Letter to Simon Read- remembering 20 years ago

 

HI Simon/Pauline

Did you know it has been almost 20 years since you picked us up in the pouring rain at Bearsted station, way back in October of 2000.

As people often say, I don’t know where the time has gone. But one thing I do know is that I have thought about England almost every day since we returned in December 2003. J says I was desperate to come home, but as I sometimes tell her, within minutes of arriving at my parents’ house after flying home, I felt ready to go back. And of course, probably for a few different reasons, we never did.

I think about England all the time, as I have already said. I think about each of the various schools, especially MGGS. I think about our frequent trips to London and seeking out bookshops along Charing Cross Road, and Ulysses in Museum Street, and countless others. I think about drives to lots and lots of villages and towns like Hawkshurst and Aylesford in Kent, and Ludlow and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Kingsand and Zennor in Cornwall. And I think about the various National Trust homes like Cotehele, also in Cornwall, and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Monk’s House in Sussex. And of course all the D H Lawrence houses we visited, such as Mountain Cottage, and Chapel Farm Cottage and The Triangle and the long barn at Greatham, and the various other writers’ retreats, like the Bronte’s, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath's grave.

I think about all the counties and our travels in them, including ventures into Wales (my favourite ever holiday), Scotland, and Ireland to meet Colm Toibin, and great short holidays traversing Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon, and up higher, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and even as high up as the Lakes District, northern Wales and Yorkshire and Northumberland.

We lived, distinctly, for periods in 3 main counties if you recall- Nottingham, Newent in Gloucestershire, and of course the beloved Maidstone, in Kent.

Now I arrive at my fondest memory. And perhaps the greatest pleasure of my life. Living with you and Pauline on Gravelley Bottom Road, sharing your upstairs, having lots of day trips, such as the Churchill home, and Sissinghurst, Sutton Vallence, Sittingbourne. Negotiating your terrible shower. Beautiful walks amongst the leaves in the expansive backyard. Playing with Missy and Tiger on the stairs. You kindly getting cars for us. Your mother looking after us and taking us out to get food at Nettoes and not wanting us in the kitchen. The degus’ in their cage. Visits by Caroline and her kids and David, who would find all of this horribly sentimental. Remember our trip to (I think) to Elham for fox hunting protests, where you drove like we were on an autobahn, seeing you work in your garage and going to the dance together, seeing you in banger racing at Ipswich, the local cinema in Maidstone where we saw the Hannibal Lecter film, eating out expensively at the Tickled Trout, and meeting your interesting friends, the car mechanics, the one from Liverpool I think called Paul and the one who died suddenly, who used to go the pub called ‘The Sugar Loaves’, possibly Wayne, and walking along the Medway and seeing Leeds Castle. The list goes on.

I will never forget those days. They fill me with joy just thinking about them, but they also fill me with sadness because of some personal regrets, and how much I miss everything and would love to have it back again. But of course, time marches on and it is difficult to recapture things that you once loved and experienced. I dream, often, of England, and one recurring dream in particular is this one where I am on the verging of coming home to Australia and I am filled with so much dread about having to leave… and yet J says this was not how I was- almost 20 years ago.

I hear that you are still in the house, and Pauline is with you, and even Camilla is close by. What an incredible experience it would be for me to return and sit in the backyard and have everyone around us again. I have lots of photos of this time. We all look young and healthy and optimistic. It feels like another life ago. If you get time let me know what you remember and love to everyone, especially Pauline who was so good to us. In my dreams I am sitting with J, and you and Pauline, and we are in the conservatory, and we have just arrived, a day or tow, and it is cold but I am cradling your book of English villages, and my heart is racing and I feel like I am on top of the world.

I leave you with the foreword to a book I put together about our travels. I must show you some day. All the best,

DH XXX

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. 

England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. 

My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity.

 

 

 

Landscapes in Emily Bronte, Lawrence and Mansfield

LANDSCAPES

Tonight, I am thinking a lot about landscapes.

It has come about because I have recently read the ultimate landscape novel ‘Wuthering Heights’. The landscape, or the setting, is of course the moors surrounding the Bronte Parsonage near Haworth, in Lancashire. I don’t have the book with me, but some of the vocabulary I am left with in my memory is craggy, rocky, heather, black frost, fleecy cloud, abundant rain, temporary brooks, shadows and sunshine, transient mist, wintry drifts, primroses & crocuses, impassable roads, and so on. It is a tough environment which suited only the toughest of people. And Emily Bronte must have been one of the toughest young women who ever lived. The novel is extraordinary for its power, cruelty, violence and menace. It paints a visceral world of loneliness, imprisonment, and despair, as well as other gothic elements like madness, imprisonment, the supernatural and mysticism.

 It must have been thrilling for EJB to apply her imaginative world to such a ‘fantastic’ and surreal story, dark and foreboding, although in the case of Heathcliff and Cathy, and younger Cathy and Edgar, her father, full of romantic love and filial bonding as well. My impression of EJB is that of someone who could be ruthless like her characters, hard-nosed and wilfully independent and determined and capable of cruelty. Filled from top to toe with the ‘romantic imagination’ but understanding of the uncompromising tenor of her times and the people who inhabited remote areas of the wild countryside in the nineteenth century.

