Our current fractious world needs – indeed, yearns – for more harmony, more togetherness, more joy. On the 20th of June, at All Saints Church in Maidstone, we had all those qualities in abundance. Our spirits were encouraged to soar in a concert by Maidstone Wind Symphony and The Maidstone Singers Extended Choir on a gloriously balmy evening.
A Buddhist meditation by David Maslanka opened the concert sensitively conducted by Roger Graham with the Maidstone Wind Symphony (all talented amateur musicians) drawing us into a state of calm reflection as the music drifted around this stunning grand church. This piece, entitled ‘Give Us This Day’, set the spiritual tone for the evening.
‘O Magnum Mysterium’ by Morton Lauridsen is a “quiet song of profound inner joy”. The Wind Symphony was led gently and precisely by Roger Graham through this popular piece.
The first half closed with the surging, uplifting ‘Alleluia Laudamus Te’ by Alfred Reed, raising spirits to the ornate gilded roof – a triumphant recitation leaving us in need of interval refreshment to feed the body after the soul had been sated.
And what a second half! Karl Jenkins’ ‘The Armed Man’ was sung with passion by The Maidstone Singers. The piece is almost a musical documentary which traces both the bravery of soldiers and the utter futility of war. The choir marching on the spot set the tone. It is not simply an anti-war diatribe. It is much more subtle and, therefore, persuasive. Jenkins composed the piece as he daily watched the unfolding genocide in Kosovo. This Muslim-majority now independent country no doubt inspired him to include ‘The Call to Prayers’. This was a particularly poignant moment as Adi Usmani took to the pulpit to sing the Call in Arabic. A Call to Prayers in an Anglican church – what better message of tolerance, mutual understanding could there be rather than blind, ignorant hatred? Fly a flag for that alone.
The ‘Kyrie eleison’ was sung with great feeling by the Maidstone Singers with all eyes on their conductor, Kathryn Ridgeway, who did seem to live every nuance, every twist and turn. Her direction of the percussionists as they created an ambience of hope and horror was masterful.
We are then with the soldiers (helped by war images projected on a screen) as they prepare to go over the top almost certainty to their deaths. This is the slow, brutal horror of All Quiet on the Western Front as in the film a twisted bloodied hand in the mud slowly stills of life.
The ‘Agnus Dei’ was sensitively sung with strident dignity and we are with the soldiers who have survived staring at their dead mates. Has there ever been a more beautifully composed cor anglais solo for the Benedictus? Jenkins was himself a skilled oboist (listen to Soft Machine Six) and this solo is played beautifully.
A panoply for peace closes ‘The Armed Man’ with Tennyson’s words “Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace”. As we all headed home in the warm evening air with hope renewed by this performance maybe we could see a new light in these dark times. Music matters more than ever. Thank you to all the performers.
The idea that the universe has an underlying sonic structure is as old as philosophy, and as perennial. Ancient observations of planetary orbits encouraged Pythagoras to hypothesize that just as the pitch of musical notes was determined by the rapidity of vibrations, so planets which orbited at different speeds must also make unique sounds, which harmonised as a majestic “music of the spheres”. Classical world-influenced Christian thinkers dreamed up trumpets toppling the walls of Jericho or signalling the End of Days, and the allegorical Instruments of St. Jerome, whose tuba had three mouthpieces, symbolising the Trinity, and four openings, to symbolize the Four Evangelists. Since its invention in the third century BC, the organ has been seen as much more than a machine – rather, with its air currents and complexity of construction, a metaphor of a breathing grand design.
Sir Thomas Browne called God “the First Composer” in Religio Medici, and saw music as key to universal understanding; he would have known the already old proverb “Music is the eye of the ear.” In 1921, 64 years-old Edward Elgar would write wistfully to his friend, the critic Sir Sidney Colin, “I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side, with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great.” The music of the spheres seems inseparable from the music for our ears.
But while music can express emotions not easily conveyable in words, it can have limitations of its own, because of the imperfections of the instruments we use to “fix” the music we hear in our heads. Even the most advanced instruments are really reminders of music rather than music in themselves. In this diverting and handsomely illustrated book – an offshoot of their project www.imaginaryinstruments.org – two American organologists examine how musical visionaries have always sought to supersede the shortcomings of the tools of their trade, and surpass previous sounds.
Instruments, according to the authors’ expansive definition, are not necessarily contrivances of metal, wood and catgut, but can be wholly conceptual – a “constellation of forms, at once material and intellectual.” A radio, to these authors, can be an instrument – so too a piece of software. Instruments may not even be intended to make what we would consider musical sounds, but can be used to convey visual and even olfactory ‘music’ – colours or odours obtained by pressing keys. Conventional organologists categorise instruments according to their primary sound-producing mechanisms – for example, idiophones have vibrating bodies, and aerophones vibrating air columns – to which these authors now add ‘fictophones’, instruments which either never existed or progressed no further than prototype, yet inspired actual instruments, or otherwise resound in our imaginations. This is a highly entertaining account of artistic playfulness from ancient times to today; it also constitutes a serious study of the natures and meanings of music.
Inventive musicians in all ages have sought to make instruments that are larger, louder, sweeter or more versatile, or that can render audible otherwise undetectable sounds. While many of these experimentations led to colourful dead ends, others eventually sparked off calculus, computing, medical audiology, recording and streaming, science-fiction, and psychological concepts like synaesthesia.
Renaissance anatomical discoveries encouraged musicians in search of amplification to try and replicate the inner ear in cochlear whorls of brass. The polymath Giambattista della Porta thought it possible to trap sounds in pipes to be listened to later, a reiteration of older traditions that sounds could be frozen in mid-air, or that one of the biblical Joseph’s exhalations had been preserved in a jar held at the Vatican. Leonardo filled notebooks with ideas for instruments from kettledrums with instantaneously tuneable skins to a concept of coaxing musical correspondences from different-sized waterfalls.
Isaac Newton analogised his colour spectrum with the musical scale, which encouraged experimenters to try and make music with colours. Voltaire was dismissive of the ‘optical harpsichords’ thus envisaged, but even he allowed there might be “hidden rapports”. The early twentieth century American artist Thomas Wilfred invented the ‘Clavilux’, a silent instrument where colours were conjured by keys – a service less to music as we think of it than to the emerging genre of ‘lumia’ or light art.
Even people could almost become instruments, as seen for example in the origin story of the Arabian oud – supposedly modelled on a dead boy’s bones by his grieving luthier father – or the Austrian author-composer Johann Beer’s 1701 satire Bellum musicum, in which the forces of musical conservatism are assailed by demotic ‘bunglers’ (village fiddlers and the like) led by an ‘ambassador’ whose body is confected of musical notations and parts of instruments. So, too, could animals – at least according to the sadistic invention known as the ‘cat piano’, in which cats were allegedly fastened in rows and made to issue different yowls by being jabbed with pins. Mercifully, the cat piano seems mostly myth, but Peter the Great of Russia really did commission one in 1716, which was apparently used occasionally as late as 1803.
The Greek Aeolian harp, in which music is made by the wind passing over untouched strings, is distant ancestor to the equally unhandled theremin (invented in 1928), whose ethereal tones in turn inspired the Moog synthesiser (invented in 1964). The prophetic ‘speaking heads’ of medieval legend prefigure today’s (and tomorrow’s) robots. In 1739, the German-Danish music theorist Johann Adolf Schiebe conceived of a musikalische wunder-Maschine – a device that could not only create music but appraise its artistic worth – a satire, but a forerunner of today’s AI music generators. The Panharmonicon “mechanical orchestra” invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel inspired his friend Beethoven’s 1813 symphony Wellington’s Victory, and can be seen as an antecedent to today’s electronic keyboards.
Adolphe Sax envisaged gigantic steam-powered organs and an array of other impossible instruments, including a thirteen-bell trumpet, but he also gave us the saxophone. Francis Bacon’s 1526 utopian novel New Atlantis, in which his hero visits an island off Brazil where the inhabitants operate official sound-houses to “practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation” inspired Daphne Oram to co-found the BBC’s world-famous Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. Musical Prometheans still look backwards in order to look forwards, like Brian Eno whose insights into medieval bells are informing his ideas of the sounds of thousands of years hence, when bells may be built of very different materials and ring with radically different tones. Whatever that far off world might sound like, it seems certain some of us will always be straining our ears to hear yet farther.
This review first appeared in Café Americain, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN revisits Yellow Sky, 1948, directed by William A. Wellman
Both the triumphant and then jolly music of Yellow Sky[i], with its flippant echo of Oh! Susanna[ii] are a complete contradiction to the overall mood of the film. Whatever your definition of noir, Yellow Sky comes stylistically and psychologically close until the end. Purely noir[iii] Westerns that also have negative endings are very rare. Wellman’s later, colour Western, Track of the Cat (1954) starring that fatalistic ‘Tsar of Noir’, Robert Mitchum[iv], though regularly considered one of the bleakest of Westerns, scrapes some hope at the end – albeit not for Mitchum.
Despite being known as “Wild Bill” for his confrontational personality, womanising and World War 1 exploits as a fighter pilot, Yellow Sky’s director, William A. Wellman[v], is not a household name. A hard-working, cross-genre versatility, valuing story over distinctive personal signature, has limited easy categorisation. Obviously, I didn’t know the man . . . and whenever fashions change, biographical accounts (and lots more besides) habitually shift emphasis to be in tune with them . . . who can you trust?
The frivolous banjo of Oh! Susanna is almost withering on Yellow Sky’s soundtrack as a headline spells out: The West – 1867. When the film was released on Christmas Eve, December 1948, I expect US cinemagoers would have realised the date’s significance. Not having studied American history at school, I needed to hear the characters’ backstories to discover that the American Civil War[vi] is not long over. This setting in time (echoed roughly by the gap between the end of World War 2 and the film’s release) must be intended to partly justify, or at least explain, the wild, egotistical and reckless behaviour likely to occur on the margins of traumatised civilizations.
After the titles conclude, the stock opening music of blaring victory and light-heartedness hits a streak of menace which declines into a thunder-clap over a sunny marshland area. If opening night audiences were looking forward to Christmas, they should postpone such thoughts!
A group of seven weary-looking men, their horses splashing onward in single file, ride slowly across the screen. We are only a minute and 40 seconds into the film – including logos, titles and a fine series[vii] of sketches of ghost towns and mine ruins – and the mood, having swung all over the compass, settles here with the kind of grim certainty one associates with either stoicism or desperation. Yet the landscape looks lushly verdant, flowery and appealing before the youngest of the group spots a skull with an arrow right through it.
