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We returned from one of our regular trips to the library recently - me with a bagful of poetry – and my daughter with White Crow, a young adult novel with a dark, portentous cover…
As soon as we were through the front door, my daughter disappeared to her room, clutching the book like a prize – and by tea time, she had already read half way through it. By the end of the day, she had finished it, and was wearing that enigmatic expression of a reader just emerged from a journey somewhere inward, challenging and rewarding…
She mentioned an elfin-like girl named Ferelith – and mysteries that had gripped so much, she had been unable to put the book down… But she didn’t want to spoil it for me if I decided to read it too… (I’ve been careful not to include any potential spoilers in the following review, for the same reason…)
In the library, I’d only taken in a general impression of the book’s cover and title. Now, looking at it again, I fully registered who the author was – and recognised Marcus Sedgwick’s name as one that often crops up on children’s book recommendations and shortlists for book awards, including the Carnegie Medal. I checked my bookshelves – and yes, I was right, I have one of his other novels, The Dark Horse, which I bought a while back and still haven’t got round to reading.
Intrigued, I borrowed White Crow from my daughter a few days later – and, like her, found it was one of those gobble-up books that won’t let you go. I’m not quite sure who or what did the devouring – whether I gobbled up the book, or whether it gobbled me. All I know is that I was edgily compelled to turn just one more page, to read just one more chapter – unable to let it go. The book has an uneasy hold on you – circling you first with intrigue, and then moving in ever closer, to enmesh you in a growing sense of troubling darkness.
And as the story progresses, we are moving into very dark and disturbing stuff indeed. At the climax of the novel, Sedgwick heightens the tension to such a degree, my fear for the protagonist became oppressive, almost physical. Mistrust, the sinister and the malign are pitched to an all pervasive sense of dread; an almost unbearable suspense.
Reading this book, I felt increasingly on shifting ground – metaphorically and, in terms of the characters’ location, quite literally. The story is set in the village of Winterfold, based on Dunwich in Suffolk:
‘Once upon a time there was a whole town here, not just a handful of houses. A town with twelve churches and thousands of people, dozens of streets, and a busy harbour.
And then the sea ate it.
Storm by storm, year by year, the cliffs collapsed into the advancing sea, taking the town with it, house by house and street by street…’
We see a landscape where the last remaining church in the village is half eaten away by cliff erosion, its eastern end gaping open to sea, moon and stars; where the graves and bones of the long dead are poised to fall into the sea – and where subterranean secrets of the past are about to be exposed in all their horror.
This is a novel of big themes and big questions. It’s about the inevitability of death and loss – and about human questioning beyond the boundaries of that inevitability. Opposites constantly fray each other’s edges – life and death, sea and land, love and hate, good and evil, trust and mistrust, choice and fate, hope and despair, heaven and hell – angels and devils.
Sixteen year old Rebecca arrives in Winterfold with her father, their relationship also fraying at the edges of love, mistrust and resentment. Her father is a police officer, under suspicion for some kind of dereliction of duty that may have led to the death of a young girl. In Winterfold, they are looking for a retreat from the hell of their situation in London.
Rebecca meets Ferelith, a local girl with an ethereal, other-worldly quality, who is:
‘…strange-looking; there’s something elfin about her. Everything ends in points; her nose, her eyes, her chin, her lips, her fingers, the spikes of her long tresses of black hair…… her teeth, not quite a vampire’s, but not far short.’
Ferelith is a highly intelligent young woman who, having gained her ‘A’ levels at the age of fourteen has taken herself out of school, bored with it limitations. What interest her are big questions. Is there a God? If there is a guiding force in the universe, is it benign? Is the universe just a big cosmic accident? Is there a purpose to life? What are the implications of all the possibilities? She becomes obsessed with the question of life after death, wrapping up her thoughts in stories that surround the old, ruined manor in Winterfold; stories of a man called Dr Barrieux who arrived in Winterfold in the eighteenth century, fresh from the French Revolution, amid rumours that he was conducting sinister experiments into the possibilities of life after death.
An exploration of the philosophy of William James (philosopher and psychologist brother of the novelist Henry James) also runs through the fabric of the novel; Ferelith is very interested in choice and how it determines the future – and bound up in her obsession with questions about the afterlife, is William James’s analogy of the white crow. As Ferelith explains it in the novel:
‘You might say that although you have not seen every crow in the whole world, every crow you have ever seen is black. Therefore the chances are very great that all crows are black. In fact, you have decided that all crows are black. Now of course, if someone could show you a white crow, everything would be overturned in a moment.
But all crows are black.
And in the same way, you conclude that no one lives after death. There is no ‘other side’. There is no white crow.
But, supposing I said I had seen a white crow? Just one. A single white crow.
What then?’
There is a leaden weight of sadness and suffering behind both girls’ histories, and a longing to love underlies their troubled paths. In their developing friendship, there is a moving, tentative reaching out through the ravages of damage, whilst manipulation and detachment , threat, cruelty, power-play and vulnerability become a shifting counter current in that connection between them.
The summer in which the story takes place is unrelentingly hot, dry and parched – but, like everything in the book, the unease between states is held on a knife edge and Winterfold, living up to its name, retains ‘a cold embrace, and like the snows of winter, it does not let you go easily.’
The language is tight, edgy; it makes you jittery and unsure. There are three narrators – an omnipotent narrator, telling the story in third person present tense, an eighteenth century priest telling his story in diary form – and Ferelith, narrating in first person past tense. Like the unstable landscape, the unsettling dance between the narratives adds to the shifting feel of the book – and the reasons for the differing tenses become startlingly exposed by the end of the novel. The very structure of the book fulfils the interplay of its explorations.
All the time, as I raced through the book, I was aware that Marcus Sedgwick was layering the narrative with meaning and significance, with clues and pointers; food for endlessly questioning thought. For instance, each of the chapters narrated by Ferelith is headed by a song title, which I’m sure on further investigation, will throw up some deeper significance. So far, in hindsight, I’ve realised how one is a major clue.
It is a book that deserves a second – slower and closer – reading. Its structure is layered with fraught possibilities, working on many levels simultaneously. The symbolic and apparent, the psychological and physical, the natural and supernatural draw the reader to their tipping points, challenging interpretation. Taking us on subterranean journeys of the human mind, Sedgwick offers up an unsettling exploration of the unanswerable, and leaves our perceptions teetering on that ever present knife edge of doubt and insight.
This is territory suitable for older children and adults. Dark, disturbing and leading into gruesome and horrifying recesses of humanity, it is a troubling read, but one that nags at the edges of the mind and sets a deep questioning to eat away at assumptions and veiled possibilities, exposing them to the light of scrutiny, just as the sea in the book relentlessly uncovers what’s hidden, and the storms force us to look and see.
…Continued from: A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ – Part One.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
- From Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake.