The landscape of D H Lawrence’s childhood never left him. He grew up in Eastwood, Nottingham, semi-rural with a fairly short distance to town (Nottingham) but also enclosed by woods and country paths and farms and wild nature. His landscape crept into novels his whole life, from the beginnings with ‘The White Peacock’ and ‘Sons & Lovers’, to latter works such as ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘’The Lost Girl’. Despite the fact that he spent a good deal of his fertile writing career living abroad in places like Australia, New Mexico and Italy, Lawrence also came back to the world of his childhood in his latter books like ‘The Virgin & The Gypsy’ and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Just like a venture into Bronte territory is manna from heaven for me, it is similar with the Lawrence world of Eastwood, Moorgreen Reservoir, Cossal (Cossethay in ‘The Rainbow’).

Lawrence’s favourite place of his childhood was Hagg’s Farm, where he would walk several miles to visit the Chambers family, all of the Chambers family who were a second family, and in particular the love of his youth, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in ‘Sons & Lovers’) who he might have married but for the fact as he later said ‘she would have destroyed (my) genius’ (not a feminist-friendly afterthought). Lawrence wrote Jessie’s brother a letter near the end of his life about the joy of visiting The Haggs, which never left him. He called it ‘the countryside of my heart’. The closest, perhaps, to experiencing these feelings of joy and comfort and landscape again were probably whilst living in New Mexico with his wife and friends, baking bread, writing novels, riding horses, visiting ancient places like Guadalajara…

Katherine Mansfield came to hate New Zealand, her birthplace, as enclosed, smothering, provincial. As an adolescent she had a taste of life in London, and on return she had a miserable period in Wellington with her parents where she felt listless and angry. She was the archetypal bored young adult in her restlessness and feelings of confinement and restlessness. On her return to Queens College London, she blossomed in an environment more conducive to her study of music, imagination and literature, in particular Oscar Wilde and other so-called ‘decadents’.

 This is not to say that NZ did not feature in her writing as she grew to become a highly talented and revered writer of short stories. We see Wellington and its environs crop up in stories like ‘The Voyage’ and ‘At The Bay’ and ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Garden Party’. These are some of her best stories. It is just that when we think of Katherine Mansfield, we sometimes forget she is from New Zealand because she embraced Europe and everything it had to offer in the 1920’s so wholeheartedly, and never seemed to entertain thoughts of ever going back there.

Landscapes feed writers’ imaginations. I doubt that Virginia Woolf would ever have said that Katherine Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of if KM had have stayed in NZ all her life. Lawrence’s books and stories and poems and plays are much more vivid and varied for having the thirst to travel and experience life in some of its extremities on his so-called ‘savage pilgrimage’ to far flung places in Europe, America and Australia. As for EJB, who lived until only 30, what might she have created had she travelled more, and lived on the continent or the US or some island for a period of time. When she died it is said that she was busy with a second novel. It is difficult to imagine Emily Bronte attached to anywhere other than her beloved moors that seem such an intrinsic part of her psyche and her life. And I want to go back there and search for Cathy and Heathcliff.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD- BEFORE ENGLAND

I HAVE nearly finished Gerri Kimber’s ‘Katherine Mansfield -The Early Years’, and it is so snug and warm and calming and reassuring and lovely, it’s like an old lost friend. Except it is also luxuriating in its richness and wonderment, and I don’t really have an old friend like this.

 I have come to it after many books by and about Katherine Mansfield. The famous Antony Alpers’ biography, her notebooks and journals, Kathleen Jones’ biography, a favourite, and recently I acquired the Edinburgh University Press editions of her complete works, a great treasure. I was about 20 when I first read Mansfield. I nominated her short story collection ‘Bliss & Other Stories’ as a personal favourite when I was with a group of students in an English tutorial at university many years ago. I read all her short stories then. Those wondrous years of active imagination, fervent reading, abundant curiosity. She has stayed the course with me- along with D H Lawrence and Sylvia Plath- when many others, I have somehow, let go.

When I was in England she was a part of that great literary pilgrimage conducted over a period of more than two years. The ‘Elephant’ house with Murry in Hampstead Heath, her friend Koteliansky’s house at Acacia Road in St John’s Wood, in Fontainebleau in France stumbling luckily upon her gravestone- ‘the wife of Middleton Murry…’. Then many years later to Wellington itself, the childhood home in Thorndon, now a museum.

So I sit in my bedroom any spare moment of any day, thinking of KM constantly, wishing this book of her early years would never end. Somehow, despite the amount of time I have dedicated to her, I have forgotten a lot of these early years. Or at least some of it. It intrigues me from beginning to end. Nothing ordinary about her. Her very real passions and frustrations. Solitariness. Desires. Influences. Loves. Resentments. Ambition.