“Prospector.” States a man who transmits an air of authority. Since he is portrayed by Gregory Peck, we imagine that if at times he must be brutal, he will usually be fair.
“Skinny little fella. Them bones ain’t hardly as big as my little finger,” opines the portly Walrus (Charles Kemper, who had been a foil to Danny Kaye early in his career and was often to provide an element of comic relief; in Yellow Sky it is faint). Picking the powerful arrow from the two huge holes it has punched in the skull, the youthful Bull Run (Robert Arthur) takes it to the probable leader, who regards its still pristine shaft. With the possibility of vengeful or “crazy Indians” adding to the landscape’s threat, the group survey their immediate surroundings. Dude – played by Richard Widmark, seems to know the area well and starts to lay it out (00:02:48): “up north there are lots of canyons and draws . . . if you know which ones are open.” Intrigued by what a “draw” might be – does it draw you in and then prove to be a fatal dead end? – I discovered a whole chain of words[viii] which construct a hierarchy of depressions and ravines, descending into canyons. Draws are the least significant. Draws drain into arroyos, which drain into coulees, which drain into canyons. As with so many words and word origins this is both fascinating and yet disappointing – disappointing that one imagines additional mysterious meanings. But aren’t such extra implications, to some extent, what poetry and music and the visual arts rely on? How is it that great black and white photography can often suggest more depth, even more colour than colour – can look more real than the reality of colour?
Dude continues to summarise the area’s variety. I’m not sure if such environmental diversity actually exists in such close proximity to Death Valley[ix] – with fertile looking marshes, killing salt flats, canyons, hills, mountains, and a dusty desert town all within a few miles’ radius . . . but if it does, take me there and there I’ll happily live!
Of the salt flats “down south” at 00:03:00, (Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth[x]) Dude chuckles “even a rattlesnake couldn’t get across em”. Is Dude referring to the reptile or to the memorable psychopath, Tommy Udo[xi], who he portrayed so effectively the year before Yellow Sky was releasedin Kiss of Death, (1947), almost stealing the film with his insane intensified chuckle – a chuckle he only slightly revives once (at 00:37:47) in Yellow Sky.
Eventually, in a town saloon, reviving themselves with a drink, the band encounter an extraordinary painting[xii]. A partly naïve, partly delirious, painting. Albert Pinkham Rider[xiii] crossed with Chagall[xiv]. Pale Death on a dark horse![xv]. This large image behind the bar fixates them all.
Lengthy (John Russell) whose awestruck lascivious comment at 00:03:57, harvests lust from the silence and then amusement: “I wonder if she’s got any plans after she gets through ridin’ that horse?” is reprised with more words but less universal staring at 00:05:29 – the camera closer to an image now about 50% larger. The statuesque woman appears to be tied to the rearing horse yet has the posture of someone reclining calmly on a sun lounger. The image is surreal and haunting – and perhaps intended to be subjective? Are the men all seeing it differently? She is not depicted as a victim. Does the horse represent the spirit of the woman? A woman as beyond the pale as Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Lengthy wouldn’t stand a chance!
“Yes sir, I sure would like to know what she plans to do after she gets through ridin’ that horse?” 00:05:29
The hold up (00:05:52) shoot up and escape is all over in less than a minute and by 00:07:52, chased by the cavalry out into a rocky wilderness among amazing tooth-shaped rocks towards the salt flats, they have lost their rear lookout rider. The cavalry captain calls a halt to the chase knowing the gang aren’t likely to survive crossing the sink of Death Valley: “Let ‘em go! Save us the trouble of hanging ‘em!”(00:08:30)
As Stretch divides the loot, the gang appear on the verge of fragmenting, though it’s hard to imagine they were ever a very cohesive unit. Dude, not caring personally about Jed being shot by the cavalry, is superstitiously fearful that the number of gang members no longer adds up to seven (00:09:21): “This desert’s a mighty unlucky place. A man needs all the odds he can get.” Several of them know it’s crazy not to turn back, “It’s a good 70 miles across this sink, maybe more!”, protests Lengthy, yet Stretch (at 00:09:38) asserts “it’s just a place, a place can be crossed.” At a horse walking speed of four miles an hour it would take 17 and a half hours to cover 70 miles. Wouldn’t travelling by night have been a good idea? Do most cinematic cowboys lack common sense? But since there is no shade to be had, maybe it’s better just to get going? In the end, even Dude, who was thinking of pulling back with the dark, follows Stretch and the gang out into the whiteout heat of the sink.
At minus 86 metres below sea level (or minus 282 feet) the Badwater Basin is one of the lowest places on earth as well as one of the hottest. As the band become dots in the whiteness, the scene conveys the idea that Stretch, like Captain Ahab (whose obssession with Moby Dick – the White Whale – Gregory Peck was to portray with festering intensity in 1956) is resolute and tenacious, yet also perhaps, recklessly self-destructive. At 00:12:16 the crazed crust of salt becomes soft and the horses begin to sink and stumble, obliging the men to walk. The film expertly gives an epic sense of this ordeal, of the heat and dessication, of wrong decisions – the folly of Walrus having filled his canteen with whiskey, the mistake of sleeping at night. To cut short a midnight fight between Walrus and Bull Run, when the former tries to drink from the latter’s water canteen, Stretch hurls a large chunk of salt at Walrus’s head (00:13:57). Stretch’s authority is no longer in doubt – as neither is his compassion the following day when he wets his horse’s mouth with valuable water from his canteen (00:15:15). This could be viewed as enlightened self-interest, except that he follows up by doing the same for Walrus’s horse. “Kinda noble, aren’t ya?” sneers Dude (00:15:45) to which Stretch replies “A horse’s a useful animal, no use letting him suffer just because he belongs to a jackass”. The hostility between the two men increases from here on, with Dude less ironically detached from the possibility of taking charge – although at this juncture, he appears to believe they are all doomed. When Lengthy shoots a lizard (00:16:31), basically for looking chipper and able to survive when he probably won’t. Half Pint (Henry Morgan) protests: “he wasn’t doing you no hurt”. The sink however, has no truck with compassion: it is Half Pint’s horse that soon collapses in sand dunes and has to be shot (00:18:19).
After almost ten minutes (a long time, especially in 1940s cinematic terms) at 00:18:47, Stretch, suspecting mirage, spots what appears to be salvation in the form of a distant town. Hope to cracked lips and dried out voices. They struggle on…to find the town of the title: Yellow Sky. A dehydrated ghost town. Dead. Crumpling up all over the steps of a collapsing saloon, the gang don’t have the energy or sense to even get out of the sun, resigned to becoming skeletons. Then there is the faint click of a rifle hammer being cocked. At 21 minutes, Mike (Anne Baxter, hilariously described in IMDb as a “gun toting tomboy”) at last appears:
Yellow Sky at 00:21.08 and the first appearance of ‘Mike’
If I could have it to myself – or better still, share it with Anne Baxter – Yellow Sky is another place I wouldn’t mind living. The rock formations around are superb and the dilapidation aesthetically surpasses Heysham and Morecambe, without people to complicate it![xvi]
In his wonderfully terse, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky[xvii], John Sayles may not overstate Anne Baxter’s impact but does exaggerate what she’s wearing: “tight jeans and a 50s bra that could put your eye out”. The high-contrast noir-etched photography of Baxter is stunning. Without doubt, apart from settings and landscapes, Baxter is the best thing about Yellow Sky, but although frowningly beautiful, its her spirit and character that most impress.
I’ve long had a thing about Anne Baxter, especially in earlier films such as Swamp Water[xviii] (1941) before fashion styled her hair in that increasingly fixed, bouffant power-perm manner which I can no longer bear to see because it unfailingly reminds me of the night and daymare that was Margaret Thatcher![xix] You can see this style creeping in by the time of another of my old screen favourites: 1958’s Chase a Crooked Shadow – although realistically, even in much earlier films, the secure Forties hairstyles aren’t so very different. Perhaps it is her wilder character in both Swamp Water and Yellow Sky that is so appealing?
Where matte[xx] shots are interposed into genuine landscape is often hard to tell when watching films in a relaxed way, but the solid ghost town of Yellow Sky, “fastest growing town in the territory” – its appearance and atmosphere – are entirely convincing. Apparently, the filmmakers reused and partly rebuilt or wrecked an old set known as “Last Outpost” in the Alabama Hills[xxi] just to the west of Lone Pine[xxii]. A hundred miles east, the salt flats and desert scenes were shot mostly in the Death Valley National Park[xxiii] with actors and crew staying at the evocatively named Furnace Creek.
Before the Thatcher-esque look of later years – a colorized, glammed-up publicity shot for Yellow Sky
At 00:21:54 Mike tells the exhausted gang where to find the spring “up behind those big rocks, at the head of the street”, suspiciously tracking them, rifle in hand. Later, at 00:23:47 she appears dominantly on a boulder above them, regretting their arrival, poised as they gulp and wallow in the pool.
It has often been repeated that Yellow Sky is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest,[xxiv] and you can see certain obvious parallels: desert = sea, Stretch/Peck = Ferdinand, Grandpa = Prospero and Mike/Anne Baxter = Miranda . . . but if so, it’s a still looser adaptation than Forbidden Planet (1956), and Mike clearly has no wonderstruck admiration for Stretch: Miranda in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest: “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble”.
If I had money for every film ‘loosely based’ on Shakespeare (the seventh art tirelessly in quest of respectability?) I would not be poor! In any case, the true value of Shakespeare, is the poetry, not the plots – most of which The Bard lifted from earlier sources. Once the description ‘loosely based’ is applied, most films would begin to resemble one (or several) of the seven – 36 basic plots[xxv] available. One might just as well say that Yellow Sky is ‘loosely based’ on the shipwreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda in 1609[xxvi]!
No, Mike is not enraptured by this new humanity and if she were less defensive when the now hydrated Stretch first visits her house (00:24:25), could she have falsely conveyed that she was hiding nothing other than herself? With water, food and rest, the gang are bound to remember that weird painting in the saloon and revive their other animal instincts.
At 00:25:05, Mike tells Stretch that “it ‘aint far to Alkali, you could make it easy, if you try”. Alkali is a real place[xxvii] albeit a ghost town now[xxviii] in the inappropriately named Esmerelda County. Or perhaps the name only seems inappropriate because owing to one of those carelessly poetic lateral slips, it makes me think of emerald green grass . . . rather than sand, salt and emeralds[xxix]?