In his biography of William Blake, Peter Ackroyd describes two events that happened in 1825, when Blake stayed in a cottage in Shoreham during a visit to The Ancients. One involved a trip to ‘a half-ruined mansion’ in search of ghosts, during which the party of friends were both scared and riveted by ‘a curious rattling sound’ – which, on further investigation by Palmer and Calvert, turned out to be the manifestation of nothing more than a humble snail climbing an oriel window. Ackroyd goes on to relate that:
‘Powers of another sort were more in evidence later, however, when Blake sat at a table in the cottage. He put his hand to his forehead.
BLAKE: Palmer is coming. He is walking up the road.
CALVERT: Oh, Mr Blake, he’s gone to London; we saw him off in the coach.
BLAKE: He is coming through the wicket.
Then, sure enough, ‘Samuel Palmer raised the latch and came in amongst them. It so turned out that the coach had broken down near to the gate of Lullingstone Park.’
- From Blake by Peter Ackroyd (Published by Vintage) – Chapter 28.
Almost two centuries later in June 2010, our second trip of the day was to the very same Lullingstone Park – or what is now the council run country park, part of the old estate adjacent to Lullingstone Castle. Here, after lunch in the café garden, we plunge out of the fiery heat of the afternoon into a cool winding out of trees along the River Darent. Some of the trees we meet along the way are venerable ancients.
They have seen some of our group before at various stages of our lives – me, during my childhood and young adulthood, my parents during theirs, my husband during our early years together. This is the first occasion these old-time trees have seen my children pass this way. Did they once watch Samuel Palmer and William Blake tread this path too? Did these oaks perhaps even make it into the artworks of Palmer and his friends?
Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park, 1828, Samuel Palmer
Oak Trees and Beech, 1828, Samuel Palmer
According to the British Museum catalogue, Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (from which the above illustrations are taken) the very name Darent ’…derives from the Celtic word derw meaning the river surrounded by oaks.’
These ancient trees have a heritage and legacy in this valley that stretches all ways in time…
My mum tells us stories of how she and her best friend often cycled out here from their nearby home town, in the early years after the Second World War. She squints at the trees and ruminates – “Yes, I remember this. We sat here and ate lunch, I think…” The trees are reference points to her memories, overlapping the past and present in her mind – like transparent photographic negatives – snapshots of ‘here’ and ‘then’ – one on top of the other. She tells us of how, back in those days in the 1940s, she remembers seeing the early excavations of the villa, still open to the elements.
Earlier, as we drove to the villa, we passed the river near Eynsford ford, and I was reassured to see groups of children, ankle deep in the water, colourful seaside nets and buckets or jam jars in hand, fishing for tiddlers – a scene that has replayed over and over, generation after generation in that spot. It’s almost a local tradition, family after family bringing kids to experience hand-me-down memories, as my parents brought me here to paddle and chase the shadows darting at my feet.
Back in Lullingstone Country Park, we enjoy the cool respite of the trees. The river is deeper, slower, more opaque and secretive here than back at the ford and the villa.
Shadow-winged groups of banded demoiselles flash like green-blue jewels over the water, landing on the flowering yellow flag irises to bask in the sun…
Banded Agrion (demoiselle), Agrion splendens - male. (Photo taken on banks of the River Avon, near Keynsham, 2010)
Banded Agrion (demoiselle), Agrion splendens - male. (Photo taken June 2010 in Victoria Park Botanical Gardens, Bath)
Blue sky, butterflies, light-gleams flicker through the leaves…
– and this year’s emerging generation of may flies bounce up and down like little yo-yos on strings, grasping their brief moment of airborne existence on this spinning planet.
Suddenly, the trees give way, and we are out into a driveway and at the gate of Lullingstone Castle. The blue sky bursts open – wide and limitless, and is written all over with the calligraphy of house martins, flashing white and black in curls and flourishes, eagerly read by our eyes. It is a joy just to stand and watch their exuberance, listen to their calls.
More flint, grown out of the landscape, rises up before us in the shape of the wall that surrounds the castle.
Like Eynsford Castle and the villa, it is the work of yet another generation shaping this landscape and the very stones of its soil. I remember that moment when, back on my 1970s school trip, we stood looking in at Lullingstone Castle, and were told the story of the silk worms here turning their mulberry-leaf-fuelled energy into the silk destined for Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding dress and coronation robes.
Amongst all this peace, and surrounded by the ebullient flight of house martins, it is sobering to think of a time when flights of a very different kind crossed these skies. Many World War Two pilots lost their lives in combat over this valley and the surrounding area. There is an Aircraft Museum in Shoreham, the work of which relates to this time – and I remember that often, when we drove past the memorial cross on Shoreham’s Downs, my parents would be prompted by its associations to weave an oral remembrance to the pilots who had fallen in our now peaceful corner of Kentish countryside. My parents once knew a very different Kent – of air raids and bombs.
A few years ago, in response to the oral history project my daughter was doing at school, my dad told us of the time when, as an awed and terrified small boy, he ran for cover as an aeroplane, machine guns firing, hurtled out of control over the high street of his hometown, just a few miles away from the Darent Valley. The pilot, on an air raid mission into British skies, had been shot by a defending Spitfire from Biggin Hill, and he had fallen across the button that fired his plane’s guns. Miraculously, no-one on the ground was shot and the plane fell clear of the town.
Another time, when my dad was about twelve, spending time alone digging the family allotment, he was left clinging to a tree as he heard the sickeningly familiar sound of a V2 rocket overhead, followed by its explosive landing about a mile away. Moments later, a six foot long piece of rocket debris landed in the lane close to the tree he was hugging for dear life. What a world of madness whirled around my parents’ childhoods. This Valley of Vision, and its quiet surroundings, brims over with stories. Life – and death – echo through its layers.
I think back to the time when the building of the M26 was imminent. Our inspirational drama teacher at school commissioned us with the task of creating our own play from our responses to the losses that would soon follow. She took our minds back to the cultural heritage of the Darent Valley, the people’s lives bound up with its landscape across the centuries. Samuel Palmer featured in our play – taking his place in the layers of our telling of the valley’s story, culminating with our own stories – and our fears and visions for the future. I think it was then, when the Valley of Vision, full of childhood memories, legacy and experience, suddenly presented itself as a vision of potential loss, that an awareness of the very real threats to our natural world first really hit home. It was another prompt to my ever growing restlessness to do something; another step towards rolling up my sleeves and getting involved in practical nature conservation…
In June 2010, we leave the Valley of Vision via the lanes that dip and weave through the huddled cottages of Shoreham where Palmer once lived.
Coming from Evening Church, 1830, Samuel Palmer
There’s a kind of ‘eternity in an hour’ to the passing of generations and the successive bonds we share to the landscapes around us; the cultural shaping of our lives in relation to the ancient hills and stones, the water and trees. Such places are vital for their own sake, for the natural life they support and contain. Their survival is also important to that core of the self, which for each person, in different ways, is bound up in the magic of those wild spaces; those places that remain a refuge both for the soul – and for vision.