The book begins with her wealthy origins in Wellington and the various births in the family- the sisters and the much-loved younger brother who would be killed during the war. Not long after Vera was born came Chaddie, then KM in 1888, and Gwendoline who died as a baby followed very quickly by KM’s youngest sister, Jeanne. The family moved to nearby Karori, presumably for health reasons, to a house with a 14-acre garden called ‘Chesney Wold’ where the last sibling, KM’s favourite, Leslie was born. Karori became important to KM’s fiction. She wrote many stories as an adult based on her time there. I also saw that the school she went to- called, interestingly, Karori Normal School’ - is still functioning- http://www.kns.school.nz/

When she was 9 the family moved back to Thorndon (75 Tinakori Road), and the Beauchamp girls were enrolled in Wellington Girls’ High School, also still extant- https://wgc.school.nz/  This is where her first short story was published, aged 9. This is where the book begins to show KM as emerging as different to her sisters and her peers- an outsider, aloof, moody, idiosyncratic. And poetic. But now, and through her teen years, there is also a sense of awkwardness as well- her plumpness, glasses (which mysteriously disappeared later), and bourgeoning interest in music. KM would become quite an accomplished cellist. 

At this time the wealthy Beauchamp’s took a number of domestic summer holidays and rented cottages at places like Day’s Bay. I re-read the longish ‘At The Bay’ recently as a memorial to her time spent on summer holidays.  Important friendships were formed at this time around the turn of the century, that would later develop into strong romantic and sexual relationships- the Trowell twins, Garnet and Tom, highly accomplished musicians, and Maata, a dark-skinned Maori princess that KM met at a wealthier, more prestigious school in Fitzherbert Terrace. She also knew somebody called Edith Bendall and wrote about laying her head on her naked breast at the holiday house at Day’s Bay. Her yearning also extended to one of the English cricketers on board a ship KM was on, returning from her first trip to England. She refers to him as Adonis in her journal.

KM has such a restlessness for love and desire like any teenager from any time, but also for culture, literature, music. Her writing is dominated by ‘decadent’ influences like her favourite, Oscar Wilde, whose aphorisms she adored. She soaked up time in London where she studied during her formative years at Queen’s College on Harley Street- http://www.qcl.org.uk/

Here she met her lifetime friend and ‘slave’, Ida Baker, also known as LM, for KM an emotional support until the very end. What an incredibly rich and fulfilling time she had at Queen’s College. It enabled her to study music (her beloved cello), practise her craft of writing, meet fascinating intellectuals and like-minded people she struggled to meet in Wellington. Once back home again when her education ‘finished’ she got into a real funk, angry with her family, her father in particular who held the purse strings, and becoming notorious for her moods and dissatisfaction. NZ was, it seemed, a stale city with little to offer (Kimber shows that intellectually, it was in fact quite rich for its size), but for the restless KM, pining for England, it was stuffy and provincial in the worst possible way. It did not fit in with her bohemian ways, her grandiose, modern thinking, her dreams of decadence and separateness. KM was establishing, in her own mind, the idea of having a career in writing as a modernist author, and Wellington seemed to dampen her ambitions.

Eventually she realised a way of getting around her father and gaining his support. At about 18 or 19 she eventually went back to London to pursue a new life, but not until after a camping holiday around the north island where she learned some valuable lessons about living a more practical life and learning how to peel potatoes, amongst other things.

Oh, how much she would have savoured getting on a boat again, escaping the stifling Wellington, and getting away from her father, except for his much- needed money, which was 100 pounds a year. And oh, how I can relate, right now, to the idea of getting on that boat and going once again to England and the promise of great adventure- Northumberland, Shropshire, Lakes District, Cornwall, Kent, Yorkshire, Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Devon, Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire…

She went back to England and eventually met John Middleton Murry and published short stories and created a deeply enriching life around her, inhabited by D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and many others. She never forgot New Zealand, though, which crept into her stories time and time again. There is something about memories of our youth, and how we can paint them somehow rosier in our minds. If there was some rosiness.

   

Looking For, and Finding, The Lost Girl

I STARTED reading short stories and novels by D H Lawrence in 1989. At the time I was living in Wangaratta. I was browsing books at a newsagent on the main street. I didn’t know many people in the town. I had a lot of time on my hands. I’d read the odd short story during my university days. Probably about six or seven. The Rocking Horse Winner and You Touched Me, among others. Two of his best stories. So there I was in Wangaratta, with plenty of time on my hands and wanting to get back into reading, looking for a good cause to devote my energies to. Perhaps I had even read Sons & Lovers by then. And here it was, a paperback version of the Keith Sagar illustrated biography. I was hooked. His story was powerful, and led me in the following months to devour The Trespasser, Lady Chatterley, The Rainbow, Women In Love, etc, etc. but this wasn’t enough. Soon I found myself buying the hardback CUP editions of his letters, all eight volumes of them. Well, as they say, the rest is history- many first editions of books by him and about him, mostly courtesy of Michael Logie in Adelaide, and eventually visiting houses he once inhabited, in countries like England and Italy.

This past two years I have been wandering around, doing my job, carrying a tacky Penguin embossed aluminium water bottle of The Lost Girl (1920). It has occurred to me, on and off, that this is one of the few novels that has slipped my grasp. I had never read it. If people asked me about, I, the so-called ‘Lawrence expert’ would go totally blank. So I thought I had better do something about.

This past week I have had a couple of days where I found some rare space, some real solitude. I found a copy besides my first edition in the Niddrie library. One of those green ‘Phoenix’ copies. I found myself at the zoo the other day. The kids went off with some other kids and some adults, and I had a 3-4 hour stint alone next door to the carousel. I saw kid, after kid, after kid line up and go off on their $3.95 ride. But most of the time I was engrossed on this bench seat next to the carousel, reading The Lost Girl. By the time I was re-united with everybody, I was just over half way through. And, as everyone knows, the second half of any book is easier and quicker to devour than the first half.