Nevada ghost town – Alkali Springs
I don’t want to venture into the political incorrectness of Stretch and his gang’s attitude towards the Apache[xxx] (though not only was Mike raised “with Apaches”, Grandpa praises them (00:26:11) as “fine people, if you can understand them”) or their lust or chivalry (the latter particularly in Bull Run’s case) regarding Mike/Constance Mae, or the necessity for a 1948 production to reinforce gender stereotypes for its mainstream coda (more on that later). Some of these attitudes are obviously toxic, some just amusingly or irritatingly of their time. Yes, it was inevitable that Mike and Stretch would ‘fall in love’ and probably both of them subconsciously feel this from the first moment they see each other – or so runs the timeless loathing-to-loving story convention, as well as the popular romantic notion. Mike tries to resist, whereas Stretch violently relaxes (!) into it, ceasing to sufficiently lead or control his gang and breaking his own rule to “stay away from those people!” (00:29:03). Eventually, stung by Mike telling him he smells bad (00:33:19), he even washes and shaves.
Mike with a smoothed-out Stretch!
Stretch looks much less appealing once shaved . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself and far ahead of the plot since it is Dude who dolls himself up first, just before Mike first comes to the spring for water (00:27:47). I hope she is going to boil that water before use after the mob has all slurped and wallowed in it! Or maybe, it’s just that I feel like washing after the battery of sexist comments and leering – all of which Mike takes in her stride. Of this and more violent scenes, no less than the BFI seems to have become over-compliantly politically correct[xxxi] proposing to demote a film made in 1948 for not having the worthwhile but somewhat idealised values of 2026. However enlightened we think we are 78 years later, such situations have not gone away. In watered-down fashion they happen in Heysham and Morecambe every day and my 16-year-old daughter prefers not to walk on the prom alone.
With dozens of wrecked buildings to choose from, why do the gang all “bunk down” in the saloon (00:29:50) – I’d chose a building as far away from the others as possible. The characters that “amount to nuthin’ nohow” (to quote Lengthy) seem able to sleep through Walrus snoring like a “wounded buffalo”, but Lengthy is driven outside – to find Stretch contemplating on the veranda of the ruined saloon. After needling Stretch about the whereabouts of Dude he goes back inside.
Is Stretch really looking for Dude, as he claims, when having moved towards the tenebrous homestead Mike emerges from the shadows to challenge him at 00:31:58? Tackling her by surprise, they fight, she head butts him, he does it back harder and forces a kiss on her, before desisting. This is where she tells him twice that he smells, and then taking careful aim, shoots him across the scalp (00:33:39). In another excellent post from 2008[xxxii], the writer highlights the scene which follows with Mike trying to explain to Grandpa why she shot Stretch:
“He made me feel . . . I don’t know.” But she does know. Stretch has made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life. Wellman then cuts to Mike’s room, in which a picture of an elegantly dressed lady is pinned onto her wall. Seeing it fills her with disgust and causes Mike to angrily tear it into pieces. It’s a great moment of self-loathing – she hates herself for feeling something that she’s been trying so hard to suppress. Although having such a picture on her wall in the first-place clues us into the fact that Mike longs to be as pretty as any other woman out there. In that one short scene, we sense Mike’s vulnerability for the first time.”
More specific than the tragic/Romantic pop songs that are a chart constant, the romances of old films still need last only half an hour or so of screen time – this is why they can be so haunting. Novels and tedious soaps and serials often do them to death. The best romance stories are about potential and hope, not dull, chronological reality. Being fundamentally frustrating, the human condition (in its customary form) cannot fulfil our yearnings for long – yet almost everyone who refuses to let the human state get them down, clings to hopes we project from imagination. Hence good love stories (and happy endings) have a general appeal even if many who have experienced the long-term reality of romantic love, try to reject such unreliable optimism. Romantic love may linger as familiarity and companionship, even flourish and create a sense of safety for decades, but are its deepest feelings of connection and joint projection, always liable to return to being about the other or the elsewhere? To a degree, this could be why I have abstracted my own deepest feelings into landscapes, atmospheres and the most searching art – which doesn’t mean that I can resist a wistful attraction to actresses[xxxiii] usually long dead. In great films none of the characters or landscapes are ever dead!
Bathing his scalp at the spring, Stretch encounters Dude. Could they have once been friends? Could they become friends? Not in Yellow Sky – this, distinctively, is one of its noir aspects. Stretch’s romantic inclinations have prevented him from deducing what Dude has had a hunch about all along – the presence of gold! Dude is greedy for gold and has no interest in romance. He tells Stretch his history and it’s the thought of his betraying ex-woman being made to suffer, that briefly revives Widmark’s insane chuckle from 1947’s Kiss of Death (00:37:47)[xxxiv]: “she lit out with a fella who ended up beating her”.
Above the ghost town the spring looks idyllic – as if the gang are enjoying a picnic. 00:26:57
From first encountering the Anglo-Saxon poem The Ruin, as a teenager,the idea of the ghost town, or of ghost areas – such as the ex-lead-mining moors of Northumberland upon which we lived for seven years – may be even more fascinating than the allure of actresses who, while society survives, will never die. Ghost towns represent the flip side to potential, and up to a point, their history becomes fixed in time. Tyneham[xxxvi] in Dorset was one such place explored when we lived in the southwest of England. Appropriated as a training ground for D-Day in 1943, it was never returned to its inhabitants. Mardale in Cumbria[xxxvii] was another valley we knew well, though we never knew its villages, Mardale Green and Measand, only the reservoir which gradually drowned them from the late 1930s. By contrast, the ghost towns of the desert states of Nevada and California largely record a failure to survive at the periphery. Spelling out tales of greed, aspiration or over-ambition, they are gradually destroyed by extreme temperatures and the wind.
Shattered stable in a court of rocks. 00:41:09
Stretch makes no attempt to understand or appease Dude (00:38:16). The increased antagonism between them begins the central section, though at first, Stretch is more interested in smartening himself up. The gang meet to decide on a course of action having voted Dude as new leader (00:41:53). Stretch has no regard for democracy, but before a direct showdown, Mike takes the initiative from the boulders above – with her rifle. The existence of gold can no longer be doubted.
White flag or not, Mike has Stretch in the barrel of her gun – 00:45.09
This was probably not the first time such an idea was used in a film. Since the helical grooving[xxxviii] is clearly shown, was it actually shot through a larger diameter gun barrel or was this a special effect added in post-production?
If you have read this far without knowing Yellow Sky at all, I will leave all the nuances and twists of fate of the film’s second half to your imagination and jump to the perhaps unjustly despised coda which opens at 01:34:37. For long sections of its often nocturnal second half, Yellow Sky looks like a noir, but both the romantic elements and the reformation of Stretch to “James Dawson”, run counter to this. Stretch starts his biography by telling Mike and Grandpa (01:04:42) that “I come from good people. When I give my word, I mean it”.
Long prefaced by Grandpa’s compassion (01:08:02): “Guess the wars upset a lot of those boys and set them off on the wrong foot,” the coda is not just happy but quite comic and begins with the chagrined, contrite surviving bandits returning the stolen money to the bank. As if all crime could be so simply undone!
At 01:37:00 as the three survivors gallop across a beautiful flower-filled water-meadow for a rendezvous with Grandpa and Mike, the film reverts to its framing triumphalism and lightness. However, rather than the exploratory, adventurousness of the opening, the ending quickly becomes jubilant.
Do I want to be a woman some of the time? Can I do this? . . . 01:37:53
At 01:37:30 Stretch presents Mike with the hat bought from the head of an only temporarily affronted lady at the bank. This might all be “sappy” and “unbelievable”[xxxix], but personally, I enjoy it. Even if it was a studio imposition, it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, not worth getting wound up about[xl]. I don’t believe Mike will change because of it.
. . . Yes! At least for a while 01.38.00
Mike dares herself and accepts the hat. Love is in the air, let’s end quickly before the wedding!
[iii] In this outstanding piece by Stark Holborn, starkholborn.com/2020/01/23/review-yellow-sky- 1948/ he claims Yellow Sky as a precursor to the “Acid Western” sub-genre: “Acids, if you haven’t come across them before, are known, and named, for their counterculture tendencies; the desire to kick the western away from the glowy sunset of manifest destiny and into the dark corners of the soul.”
[iv] This article by Imogen Sara Smith brightlightsfilm.com/past-sunset-noir-in-the-west/ is so good on Bob Mitchum and others and on Pursued (1947), that I might abandon all future hopes of writing about that particular film!
[xii] I cannot find out who painted this. Presumably an artist employed by the film studio? If Sherlock Holmes were alive now, we need a monograph on bizarre portraits and paintings of old Hollywood A and B pictures – though I’m not sure it would be much help in the field of crime solving. When I’d almost reached the end of this essay, I encountered yet another wonderful post about Yellow Skyjeffarnoldswest.com/2022/03/yellow-sky-fox-1948-2/ which highlighted the similarities between the scene with the strange painting behind the bar and the opening of Wellman’s earlier film, The Ox-bow Incident (1943). The painting in Ox-Bow is not nearly so strange, but Henry Fonda’s comment “that guy’s awful slow getting’ there” sets off an interesting dialogue exchange.
[xviii] The first of Jean Renoir’s five films made in Hollywood during the Second World War was produced by 20th Century Fox. Categorised by the Nazis as “Cinematic Public Enemy Number One” Renoir’s left-wing anti-fascist and anti-war stance gave him no choice but to flee.
[xxix]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esmeralda_County,_Nevada “Esmeralda is the Spanish and Portuguese word for “emerald”. An early California miner from San Jose, James Manning Cory, named the Esmeralda Mining District after Esmeralda the Romani dancer from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”
[xxx] Ibid, from Alex Good’s post: “At one point I was hoping for the return of the Apache at the end in the role of the cavalry, saving Stretch and Mike and Grandpa from Dude and the gang. That, however, would have been a turn of the screw too far in 1948.”
[xxxi]bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films see also, reference xxxv below. It is notable that after Yellow Sky, Anne Baxter’s very next film, You’re My Everything (1949), a slight, cringy and often irritating musical drama, insidiously reinforces sexist attitudes as well as racism – Dan Dailey even blacking up for one film-within-the-film. Rightly unacceptable now, this was standard at the time. Unlike the constant threat of the lustful men (a gang of criminal roaming men would be no different nowadays) towards Mike in Yellow Sky, this casual racism is not intrinsic to the contrast, tension or plot. An amusing aspect of You’re My Everything however, are the silent film take-offs – one entitled Flaming Flappers – acted out in believable, satirical fashion by Baxter, whose character is supposedly “patterned” on Clara Bow. She is certainly utterly different to Mike!
[xxxv]The Ruin, lines 8-13, translation by Michael Alexander, from The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics, first published in 1966, is thought likely to be about Aquae Sulis (Bath).