In a Shoreham Garden, c.1829, Samuel Palmer
As the ancient tombs behind Lullingstone Roman Villa remind us, we may be – in terms of the huge workings of the universe – as ephemeral as the mayflies by the river, but the connections between us all; the layers we leave behind and build, memory by memory, foundation by foundation one on top of the other, the on-going traditions and relationship to place – forge a kind of eternity in each hand-me-down moment. In the Darent Valley, those memories have been laid down in flint and water – and in the mosaic of a villa floor, in the sweep of a fishing net, the glint of a damselfly, in the vision of an artist’s mind working through paint and brush – and in his poem, echoing down the ages from a page of his 1824 sketchbook to a 21st century blog:
Thee night shall hide, sweet visionary gleam
That softly lookest through the rising dew;
Till all like silver bright,
The faithful Witness, pure and white
Shall look o’er yonder grassy hill,
At this village, safe and still,
All is safe and all is still,
Save what noise the watch-dog makes
Or the shrill cock the silence breaks
Now and then -
And now and then -
Hark! – once again
The wether’s bell
To us doth tell
Some little stirring in the fold.
Methinks the ling’ring, dying ray
Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,
And lights the soul up more than day
- From Twilight Time (Shoreham) by Samuel Palmer.
Late Twilight, 1825, Samuel Palmer.
- All art illustrations in this post are from Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (British Museum publication)
The Darent Valley in Kent was Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision,’ and a home for many of my childhood daydreams.
Open a book containing Palmer’s rounded hills, swelling moons, embracing trees; the inviting dip and curve of a lane – like the mind’s reach into promised discovery – and I am back there, caught again by the spirit of the place…
Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape, by W. Vaughan, E.E. Barker & C. Harrison (British Museum catalogue). Cover shows The Magic Apple Tree, c.1830
Cornfield by Moonlight, with Evening Star, c.1830 - Samuel Palmer
Early Morning, Samuel Palmer - 1825
A Hilly Scene by Samuel Palmer, c. 1824-6
Once a week, every week all through my childhood, our little family car would wend its way along the road above Shoreham and through Eynsford, en route to visit my grandparents. From the back of the car, forehead resting against the window, I would drink in Samuel Palmer’s valley below, and let my imagination rove over the hills on the far side. A check-list of familiar scenes would unfold and recede – the memorial cross, carved into the chalk of the Downs in remembrance of villagers killed in World War One; the arch of the railway bridge; Eynsford ford – tugging enticingly at thoughts of bare feet, fishing nets and buckets; a hidden castle; tiled cottages with tiny doorways; a looming church tower; a school playground surrounded by fields, its trees gathered round like benevolent dinner ladies, inclining their branches to listen and keep watch.
In June 2010, three generations of our family were back there again – in the Valley of Vision. It was a hot, hot day. The sun beat down on our heads and glittered on the river. Butterflies shrugged the heat from sap-high leaves.
Our first stop for the day was Lullingstone Roman Villa – my first visit there since a school history trip back in the 1970s. My memories of that trip are of Eynsford Castle - muscular, flinty, uptight and stolid; a building blindly in league with our raucous imaginations. I remember the walk past the river, through the impressive arches of the railway viaduct…
…and towards the shed-like building which housed the Roman Villa at that time. After an hour or so spent echoing our amazement around that modern protective enclosure, we headed off for a nettle-stung wander through the woods, our teachers anxiously herding the intrepid souls who were each convinced they knew ‘the best way to go’ to catch a tantalising glimpse of Lullingstone Castle, before our return to school by train. I think I learnt more about history that day than during any lesson spent in the classroom. I felt it and touched it – saw for myself the layers that preceded, and yet somehow also surrounded, our own layer of time and earth…
…The Roman Villa has lost none of its magic this time round. It is like an ancient dream unfolding from the ground, full of the colours and form of past thoughts and footsteps. You can almost see the mind-turns of long-gone people etched in the evidence of their actions.
Mosaic depicting the mythical story of Europa and the Bull, Lullingstone Roman Villa
Mosaic panel in the audience chamber, depicting the story of Bellerophon, Prince of Corinth, on the winged horse, Pegasus, killing the Chimaera.
Four hundred years of occupation give the villa many layers all of its own. Painted water nymphs glance palely from the niches in the lower walls (a former cult room), their eyes gleaming with liquid knowledge we can only guess at. Standing on the footbridge over the river outside, it is easy to see why they are here. Easy to apprehend those ancient people’s sense of a presence of deity in the play of water and light in the river that was their lifeline.
Beneath that clear, cold water a bed of flints dices up the sunlight, damselflies glance it back at the sky like blue-green fire – and the water trembles in gentle folds, ever onwards in a renewing one-way journey.
This is a valley of flint and water – and, today, of sunlight; bright and transforming. The villa is built partially from flint; grown out of the land that surrounds it. The villa’s history is fascinating. It consists of successive additions to the building made by the many generations that lived in its walls. Here, the water nymphs, when first exposed by archaeologists, blinked in the light of the future, and were found surrounded by the collapsed rubble from the room which once stood above. When the archaeologists pieced together painted pieces amongst the rubble, they discovered a wall painting of figures engaged in Christian worship, plus painted Chi-Rho symbols – unique, unequivocal evidence of a house-church in Roman Britain.
The wall paintings are also a discovery of almost unique international importance. There are theories that, amongst the depictions of Roman legend and the literary allusions to Ovid and Virgil in the villa’s mosaics, there may also be secret allusions to Christ and Christianity, which perhaps date to a time when the villa family may have been wary of declaring Christian belief. The realities of the exact unfolding of the layers of belief here remain a challenge of interpretation. However, an adherence to a new, emerging religion is literally written into the walls, enmeshed there in the building’s fabric amongst earlier traditions and beliefs – perhaps also reflecting a mix that was still interwoven in the minds of its inhabitants.
Centuries later, a young artist, Samuel Palmer also felt a spiritual transcendence in this valley. Nature, he felt, brought him closer to God; the numinous was all around. The paintings that emerged from the years he spent in Shoreham glow with a mystical, visionary insight that locks on to the land and the significance it unfolds for him. Together with a small group of artists, which included George Richmond and Edward Calvert, Palmer formed the first brotherhood of painters in England. Known as The Ancients and based in Shoreham, this small artistic movement wanted to turn away from the industrial revolution and modernity, to return to spiritual values, connect art to nature, and to explore literary imagination and poetic rapture.
Neo-Platonism, the Bible, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Bunyan and Spenser all informed Palmer’s work. He loved Virgil (I wonder if he could have ever dreamed of those ancient, forgotten mosaics buried beneath his valley? Making hindsight connections now, it’s easy to weave fanciful thoughts of those hidden Virgilian allusions seeping up through the earth, to mingle with Palmer’s own Virgil-inspired visions in paint.) The Ancients were disciples of William Blake, finding particular inspiration in Blake’s woodcut illustrations to Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil. In his 1825 sketchbook, Palmer wrote about his response to these woodcuts:
‘They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their light and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to describe it. Intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliance only coldly and partially describe them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul…’
(A.H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer).
In this tribute to Blake, Palmer seems to give a perfect description of what he, himself, achieved in his own work, revealing the bound up nature of aims, inspirations and leaps into the unique. The two men - though different in many ways - give us glimpses, through their respective art, of vibrant, questing minds somewhere out on the edges of the apparent, both peeling away layers to see what lies beyond, beneath, alongside – just out of our immediate line of sight, alive in the tensions of existence and imagination.
