Posted on by Derek Turner

Treasure island

The Parable of the Hidden Treasure by Gerard Dou

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

Posted on by Len Krisak

Three poems by Len Krisak

LEN KRISAK’s two most recent books are Magpie (original verse from Measure Press) and a complete verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, from Routledge. With work in the Hudson, Sewanee, and Southwest Reviews, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes, and a four-time champion on Jeopardy! A 3.6 pickleball player, he hopes to die a 4.0.

QUASI-EKPHRASTIC

Impastoed on the ceiling of the day,

Van Ruisdael’s clouds—and Constable’s—contend.

The war-torn firmament will not take sides;

Great cumuli must see it to the end,

Where their brute forces mean no other way:

They’re on their own, as cloud with cloud collides,

Smashing gun barrel blue against lead grey.

Two sky-scapes that have power to hurt, and may

Do some in combat, threaten us below

As well, where we live out our lives as though

This world meant either castles, long laid waste

And stabbing still at some scant scrap of blue,

Or hay-wain folk, who scorn unseemly haste

In reaping . . .  and in all that they must do.

CUCHULAIN MANQUÉ

—after a phrase stolen from Marie Ponsot

I run into the sea—no time to wade—

To snag a ball the combers carried out.

It is a warring water I invade.

You hug the safe shore; I can hear you shout

Your fear above the rollers’ roar. Invading

The invading breakers breaking in—

Their ravenous undertow, white edges braiding—

I plunge ahead. There is a game to win,

To take back what the water hasn’t earned:

The prize I play for. Rip tide wants me down.

Still, there where I have somehow never learned

The prudence needed if I’m not to drown,

The surge, though it’s an asymmetric fight,

Relents. I race back shore-ward, saved, but shaken

By mindless forces of unstinting might

That almost snared the prize they could have taken.

HIS MAGPIE SPEAKS

Across this white-scape in the morning light,

I scan the snow. There’s nothing here to eat

But shadows, blue and pink devouring white.

Where sun was, drifts have buried all the wheat.

No scuttling prey betrays a chance of meat,

And everything is far too blinding-bright.

Packed clumps of flakes weigh down the black-limbed trees,

Arthritic branches rhyming with my back.

Dead beauty: that is all this magpie sees,

Roosting atop my canted, crippled gate.

In frozen silence, I know only lack.

Sitting for Monet, how long must I wait?

Posted on by Isabel Chenot

Three poems by Isabel Chenot

ISABEL CHENOT has loved, memorised, and practised poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood Books

Great Lake 

As though we’d slipped through to a hidden room, 

we walked without our usual thoughts. 

Our fear was dying. 

A tree swept upward, an abandoned broom  

raking the quiet. Intermittently, it rained white 

birds – of whom, not one was crying.  

Dead fear can be exhumed,  

but what can rob us of that 

blue bar lying  

on its steel grey tomb – 

or of the slippered light 

on the sole sound of water flying? 

dawn, Manitowoc 

Lake birds are rowing out and turning 

  their long canoe of flight, 

perfecting air’s geometry of yearning 

  with curves of white. 

Hover and dip and swivel, gullwing, 

    ternwing; 

  pelican, drip light. 

Skim, heron. Oars of morning 

  on lakes of sight. 

The weeds were wrapped around my head 

  -Jonah 2:5 

The light exists along the edges 

of the roads we took. 

A few weeds grip the dirt 

and hold 

like weeds (we’re told) 

around a whale-shocked 

prophet’s head. Unlikely plot 

of an old book. 

On scraggle hedges 

where uncommon rains erode  

the desert 

light exists. 

And when I close 

my eyes 

gnarled, ragged roots of stars 

milk filaments of moon 

hard scimitars 

on seeds 

of sun 

and sparks 

of finespun 

nebula 

clutch havocked 

thought 

like weeds clutched Jonah. 

When I close my eyes 

a few weeds by a desert road 

clutch light. 

Some buried reason’s lode 

of sight 

in the foreswallowed 

dark. 

Posted on by Ian C. Smith

Correlations

IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island

Correlations

In March 1790 Bligh reaches England the same day as his letters describing the Bounty mutiny written five months earlier, Bligh aboard a Dutch vessel from the East Indies, his cannon shot news via France which seethes with its own uprising as does he with his need for vindication.

A new luminary deriving from his account of the miraculous feat of seamanship in the open launch, Bligh both seethes and basks at first. But questions soon arise suggesting all is not quite right with this talk of the town exploit, and Fletcher Christian is better connected than many in England, including Bligh. His clan numbers bishops, MPs, and university alumni, one brother a lawyer, another, a doctor.

Unable to defend himself, Fletcher of the tattooed arse constructs huts of vegetation and yard, cultivating his semi-tropical garden in a mutineers’ allotment on a little known and maddeningly more difficult to find island of the remote Pacific in residence with one of several native women and various scoundrels. Even from that distance he has allies with clout.