[xxxix] In his splendidly terse, to-the-point, two-minute recommendation of Yellow Sky, John Sayles hates its possibly studio-required end: youtube.com/watch?v=SrbtgJTe6ok saying at 00:01:36 “If I ruled the world, I’d cut the sappy, unbelievable coda off the movie!” But I often like abrupt happy endings, unless they are so bad they make you nauseous. They can be less tiring. I always feel tempted to rewrite bad endings. Every time I watch Out of the Past (1947), for example, I always want Bob Mitchum to survive even though that would defy one of the rules I consider essential to true noir – a tragic conclusion.
In William A. Wellman: 10 essential filmswww.bfi.org.uk/lists/william-wellman-10-essential-films the BFI also finds fault with the cheerful ending (and other things): “Were it not for some alarmingly dodgy sexual politics – from Gregory Peck’s assault on Anne Baxter to her final acquiescence (via a bonnet) to his idea of feminine norms – Yellow Sky might rank among Wellman’s best.” I fail to see why depicting things how they simply would have been, counts as “alarmingly dodgy sexual politics”. That is to apply modern attitudes to a film made 78 years ago. The hat incident may or may not have been a studio imposition, but it is a humorous, loving, throwaway thing, neurotic to be wound up about, and absurd that it should affect how we rank the film. We can deplore aspects of the past, but we can’t expect the past to fit in with our current fashions. Personally, I don’t believe Mike/Constance Mae will change all that much because of a silly hat and both Stretch and I would be disappointed if she did. But that’s why films end when they do. In ‘real life’ we are often likely to be disappointed. One of the major problems with long-form TV is that it never ends but merely staggers on into the desert.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
RUPERT LOYDELL revisits David Lynch’s unforgettable dystopia
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was the moment when the town of Twin Peaks was revealed to be a dark hellhole of occult mystery, sexual abuse, intrigue, murder and underhand business dealings as opposed to simply a cozy backdrop to a strange detective story involving demon possession and sexual intrigue.
Although the first two television series had some shocking episodes, particularly the reveal of the evil spirit Bob and Leland’s death, along with the final episode (produced at short notice under instruction from the TV company), viewers’ memories seemed mostly of a quirky and occasionally surreal soap opera whose characters were fuelled by coffee and doughnuts, had high libidos and were very good looking – not to mention a friendly visiting detective who was prone to visions and intuitive investigation.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light by any means, but the darkness was leavened by humour and friendship, not to mention the haunting soundtrack, but Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was having none of it. Billed as a prequel, the film was also a kind of reveal of what was actually going on, ostensibly before the TV series started but allowing us to project several of the stories into that time frame as well.
Nobody, not even Agent Cooper and his fellow police force members, seemed to come out well. Everybody was conniving with somebody else, had a dodgy deal going on, and seemed complicit in prostitution, smuggling and drug running. There was a lot of looking the other way and a lot of non sequiturs and references to things we’d missed, not been shown or that Lynch felt we should know about. This included more dreams and a meet-up of demons in an upstairs room.
At the time, many of us felt cheated. My friends and I came out of the arts centre where we saw it in shocked silence. I don’t watch or like horror films, but we had just seen one that seemed to take away any pleasure we’d had whilst watching the two TV series. That seemed to be the general public and critical response, and although there was and still is a sustained discussion about Lynch’s work, and a recognition that he had done something amazing for TV, that was Twin Peaks done with.
Twenty-five years later, that turned out not to be the case. Twin Peaks: The Return was even more surreal and fragmented than the original two TV series, and although presented in 18 episodes, Lynch claimed he thought of it as one 18-hour film. Although a few storylines were continued from the 1990s, most weren’t, and the film was full of new character, including three versions of Agent Cooper, those present in one-off scenes, not to mention aliens and godlike beings and a complete blurring of reality and dream states.
In fact Twin Peaks: The Return seemed mostly a kind of return to Lynch’s Eraserhead, a disturbing and unfathomable monochrome nightmare with a deformed baby and a (literally) industrial soundtrack that highlighted Lynch’s love of photography and the fleshy paintings of Francis Bacon. It highlighted and picked up on occult connections and cultivated its own lines of influence and diversion. Whilst it offered a creation story for evil in our world (or at least, the Twin Peaks world), it also opened up an impossible number of possibilities of what was going on and why.
Interest in Twin Peaks had never really gone away, but the announcement of series 3 saw a renewed interest. Discussion forums sprang up online, a number of academic volumes were published (there would be more after The Return ended) and co-writer/director Mark Frost published two hardback volumes – The Secret History, labelled as a novel, and The Final Dossier – which sought to flesh out some of the loose ends but also act as bait for the forthcoming series.
Twin Peaks: The Return was not easy or lighthearted viewing. There were trips into space, out of time, to cities and gangland underworlds – visions, prophecies and dreams – a giant pepper-pot that was David Bowie’s character – and Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) seemingly trapped in a loveless marriage, or locked up in an asylum. There were doppelgängers, demons, a hybrid frog-insect alien, visiting bands and songwriters, and a new gang of young people forming their own romantic and sexual liaisons whilst taking new, contemporary drugs. Oh, and there was a slow-motion atomic explosion too.
And there was electricity, snaking through, by and over the land, sparking, hissing and humming. And the woodsman, an unwashed and obsessed tramp, who broadcast a poem over the radio once he had killed the DJ. No-one who hears it knows if the poem is a sacred text, a warning or a magical spell; it hypnotizes them and sends them to sleep. And there are mystical beings trying to balance and juggle good and evil, sending spirits and signs to earth to sort things out. One of the beings is the giant from Agent Cooper’s dreams in earlier series, now called the Fireman in the closing credits. And there is the Experiment, momentarily appearing in a glass box in New York City. And, and, and…
And hundreds of walk-on parts: passers-by or passers-through, and those confined to the background. But no sign of Agent Cooper, and only tantalising glances of the town of Twin Peaks itself. Versions of Cooper are busy out in the world whilst the good/original Cooper remains trapped in the Red Room or White Lodge. Another Cooper squeezes himself through an electrical socket as a doorway from space to Earth, and comes out as a simpleton. Evil Cooper is intent on amassing a fortune and facilitating evil on the world.
The Return seems to refer to Cooper himself, since he takes most of the 18 hours to find his way back, before leaving again. He tries to undo Laura Palmer’s murder, which kicked off the whole Twin Peaks series, by finding a version of Laura and travelling back in time, forgetting all his zen ideas of acceptance and living in the moment. The version of Laura he finds (or creates) does not seem to know him or her own history, is only shocked into realisation at the end of the series, indeed the whole show, which ends with a scream.
David Lynch. Image: Wikimedia Commons
There is no resolution, although fans, critics and film buffs have used up thousands of words trying to find one, contorting ideas and scenes into ridiculously tangled cats-cradles of even more impossible narratives, story lines and time loops. Some of it, of course, makes sense: there are repetitions, similarities and repeats in the plots and filming, there are what seems to be codes and signs on the likes of stray lamp posts and campsite notice boards, and the pylons do look like owls. Nothing is what it seems, but nobody is sure what they seem to be. And nobody seems sure who they are any more either, how to get where they want to be, or why things are happening the way they are.
This time round, however, the deaths and violence, the visitations from the spirit world, the hauntings and occult leanings, all the unexplained mysteries, are once again leavened with humour and wit. Twin Peaks: The Return may not be the return we expected, and is definitely not a return to the Twin Peaks we first enjoyed visiting, but its strangeness and unknowability, its twists and turns, surprises and senseless signposts, leaven it, along with a roster of musical visits to the Roadhouse, some come-uppances and happy endings. By embracing the surreal and the senselessness of our lives and juxtaposing it with chance and the unknown, Lynch reinvented television again, just as he had 25 years earlier, producing an extended film to sit alongside his other career highlights: Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride magazine, contributing editor to International Times and a writer and abstract artist. He has many books of poetry and several collaborative publications in print and has edited anthologies for Shearsman, KFS and Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (he is a member of the journal’s editorial board), JournalofWriting and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north, and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He has also contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
LIAM GUILAR finds a much-hyped recent TV series worse than vacuous
The dust has settled and King and Conqueror has faded away to wherever TV series go to be forgotten. Nominally based on the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, it attracted criticism for its many historical inaccuracies. The history was wrong; the changes to chronology dizzying; characterisation was preposterous; the costumes and the armour were bad; men said fuckalot and everyone and everything was permanently dirty. Some of its defenders pointed out that it was not a documentary but “historical fiction”.
If the history was so inaccurate it can’t be called ‘historical’, the fiction was the latest instalment in a collective infantilisation of the Middle Ages. Instead of the rich strangeness of the past appearing in historical dramas, film makers insist on confusing history with fantasy while erasing the differences between past and present. By leaning on the tropes of modern film, and fantasy films in particular, they present an adolescent version of the past which is rarely as dramatic as the reality it pretends to dramatize.
There’s a probably apocryphal story about the screening of the film, Titanic. Someone in the audience started to object, loudly, because the pattern of the rivets on the ship’s hull was not historically accurate.
Every historical film brings out the Rivet Counters. Harold’s cloak is fastened incorrectly.The armour is wrong. The hairstyles are wrong. It gives people with specialised knowledge the opportunity to air their expertise. King and Conqueror has given the Rivet Counters many reasons to object. You will find their objections on YouTube.
Not all historical objections are rivet counting, and more is at stake than the lack of colour in the clothing or the preposterous attempts at ‘armour’, especially in this case because those involved with the production have repeatedly claimed their version is historically accurate.
A consulting company called SceneSpan claims on its website:
King And Conqueror.
In this project, history was the script. Brought in during early development, we advised across the script to ensure historical authenticity from the ground up: story arcs, character motivations, political dynamics, and cultural detail. Set during the Norman Conquest, the series required careful navigation of both Anglo-Saxon and Norman worldviews. Our role helped ground the drama in the lived realities of 11th-century power and identity.
What grounds a story in the ‘lived realities’ of the past is a question: in this place and time, would a character of this rank say this, or act in this way?[ii] The failure to consider this ruins King and Conqueror and almost every other film set in and around this period.
In the first episode characters are ignorant of their own history. When William and Matilda are arguing with the king of France, the latter scornfully suggests that only a fool would try to sail an army across the channel. It’s meant as dramatic irony, given that we all know that’s what William will do, but the historical king of France would have known armies had been sailing back and forth across the Channel and the North Sea for centuries. How else did he think Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England or the ‘Normans’ got to ‘Normandy’?
