and without doubt contributed to Barlach’s early death in 1938.

Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund

In the novel, the Reading Monk has a central role as a trigger of consciousness and is a starting-point for the external action. “Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund” is about moral choices in a tale of escape, pursuit, persecution, crises of faith and political disenchantment. The statue, which must be smuggled out of Nazi Germany as an act of defiance, is a focus for the inner dialogue or practical desires of each of the five protagonists in the tale.

Among those characters is  Knudsen the rough-and-ready fisherman to whom the task falls to take the figure to Sweden. He is touched by the figure as “a strange creature from wood in the dark”. The Boy, his helper and the seeker of the “Last Reason” to leave his home, is captivated by the aura of the character.

Helander the priest the sculpture embodies an age-old spirituality that is timeless, in stark contrast to the indifference of the populace to the rise of a godless and inhuman regime. To save the figure will be an act of defiance and a show of his faith. Not least, a show of faith to himself, which is sorely tried by the absence of God and His failure to act against the totalitarian state.
For Judith, the monk is one who can read all he wants, and is free to read anywhere. As a Jew in flight from Germany, this is emblematic of her bid to escape from a place where reading is done only in a background of fear and entrapment.

Gregor, the Communist Party official tasked with the safe removal of the figure to Sweden, is the character most in thrall to the Reading Monk.  He recalls his time at the Lenin Academy when the reading was intense, but all about getting lost in the uncritical acceptance of words echoing party ideology. Gregor can see that this monk is very different. He is not lost. He reads easily, attentively and closely. But he also one who is able to close the book, stand up and turn his attention elsewhere, and do something entirely different and of his own choosing.

Gregor’s reaction echoed my own in those days. But for me the emphasis was different. This Reading Monk was enjoying an engagement in study and a peace in spirit. There would be a time to walk away, to have new experiences.  But whatever these were, there would always be this place of serenity awaiting.

Images of the Lesender Klosterschler and Barlach

Barlach website:  http://www.ernst-barlach-gesellschaft.de/