I finished The Lost Girl that night, or the next day, I’m not sure. Reading, to me, and especially reading D H Lawrence, is a great adventure. The next port of call was the CUP volume of letters- Vol III, I think, marking the period leading up to and around 1920. Here, Lawrence was living in Taormina, Sicily, and quickly writing his novel (the novel was initially started, then abandoned, back in 1913 when Lawrence was still in England). So here were all the interesting references to his friends in his letters about the novel he was currently working on in Taormina. Initially it was called The Insurrection of Miss Houghton (!), then I think Mixed Marriage, and finally The Lost Girl (his publisher was apparently concerned that libraries would be scared away from this title- this was not long after the controversy of The Rainbow, you see).

So evidently Lawrence had great fun writing The Lost Girl, and thought it would be a success. The next thing to read was Vol II of the III part CUP biographies. Vol II covers the period around the 1920’s, and here was a great discussion about Lawrence’s intentions and his life at this time.  As is typical with Lawrence, the so-called ‘scandalous’ sections raised the most questions. Alvina Houghton is the daughter of a middle class businessman, owner of Manchester House drapery firm, and later joins a travelling theatre group as they play to audiences around England. Here she meets the working class Italian man with green eyes called Ciccio. Twice Alvina and Ciccio make love in the story- Alvina is a virgin until she meets Ciccio, well into her thirties. It is fairly dominant love-making, weighted on the male side, and according to the Lawrence scholar, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, there might be some anal sex in it as well (although I could not really pick that up in reading the sections he alludes to). So as it turns out, there are three variants in the Secker (English) first edition. The second variant, which is the one I have, has tipped in pages based on Lawrence’s apparently controversial intent. The first variant contained the altered text that was used to satisfy the prudishness of the libraries. The third variant (I think) contains Lawrence’s original intentions, not tipped in. all this is in the Lawrence bibliography I own, so I could pore over this with the second variant in my other hand.

Then there was the internet. The Australian scholar, Sandra Jobson-Darroch, has written an article claiming that Lawrence based his heroine, Alvina Houghton, on Katherine Mansfield. Another researcher, someone who completed her doctorate on this link, colludes with Jobson-Darroch, and says, yes, there are strong links suggesting that although Lawrence may have begun to use Notts woman Flossie Cullen as his model for Alvina Houghton, she became Katherine Mansfield when he took the novel up again just before 1920. It is interesting reading all this, yet I don’t get the sense at all, from reading The Lost girl, that there is more than just a passing reference to Katherine Mansfield in his novel (I certainly agree, however, she was the model for Gudrun in Women In Love).

All this is very interesting to me. I weigh up what these writers have written and I dismiss their ideas, but I can see how exciting it must be for them, to think they are on to something new, something the CUP biographers never seemed to think about. But I find their conclusions very non-conclusive, and I think it’s good to have an independent, critical mind as well ( I remember being at university, and the lecturer, Tony French, told me not to heed the ideas by the Cambridge scholar in his introduction to Hardy’s poems. The thought of rejecting the ideas of a Cambridge scholar in my Penguin copy of Hardy’s poems back then seemed to be almost sacrilegious).

What is more interesting than all of this, anyway, is the fact that Lawrence created another interesting and modern heroine in his Alvina Houghton, who paved a path for herself that is courageously completely at odds with her upbringing and those genteel influential folk around her (in this regard Lawrence’s own wife, Frieda, is a much more likely model for Alvina, although Katherine Mansfield forged a completely independent path for herself as well!).  Bravo to another of Lawrence’s heroines. Look closely, though, and you will see he is criticized by some well-meaning modern critics who detest Lawrence’s sexual politics and find fault with all of his heroines, and feel somehow that they are too male reliant and are victims of Lawrence’s so-called misogynistic world view.

Having read The Lost Girl I can, now, with greater confidence, saunter around the corridors and fields of my workplace, dangling my Lost Girl water bottle in my right hand, competently answering questions about the identity of this mysterious ‘lost girl’, and discuss the irony of the title- Alvina Houghton, a woman who discovers what she truly desires, and forges a courageous path to achieve it.

Kicking back on 'Rananim Farm.'

       

Well what a 2013. Going overseas for a year was the best decision I ever made- in conjunction with my family, of course. We received the letter, or offer, in the mail just seven days before the new year. I remember thinking, what a lovely, quaint way to receive an invitation. I really expected, when I received it, it would be by email. I have kept the envelope and all. It is bright red with a pen and ink drawing of the moon and stars on the reverse, drawn by a child. One of the children in the commune, as it turned out. It filled everyone here with excitement.

In the morning we watched the first half an hour of this new surreal film called ‘Gravity.’ The weightlessness in space and the beautiful blue universe got us all thinking about planes, and then we were off, by taxi, to the airport.