At other times characters act with no knowledge of the lived reality of their world. William rides away from the coronation on his own. He’s a Duke. In a culture where public display was essential, there should be a retinue and all the other signs and symbols of his wealth and status. He’s also a royal guest, which meant the king was responsible for his safety and would have provided guides and an escort. He had been ambushed on the way there, but apparently this doesn’t make him cautious on the return journey. How was he going to find his way to Pevensey on his own? Did the writer imagine a modern road with signposts?[iii]
The changes to chronology are dizzying. William was born in 1028. Even if he had attended the coronation (he didn’t) you can work out his age. In King and Conqueror an adult William leaves the pregnant wife he didn’t marry until the 1050s to attend the coronation in 1043, where he is introduced as the victor of Val es Dunes, a battle he didn’t fight until 1047. The events at Dover, which are being plotted at the coronation, and which will lead to Godwin being banished, happened in 1051.
If time is treated loosely, characters are melded together, their names are changed, or they are left out. The evil Earl of Mercia is called Morcar. At the time of Edward’s coronation, Leofric, was earl of Mercia. His grandson, Morcar, became earl of Northumbria when the locals rose against Tostig and deposed him in 1065. Making him earl in 1043 means the devious goings on of 1065, which potentially reveal so much about Harold’s character, have been erased[iv].
The defence against these objections, and even in the first episode there is so much more to object to, is that this is not a documentary, but historical fiction. It’s a sound defence. Some historical inaccuracies need not ruin a film, and accuracy does not guarantee a film will be entertaining.
The Middle Ages have often been caricatured or infantilised. First image: William the Conqueror by an unknown artist, c. 1580. Second image: The Battle of Hastings by Francois Vivares (c. 1780). Third image: Llandaff Historical Pageant, 1952 by Geoff Charles. All: Wikimedia Commons
If you take the history out of historical fiction the characters are left flapping in the wind. In the complex context of their time, their choices and actions defined them. Remove that context and the characters are just names. Remove the history as context, and something must replace it. In King and Conqueror, the replacement is always so much less than what it replaces.
The period between the coronations of Edward the Confessor and William 1st is covered by well-written, historically accurate books aimed at a non-specialist audience. Without learning Old English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, it’s easy to stack a shelf and be up to date with the current knowledge of the time and the characters. It is depressing to think that the writer and producers of King and Conqueror didn’t bother. It is even more depressing to think that they did and then decided to throw out the history because they thought their version was better.
Godwin was banished in 1051 because of an incident in Dover. The facts are murky. Different versions of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle give slightly different versions of the events. Returning to the continent, Eustace of Boulogne and his men were involved in an altercation with the inhabitants of the town. There were deaths on both sides. Eustace seems to have raced to the king and given his version of the story. Without waiting to ask Godwin to investigate, Edward called on him, as the relevant earl, to reestablish the king’s justice by punishing the town[v].
When Godwin refused, and according to some versions demanded Eustace’s men be punished, he was called on to answer charges of treason. Turning up to court without guarantees of safe conduct, including the formal exchange of hostages, was never a good idea. Godwin was old enough to remember at least one culling of the earls. He refused to appear and called out his armed supporters. The king was expected to keep the peace and punish wrongdoing. Edward could not withdraw the order without losing face. Edward and the Witan found Godwin guilty of treason. The other earls sided with Edward. Godwin fled and his family scattered into exile. [vi]
Earls were not kings, they were the king’s appointed officers, and their job was to enforce the king’s rule. When Godwin refused the order to ravage Dover he was challenging the king’s authority. For nearly ten years he had been the most powerful man in the country. His daughter was the queen. He must have thought he was secure enough to ignore a royal order.
Why did Godwin refuse a direct order from his king: arrogant self-confidence that reveals his own bad judgement and his poor opinion of Edward? Or was he feeling his influence slide, his advice ignored, his proteges passed over and trying to assert himself? Did he have a personal dislike of Eustace, or of the ‘foreigners’ who Edward seemed to be favouring?
Was Edward overconfident? Not thinking clearly? Desperate to please a foreign relative? Was he looking for an excuse to break Godwin’s hold over him. Did he expect Godwin to protest and then back down and was taken by surprise when he didn’t?
No ‘personal’ records survive from this period. We don’t know what the characters were thinking. The writer of historical fiction is free to explore the possibilities within the framework of the historical events.
King and Conqueror replaces this with simplistic nonsense about Godwin being accused of ‘breaking The Treaty’. It’s clear to the audience that whatever happened in Dover was due to the machinations of the Evil Mercian Morcar and the Wicked Queen Mother. Godwin becomes the ‘Good Guy’ done over by ‘The Baddies’. It’s childish in the most derogatory sense of that term.
Fictional characters don’t have to be realistic, but they need a coherent story world in which to operate. Mangle the history, and the possibilities of coherence become increasingly small. The fashion for presenting characters in ‘the past’ as though they were modern people with the approved attitudes and fashionable responses adds to the mess[vii].
In the first episode, Sweyn has sex with a bride on her wedding night as it’s his ‘right as her lord’[viii]. His brothers are disgusted, and he has to threaten Tostig to prevent him from telling their father. Their disgust is a modern reaction. If it were his right, legal and customary (which to be clear, it wasn’t) why would they have been disgusted? They would have normalized the behaviour.
Harold promises his mistress he’ll never let his father force him into a ‘church marriage’ with anyone else. This is the romantic, individualistic modern lover of popular fiction speaking. If Harold Godwinson ever said that to Edith Swanneck, they would have both known that he was lying[ix].
Without the historical context, King and Conqueror settles for importing the adolescent tropes of modern fantasy. The result is fiction as bad as the history.
Emma, the queen mother, is the only woman in history to have married two kings of England and had two sons, by different fathers, who ruled the country. She survived the reigns of five kings before Edward, her son by her first marriage, was crowned. Matilda alludes to all this before William leaves for England. Yet the writers do not have Emma behave with the subtlety of a survivor and successful political operator. She is a strident pantomime witch. Harold is a tousled haired womble with daddy issues. He likes to bite noses during combat. He’s dominated by his mistress and portrayed as an untrustworthy liar. You’d think twice about following him to the pub.
The characters are juvenile, leaning heavily on the tropes of popular film. We know these are hard men because they say fuckalot. Both William and Godwin have wandered in from a film about gangland struggles for control of the neighbourhood. Godwin seems to be the last survivor of the Kray Brothers gang. And there’s the ‘Bromance’[x].
The film industry has a long record of treating the Middle Ages as a vague backdrop and mangling history in the process. In the general slop of cheap art chasing money at a time of rising historical ignorance, it would be surprising if King and Conqueror wasn’t the mess it was.
Does it matter that King and Conqueror is less true to the eleventh century than House was to a modern American Hospital?
We knew House was fiction. But King and Conqueror has been presented as history. This is not a story about fictional characters in the past. It uses the names of historical persons in a way that suggests this is a representation of those people in their specific historical setting. Publicity for the series made repeated claims for its accuracy as history.
Responding to criticisms about historical inaccuracies, James Norton, the actor who plays Harold, stated:
The truth was, they were friends. They met at the coronation, we know that William invited Harold over to Normandy to fight against the Baron of Brittany, he did swear, he acknowledged William’s rightful claim to the crown over the relics – whether he meant it or not, we don’t know. But so much of what we tell, in terms of their relationship and friendship, is true.[xi]
It is not the truth. They were not friends. They did not meet at the coronation. They probably didn’t meet in person until 1065 when Harold was (possibly shipwrecked) on the continent [xii].We don’t know why he was on that ship but none of the suggested reasons include an invitation from William ‘to fight against the baron of Britanny’. We do know Harold was in William’s custody. We do not know what oath Harold made, if he made an oath, over relics while he was there. William had no ‘rightful claim’ to the crown of England.
Whether this is ignorance or indifference, the insidious lie, ‘This is true’, is where the damage is done. One can guarantee that there are now people who believe this is ‘the real story’ because James Norton said so, and for them an actor is a more reliable source of information than any historian. There are people who believe Clive Owen’s King Arthur revealed the identity of the real king Arthur because the film was advertised as “The untold true story that became the legend”[xiii]. No amount of fact-based refutation is going to change their minds. They saw it on the screen.
Perhaps it’s a minority view, but King and Conqueror turns a period of unusual historical importance into a pantomime. It would be naïve to expect any film maker to treat the past with respect or have any respect for people who do. Art chasing money doesn’t have a conscience. The idea art should, or could, be responsible, seems quaintly, almost embarrassingly, old fashioned. The period between the coronations of Edward and William I is crucial in the history of the British Isles. Old fashioned as it seems, it’s possible to believe it deserves better than to be presented as a second-rate episode of Game of Thrones or Bored of the Rings without the attempted humour.
[i]https://scenespan.com/our-work/ Their emphasis in bold. The kindest thing to say about this quote is that perhaps they worked on a different King and Conqueror to the one we all watched.
[ii] To be very clear I don’t mean they should be speaking Old English or a faked version of it.
[iii] William never learnt to speak English, so he couldn’t ask for directions either.
[iv] Tostig, was unpopular as Earl of Northumbria. In October 1065, while he was away at the royal court, the locals killed his followers, and marched south. They were joined by the Mercians under their earl, Edwin (Eadwine). The Northumbrians then offered the earldom to Morcar, Edwin’s brother. King Edward wanted to call out the army and crush the rebellion. The army refused to muster. Harold acted as mediator, and Morcar became earl and Tostig was banished. The date is not known but either before or after the uprising Harold married the sister of Edwin and Morcar. Harold swore he was not involved in planning the uprising. Tostig was probably not the only person who didn’t believe him.
[v] Ravaging towns that broke the King’s peace was not unusual. Godwin, Leofric and Seward ravaged Worcester for three days under the previous king after two of the king’s men had been killed in the town.
[vi]King and Conqueror begins by stating that England is emerging from decades of ‘bloody civil war’. This is historically wrong. Cnut had ruled from 1016-1035, and while there was disagreement over the succession, it didn’t lead to ‘a civil war’. Despite the popular idea that medieval people went to war at the drop of hat, there is evidence to suggest that those in power in England at the time preferred to avoid armed conflict. Thismight explain why the Earls first sided with Edward, and then the ease with which Godwin was allowed to return.
[vii] For an extreme example, see ‘The King’ (2019) in which Henry V is presented as a pacifist who is shocked to discover his courtiers are making money from the war against France.
[viii] The idea of ‘Premier Noce’ or ‘Droit de seigneur’ or ‘jus primae noce’ has been shown to be a myth invented by much later writers. The historical Sweyn was banished after eloping with an Abbess and murdering his cousin.
[ix] Calling Edith his mistress is unavoidably and unintentionally derogatory. She was his wife ‘after the Danish fashion’. This was a marriage that was not sanctioned by the church but regarded by everybody else as a marriage. It allowed aristocratic men to choose a wife, knowing that when the time came and they entered into a church marriage for political reasons, (and all aristocratic marriages were political), they would not be entering into a bigamous relationship.
