Tell someone you're going walking in Leicestershire and chances are you'll be greeted by a blank bewildered look, or the bald question 'Why?' In fact, Leicestershire has some of the best walking country in England - and yesterday I was there, in the countryside east of Leicester, amid wide open views, rolling hills, hedgerowed pastures grazed by sheep and cattle, patches of woodland (mostly coverts for foxes - this is Quorn country), little stone-built villages of understated charm with sturdy spired churches, and otherwise, as far as the blue hilly horizon, little or no evidence of human habitation. Beautiful walking country, and - what gives walking in these parts of Leicestershire its special feeling - country with its history still written on the face of the land. Everywhere is evidence of the medieval past, in the form of the distinctive ridge and furrow pattern (as in the picture) left by generations of ploughing, and - most dramatically - the outlines and 'humps and tumps' of deserted medieval villages. In the most remarkable DMVs (as historians call them), such as Ingarsby, the hollow ways that were the village's streets can still be walked, between raised areas where the houses were - even the site of a mill can still be made out, and nearby a motte and bailey castle and the moat of the old manor, the one house of the medieval village that is still standing. Villages were deserted for various reasons - epidemic disease reducing population below viable levels, marginal sites proving unsustainable, loss of crops causing famine - life was hard, and people more mobile than we commonly think - but Ingarsby is a classic case of 15th-century enclosure driving the population off the land. Those sheep pastures, so peaceful and picturesque today, represented the end of village life for the inhabitants of Ingarsby and many another village, at a time when, in Thomas More's phrase, sheep ate men. While the sheep barons grew fat in their big houses (and indeed abbeys - it was Leicester Abbey that enclosed this land), those who had once lived off the land around were evicted and thrown on their own meagre resources, many becoming beggars, many dying of disease and want. To walk amid the remnants of their village life - which survive only because the heavy land has remained as unploughed pasture - is a poignant reminder of a historical experience that resonated for centuries, continuing in different forms (read John Clare!) and still feeds into the unique English relationship with the countryside, into that faint unease behind our enjoyment of it, a sense of brutal disruption, shameful appropriation, of something lost beyond recall.
Saturday, 31 July 2010
History on the Face of the Land
Tell someone you're going walking in Leicestershire and chances are you'll be greeted by a blank bewildered look, or the bald question 'Why?' In fact, Leicestershire has some of the best walking country in England - and yesterday I was there, in the countryside east of Leicester, amid wide open views, rolling hills, hedgerowed pastures grazed by sheep and cattle, patches of woodland (mostly coverts for foxes - this is Quorn country), little stone-built villages of understated charm with sturdy spired churches, and otherwise, as far as the blue hilly horizon, little or no evidence of human habitation. Beautiful walking country, and - what gives walking in these parts of Leicestershire its special feeling - country with its history still written on the face of the land. Everywhere is evidence of the medieval past, in the form of the distinctive ridge and furrow pattern (as in the picture) left by generations of ploughing, and - most dramatically - the outlines and 'humps and tumps' of deserted medieval villages. In the most remarkable DMVs (as historians call them), such as Ingarsby, the hollow ways that were the village's streets can still be walked, between raised areas where the houses were - even the site of a mill can still be made out, and nearby a motte and bailey castle and the moat of the old manor, the one house of the medieval village that is still standing. Villages were deserted for various reasons - epidemic disease reducing population below viable levels, marginal sites proving unsustainable, loss of crops causing famine - life was hard, and people more mobile than we commonly think - but Ingarsby is a classic case of 15th-century enclosure driving the population off the land. Those sheep pastures, so peaceful and picturesque today, represented the end of village life for the inhabitants of Ingarsby and many another village, at a time when, in Thomas More's phrase, sheep ate men. While the sheep barons grew fat in their big houses (and indeed abbeys - it was Leicester Abbey that enclosed this land), those who had once lived off the land around were evicted and thrown on their own meagre resources, many becoming beggars, many dying of disease and want. To walk amid the remnants of their village life - which survive only because the heavy land has remained as unploughed pasture - is a poignant reminder of a historical experience that resonated for centuries, continuing in different forms (read John Clare!) and still feeds into the unique English relationship with the countryside, into that faint unease behind our enjoyment of it, a sense of brutal disruption, shameful appropriation, of something lost beyond recall.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