I fished out the original invitation again when were nestled onto the plane. ‘NEED A CHALLENGE?’, it stated. ‘SICK OF CARS AND ADVERTISING AND HOLLOWNESS AND VACANT STARES ON PEOPLE’S FACES? HAD ENOUGH OF LOUD MOBILE PHONE CONVERSATIONS AND TRAFFIC AND WALLS AND FENCES AND KEYS AND LOCKED DOORS AND SUSPICIOUS GLANCES? OF WASTE AND POLLUTION AND PEOPLE SELLING AND BUYING HOUSES AND CRAP ON TELEVISION AND ON FM MORNING BREAKFAST RADIO? OF GETTING UP USELESSLY EARLY EVERY DAY AND BEING TOO EXHAUSTED FOR REFLECTION AND RELAXATION AND REST AND RUNNING? MISSING BOOKS AND READING AND FRESH AIR AND GRASS AND MOUNTAINS AND BLUE WATER AND CONVERSATION AND CONTEMPLATION? WELL ‘RANANIM FARM’ IS FOR YOU.’

As a family we discussed it for about three days. I piled on enormous pressure. First we had to get neighbours to agree to mow the lawn and water the plants. My wife was dubious about how little money we would allegedly need. The children felt that they would miss their ‘things’ but I was able to convince them that for one year ‘things’ would not be important anymore. I spent the last days before our departure sitting amongst the old books in the bookcase in my bedroom, and watched a bit of Simon and Garfunkel on youtube. My wife rang as many people as she could squeeze in and the children played on the backyard swing until their hands had little callouses all over their sorry red palms.

The plane journey was painless enough. Our children were quite mature even before our trip. The youngest wasn’t bothered at all by the air 24 hour flight to England. She roamed up and down the corridor of the plane with the only ‘thing’ she was allowed to take, which was ‘Dolly’ nestled inside a little pink plastic pram.

At Heathrow we caught a Northern line train to Central London. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. There we were, a family of four wearing nervous, expectant expressions, carrying four wrinkled blue backpacks amidst business men and women holding expensive suitcases and nudging mobile phones.

Another train at Waterloo Station spat us out towards the Devon countryside, and eventually to ‘Rananim Farm.’ It might sound clichéd, I know, but there was a rainbow sitting above a green hill when we arrived, and the indigo was particularly indigo, and the green particularly green. The farm itself was red brick, ancient, and oblong in size. There were all these little segments, each with a tiny window and at one there was a happy child peering out. As fate would have it, she would become my eldest daughter’s best friend.

 

Over the next several hours, and days, I learnt the fairly simple drill of what life on ‘Rananim Farm’ was all about. It remained simple for all four of us, over the whole of the twelve beautiful months we spent there. I’m not exactly sure what my wife and children did when they weren’t with me. Part of the ‘Rananim philosophy’ was to spend time alone in contemplation and the company of crosswords and books. There was time allocated for this every day, as well as time engaged with the community.  A typical day on the farm for me throughout most of the twelve months was as follows:

9:00 AM- rise and breakfast with the community. Sitting at long trestle tables and eating the produce we had grown and reading interesting books like ‘Glorious Devon’ and ‘Glorious Cornwall’.

11 AM- working with the community on the vast communal crops, vegetable gardens and helping to clean each other’s rooms and prepare for the coming meals.

1 PM- eating a healthy lunch with the community, at a different trestle table than the one before.

2PM- an hour spent with the family or someone or some people of your choice. Usually a walk across fields, watching your reflection in the lake, or listening to music in the cabins behind the hills.

3PM- joining a ‘conversation panel’ of your choice. There were several groupings of people, each according to his interest or expertise. The groups were about 6-7 people in size.  People  were rotated. The ‘conversation panels’ I chose to join were invariably music, literature or film oriented, and sometimes politics or religion if my mood required it. Some of the memorable discussion topics included ‘Christian Atheism’, ‘the films of Ingmar Bergman V the films of Woody Allen’, ‘the most progressive rock artists from the 60’s and 70’s’, and ‘stream of consciousness writing in twentieth century Literature.’

5 PM- working with the community again to prepare the evening meal, and, if still daylight, a half hour helping to maintain the garden and the food crops.

6 PM- eating dinner with members of the community. A different grouping from the earlier sessions, and cleaning up on a rotational basis.

7 PM- family (or close friends) time- usually discussions, cuddles, or simply resting.

8 PM until late- time allocated for reading, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, music, writing letters, etc-  my favourite part of the day.

             

 

The only variance from days like the one described above was when members of the community agreed to take a day’s break from the farm and walked off to explore other parts of the English countryside. An old, ramshackle bus was housed on another part of the farm, and that was occasionally used for trips to a neighbouring district or county. Small groups, or families, were known to sometimes visit areas of natural beauty in counties as far from Devon as Somerset or Cornwall.

 

The children’s conversation groups to be a little moralistic at times. Discussion topics such as ‘the moral dangers lurking in Disney’, or ‘modern day Princesses- feminine or feminist?’ (I was only privy to the female topics) were all the rage, and even though my children were young, they enjoyed them because it meant looking at Disney images in old scrapbooks someone had brought along.