[x] I dislike this term as it cheapens friendship but it’s exactly what is presented in King and Conqueror.
[xii] There is not only disagreement about what happened but about when it happened. Edward’s most recent biographer puts it in 1065. William’s opts for 1064.
[xiii] This phrase appeared on the poster for the film, popularising the candidature of L. Artorius Castus for the role as ‘the real king Arthur’. However, King Arthur is a good example of a film that is both entertaining and historically inaccurate.
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
Time and Other Solvents: A Story of Healing, Told in Poems
Claudia Gary, Sligo Creek, 2026, pb., 96pps., £12.99
VADIM KAGAN finds very personal echoes in a fine new collection of verse
Full disclosure: Claudia Gary is my teacher. I mention this upfront, because it shapes my approach to Time and Other Solvents – a poet reading a poet, with the personal connection inevitably influencing the process. Poetry can obscure as easily as it reveals, which is why it takes courage to turn it on your own life. Gary does exactly that, across eighty-plus poems and a whole life, in forms ranging from the villanelle to the sonnet to free verse. It is one of the most honest books I have read in years, and one of the most charged.
The collection is organized as a triptych. Part I traces a childhood in New York and elsewhere, filtered through art, music, a brilliant and damaged mother, and the first intimations of loss; Part II follows the speaker through the joys and pains of adolescence and young adulthood – asserting her space, a marriage and life abroad, another marriage, pregnancy, and an off-and-on background of eating disorder; Part III moves into a hard-won adulthood – grief, recovery, the death of parents, and the return to (and through) art. The title says “A story of healing”, and it is not a marketing phrase. It is a precise description of what the book does and how it works.
I admire Gary’s command of form. The sonnet ‘Perfect Time’ splits cleanly into two numbered sections: the first a subway ride with her mother, the second the mother’s psychiatric hospitalization and ECT, which Gary names in a footnote with clinical plainness: electroconvulsive therapy. The second section opens: “Perfect time’s up. A brittle stick of chalk, / you’re quivering, sobbing, packing for somewhere.” The same rhyme scheme, the same fourteen lines – but the mother who was singing is now shaking and being packed off to a clinic. Gary doesn’t explain the gap. The form does it. It is notable that the first part is an uninterrupted block of text, while the second one is broken into stanzas – somehow adding to the difference between the childishly joyous stream of thought and brittle, uncertain reality of a clinic. The villanelle ‘Getting Lost’ ends: “Patterns of bricks, words, music, inexhaust- / ible in variation, began oozing / out of that childhood dream once double-crossed. / I found myself through fear of getting lost.” That fear becomes the reason to write.
The mother is the centre of the book, and Gary gives us time to understand that relationship. The mother was an artist herself – a maker of mosaics, a repairer of picture frames, a woman who guided her daughter’s hand across the paper. She was also someone whose own mind had been damaged by the very treatments meant to mend it. In ‘Her Memory,’ Gary says: “Mom was a blessing once, / a vibrant tapestry, / until they took away / her woven synergy. / Although her inner strength / turned into cruelty, / her earliest bright stitches / dance through my memory.”
That the mother who could receive half an embrace before pulling back, who could call her clinging child “sticky chewing gum,” who retreated from half an affection, also taught that same child to see the world – this is the contradiction the book is built on.
Part II turns personal. The eating disorder is present from ‘Empathy’ through ‘Bulimia’ and into ‘The Spill’ – shown, named, and examined. A poem addresses Princess Diana directly, noting they shared a hushed disease before it had its public name. ‘Desserted’ is about chocolate the way addiction is about the substance – not really. ‘Wrong-Way Driver’ uses a near-collision on a dark road – a wrong-way car narrowly missed, the baby in the back seat sleeping through it – to ask whether a brush with death is enough, or whether the will to live has to come from somewhere else. ‘The Cure’ takes that question head-on: the speaker has been told real illness demands a real cure, not an imagined one. The final couplet doesn’t argue – it just states what is true: “You have been cured by friendship, words, and song.”
Part III is about losing the people who made you. The father who walked through the Brandenburg Gate just after the Wall fell, who had once been a billboard face for bourbon in cities the daughter never knew; the mother who, near the end, ran her fingers through her daughter’s curls and apologized for straightening them chemically decades before. ‘Barrier Reef’ returns to that childhood subway ride and what the mother tried to teach there – and finds that something the speaker once refused has finally come through. The poem ‘Marathon’ holds the mother’s dying with quiet control – its returning lines carrying the long duration of dementia, until her last words turn out to be about airline ticket prices, and then she is gone. The quietly intense poem called ‘In the Cellar’ gives the collection its name – stories kept in airtight vessels, agitated from time to time, until one day they appear “translucent.” The poet asks: “Will I someday grow old / enough to speak of them?” The book itself is the answer, and it took decades to get there.
I come to Gary’s work as a poet myself – someone who has spent years wrestling with formal verse in two languages and knows what it takes to make a form work rather than merely contain. What I find here is something else I aspire to: an image that carries more weight than an argument. ‘Skating Lesson’ ends with one: “Under the frozen surface of a pond / was a baby. I ran to break the crust, / and found the child alive. / From this dream I gathered, / Yes, have children. / The message had a hibernating twin: / Ice will revive you.” It’s the most quietly hopeful image in the book.
I also understand many of the losses Gary writes about – not the same losses, but similar in shape and scope. The distance between a parent’s aspiration and their capacity for presence. The experience of arriving in a foreign country and learning to live inside another language. The way poetry and music are not escape routes so much as load-bearing walls, the things that hold you together while you figure out how to hold yourself together. Reading Time and Other Solvents felt, at many points, like being recognized by a stranger – which is perhaps the best thing a collection of poems can do.
The book ends with ‘Comfort Food,’ a short poem that manages to be funny and devastating in equal measure: lentils, barley, split peas, water, salt – the recipe is simple, almost nothing, and then in the third stanza, with no warning: “Towers have toppled / into the soup.” A poem can do that – fold the catastrophic into the domestic without irony and without sentimentality – only if the poet has earned it by paying attention, poem after poem, to things that hurt. Claudia Gary has earned it.
VADIM KAGAN writes poetry and prose in English and Russian. His work ranges from metered verse rooted in Russian and English traditions to contemporary free verse inspired by current events. His poems have been published in The Lyric, Founders Favorites, The Road Not Taken and the Ink Blots collections, and his poem ‘How Often’ was featured in the Maryland Bard Review 2025. He lives in Bethesda, MD, where he runs an AI company
STUART MILLSON reports from the English Music Festival – and reviews new issues of Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt and Rimsky-Korsakov
With funding for the serious, civilised arts in short supply in modern Britain (no Arts Council of Wales money for Mid-Wales Opera; the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, de-funded by Birmingham City Council) the English Music Festival – EMF – is an inspiration and hope in the face of general adversity. As one of the Festival’s regular conductors, Hilary Davan Wetton, pointed out, if this were France, the government there would be pouring hundreds of thousands of Euros into a French music festival – a contrast to our own political elite, with their freebies for Britney Spears gigs and obsessions with ‘diversity’. The nineteenth English Music gathering took place, escaping this year to that utopian, rural setting of Dartington Hall in Devon – a magnificent structure built by the first Duke of Exeter in the 14th century, and turned into a prototype agrarian and arts community in the 1920s by monied visionaries, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. A College of Arts flourished here between 1961 and 2010, and traces of the Elmhirsts’ William Morris-type outlook still survive in this idyll of garden and performance spaces.
EMF Founder-Director, Em Marshall-Luck, welcomed for her late May Spring bank holiday extravaganza artists of the calibre of the London Mozart Players, the University of Exeter Chapel Choir and numerous soloists and chamber musicians, all performing in the impressive and resonant Dartington Great Hall.
The University of Exeter Chapel Choir. Image: Stuart Millson
Saturday the 23rd May was a day of brilliant sunshine and intense heat, so Festivalgoers enjoyed the coolness of the old mediaeval building, filled as it was by the ethereal tones of the Exeter choristers in works from the 1920s and ‘30s – Vaughan Williams’s, Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge (the choir used to grand antiphonal effect); Holst’s meditative The Evening Watch; Edgar Bainton’s To Thy Name Above Every Name (a testing work for the singers, and one which, perhaps, should have been conceived with orchestral accompaniment); and Dyson’s Lauds, from Three Songs of Praise. The concert ended with a dip back into the late 19th century, with Elgar’s whimsical choral postcards from old Germany – his Songs from the Bavarian Highlands, the sort of good tunes which you could almost sway along to with a brimming Stein. Elgar and his wife, Alice, clearly relished the countryside of Garmisch, and were inspired by lines such as “Quaff the bright brown ale my treasure, Hark! What joyous sounds!”
The next day, a complete change of mood, with the morning chamber recital – given by violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and South African pianist, Peter Cartwright – devoted to music by Bliss, Rawsthorne, Holst, Delius and Howells. Lancashire-born composer, Alan Rawsthorne, is probably best known for his film scores (including that for The Cruel Sea) and his Second Piano Concerto with its carnival-like final movement, but Rupert and Peter have rediscovered for us and curated the composer’s extensive works for violin and piano, giving at this festival the UK premiere of his Theme and Variations for Pianoforte and Violin.
Rawsthorne’s taut, concentrated, challenging writing proved to be an excellent foil to the more romantic sonata, from 1914, by Arthur Bliss – an early work, yet one which any listener, new to the piece, would consider a work of mastery and maturity. With its lovely whirlpool moments, its combination of sunlight, melancholy, nostalgia, the sonata was (for me) the outstanding work of the concert, especially the heartachingly beautiful piano opening, played with such gently paced and slow shaping by Peter Cartwright. Rupert Marshall-Luck more than embraced all the virtuoso moments of the piece, especially the exciting passage where the soloist has every opportunity to out-soar even Vaughan Williams’s famous ascending lark.
Now to recorded music: a new CDs from Chandos Records, of Shostakovich’s great Stalinist era monolith (yet with the composer confusing the totalitarians of his country with cryptic ideas and sardonic snarls) – his Symphony No. 5. Played with great tension and power by the Greater Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic – the old ‘BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra’ to we old Radio 3-ites – the recording dazzles at all levels, the players giving everything they have for the Finnish maestro, John Storgårds, a musician renowned for his readings of Sibelius and Nielsen. Here in the Shostakovich is a darkness that any Scandinavian or Russian would recognise, yet we are in the world, not of the Russian steppes or the cold Baltic coast, but the labyrinths of Moscow and the artist, enslaved but never truly at bay. For those who know their Shostakovich recordings, the new version is extraordinarily similar in temper and timbre to the early-1980s interpretation by that Russian patriot-dissident, cellist-turned-conductor, the great Rostropovich. Some may still remember the pent-up power and bare bones of the Fifth, as performed some 45 years ago by the USA Washington National Symphony Orchestra under that magisterial maestro.