Continued in A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ Part Two…
Samuel Palmer, Self-Portrait, c.1824-5
William Blake at Hampstead, c. 1825 by John Linnell (1792-1882)
- All art illustrations in this post are from Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (British Museum publication).
‘Chapter 1 – I Am Born
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show…’
(Opening of David Copperfield)
Well, it’s here – the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. And what a difference that baby’s arrival in the world – on 7th February 1812 - went on to make to so many lives, including my own…
‘Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.’
- Charles Dickens, Chapter 9, Great Expectations
For me, that fateful arrival in the world created a first link in a chain that would definitely be of flowers, gold and many treasures - binding me only to the freedom and endless possibilities of the imagination…
This morning, at 11 o’clock, there will be a wreathlaying service in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, to commemorate the momentous event.
I wish I could be there to pay tribute. But, instead, I shall set aside some moments today to make special remembrance and thanks, light a candle… and, most of all, to celebrate Dickens’s life by reading some of his magnificent prose. Spending time with Pickwick, Fezziwig and other companions from the teeming array of colourful characters he gifted to our imaginations, should make for a great (and very interesting) birthday party!
Dickens's Dream, unfinished painting by R.W. Buss, 1875 (pictured in John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens, Illustrated Edition (published by Sterling)
Wishing all my fellow Dickensians a very Happy Bicentenary Day!
Happy 200th Birthday, Dickens!
In snatched moments (between blog post preparations and some big Life Happenings to deal with) – I’ve been mentally running around trying to catch up with the current BBC Radio Dickens fest in honour of his bicentenary (thank goodness for iPlayer!). So many programmes to listen to! Every time I check the Radio Times or the BBC website, there seems to be a fresh crop.
I particularly enjoyed Frances Fyfield’s programmes on Radio 4 examining Dickens’s original manuscripts. I managed to catch the ones on The Mystery of Edwin Drood and A Tale of Two Cities – and was so moved by actor David Timson’s reading (direct from the original manuscript) of Sydney Carton’s supreme sacrificial moment, written, of course, to such superb emotional effect by Dickens (‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…’ Gets me every time…).
Those programmes led me to the V&A website to look at Dickens’s original manuscripts there. Spellbinding stuff!
Last page of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (illustration from The Life of Charles Dickens, by John Forster, published by Sterling)
Seeing what a tangle of words and crossings out Dickens’s final MS were (his compositors must have been superheroes!) I feel much better about the scrawls, scratchings out, and crazy trails of thought doing a merry dance around the page, that pass for my own creative writing endeavours! (Apparently, there were suspicions that Dickens used to deliberately leave all the muddle and crossings out, to make sure he got the best compositors assigned to his novels!) On the programmes, it was pointed out how amazing the sections are where there are virtually no crossings out (very often the dialogue) – so confidently placed on the page, fully formed. Dickens’s daughter Mamie reported that he used to act out his dialogue in front of the mirror first, and then write it all down. He must have had a remarkable ability to hold great chunks of his novels in his head before transferring them to paper.
Using the V&A website, it’s an entrancing experience to see the familiar words of Dickens’s novels in his own writing, to witness his mind at work – to spot the arresting little details that bring a sense of immediate human contact across the intervening years. On the Edwin Drood programme, Frances Fyfield and her guests were totally captivated by a coffee cup stain on the MS – a snapshot of a writer’s creative moment grounded in a small daily life detail.
Hearing Penelope Wilton read from Claire Tomalin’s recent biography of The Great Inimitable on Radio Four’s Book of the Week (still available on the archive) was also a real pleasure. I was so moved when Penelope Wilton reached the account of how that fiercely burning creative light went out. I was left feeling its loss in a very immediate way.
And yet, of course, that light still burns ever brightly in the brilliant works Dickens left us - without which my own life, for one, would have lost so many rich enhancements. I cannot overstate how much I love Dickens’s work and how much it means to me, how woven into my life his novels are.
It was wonderful to hear, on another recent Radio Four Book of the Week, Michael Rosen’s beautiful and moving account of the profound way in which Dickens’s novels have been interwoven in his own life, family and experience. As I began to listen to it, I quickly realised that I’d read the essay (from Stop What You’re Doing and Read This, published by Vintage Books) in The Guardian over the New Year – but it now seems to have disappeared from the Guardian’s web pages, due to its copyright for the piece having expired.
On TV, I gleefully enjoyed Armando Iannucci’s tribute to Dickens, Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens (an exploration of Dickens’s craft, revolving around the chosen text of David Copperfield). Apart from the other treats of the programme, it was fabulous to see someone do some detailed practical criticism of the text on screen – actually pointing to the words on the page, savouring how they work, the artistry and magic of their combination and construction. I remember from Iannucci’s previous programme on the BBC about Milton, he did the same thing. Joy of joys! Real, direct, in-the-moment practical criticism! A focus on the text! A rare thing on television, but Armando Iannucci demonstrated that, with the right, impassioned approach – it works on screen! I think I’m correct in thinking that, at one point in his life, Iannucci spent time researching for an intended PhD on Milton. Obviously, the passionate, insightful and enthusiastic literary scholar still burns in his spirit. Unleash it further please, BBC!
Dickens on Film explored the episodic nature of Dickens’s writing and its influence on the emerging art form of film. I hadn’t really thought before just how soon after the novels were written that the first film adaptations of Dickens’s work appeared (I think one dated from 1902). I discovered, alas too late, via the BBC Dickens page and Radio 4 blog that there had been a series of radio programmes (Dickens on Location) about places Dickens mentions in his novels. The Radio 4 Extra blog post about St James’ Church, Cooling on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent – scene of the opening of Great Expectations – makes for interesting reading.
I did manage to catch the first episode of The Mumbai Chuzzlewits and have downloaded the next two, as I knew I wouldn’t catch up with them before they dropped off iPlayer. There are some interesting behind the scenes ‘raw clips of the recording of The Mumbai Chuzzlewits in India’ on the production company’s website, as well as details of an upcoming documentary (7th – 11th February) on the BBC World Service, Dickens and India – Mutual Friends, in which writer Ayeesha Menon ’explores India’s love affair with Dickens.’
I highly recommend a recent series of Radio 3’s The Essay (available to listen again on the December 2011 archive) The Writers’ Dickens in which authors talk about various aspects of Dickens’s craft and how he has influenced their own work. I particularly loved Tessa Hadley’s exploration of Dickens’s use of material objects; his rendering them alive with metaphor and meaning (it was a treat to wander around the House of Clennam in her company, and to relive the imagery, symbolism and sheer harmony of language, detail and meaning crafted by the masterful hand of Dickens, as he unfolds for us Arthur’s return to that precariously shifting family edifice). Oh, and watch out for Tessa Hadley’s comparison of Dickens’s 19th century, and her own 21st century, use of metaphorically charged mirrors! She makes an intriguing point. Alexander McCall Smith’s appraisal of Dickens’s skilled use of the serial form (also looked at in the light of his own experience of serialising the 44 Scotland Street stories) was equally enjoyable. A. L Kennedy was brilliant – and spot on – in her sensitive and deeply insightful analysis of that passionate, troubled, dark sense of ‘something is wrong,’ combined always with a faith in the possibility of human goodness and redemption, in Dickens’s work. She got right to the heart of Dickens, I thought. Justin Cartwright’s essay on Dickens and Christmas and Romesh Gunesekera’s essay on Dickens and ‘The Orphan Eye’ were also both gems.