The Vet's Daughter
And still they keep on coming - those women novelists (I promise I'll read a man one day...). I had never heard of Barbara Comyns, a bohemian type who mixed with the (appalling) likes of Dylan Thomas and Augustus John, lived a rackety life, ended up married to a pal of Kim Philby's, spent many years in Spain, and along the way managed to write a string of novels which are highly regarded by, shall we say, a select few. I've just finished reading the one regarded as her best (it was even turned into a musical by Sandy Wilson - a mind-boggling thought) - The Vet's Daughter (Virago Modern Classics, with a new introduction that no one bothered to proofread). It is an extraordinary work, very individual in style and quirky in outlook - Comyns has been described as 'Beryl Bainbridge on acid' - and I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. The first paragraph gives a good idea of the book's world and Comyns's style:
'A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that was what he seemed to need me to say, and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would most likely have worn knee-caps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet's house with a lamp outside. I said 'You must excuse me' and left this poor man among the privet hedges.'
And that is the last we see of the man with the ginger moustache until he makes a mysterious reappearance at the very end of the story. In the meanwhile we are taken into the house of her father the vet, a drunken brute who has subdued his wife and daughter by violence and terror. Life becomes increasingly intolerable for the vet's daughter, until the opportunity for escape emerges and is taken - but then things take several unexpected turns, building up to a very strange and enigmatic climax, by which time it almost seems the tale has strayed into (aargh) 'magical realism'...
Barbara Comyns came recommended by the owner of this fine bookshop, and as it happens I was in his shop again yesterday with my Derbyshire cousin. I had only finished The Vet's Daughter on the train up and we talked about it briefly before I fell to browsing those well-stocked shelves. He characterised the book as 'English Gothic', and I think that's dead right - it's a rare example of 20th-century English Gothic, perhaps a kind of secular and very English equivalent of Flannery O'Connor. It represents a cast of imagination and a freedom of resource that seldom turn up in English fiction - even among women novelists.
'A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that was what he seemed to need me to say, and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would most likely have worn knee-caps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet's house with a lamp outside. I said 'You must excuse me' and left this poor man among the privet hedges.'
And that is the last we see of the man with the ginger moustache until he makes a mysterious reappearance at the very end of the story. In the meanwhile we are taken into the house of her father the vet, a drunken brute who has subdued his wife and daughter by violence and terror. Life becomes increasingly intolerable for the vet's daughter, until the opportunity for escape emerges and is taken - but then things take several unexpected turns, building up to a very strange and enigmatic climax, by which time it almost seems the tale has strayed into (aargh) 'magical realism'...
Barbara Comyns came recommended by the owner of this fine bookshop, and as it happens I was in his shop again yesterday with my Derbyshire cousin. I had only finished The Vet's Daughter on the train up and we talked about it briefly before I fell to browsing those well-stocked shelves. He characterised the book as 'English Gothic', and I think that's dead right - it's a rare example of 20th-century English Gothic, perhaps a kind of secular and very English equivalent of Flannery O'Connor. It represents a cast of imagination and a freedom of resource that seldom turn up in English fiction - even among women novelists.