Locals tended to be suspicious about the goings on at ‘Rananim Farm.’ It reminded me of Orwell’s famous novella, and the way in which neighbouring farms would gossip about what was being played out at ‘Animal Farm.’ One day a local reporter even came along. She was young and ambitious and hung around like a bad smell for several hours, and even tried to slip into one of the adult discussion forums. I think, from memory, it was titled ‘the insidiousness of the outside world’, or words to that effect. The article in the paper a couple of days later said that the people on the farm had ‘Communist leanings’!, and an accompanying editorial noted that none of the members of our idyllic group seemed to contribute in any tangible way to society. This was despite, the letter said, that there were teachers, musicians, gardeners, massage therapists, climate change officers and even a fireman on the farm. Well, that made all of us smirk because whilst we were possibly not adding anything to general society in terms of services, and so on, were weren’t taking anything away either. We were, in the true spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-sufficient, and that was exciting. The word ‘rananim’ was also speculated upon. The young journalist seemed to think that there was a hint of revolution in the word. The article did include one aspect that did please all of us. It noted that there didn’t really seem to be a ‘leader’ or ‘head’ as such on the farm, and that was something we were all proud of.

At some stage during the winter, when our resolve was being tested by spoiled crops and freezing rooms, a letter came from my brother which I read gleefully to all concerned. It was like manna from heaven.

‘Dear P (it read)

I have no idea what you are up to with J and your two young girls, but all I can say is don’t hurry home. I am writing this in the car on Punt Road whilst I am driving, believe it or not! It is safe to do so because the car edges further towards the city every few minutes, but it’s only about a metre or so, and if I turned the engine off I could almost roll all the way. Besides the disgusting traffic, I should also tell you that there is nothing that is any good in the news. I read ‘The Age’ online today, and the cover story was about two kids being abducted from their bedrooms the day before Christmas. On page three there was the story of the mother taking the Education Department to court because of the severe cyber bullying that was happening at their children’s school. Then if that isn’t enough, some desperate, unhappy people have arrived from their war torn country and have been put straight into a detention centre (read jail) and told they might be stuck there for years because of their troubles.’

The letter went on about some family news, and finished with this: ‘Write to me soon if you are interested in hearing about some more peculiarities from our alien world.’

It was the escape from all of that, but as well as the camaraderie, the closeness, the tranquillity and the harmony that made me cry real tears one mild evening during December. Our time on ‘Rananim Farm’ was coming to an end, and all four of us would miss it greatly. We were all worried about heading back home to Melbourne, but we knew our golden places were waiting to be filled by a horticulturalist and her partner and children, next in line for the most magical year of their lives.

 

 

SONS AND LOVERS IS A HUNDRED YEARS OLD

 

SONS AND LOVERS was first published in the early months of 1913. The Lawrence’s were living on Lake Garda at the time. It must have been of some relief to Lawrence. It was many years in gestation, and featured any number of drafts. Lawrence’s former fiancée, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in the novel) was a heavy, early influence. She read and commented on many of the drafts. Later she lost a lot of influence when they became estranged after Lawrence became engaged to Louie Burrows who knew Jessie Chambers, and especially diminished when Lawrence met his future wife, Frieda. Frieda helped Lawrence see his past in a much different light. Sometime later Lawrence would admit that he was under the influence of his mother too much, to the extent that his ‘memoir’ of his boyhood struggles did a disservice to his father and his father’s relationship with his family. It must have come as quite a shock to Jessie Chambers when suddenly, one day, through Louie Burrows if I remember correctly, she was told that Lawrence had eloped with a German woman (not far from the start of the first war). The Lawrence of her girlhood and his boyhood, as traced throughout Sons and Lovers, was much altered.

           

The first book I ever read about Lawrence was a pictorial biography written by the celebrated champion of Lawrence, Keith Sagar. It was when I was living in Wangaratta, and I visited the local newsagent in search of something new. The account of Lawrence’s family and upbringing, the closeness with his mother, the hatred of his father, the death of an older brother, the struggles with women and the frustrations of sex, the love of languages and learning and nature, the boyhood joy of going to the rural property, ‘The Haggs’ to see Jessie and her family- this was the stuff of wondrous excitement for me and it left me hungry for anything Lawrentian, which still carries to a certain extent to this day. The next logical reading excursion was ‘Sons and Lovers’, and here to my great surprise was pretty much the Sagar story retold with a protagonist called Paul Morel, and a girlfriend called Miriam. The rural property was there, the massive mother influence, and the frustrations with sex and fascination for all birds, beasts and flowers- it was all there amidst incredibly vivid, psychological writing.

      

I went to England in 1987 and stayed the night at a YMCA in Nottingham. I spent the day in Eastwood where Lawrence grew up and wandered the streets, found the various houses he lived in with his family, saw the family graves at the local cemetery, and visited the local library to see their Lawrence display, which constitutes some of the lovely homage that Eastwood pays to its most celebrated citizen. I returned again in 1993 because I couldn’t get enough of it and did much the same thing- lots of wandering along the snowy footpaths and going to the Lawrence Birthplace Museum and bypassing the tacky ‘White Peacock’ café opposite. My most recent trips were made in 2002-2003. I was living in England at the time. I packed the car, and with my wife I drove to Nottingham city centre randomly in search of a job and a house to live in. For the next 2-3 months, after settling eventually in Old Basford, I found myself within easy driving access to Nottingham University to see the Lawrence collection at the library, and what’s more, Eastwood itself, so I could make many trips to the library, the museum, the wooded areas surrounding The Haggs, the four houses the Lawrence’s lived in, and the pub that Arthur Lawrence frequented. This was real ‘Sons and Lovers’ territory and it brought the wonderful book to life. I imagined the lucky students in neighbouring counties like Leicestershire, and Derbyshire, and even Yorkshire, going to Eastwood for school excursions whilst studying ‘Sons and Lovers’, and witnessing the respectful painted trail along the small city’s footpaths that follow in Lawrence’s former footsteps.