Still to catch up on for me is The BBC World Service World Book Club discussion of Great Expectations, with biographer Claire Tomalin and actor Simon Callow – and, today, the Woman’s Hour drama, Dickens in London began its unfolding….
Begging to be read are the two fabulous Dickens biographies now gracing my shelves since Christmas day – the first Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens, A Life (published by Penguin) and the second by John Forster, Dickens’s close friend. Both are beautiful volumes to behold.
John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, The Illustrated Edition (published by Sterling) is a truly hefty tome, but is a thing of such utter gorgeousness that it’s more than worth the extra muscle power involved in lifting it down from the shelf!
Full of sumptuous illustrations - all visual gifts to gladden any Dickensian’s heart - it also unwraps like a tantalising pass-the-parcel, revealing hidden treats beneath each layer:
For a bevy of more Dickensian treats, the Dickens 2012 website is a hub of all the bicentenary activity – and Warwick University’s Celebrating Dickens website looks like a fascinating destination for further exploration…
And then, of course, most importantly of all – there are the novels! Once I’ve finished my re-read of Edwin Drood – my top favourite, Our Mutual Friend, calls…
After all that…and in anticipation of more to come…do I feel Dickensed-out? Not in the least! Bring it on! I’m like a kid in a sweet shop!
Do you know that feeling – when your head is so full of concerns, worries, events, demands and things to do, that you just freeze, come to a standstill, not knowing which way to go, what to tackle first – and so end up going in all directions and none?
That’s what happened to this blog over the last few months – and it lived on only as half-started posts in my notebook, good intentions and a ghostly on screen presence… the spirit of Bookish Nature Past…
Miss Havisham-like, I still feel a bit frozen and stuck, my blog all cobwebby and neglected. The clocks all stopped. But, on Sunday, some bookish progress was afoot, when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood – in the nick of time, ahead of the BBC’s adaptation to be screened… tonight!
To be precise, it was back in August when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood as it was left to us by Charles Dickens – forever suspended at the end of Chapter 23 which, so poignantly, he penned just the day before he died. Since then, I’ve been trying to unfreeze my literary critical faculties enough to write something here about Dickens’s unfinished novel, before embarking on reading Leon Garfield’s interpretation of a possible ending. The plan was to write my impressions of Dickens’s last novel and my take on where it may have been going – then to read Leon Garfield’s completion of the tale, write a separate post on that – and then conclude with a post about the BBC adaptation and how each compares… However, still being stuck in my Bookish Nature version of Satis House, that plan has remained as cobwebbed over as Miss H’s wedding cake!
But, at least now… at the eleventh hour… I’m blowing away the dust and trying to resurrect the poor neglected thing (though I doubt I’ll get my Edwin Drood posts finished in time to coincide with the screening of the television mini-series; will this blog ever be topical??? I always seem to be dozens of steps behind the signs of the times!) With an attempt to stay vaguely on track, I leapt in ahead of the BBC adaptation’s imminent arrival, and read Leon Garfield’s ending of the novel over the weekend – so this resurrected creature of a plan won’t be quite the same thing as was originally intended. But, hey, it just may well morph into something more meaningful…or meandering…or both… and go down all sorts of unexpected ways, maybe following all those probing and mysterious beams of light which, through Dickens’s (and Garfield’s) imagery, follow the novel’s brittle, edgy darkness and prise it open, pestering a reminder of truths to keep the shadows in perpetual tension; a play of light and dark upon the wall – with struggling gleams of possible resurrection and redemption being, I think, what Dickens may have most wanted the reader to keep their eye on…
So, I suppose that’s a very good note on which to also resurrect this blog. I tried in vain to write a detailed post about Edwin Drood yesterday morning and ended up still going down a thousand ways and getting nowhere (I keep hitting this problem of too much in my head, and not enough idea how to deal with it all!) I was feeling a little despondent that I’ll never get back the blogging habit. But, over the next few days (or most probably weeks…) I will attempt to bludgeon into shape all my notes and we shall try to begin again… At least I’ve managed to cobble together this post today, which is a start and makes things seem a little less daunting! And there are some nature oriented posts lurking half prepared in my notebook to knock into shape too…
Add to that the fact that the BBC’s very interesting adaptation of Great Expectations has left me longing to return to the real thing… plus the very tempting group read of Our Mutual Friend (one of my absolute favourite novels of all time) coming soon over at The Argumentative Old Git – I’d better get started on dusting off those cobwebs! See you back here soon for, hopefully, some resulting shiny new posts over the coming weeks…
I hope you had a happy, bookish World Book Day 2011!
I started writing the following post yesterday, with every intention of posting it on the actual ‘Big Day’ - but… time and events had other ideas… So, here’s the finished article; a day late – but hopefully still topical (may whichever day you happen across this post, be a bookish celebration wherever you are in the world!)
Here’s what I wrote on 3rd March 2011:
My son has gone into school today dressed as Harry Potter, his wheelchair wheels sprinkled with wizardly magic (how he would love to be able to fly that NHS wheelchair, broomstick fashion, at Nimbus 2000 speeds! There would be no stopping him; he’d be airborne faster than you could say ‘snitch!’)
As I write this, my daughter will be paying homage beside Shakespeare’s grave. I hope she is passing on to Will a special moment of remembrance from her mum…
Later, she will spend a couple of hours at a workshop with the RSC – followed by a trip to the recently re-opened Royal Shakespeare Theatre, to see Rupert Goold’s production of Romeo and Juliet; a school trip beyond the wildest dreams of my own teenage years!
She’s beaten me to it as first member of the family to experience the new theatre at Stratford upon Avon. For the past few years, I’ve periodically watched its gradual rebirth, gazing across the River Avon at the original red brick façade, imagining the ghosts in its walls stirring, gathering up the memories and poetry of the soul of the theatre as it settles around the new stage and waits for new magic to happen.
My September 2008 trip to see the RSC’s truly riveting, unforgettable Hamlet (David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie – directed by Gregory Doran) saw the RST redevelopment looking like this:
My birthday treat in February 2009 (to see Antony Sher and John Kani in a deeply moving production of The Tempest – its African heartbeat throbbing with the strange magic of the play) - took place in a mysterious, mythological world parallel to these scenes:
And, in June 2009 – another trip to Stratford upon Avon revealed these changes in the theatre:
…all bound up with memories of the truly visceral drama of the assassination scene in Julius Caesar, which I watched through tears of shock and pity, my emotions wrung by the electric, skilful interplay of confusion, betrayal and human frailty moving like a lonely, cornered animal amongst the characters on the stage.