Another famous conductor was Sir Thomas Beecham, founder of both the London and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Beecham had a wide repertoire, and it is perhaps hard to pin him down: Wagner and Berlioz, and the lush, heavy tone-poems of Richard Strauss appealed to Sir Thomas; Delius, too, and Handel – and opera. But so did orchestral favourites, French ‘lollipops’, and Russian romanticism. New from Siva Oke and SOMM comes a full-blooded, orientally-shimmering account, recorded at a packed Royal Festival Hall in 1957 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade – an irreplaceable capturing of a style of playing which we often do not hear today; in which the orchestra heaves with turbulence and colour, and section leaders play like virtuoso soloists. Rimsky-Korsakov’s piece is a work steeped in the legends of an imagined Arabian world of magic – of a clever princess who outwits a despotic ruler, by beguiling him with stories which she tells, night after night. (One could almost see Shostakovich in a similar dilemma, using his musical powers to keep one step ahead of the hammer of doom.)
Arvo Part. Image: Woesinger, Wikimedia Commons
Finally, a return to Chandos Records and their new CD of Estonian musical magus, Arvo Pärt (born 1935) – the complete symphonies (1-4), performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Eva Ollikainen. “Worlds ahead for clarity” was a one-time sales slogan of Chandos, a choice of words which fully applies to this living-presence, revelation-of-detail recording made a year ago in Reykjavik; a presentation of a symphonic progression from the 1963 ‘Polyphonic’ – just over a quarter-of-an-hour in length, to the harp, timpani and percussion of the 2007-08 Fourth Symphony, subtitled Los Angeles – and dedicated to the Philharmonic Orchestra of that city. Essentially, Pärt’s music is concerned with the spiritual, with pure belief – orthodoxy, credo (‘Credo’ was a name of one piece from the late 1960s). In this collection, it is possible to find a rooted hope for music and for our world – every bit as reassuring as the mediaeval stonework and arches that we found earlier at Dartington Hall.
Recording details: Alan Rawsthorne, the complete works for violin and piano, and the Violin Sonata by Sir Arthur Bliss, available from EM Records, via em.marshall-luck@em-records.com; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 (with Second Symphony), CHSA 5378; Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, RPO, Beecham, SOMM-Beecham 34; Pärt, Complete Symphonies, CHSA 5372
Treasures on Earth – Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend
Jeremy Harte, London: Reaktion, 2026, 292pps., £15
DEREK TURNER reads about hunts for hidden hoards
In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton offers some sensible advice as one of his ‘Remedies against discontents’ – “Seek that which may be found.” Jeremy Harte’s subtle and finely written new book examines the countless Britons who have taken exactly the opposite approach.
Harte is a romantic and an indefatigable follower of tantalising trails, having written to excellent effect on the Devil in England, and the history of gypsies – and so feels empathy with the delvers and dreamers who from earliest history have hankered after treasures that are occasionally wonderfully real but much more usually imaginary. Rumours of hidden hoards speak to some of our deepest psychological requirements.
Treasure can be found, or visualised, in many places – burial mounds, castles, caves, churches, old houses, tunnels and under landmark stones. The Honours of Scotland were even concealed in a bed. Hoards have been envisioned as spectral specie guarded by demons, dragons (there are some 30 British placenames containing the root-word draca, dragon), fairies or monsters, only accessible to astrologers and ‘mystical sciencers’ – like the Elizabethan polymath John Dee, who tried to persuade the Lord High Treasurer to grant him a royal licence to hunt for caches guarded by such fearsome ‘kepars’. Traditionary treasure hunts almost always take place by night, tense events whose codified procedures are usually derailed by unnatural storms, strange lights or panic attacks, or when some searcher emits an excited oath just as the hoard hoves into view.
Hoards have also been seen as traces of vanished races, or mythologized individuals from King Arthur to the North Country bogeyman ‘Long Lankin’ – or more prosaically as the left-behind legacies of real-life despoliations and downfalls. The Dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil Wars left in their respective aftermaths countless rumours of secreted wealth, suggesting long-persisting sociocultural trauma. Buried treasures have also often been imagined in border areas, relatively plausible because of such regions’ turbulent pasts – suitably liminal locales for things themselves evanescent and uncertain.
Treasure’s potential presence in a landscape attests not just to a desire for actual wealth, but also our habit of investing hard earth with pleasant fictions. A fabulous hidden hoard can constitute a source of local pride, like the golden stag concealed somewhere near Llantwit Major which when found would allow the modest Glamorgan town to regain its early medieval eminence as Celtic Christian cultural powerhouse.
Hoards can also be symbols of non-temporal power. Treasure tales cluster in historically poorer or more remote districts, and in many of these stories ghostly guardians wishing to unburden themselves of guiltily got gains that are tying them to the earth select the virtuous poor as recipients of their eerie instructions, phantasms offering a chance of advancement in return for absolution. Treasure-tales have frequently been cautionary parables, affording moralisers agreeable opportunities to expound on the greed, gullibility or unscrupulousness of their fellow humans. Wealth has always been regarded as sniffily suspect, especially when its origins are opaque. It is hardly surprising that some troves were supposed to have been cursed. Treasure, Harte observes, “can never quite be cleansed from the blood and sweat that laid it in the ground.”
Treasures are sensationally unearthed – Mildenhall, Snettisham, Sutton Hoo – but much more often they are not, even when searched for systematically (or obsessively). This is hardly surprising, as most traditions are extremely vague, such as the Selkirkshire saying that the fabled “gowd” of Tamleuchar would be found “atween the wat grund and the dry”. Such discoveries as there have been have almost always happened accidentally.
Harte opens with one such incident in 1840, when the Cuerdale Hoard of silver was uncovered by workmen working on flood defences along the Ribble near Preston – 7,500 coins, 350 ingots and 1,000 fragments of buckles and jewellery – buried by retreating Vikings around 911, the largest early medieval hoard ever discovered in England. That part of Lancashire already had legends of buried treasure; there had been previous unsuccessful searches in and around Cuerdale (where Roman remains had been found), and there would be several more after 1840. Nearby Ribchester had famously disgorged an ornate Roman helmet in 1796 (now in the British Museum), which had seemed to bear out a local saying William Camden had recorded as long before as 1586 – “It is written upon a wall in Rome Ribchester was as rich as any town in Christendom”.
Many antiquarians saw such discoveries as suggesting that traditions about local hoards must have at least some basis in fact, although in many cases these ‘traditions’ were post-hoc confabulations. One example comes from Wales. The prehistoric gold peytral that was discovered in Mold in 1833 came from a hill whose Welsh name, Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, can be translated as ‘Hill of Goblins’, where it was said there had long been tales of golden ghosts glimpsed at night. But these traditions were not recorded until after 1833.
For obvious reasons, hoarding is usually carried out in secret, so it is difficult to see how it could lead to any tradition in the first place – whereas the excitement of finding treasure encourages people to see prefiguring patterns. If people really knew where treasure was stashed, they would almost certainly obtain it for themselves rather than talking about it to others. Almost all attempts at ostension – when traditions are subjected to tests – end in failure. Yet the allure never dims.
Treasure-hunting goes back a long way, and everywhere is fraught with contradictions. There was supposedly once a wayside stone near Damascus which bore the legend, “If you dig here, you will be sorry; if you do not dig you will be sorry also.” In Britain, there are eighth century runic inscriptions about hidden treasure in the Orkneys, and the contemporaneous Vita of Lincolnshire’s St. Guthlac records the traces of hopeful fossicks in the Fens. Gold glitters with the greatest lustre because of its scarcity. It was not used to make everyday currency – the Edward III noble, introduced in 1344, was the first relatively widely circulated gold coin – so was always associated with display, nobility, royalty and sacrality. Lost gold crowns are an especial leitmotif of lore, from King John’s crown allegedly lost in the Wash by way of the Crown of King Edward which vanished in 1649 to M R. James’s celebrated 1925 story A Warning to the Curious, about a legendary lost diadem of the Angles and its deadly custodian. Local saints were often imagined as sleeping in golden coffins, and the Holy Grail as a golden chalice. Buried gold is rarely seen as realisable riches, but more as a talisman and means of transmutation, all the brighter for being ultimately unobtainable.
For many treasure-hunters, the riches they seek often seem less important than their itch to search. Actually finding something could even prove anticlimactic. Anatomy of Melancholy to the contrary, seeking things which cannot be found may be a better ‘remedy against discontent’. As Charles R. Beard notes in his 1933 survey The Romance of Treasure Trove, “Treasure-hunting is like virtue; it is generally its own reward.” There are things hidden in the human psyche, we conclude, that surpass the wildest dreams of avarice.
This review first appeared in Country Squire, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
My Auntie Audrey used to cut the edges of her lawn with scissors. The grass was bowling green standard and a source of great pride, labour and constant concern. Her garden reflected her personality – meticulous attention to detail and a capacity to work endlessly to maintain her own high standards. I cannot remember her actually sitting in her garden, taking in the scents and views. The esteemed editor of this magazine takes a different view. Let nature do its magnificent work whilst I lounge with a glass of something refreshing. Both approaches to gardening were to some extent on display at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. The event has become a high societal event akin to strawberries at Wimbledon and flags at the Proms.
The best show garden this year was judged to be Sarah Eberle’s ‘On the Edge’ garden for the Council for the Protection of Rural England (see picture above). “Some of the best landscapes are where people and nature coexist in harmony…It’s about how it makes you feel. It’s almost a homecoming, an embrace, a hug.” A central feature of this extraordinary garden is a fallen tree sculpted into the guardian figure of Gaia or Mother Nature. Her willow hair forms the top of a dry- stonewall that weaves through the copious, verdant planting. Weeds are reimagined celebrating our native flowing plants. There is a rusty corrugated tin fence suggesting a barn or tumbling warehouse where the countryside and development meet. Sarah Eberle’s guiding philosophy is for all gardeners to work with what they have. A boulder or tree stump can become a feature rather than a problem. She advises that we browse second-hand shops for weathered metal or wooden furniture. Beauty, she reminds us, can exist in the ordinary. The design encourages us to sit and ponder and do nothing.