    

Last night I finished Geoff Dyer’s enigmatic ‘Out Of Sheer Rage’, which was supposed to be a book about Lawrence, but ended up being a book about writing a book about Lawrence. Much of it is intriguing, although admittedly I skipped certain sections, my eye alert mostly to the passages about the author. It is a book that I wished I had written- the pilgrimages to the houses lived in, the fun of following the blue line trail around Eastwood, ruminating on the fabulous letters and the best books. It is a good book to read on the hundred year anniversary of Sons and Lovers. And now that I’ve finished it I’m going to go back to the book published in 1913, about a boy and then a young man visiting The Haggs farmhouse, wondrous and lit up inside.

 

    

                

Literary Haunts of Yesteryear

MOST mornings, a little self- consciously, I am standing  in a busy Melbourne street, waiting for the bus that is invariably late and grasping, a little uncomfortably, my heavy work books. I am often thinking about England.

I wrote a kind of review of some of the literary haunts I visited when I lived in England a number of years ago. I wrote the review when I got back to Melbourne, when the memories of England haunted me even more strongly than they do now.

Britain is full of literary treasures, not the least being the famous abode of many great novelists and poets. Now is not the best time of the year to motor around the British countryside. Put it off for a few months when the weather picks up and travel to some wonderful places where writers gained immense inspiration from their unique surrounds.



You might begin your journey in the south of England, and visit the National Trust property at Rodmell, Sussex known as Monk’s House. This was the property of Leonard and Virginia Woolf from 1919 until 1941, the time of Woolf’s apparent suicide. The river Ouse runs behind the property, and it was on a stretch of this river that Woolf’s body was found three weeks after she went missing. The centrepiece of the house must be Virginia’s bedroom, a small room with a single bed and a fascinating fireplace painted by her sister, Vanessa Bell, which features a small boat heading towards a lighthouse. This image played a significant part in Woolf’s literary career, an image straight from her 1927 masterpiece To The Lighthouse. Of less interest is Virginia’s study, altered after her suicide, but still containing her desk and writing paper. The garden is another showpiece. It contains a bust of both Leonard and Virginia, and offers some insight into the view Virginia would have had on countless days of writing and contemplation in her garden, including the fateful day in March of 1941 when she wandered toward the river and placed  heavy stones in her pocket.


Travel directly west to another part of England and you come across important literary associations of a very different kind, to Thomas Hardy, who spent most of his life in Dorset, and is chiefly associated with two houses only a few miles apart: Higher Bockhampton near Stinsford, where Hardy was born in a thatched cottage in 1840, and Max Gate, where Hardy moved with his wife Emma, both at the age of forty-five, at the time of The Mayor of Casterbridge. One of the rooms in Higher Bockhampton was the source for Hardy’s earliest writing, culminating in Far From the Madding Crowd, and the invention of Wessex, fostering his marvellous geographic imagination. The house is open to the public and is a treat to walk around, double-bent much of the time with its low white-washed ceilings and seven little rooms and stairs. There is a vivid sense of little being altered, and as a monument to Hardy’s early career it is deeply respectful.



Max Gate holds a different sort of interest. The upstairs section is closed, but the bottom part contains quite a lot of memorabilia, including Hardy’s desk and private book collection, as well as a photocopied scrapbook, all available for perusal. It makes an interesting visit, even with half the house closed off to private owners, and the fact that somebody in their wisdom removed Hardy’s study from Max Gate and put it on display at the county museum in Dorchester. A man who was tending the house when I was there recalled his delight when a big, burly man a number of years ago dropped in and asked a number of fascinating questions. After he left he realised this was Ted Hughes. You might wish to try and locate the famous picture of Hardy standing next to his bicycle, taken from within the grounds of his carefully nurtured garden.


Travelling further into the heart of England, directly west of London, is the border of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and more specifically Kelmscott, the little Cotswold town famous for the beautiful, grand home let by William Morris, a man of many talents, including those of artist, writer, craftsman and socialist. Morris resided here in his self-contained manor on the upper Thames from 1871, during the latter part of a richly fertile life. His co-tenants were his wife, the Pre-Raphaelite darling Jane (Burden) Morris, and her lover at the time, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the famous painter with the equally famous poet sister, Christina. It is an impressive looking home made of stone, although not really a manor, and looks just like Morris’ drawing of it for his posthumously published book News From Nowhere. The house is full of reprints of Morris’ wallpaper and curtains, and every effort has been made to keep the furniture and look of the principal people’s bedrooms. You can see for yourself the wall hangings which gave Rossetti nightmares, and the room in which he painted some lovely pictures of Morris’ wife. Morris cared a great deal about animal life and his natural surroundings, and there is much to be appreciated of the setting of Kelmscott Manor today. Morris’ simple gravestone is an added feature of the town, lying in the garden of the local churchyard. Plenty of Morris purchases on offer, and highly recommended.