In August 2009, my daughter and I were gifted a very different mood of fun, frolics and superbly handled mayhem in the Young People’s Shakespeare production of A Comedy of Errors – and in June 2010, my friend and I were back in ancient Rome, following Darrell de Silva to Egypt, as he and Kathryn Hunter sparked and sparred in a crackling production of Antony and Cleopatra.
In beautiful August evening sunshine, 2010 – after my daughter and I had been treated to a wonderful Young People’s Shakespeare production of Hamlet - in which Debbie Korley delivered one of the best, most heartbreaking Ophelias I’ve ever seen - I took these pictures of a near complete new RST:
…And also took these commemorative pictures of the Courtyard Theatre, the RSC’s temporary performance space (and template for the auditorium of the RST rebuild) with sad, fond nostalgia in my heart. How I love that ‘big rusty shed.’ So full of memories…
But now, anticipation of my first visit to the transformed RST in June awaits new memories in the making. My tickets – little paper portals to actually be there when Jonathan Slinger, directed by Michael Boyd, inhabits the skin of Macbeth – are tucked away safely and at the ready. My excitement about this production is simmering at heart leaping levels already – it will be the first live performance I’ve seen of ‘The Scottish Play’ since Peter O’Toole was beguiled by siren witches in the infamous Old Vic production of 1980!
Macbeth is special to me – the first Shakespeare play I ever read. I first opened its pages when I was about the age my daughter is now, and it awakened in me a passion for the Bard that has continued to deepen, grow and embed itself ever more firmly in the fabric of who I am. Now, I see the same process at work in my daughter…
For these reasons, and more, I can hardly wait to see Macbeth come alive on stage in what promises to be an electrifying production - and I can’t wait to get inside the new RST. Tonight though, the magic of the place will be brought home here in the sparkle of my daughter’s eyes, and in her tales of her experiences there. This World Book day, she is caught in those heady, early stages of falling in love – as I was when I first read Macbeth – with the book that truly belongs to all the world:
Just a few World Book Days ago, she too went into primary school dressed in the Gryffindor cloak my son wore today (she was Hermione – big hair included!)
Not long before I first read Macbeth, I was tucked up in bed riveted by Jill’s Gymkhana or avidly following Bilbo Baggins ‘there and back again’ (well, I still am sometimes…some things don’t change… 
)
From Ron Weasley to Romeo, from The Hobbit to Hamlet – there’s no telling where a journey through books will lead…
On the evening of 4th October 2010, Bath was bathed in golden light. Enticing vistas – distant trees, columns, roofs – glowed like reachable other worlds. We followed the dusk into the park, searching for conkers under ancient horse chestnuts, whilst birdsong mingled with the Sunday bells of the Abbey…
…We were on our way back from an hour long sojourn in Mirror World, still a little unsure as to which layer of reality we were actually moving through. For my daughter and me, Cornelia Funke’s presentation of her latest book, Reckless at the Bath Children’s Literature Festival, had served up more than a small dose of enchantment…
An hour before, under the Christmas tree dazzle of the Guildhall’s beautiful chandeliers, all eyes had turned to the ballroom doors, as Cornelia entered – like a high priestess of fairytale – resplendent in a the most amazing dress I’ve ever had the privilege to share a room with.
I wish I could describe Cornelia’s Reckless tour dress in a way that would give you a truly accurate picture of how dazzling it was. Even these photos on her fan website don’t do it justice. Cornelia introduced it to us (immediately, I find myself referring to it as a living thing…) as a ‘crazy’ dress, ‘made by witches,’ every detail of it hand made to create a work of fairy tale art. Designed by Oscar winning costume designer, Jenny Beavan, it was a dress straight out of an Arthur Rackham illustration. Made from luminous layers of fabric in shades of moss and woody green, it was like an organic thing grown from ancient oaks in hidden groves, festooned with cobwebs.
An upright semi circle of green and gold feathers adorned the collar and, as Cornelia moved, the feathers and fabric glittered with random pulses of multi-coloured sparkle – making the prosaic electric spotlights of our, familiar, world reflect back at us like tiny points of magic made visible. It was as if the world from the other side of the mirror was glimpsing back at us from the shine of our own world. And this, as Cornelia explained to us, is very much what Reckless is about.
Mirror world, she explained, is the fairytale world – a world that ‘wants to grow up’ and which uses our world, the world we perceive to be real, to do so – capturing people and technology from this world in order to progress. It is the land which protrudes through to our world in the faces of stone gargoyles and the grisly tales of folklore – a world populated by a shape shifter fox woman, a Dark Fairy, children stolen from our world and turned into stone, a sleeping beauty crumbling into the passing of time, her skin turning to ‘parchment’ like the dried rose petals falling from the thorns surrounding her castle.
Cornelia explained that the book is the result of a three-way collaboration between herself, Lionel Wigram (producer of Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes films) and her cousin Oliver Latsch. Lionel came up with the initial idea of the fairytale world that wants to grow up; together he and Cornelia wove from that a whole world of ideas and narrative turns and surprises; she did the writing – and her cousin Oliver translated her drafts, and numerous rewrites, from German into English.
In answer to one child’s question from the audience expressing surprise that, with such excellent spoken English, Cornelia doesn’t write in/ translate her work into English herself, Cornelia explained that she has to write in her native tongue because it is in German that she feels most able and free to play with language and grammar, to ‘break the rules’ to create the effects she is chasing. She told us that a native English speaker is better able to translate these effects into ways that sound natural to an English speaking ear. She told us too, with real relish, of her ‘passion for words’ and that she could happily play with one sentence, altering, polishing, chasing that exact desired effect for eight hours or more, and love every minute of it. Whereas, with her original role as book illustrator, before she took up writing as a career, drawing didn’t engender the same love of time spent perfecting.
During the event, Cornelia was in conversation with Damian Kelleher. He began the journey into the world of Reckless by asking Cornelia to read us the opening of the novel. This is a threshold moment – both within the book; and within the room. Cornelia reads, unfolding the moment when Jacob Reckless discovers, and passes through, the mirror. The pin-drop silence of the audience, the many absorbed minds concentrated on her words, suspends the whole room on a threshold – a hovering between this world and the world of the book; each one of us drawn in to our own personal reflection of the narrative.
Afterwards, Cornelia told us how, when she reads aloud, she loves the thought of so many interpretations of her book existing in the room simultaneously. Once a book is made into a film, this tends to reduce to one shared version, and that is a loss. She prefers the thought of her books remaining books, rather than being turned into films. She also talked about the importance of attaching fiction to reality for depth and meaning; of the importance of research and real detail to inspire, anchor and enrich the story and its world.
She spoke too about how important it is, as a writer, not isolate yourself too much in this very solitary profession – but to remain in the flow of everyday life – because life and its very ebb and flow is what fiction is all about – and what it needs to feed from for any sense of Truth.