The Tokonoma Garden
Contrast all this with the Tokonoma Garden designed by Kazuyuki Ishihara where Auntie Audrey’s scissors would definitely come in handy. Everything is finely honed, brushed, choreographed. Everything has its defined and delicate space. It is the garden almost as a film set guided by well-defined Japanese traditions of harmony and beauty. Weeds and corrugated iron are not welcome here. Nature has been squeezed and shaped into exquisite arrangements. The effect is stunning for very different reasons. In the CPRE garden you take off your shoes and socks and stretch out languorously. In the Tokonoma Garden you straighten your tie or adjust your fascinator. Two styles, two approaches, two designs that are different in almost every aspect in that one embraces nature and the other shapes it.
The Garden for Every Parkinson’s Journey
There are also show gardens with an explicit narrative, a message to convey. Such as the Garden for Every Parkinson’s Journey. We will ignore the overuse of the word ‘journey’ in current human experience. This garden is wonderful. A smoothly carved handrail weaves through the planting, offering stability and sensory experience for those afflicted by Parkinson’s. Its designer, Arit Anderson, has a sister who lives with the disease. The garden offers a safe space to relax for a moment or two away from the constant challenges of living with Parkinson’s. It is also a soothing night garden as many people with the disease have difficulty sleeping. One can see so clearly that Arit Anderson has designed the space for her sister. It is personal, empathetic, emotional. It underlines the immense beneficial impact that our gardens can have on both our mental and physical health. This has become a common topic for discussion: our garden ‘journey’ for mental wellbeing. And whilst being sometimes overblown, it is not new. For centuries we have known that being in nature is good for us even if it is well trimmed and intensely weeded.
My own garden journey was interrupted by an overheard remark: “Well, I must say that is the neatest lady garden I have ever seen.” Gardens never fail to surprise. I was now in front of the Lady Garden Foundation show garden. The information leaflet informed me that 21 women die every day from gynaecological cancers most people cannot even name. This ‘Silent No More’ garden was designed, somewhat disappointedly, by a man, Darren Hughes. It contains five sculptures to signify the different cancers – ovarian, uterine, cervical, vaginal and vulval. It is an unashamedly propaganda garden with a clear, vital message. At first, I was a little uneasy with the idea but slowly as I took in the planting and the message, I understood. Two ladies were chatting about a hysterectomy one had and the discovery of an undiagnosed cancer. It had got people to talk although its underlying message was skipped over by the BBC in their filming of their evening show. The idea for the garden came from Lady Garden Foundation ambassador Emily Plane who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 23 and died five years later. A highlight for me was the contrasting ideas of planting to encourage both private and group conversations. The garden will be dismantled and rebuilt across multiple sites in Jersey and Cornwall.
With an equally therapeutic ambition is the Breathing Space Garden from Asthma + Lung UK. The design of the garden by Angus Thompson draws on the Japanese aesthetic of yohaku no bi – the beauty of empty space and ma – the beauty of empty time. He was giving an impromptu talk as I arrived. The aim was to create a tranquil woodland-edge retreat to help visitors to slow down, breathe more deeply and reconnect with the restorative qualities of nature. Despite visiting on a day when 30,000 others crowded across the site, I stared at the space and felt transported to a quieter place.
That is the power of gardens. Ultimately it is not about skilled design, strong messaging, striking architecture but discovering a space where you can breathe deeply and relax profoundly. And if you are lucky enough to have Gaia carved out of a fallen tree then all the better. One hopes that given these circumstances even my industrious Auntie Audrey (who now gardens in a higher place) would put down her scissors.
Barnoldswick and nearby Yorkshire from Weets Hill by Dominic Nelson. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that made the Modern World
Chris Moss, London: Old Street, 2026, hb., 364pps., £25
DEREK TURNER admires a survey of an amazingly inventive and influential county
In his classic 1902-1904 Collecteana, folklorist Vincent Stuckey Lean cites a proverb which has since passed into cliché – “Lancashire thinks today what all England will think tomorrow”. Travel writer Chris Moss’s task in this highly personal book is to show how his home county helped make modern England – and so the wider world.
Until late medieval times, much of the future Red Rose County was remote and sparsely inhabited, its moors and uplands unsuited to agriculture, and too near Scotland for safety. In the Domesday Book, the county was referred to as merely the land “inter Ripam et Mersam” (between Ribble and Mersey), and accounted under Cheshire; it was not named until 1182. But the Dukedom of Lancaster, first created in 1351, became increasingly powerful and was ultimately merged in the Crown in 1413. There was even a folk-tradition that King Arthur had been Lancastrian, Lancashire supposedly a corruption of ‘Lancelotshire’. The combative nature of the inhabitants is suggested by an anonymous fifteenth century poem ‘The Shires’, listing the supposed characteristics of each county, which describes Lancashire as “a fair archer”.
By Tudor times, the county was increasingly integrated into the national mainstream, despite a reputation for Roman Catholic recusancy. The mother of William Camden, author of the nation-shaping 1586 chorography Britannia, came from Poulton. Alexander Nowell of Read was Dean of St Paul’s during Elizabeth’s reign – and the inventor of bottled beer! As Archbishop of Canterbury, Farnworth’s Richard Bancroft oversaw production of the King James Bible.
Michael Drayton hymned Lancashire in his 1612 loco-descriptive poem Poly-Olbion for its cattle, the “deepest mouth’d” of hunting hounds, silvery rivers, and women “who beare away the Bell” for beauty. There were seventeenth-century sayings alluding to regional power – “The North for greatness” – and cleverness – “He’s too far North for me”. The county was nevertheless rent by the Civil Wars, its north and west for the King, the rest for Parliament. The 1648 battles of Preston and Winwick were the last of the Second Civil War, and Preston would also be the locale of the last battle on English soil, during the 1715 Jacobite rebellion.
But Lancashire’s most important days began with the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was largely a Lancastrian creation. County inventors, speculators and visionaries yoked steam power to an array of new technologies and new thinking that would galvanise the globe, and give rise to vast questions which even now remain unanswered.
The world knows of Liverpool, Manchester, the Pendle witches, Stephenson’s Rocket, Lancashire cotton, St Helens glass, the Peterloo Massacre, Frederick Engels, the footballers of Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City and United, the Beatles and the Smiths. There was, or sometimes still is, also steel at Nelson, paint-making at Burnley, brickmaking at Accrington, wire at Warrington, beer at Blackburn, aerospace at Samlesbury (where Donald Campbell’s Bluebird K7 was constructed), submarine-building at Barrow-in-Furness, and fishing at Fleetwood. Peter Paul Roget compiled his Thesaurus at Manchester’s Portico Library.
Within the UK, Lancashire also conjures images of L. S. Lowry, Blackpool Tower, George Formby, Liverpool’s “Three Graces”, black pudding and pies, Eccles cakes, treacherous but magnificent Morecambe Bay, Coronation Street, Boys from the Blackstuff, Anthony Gormley’s Another Place, Bernard Manning, Les Dawson, Peter Kay, and a host of other bands, from Gerry and the Pacemakers to Joy Division.
It also connotes decline, division, ugliness, motorways (England’s first motorway was the Preston Bypass), harsh weather and a proverbial dourness of temperament. The author acknowledges that the county is often not conventionally beautiful, with exceptions like the Forest of Bowland, but even its least prepossessing locales “engage the mind”.
He is acutely aware of the hardness of life for many Lancastrians both during the Industrial Revolution – famously fictionalised in Hard Times – and in its wake – as documented in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. As he observes, “Lancashire was the first to turn the engines on, and the lights out.” Dickensian-style Gradgrinds, grasping though they were, at least sometimes gave back to their communities, leaving many magnificent public buildings, museums, schools, charitable bequests and a bittersweet memory of gritty civic pride. Later neoliberals merely shuttered still viable industries, hollowed out communities, and filled characterful quarters with soulless glass and steel.
Social suffering accounts for local traditions of radicalism – from seventeenth century Dissenters and Enlightenment intellectuals like Joseph Priestley via the Luddites and Chartists to the beginnings of Mass Observation (in 1930s Bolton), the first meeting of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (in 1971, in Burnley) and contemporary anti-racism. Moss sees radicalism as a key county characteristic, although perhaps not every reader will share his admiration of the decor of Roughlees Clarion House, a country hostelry furnished with photographs of Labour MPs, copies of the Morning Star, and a banner exhorting “Workers of the World Unite”. But unlike some enthusiasts he realises the impossibility of erasing inconvenient facts (like slave-trading legacies) from cultural memory. He is open to all, but never uncritical.
The book is filled with little-known facts – such as that the American Civil War really ended on 6 November 1865, when the sole remaining Confederate Navy vessel, CSS Shenandoah, surrendered at Liverpool Pier Head. He also honours now unjustly forgotten local dialect poets. The Lancashire dialect was the first English dialect to be treated with cultural seriousness, thanks to writers like John Collier (‘Tim Bobbin’) whose 1746 comic tale View of the Lancashire Dialect, by way of Dialogue between Tummus o’ William’s o’ Margit’s o’ Roaf’s and Meary o’ Dick’s o’ Tummus o’ Peggy’s was one of the first books of its kind. Another was “the Lancashire Burns” Edwin Waugh, who sold shoes on Rochdale market and resided in a cellar, but whose 1855 Sketches of Lancashire Life and Localities impelled Thomas Carlyle to pronounce him “a man of decided mark”.
Moss greatly regrets the brutal truncation of 1974, when two-fifths of the historic county was reallocated arbitrarily to Cheshire, ‘Cumbria’, ‘Greater Manchester’ and ‘Merseyside’. The rump became a backwater, notwithstanding a richly suggestive – even sacral – heritage. Gawain sought the Green Knight in nearby Wirral Forest. An early seventeenth century sect called the Grindletonians was sure the Ark of the Covenant was hidden in Grindleton Chapel. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, climbed Pendle Hill in 1652 and was enraptured, writing in his journal: “When I was come to the Top of this Hill, I saw the Sea bordering upon Lancashire: and from the Top of this Hill the Lord let me see, in what places he had a Great People to be gathered”. The 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind, in which children mistake an escaped convict for Jesus, was shot in the Ribble valley. The ghosts of Scottish Royalists killed in 1651 have been ‘seen’ on the M6.
So long a stranger to his shire, the author ‘finally’ wanders closer to home and his heart – finding his own past amid landscape irreducibility and a septentrional poetry of placenames – Fair Snape, Goosnargh, Hail Storm Hill, Oswaldtwistle, Prickshaw Slack. He closes with conflicting feelings – “Lancashire lets me down, but I can’t compare it with anywhere else”. This is not just an overdue survey, but an unusually enquiring one – an admirable examination of an incomparably important county.
This review first appeared in Country Squire, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