Dylan Thomas is another writer who is buried in the town he spent quite a bit of his life in. Laugharne is in the western part of South Wales, and it was here that Thomas found the inspiration to write famous works such as ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ and ‘Under Milkwood’. It is also the town that features the modest Brown’s Hotel, another feature of Laugharne that has become heavily associated with the poet. Thomas lived with his wife Caitlin, and their three children, in what has commonly become known as ‘the boat house’, for the last four turbulent years of his life. He had earlier rented a cottage in a different section of the town. The boat house is a fairly small dwelling consisting of three bedrooms and a small living area, with a balcony or verandah running around its side. It is elevated elegantly from the ground, nestled into the side of a sea wall. There is a steep incline running from the top of the cliff, into the Thomas’ garden and their front door below. Thomas and his wife apparently grew to loathe the house and its lack of space. Hence Thomas found salvation in a simple writing shed less than a hundred yards along the cliff path. Here he could work on such things as Under Milkwood without constant interruptions from things around him. The boat house is well worth visiting for the glimpse it offers into the life of a well known poet who would become a lot more famous.


Travelling eastwards again, back into England and towards the centre of the country, the motorway takes you into the Midlands, and the birthplace of a writer who is associated with the place of his birth perhaps even more so than Thomas Hardy. A great admirer of Hardy’s, D H Lawrence spent all of his formative years in Nottingham, before becoming a school teacher in Croydon, near London. The Lawrence family grew up together in Eastwood, nine miles north-west of the centre of Nottingham, changing houses on a number of occasions, each said to be in a slightly superior position. The only one of the four houses Lawrence lived in until the age of 23 that is open to the public is now known as the Birthplace Museum. Inextricably linked with the beginning of Sons and Lovers, the house in Victoria Street contains some examples of original furniture that belonged to the Lawrence family, and anything different that has been added has been done so tastefully and with pleasing consideration to historical accuracy. Inside the modest brick dwelling one finds the original kitchen range, a spacious living-room, bedrooms and a large attic. The front window is oblong in shape and larger than those of similar houses nearby. Lawrence’s mother made the most of this economic advantage by displaying her linen and children’s clothes to passers by. Inside, one thinks of the verbal battles that took place between middle-class mother and miner father, although it should be noted that the family left for a semi-detached house around the corner when Lawrence was only two. Eastwood seems proud these days of its world famous son. The birth place museum has a wide array of Lawrence memorabilia for sale, as well as an audio visual display well worth a look. The attendants are more knowledgeable than in most places of its type. In the main street of Eastwood stands the local library, which houses a vast display of Lawrence-related literature, including a cabinet of first editions. There is also a thin blue painted line circumnavigating the town that visitors can wander along, which encompasses Lawrence’s primary school, the other three houses he lived in, and even the pub that features in Sons and Lovers, where Lawrence was sent by his mother to retrieve his often times drunken father.




There are more reasons to visit Yorkshire other than to visit Haworth, but the Bronte Parsonage is one of the best. It should be remembered when visiting this unique house that the Bronte sisters- and Emily in particular- didn’t have a lot of experience of the world outside of Haworth. The famous moors surrounding Haworth, the surviving character of the town itself, the life of the girls inside the parsonage- these are the elements that shaped the imagination of three unique individuals. Haworth itself, a grim darkly polluted village town of many years ago, has become more prosperous and commercial today as one might expect. The aspects of character that remain are the quaint little shops with original signs, the blackened stone walls of many buildings, the cobbled lanes and main street that descends into the middle of town past the cemetery, and the Black Bull Inn that has passed into folklore as the pub where the girls’ brother, Bramwell, spent many a session drinking. A short drive out of town, and well sign posted, is the crumbling stone foundation known as ‘Top Withens’ which is said to be the inspiration for the Earnshaw home in ‘Wuthering Heights’. Now getting to the Parsonage itself. Unfortunately it has been renovated and made visitor friendly with new wallpaper and heating and furnishings to make the connection with the Bronte family when visiting more difficult. However, besides a couple of extensions, the exterior of the house remains very similar to what it was in the days of busy composing. The setting is eerie and imposing, sombrely overlooking the graveyard (one must remember to what extent death touched this family’s lives). A servant the children were very fond of was buried in this graveyard, but the Bronte children themselves, with the exception of Anne, are buried anonymously in the church overlooking the graveyard. Inside, the children’s study is still a special place, very small but full of associations with the little children composing stories in their tiny booklets and playing with toys fed to them by their father to fire their imagination. Patrick Bronte’s bedroom is in original condition and the living room has been faithfully recreated. One of the show pieces of the house is the green chaise- longue that Emily is said to have died upon in 1848 at the age of thirty. One of the most rewarding aspects of the house is contained within the added on sections, and that is the Bronte memorabilia that has been spectacularly created. In glass cabinets you will find examples of the little books, locks of hair, original letters and manuscripts and drawings, and clothing worn by the family, much of it belonging to Charlotte, who lived the longest. Allow yourself a couple of hours of searching throught the biographical displays, before you venture out again into the crisp Haworth air.