She told us about her ‘writing house’ in the garden of her home in Los Angeles. How she plasters the walls with pictures of things relevant to her current work, in order to immerse herself in the atmosphere those things conjure up. Hence, during writing Reckless, she covered her writing house walls with pictures of the nineteenth century; Romantic landscape paintings, the art of the pre-Raphaelites, pictures of nineteenth century industry and machinery, architecture etc.
She also talked about women’s roles in the nineteenth century, how her perceptions of those roles had been challenged by finding out more about individual women of the period who defied the passive ideal served up by those times. She linked this to the Victorian versions of fairytales – how girls in these versions are generally timid and passive; not at all like the feisty, independent characters to be found in the much scarier, pagan world of older versions – and in her fairytale world in Reckless.
Cornelia talked about modern and old worlds meeting and overlapping through her characters, Jake and Will (their names being part of the book’s general nod towards the Brothers Grimm) – brothers from the ‘younger’ ultra modern society of America, placed in the old world of Europe. She talked about how, as a frequent traveller herself, she is acutely aware of the existence and overlapping of different realities – the contrasts of place and shifts of thought as she might move from the snow, forests and lakes of Europe, to the heat of her garden in L.A. where hummingbirds feed outside the window of her writing house.
At the end of the event, Cornelia again read to us from the novel – this time from the scene where Sleeping Beauty still sleeps in a version of the tale where the Prince never turns up, and Will Reckless’s skin is slowly turning to jade. Again, the magic of the many mind-pictures at work within the room seemed to layer the moment with many realities and fictions; separate worlds of imagination, experience and vision all woven together and spellbound by the power of the edged, spare, tightly written prose of the novel. At one point, Damian Kelleher remarked on the tightness of the prose – and Cornelia said, in response, that very spare writing had been her aim, as she felt the fairytale nature of the story demanded that effect. She also spoke of the pleasure of this style, as a change from the very ‘Baroque’ nature of the language of the Ink World novels.
I made no notes whilst at the event, so this account is entirely from memory, and so may be full of blips and trips for which I apologise – and I’ve left out some details, simply for the sake of aiming for brevity (which I still don’t seem to have achieved!) For certain, this version will be a product of my own individual perception and interpretation. Another person’s version would offer an alternative reality; the other side of the mirror. What stays with me though, is a sense of ‘this world’ and ‘other-world’, hung on the balance of the language – the precision of words creating a suspension in a place of deep-seated familiarity; the familiarity of both the ‘real’ and the fairytale – a vital, formative mixture that enriches our lives as we, like Mirror World, continue to grow up.
And what stays with me also is that amazing dress – and I’m sure it will be a memory that will stay with my daughter too. Thank you, Cornelia for creating this living memory bound up with the world of books and story; the fictional made real – the book stepping into the room.
One night during the weeks approaching Winter Solstice, I took to bed one of my favourite books, Findings by Kathleen Jamie, and re-read its opening essay, Darkness and Light.
Settling down in that long night to lose myself in Kathleen Jamie’s clear-seeing prose was a small, anticipatory celebration of that magical tipping point of darkness and light. A welcoming of the special qualities of both, at a time of year that is like a retreat and an embrace; a time to reflect, take stock, evaluate and wonder.
The winter light filling those days around the solstice was something to celebrate. It had brought gifts of form and clarity; a glow that held things close. It had had a sense of enclosure about it – as if, in each day, we were held in a tight, intense moment; our attention gathered near to watch intently those things closer to home. Those bitterly cold, but gleaming days were parcelled up in darkness, wrapped in shaded edges that defined their very qualities. Precious and brief, the light they cast entered windows with a muted whiteness that was like the telling of a secret tucked in its shadows.
One blue, bright morning…
… I had stood bathed in sunlight at the top of our stairs, and watched as its beams passed through a crystal ornament standing on the window sill, transforming the walls with bursts of vivid rainbows. Each was a perfect, intense spectrum; those huddling colours like a magic spell conjured out of the chill.
In Darkness and Light, Kathleen Jamie writes about these days around the winter solstice:
‘Mid-December, the still point of the turning year. It was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening into a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close.’
‘I like the precise gestures of the sun……everything we imagine doing, this time of year, we imagine doing in the dark.’
At around 4 p.m. on the night of my re-read, my daughter had called me urgently to the dining room window. A flock (we counted eleven) of long-tailed tits had jinked through the dusk to cluster on our garden fat feeders, their tails overlapping in elegant criss-crossing lines, their white and black markings exaggerated in the gloom, and their pink blush washed to sepia, as if caught in the glow of an old two-tone photograph. After a few moments of peck, shift, peck, flit, they huddled and separated and clustered again in a purposeful communal fidget. With urgent, constant communication they finished their hasty meal, and headed towards the big old trees in the gardens behind ours. Darkness was falling rapidly, graining the sky grey. They needed to find their roost for the night. The cold air was closing like a tight fist. Lights were beaming from the windows, spilling in pools. The long-tails flew beyond the reach of the light, seeking the shadows.
‘I imagined travelling into the dark. Northward – so it got darker as I went. I’d a notion to sail at night, to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy. I had been asking around among literary people, readers of books, for instances of dark as natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that’s wicked, but could find few. It seems to me that our cherished metaphor of darkness is wearing out…… Pity the dark: we’re so concerned to overcome and banish it, it’s crammed full of all that’s devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness are we not?’
- Kathleen Jamie, Findings (published by Sort Of Books, distributed by Penguin Group)
In her essay, Kathleen Jamie takes us with her on her travels to Maes Howe on Orkney. Her hope is to witness the setting winter solstice sun beam directly along the passageway of the Neolithic burial chamber, casting its light onto the tomb’s back wall. What she sees there is a connection between ancient and modern – between human ingenuity, and our relationships to darkness and light – played out in a surprising way.
Even in the very midst of Christmas parcel wrapping, I came across another pertinent exploration of the nature of the dark, in Luke Jennings’ Blood Knots – of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing, which I had bought for a friend who loves fishing. I’d heard great things about the lyrical beauty of the book and its nature writing – and, unable to resist dipping into the first couple of chapters before wrapping it, I was soon captivated by Luke Jennings’ description of urban fishing at night. Fishing itself doesn’t hold any attraction for me, but as an amateur naturalist, I recognise the sense of focus and fusion with landscape; the close, relished mystery of wild lives – the mystery of life itself – unseen around us:
‘My world has contracted to a box of darkness: to walls, the towpath and the black of the water. As always, there’s the temptation to wind in the bait a little, to check that it’s OK, but that way madness lies, because you’ll never really know what’s happening down there.
Nor would you want to, because in an over-illuminated world, a world whose dark corners are in constant retreat from the remorseless, banal march of progress, this not knowing is a thing to be valued and enjoyed.’
– From Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic Books)
During the Yuletide lead-up, I watched Rick Stein’s Cornish Christmas programmes on BBC2. In one episode, he interviewed Tim Smit, CEO of the Eden Project, who mused on the rich pagan and Christian mix of our midwinter festival, and also on the lighting of candles at this time. He reflected how there is something about candlelight that encourages words – makes us want to talk, share intimate conversation. It’s just occurred to me now, writing this, that the intimate sense of enclosure candlelight creates, is the same intimacy which that brief, parcelled-up light of winter gives to what we see around us. That sense of focus and centre, depth and pause. It’s a light by which to huddle, and share stories.