Monday, 26 July 2010
Enter The Room
I am indebted to Mike in New Zealand for alerting me to the existence of this prime contender for the title Worst Movie Ever Made. I'd never heard of it before, but Wikipedia capably outlines the full fascinating story of The Room and its creator, Tommy Wiseau. The many clips of YouTube more than live up to the trailer (the roof scene 'Oh hi Mark' is especially choice). I'm sorry that Wiseau has taken to claiming the film was intended as a black comedy, as there was clearly no such intention. It stands as a telling example of what can happen when a subtantial sum of money and a movie camera (in Wiseau's case two, just to be on the safe side) fall into the hands of a man of boundless ego, raging artistic ambition and zero ability. I remember years ago sitting in some little arthouse cinema and enduring another vanity project, Chappaqua, in which one Conrad Rooks explored his drug experiences in gruellingly psychedelic style, while the likes of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsgerg, Moondog and indeed The Fugs, pop up in mystifying cameos. The score was pretty much what you'd expect of a co-composition by Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass, both of whom no doubt lost no time in deleting it from their CVs. What's more,their score replaced the one Rooks had originally commissioned - an ear-bleeding sonic onslaught by Ornette Coleman, The Chappaqua Suite. Like The Room, Chappaqua is classified as a 'cult' - but by golly it isn't half as much fun as Tommy Wiseau's effort.
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Chalkhill Blues
Well I woke up this mornin'
Butterflies on my mind.
Yeah I woke up this mornin'
With butterflies on my mind.
Had to get me to them chalkhills
An' see what I could find.
I got those chalkhill blues,
Buggin' me both night and day.
I got those chalkhill blues,
They're a buggin' me night and day.
Got to get me to them chalkhills
An' chase those blues away.
Well I went down to the chalkhills,
I had no time to lose.
Yeah I went down to the chalkhills,
You know I had no time to lose.
But when I got me to them chalkhills,
All I found was blues.
I got those chalkhill blues,
etc, etc.
Jersey Tiger
Dusk in the garden. I was sitting enjoying the peace and the distant screams of swifts high above, when a moth flew distractedly by and settled, wings folded, on a clematis shoot just above and on the other side of the boundary fence. In flight this moth had seemed an orange blur, so I thought it must be one of the Underwing tribe, whose drab forewings and brightly coloured hindwings create a similar effect - but once settled, there was no mistaking this tiger-striped beauty. It was a tiger moth - specifically a Jersey Tiger moth. Once a Channel Islands speciality, the Jersey Tiger has in recent years spread along the south coast, and, for reasons unknown, into parts of London. Including, it would seem, my own, though I'd never spotted one before. As the Jersey Tiger flies by day as well as night, I shall keep my eyes peeled.
Friday, 23 July 2010
Born on This Day...
... in 1777, the mystically inclined Romantic artist, colour theorist and friend of Goethe, Philipp Otto Runge. His work - especially his painting of The Hulsenbeck Children (above) - obviously had a huge influence on the very strange and beautiful illustrations in Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. Haunting's the word...
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Memento Mori
The novels of Muriel Spark that most frequently turn up in charity shops are The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington and Territorial Rights. This anyway is my conclusion after years spent scanning the shelves on the lookout for one I hadn't read and which I knew by repute as an early masterpiece and perhaps her best novel, Memento Mori (1959). Finally, in a Kensington charity shop a couple of weeks ago, I found it (in a recent Penguin paperback which appears to be a fascimile of the 1961 Penguin in a new jacket), and was able to confirm for myself that it is indeed an early m and perhaps too her best n. It is an extraordinary book, entirely about death and yet utterly exhilarating and extremely funny (Chapter Three's account of the funeral of Lisa Brooke had me all but rolling on the floor). In the compass of a short novel, Spark assembles a large cast of characters - some vile, others delightful, each of them deftly individuated and entirely convincing - and sets spinning an elaborately complex plot composed of mysterious phone calls, long concealed secrets, old enmities and grudges, blackmail, intrigue and even murder, the whole thing perfectly organised and held together by an impersonal but omniscient narrator. It's at once defiantly old-fashioned and unmistakably modern, even postmodern - and all brilliantly, effortlessly done, with not a word wasted. And of course everybody dies... I'm glad I found it at last.
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