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.

Holidaying by the sea, and thinking of Wuthering Heights

It is January, 2020. It is another new year. I am holidaying on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria at a tourist spot Apollo Bay called Skene's Creek.

The shoreline below us at Skene’s Creek is filled with rocky plates. These are mostly thick but flattened and easy to walk upon in their smoothness. They create a magical, moon-like atmosphere, except for the choppy waves that sometimes plummet on them. Occasionally you see tendrils of seaweed or lime-green sea plants growing on them, but they are mostly bare. Yesterday we saw some birdlife, or rather death, in the form of a gull and a fairy penguin.

This is the time of year of the after effects of bushfires. They have spread wildly and devastatingly across several states, and in particular in NSW and Victoria. The atmosphere is fogged with a thick, grey cloudy haze. The sky is smoke-grey, even white in places, and it looks like it will bucket with rain, but we are only getting intermittent, brief showers. I spoke to a neighbour that I saw at the beach. His teenage boys have coloured hair. One of them, the tallest one, has a mop of bright red, curly hair. He looks like Thing One or Thing Two from ‘The Cat in the Hat.’ When I said ‘it’s not great holiday weather!’, he looked surprised at my defeatism, and in optimistic fashion, replied ‘at least it is seldom raining.’

Despite our smoggy, smoky environs, and the fact that it is a bit too cold to swim in the choppy ocean, it is enough that we have this glorious moon-scape not far from the bottom of our garden. It is like another prehistoric world and I gaze into little or large rock pools expectantly for mysterious ocean dwellers, dead or alive. The roaring sea is absorbing to watch. I like the lovely emerald green of the sea just as it is about to curl or roll into another flashing wave. You also have the sensation of the soft sand under your feet or the smooth plates of rock you can stand on in order to look imperiously over the water. It is amazing how free you feel. In the distance, in the murky haze at night, the Otway Lighthouse has a steady beam to the right. It is just you, the distant beam, the incessant waves crashing on the moon plates, a white bird or two with stork-like legs, the grey, unfriendly mountains, the thick, mysterious haze, silver sky. And besides the muted roar of the hungry sea, it is so quiet. I imagine I am on a big ship with friends and wine, flooding across the seas, looking for an uninhabited island, without responsibilities and expectations.

Then I remember I am immersed in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and I think of ghosts, and Heathcliff, and Cathy calling, cold and shut out on the moors, and I think of the sea as being like a huge wet version of the moors, and how EJB, or Emily Bronte, would have wandered these moors time and time again, like me, bewildered, and charged and exhilarated by her surroundings, feeling other wordly and looking for whatever nature might fling up to you in the wildest spaces. Not a penguin or some other seabird for her, or a strange cream-coloured shell, or random rock pools housing who knows what. For her, wild dogs and various birds, a massive array of plant life, moss and heather blazing in the late Lancashire light, the plot of Wuthering Heights forming in her mind, the slow emergence of Cathy and Heathcliff, their second carnation, Hareton Earnshaw and Hindley, kindly Nell and steady Edgar and the strange and often hostile communications between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the violence and desperate lives, their frustrations and forced limitations and the cruelty and aggression. And it must be said smaller snatches of love, and hope as well and very real longing such as Earnshaw has for the younger Cathy at the end of the novel. EJB understood somehow the whole range or gamut of emotions that make up the human experience despite her relatively insular life.

The birthplace of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- oh, to be there again now, very now… and just now it also occurs to me- and I find this very interesting- I have never thought much about the landscapes of Jane Austen. I guess this is because her novels are much more interior- still, the settings of Barton Hall, and Pemberton and the other great mansions- the lovely hills and valleys and dales of the English countryside, the sparkling streams where the men fish, the broad spaces where their hunting is done- I don’t care as much for.

I can remember vaguely Charlotte being dismissive of Austen. Perhaps she didn’t understand her, or her world. It is very different to Haworth (even so Charlotte was the one Bronte who became reasonably travelled and experienced with polite society through the success of Jane Eyre and introductions to people like Thackeray and Dickens).

It is not to say I don’t value Jane Austen. I like her. I esteem her. I like some of her novels, in fact, more than most of Jane Eyre, which I think is too long and needed more polish. Austen certainly does not lack polish or craft.

But I come back to Wuthering Heights. The attractiveness of the rawness of everything. There is not one in Austen like Heathcliff, the dirty orphaned boy who is dragged back to the Heights by his master and grows up to be cruel and vindictive and full of resentment about his place in society. No-one in Austen like Earnshaw, who is desperate to drag Catherine to bed and tear her clothes off. You can just feel this seething sense of sexual menace which is so surprising and compelling. Emily Bronte must have been so shocking for her time. Austen undoubtedly shocked too. She was full of subtle, clever criticism of her society and her best heroines were intelligent and resourceful and you can’t help but feel moved by the way things were so heavily stacked against them. But this sense of gender imprisonment is so much more powerful in Wuthering Heights. Elizabeth Bennett would have been shocked by Cathy. You could only imagine her take on Heathcliff and Hindley and Earnshaw. Perhaps Elizabeth would have coped better than some of the others.

It’s the language too, that is the great difference. I was enthralled by Bronte’s language of the gutter. Whilst Austen is cynical about everything, it is polite cynical. EJB however captures the attitudes of her people with devastating force, looking the reader straight in the eye and telling us exactly how her desperate people feel and think. And somehow she still directs our affection towards them.

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.