But the solstice also makes us look outwards on a whole planetary level – it can stretch our imagination far out to those huge workings of the Universe, the tilt and movement of the Earth, the progress of the seasons, the changes in our night skies…
In the November 2010 issue of the RSPB’s Birds magazine, there is a lovely article by Conor Jameson entitled Seasons to be Cheerful. In it he talks about the birds’ responses to the seasons – and about how many birds and other creatures ‘…make light of planetary distance and treat the globe as their home, and the galaxy as their sat nav.’
Conor Jameson goes on to say:
‘Each year, the Earth in a sense ‘breathes in’ from the autumn equinox to the spring equinox and ‘breathes out’ from the spring to the autumn. Time-lapsed footage of this really does make the planet look like it is breathing. Imagine then the world’s birds moving in response to that inhalation, that sheet of ice, snow and cold air easing them south in autumn, and drawing them back north again in the spring, at an estimated 5 mph, as it retreats.’
I love that idea – and the beautiful, all encompassing image it conjures…
This time of year brings many gifts – not least the thirteen redwings, blown in by the snow from the outlying fields, seeking food in our garden! On December 20th, they swept over our hedge and adorned our damson trees like elegant sentinels, their red-streaked sides in full blush against the white sky – causing both delight in our household, and ruffled feathers amongst the starling flock already perched on the branches! The redwings continued to fly round and round the gardens, tumbling into and out of our trees throughout the day – and on the winter solstice itself – adding more magic to that time. The winter before, the snow brought fieldfares to our garden. They stayed for a few days, ate the apples we put out for them, and enchanted us with their beauty:
As Conor Jameson goes on to say in his Birds magazine article:
‘A northern winter has much to cherish. Without it, there would be no fieldfares and redwings arriving in squadrons from Scandinavia, no geese from Greenland descending on our western shores, nor whooper swans on our eastern fields, magically, overnight. There would be fewer robins and blackbirds visiting our back gardens to see what we’ve got for them here in our temperate, ocean-insulated island group.’
On New Year’s Eve, I opened the front door at dusk, and was greeted by a calm mildness on the air that felt like an early out-breath from the Earth. On that breath, emerging from the deepening shadows, curled the leisurely, fluting song of a blackbird…
In those very last days of 2010, and in the earliest of 2011, the passing of the solstice and the slightly lengthening days awoke more and more birdsong. On January 2nd, I opened the bathroom window to let out some steam, and the room was instantly flooded by a cacophony of birds. And this week, I’ve noticed that the blackbirds in the garden have paired up, and the male is busy chasing off a rival (so, high drama on the lawn!) Two robins have also paired up, and are hanging around the garden together, and in February, frog spawn will adorn our neighbours’ ponds. Whatever the weather brings over these next few weeks, out of that bud of cold and darkness, spring is already unfolding…
Happy New Year!
‘At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.’
The lilt of those opening lines to Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen acts like a lure, making me – on this chill November day in the here and now – want to follow that farmer and return to Alderley Edge. I’ve journeyed there before in the pages of Alan Garner’s mind-shifting novel Thursbitch – but, as yet, have not read The Weirdstone…
A copy is waiting on my bookshelves, promising magic; a treat to come. But I also feel regret that I didn’t discover it during my childhood; that time of wide open doors when its magic would have overlapped my world completely, and become my dreaming reality.
I have, however, been able to open up that experience to my daughter, and to happily watch her overtake me in her eagerness to follow Colin and Susan on their adventures. I first discovered Alan Garner in my twenties when, intrigued, I stumbled upon The Owl Service in the tiny village library just a magpie’s hop across the road from the house we were renting at the time.
We lived, back then, in a landscape of river and reed beds, where the wheezing beat of mute swan wings passed overhead – and a wood, just a field’s width away across the railway, bristled with the drama of tawny owls.
That wood, a fragment of ancient forest, was a gateway to a vivid, vital, timeless world. On darkening summer evenings, we would follow the needle gleam of glow worms along the paths – and in the margins of the day, when sunshine and time met in a suspended hush, we sometimes caught glimpses of fox cubs or common lizards basking in their own worlds.
On the other side of the village stretched a mosaic of wetland, where geese patterned the sky, the occasional kingfisher sparked blue fire on snow in winter, and on warm nights, Daubenton’s bats dashed under the river bridge, snapping up prey.
Like all landscapes tend to do, it settled into my mind, even when unseen and unnoticed, as a presence – a kind of cloak around the day. It was present in this way when, with dog nestled under one arm, I curled up in our back room, close to the window which faced the tawny owl wood, and opened the pages of The Owl Service for the first time…
What spilled from that slim volume was something ungraspable, like a jolting light that would not be contained; a jagged, edgy, searing, elemental…something… binding words to place in a way that was like a spell of losing and finding, a half glimpsing – an instinctual knowing.
My daughter read The Owl Service this year, enthralled, gripping it with white knuckled fingers. One evening, she glanced up at me and said, in awed tones, “I love this book… It really makes you think.” Her eyes shone with the relish of the challenge. I could almost hear those mental doors opening to even wider horizons of possibility, and I could see in her eyes a dawning realisation of what boundaries literature can stretch, what edgy places it can let in (or out!)
When reading Garner’s books, it’s as if that presence of the landscape – that cloak of the day – stops being outside our window, or benignly present in our minds, and suddenly enters our house, startles us, scratches at the ceiling and walls like those legend-living owls in The Owl Service, and permeates our living room, removes all veneer. Whilst we read, we move out of the ‘long ago of the world,’ still bound to the here and now, but with all the vital connections between the ancient and the present haunting our deepest awareness.
Those things are internal and external – and eternal. And, in The Owl Service they are, in part, the playing out of the eternal pattern of the journey from childhood to adulthood. A literal edginess of edges between experience, possibility, past and future; doorways between worlds. And that is what he speaks to, this craftsman of words that are bound to the ancient continuity of the land and to our heritage; he speaks to those deeper elements that are both within and without us. Not clear, but instinctive, both disturbing and vital; words that return us to ourselves, and connect us to the land and its (and our) stories.
It is fifty years since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was first published, its golden anniversary falling, with an appropriate sense of magical portent, on 10/10/10. A special hardback gift edition (which I’ve only seen online so far, but am already feeling its lure!) has been published by Harper Collins to mark the book’s five decades of passage through so many young (and not so young!) lives, and a website linked to the anniversary celebrations explores its timeless, ever renewing appeal.
Legends, folklore, myths and stories draw us to the fireside. The mystery of landscape - and the words which express the bonds we feel with it - fit well the space provided by a pool of winter candlelight. There, the mystery flickers for us to examine it, whilst remaining as huge as the endless shadows that surround the flame.
As the winter solstice approaches, it’ll soon be time, I think, for me to link up with the long ago, set aside some winter hours before the year wears out – and follow that farmer to Alderley Edge…
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