Images from a Shed

Here are a few pictures/sketches which emerged from my shed at Benjamins Cottage in Kelling in 2013. I confess to a certain nostalgia for the shed, the location, the quietude.

The song is “Shady Lane” by Snowgoose. I found it on the July 2012 “Now Hear This” compilation of new releases which came with the now sadly defunct “Word” music magazine. This was a fine publication: music old and new, with in-depth interviews and  deep knowledge delivered with panache.

 .

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

“I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things steadying the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on the sea shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles, before finally coming up against these trees and their two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming accross those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all.. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyesand imagined that this was the spot where everything I’d lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it..”

These are the words of Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. She reflects on her solitude after the demise of her lover Tommy, and her progression towards the gruesome destiny defined by society for her and her closest friends. When I lived on that same Norfolk coast, at the time believing that this place indeed was where I also had washed up,  I knew they had to belong, at least geographically, to this Miscellany.

---

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

This novel by Kazuo Ishiguro has details of boarding-school existence which captures some truths for those who have gone through the experience. The formation of cliques, the petty rivalries, the attachment to benevolent teachers, the management of feelings in a parent-free environment are all in the mix, and it is this mix that key individuals discover and explore their core humanity, in spite of the controlling regimentation of daily life. But the novel is not, of course, only or even at all about boarding school existence.

Kathy is a thirty-one year old carer. Those for whom she cares, as we soon discover, are a special set of people, of whom she is one. She is good at her job – she has been doing it for eleven years. But now she is about to give it up for what is, it turns out, to be the beginning of the last phase of her life.  We find her now, reflecting back over that life, and its unique experiences. She calls to mind her days at Hailsham, the idyllic boarding school she went to and which had a major influence on her later years.

But we soon find out, through arcane references and the odd vocabulary that peppers Kathy’s narrative, that Hailsham was no ordinary school, in fact not quite a school at all. It is recogniseable as a boarding school, but differs from the norm in fundamental ways.  A key difference, we soon learn, is that the children here have no parents to go home to, and so that important rhythm of mixing different worlds, is lost to them.

Some of the teachers are distant, uncomfortable with the children. The unspoken secret between controllers and controlled weighs heavy. The punishment for Miss Lucy, who one day reveals all to the class, is immediate dismissal. The class, however, is strangely muted at the revelation. It is a secret which remains unwelcome and quiety shelved as life, of a kind, continues.

But in this mix, Kathy’s friends Tommy and Ruth want to discover more about their destiny. As they grow older, they find themselves working through their emotional bonds which grow from the seeds planted in their time at Hailsham, and it is this love story of possessiveness and then self-sacrifice that provides the background to our exploration of the parallel political, social and emotional world of the novel.

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

---

* .. 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.

---

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".