Rumour, gossip, abounds. We all love a mystery, each with an opinion. Nobody knows where Fletcher and his makeshift mob are, nor has heard from Bligh’s launch crew. Some scoff at the idea of so many ordered into an open boat, armed and provisioned, allowed to make their way home, however hazardous, without putting up a fight, the shame of this.

Several survivors of the incident-riddled launch odyssey are silenced, dead in the East Indies where tropical diseases scythe Europeans. Others stranded there by Bligh who couldn’t wait to be disencumbered of them are now debauched, drunken, threatening, even mutinous. Bligh writes to families of some of the original crew, expressing his feelings towards these shocked innocent people’s loved ones, whether calumnious or praiseworthy.

Fletcher’s fame, or infamy, puts Cockermouth on the map. Bounty’s voyage was financed to cultivate breadfruit as a profit-skimming basic slave diet. Political radicals sympathise with the French revolutionaries, among these the young Wordsworths in this time of a burgeoning anti-slavery movement. William attended the same school as Fletcher whose brother, Edward, shall later help the Wordsworths receive their rightful inheritance.

By 1808 when news of the discovery of the isolated Pitcairners – a tribe now with their own language – spreads, the South Pacific is well-charted. Illegally deposed as Governor of New South Wales during the Rum Rebellion after rubbing rogues the wrong way again, Bligh has nine years of life left.

In the heat of the mutiny he reminded Fletcher that he had dandled the Bligh children on his knee. His wife remaining in Lambeth where their twin sons are buried, Bligh’s married daughter deputised as his first lady in Australia. Did she captivate Sydney’s fledgling society with her childhood memory of Fletcher Christian?

Theatrical extravaganzas, prequels to future film flimflam, made much of Bligh’s dramatic days during his extraordinary life. Today, some still believe Fletcher found his way home to England, or vanished into America’s melting pot. In Hobart, anxious to clear his name again, did Bligh learn of the mutineers’ island descendants? Were these days of regret, of trembling sorrow?

Posted on by Richard Dove

Gardens of earthly delights

RICHARD DOVE reports from the Chelsea Flower Show

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.

All photos by Richard Dove

Posted on by Derek Turner

“The North for greatness”

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

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 2 Comments

Vernal verve

Puccini orchestral works, Chandos, CHSA 5385

Strauss and Beethoven, SOMM-Beecham33

Elgar from the Archives, SOMM Ariadne 5046

Vaughan Williams. Albion Records, ALBCD070

STUART MILLSON ranges from Manon Lescaut to Mystical Songs

Sumptuous sound – yet with pin-sharp detail – is the order of the day in the new Chandos issue of orchestral works by Puccini. Scaling the heights of dazzling audio-demonstration-level engineering, the Chandos engineers bring John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London into sharp focus – highlighting the brilliant solo playing of sections and section leaders (musicians all handpicked by the conductor) and the sheer unanimity of a sound that truly gels and sparkles. Puccini is just the right choice of composer for artists who set out to re-create what is, possibly, a lost style of orchestral playing – or at least, that resonant richness associated with the large London ensembles of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Listen out for the immaculate, tenderness of the woodwind at the opening of the Act II Prelude to Manon Lescaut, with graceful violins leading us on to the emotional blaze at the height of the piece. Likewise, a soft breeze from the Italian coast wafts through the Prelude to Act III of Edgar, a Puccini opera we hear very little. An old-world charm, reminiscent of Grieg’s Holberg Suite, is to be found in the Tre Minuetti (from about 1881, revised seven years later). This gem of a sequence started life in string quartet form, but John Wilson saw its potential for larger forces and so duly orchestrated it. From the thrilling, orchestral ‘attack’ in the short Scherzo (18812-83) to the famous, nostalgic, sepia, bittersweet Crisantemi, the Puccini collection will greatly appeal even to those who are not naturally followers of opera, but who nonetheless relish a tug of the heartstrings.

In a different era of recording, yet with an equally striking sound, but finely remastered, is SOMM Records’ Sir Thomas Beecham archive. Sir Thomas was one of a group of great inter- and post-war British conductor-knights, often known for their biting wit and somewhat authoritarian presence on the podium. At one rehearsal with the Royal Philharmonic, the position of the chair and music-stand on the conductor’s rostrum was not to Sir Thomas’s liking, and he became a little irritated by the arrangement. “Do you think I’m Samson?” he remarked, as he tried to adjust the heavy podium apparatus. “Sometimes, we do wonder, sir?” replied a brave member of the orchestra. Beecham saw the funny side, fortunately. Yet the conductor was a musical titan, as can be heard in Richard Strauss’s grand symphonic odyssey and autobiography, Ein Heldenleben.

For Strauss, his music rooted in Wagnerian willpower, the ‘Hero’s Life’ of the title referred not to a sword-wielding Siegfried, but to the German artist himself – fighting battles for recognition, for artistic truth, against sniping and snarling critics (Das Helden Widersacher – The Hero’s Adversaries). Heldenleben is, perhaps, Strauss’s version of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, although the work ends not in exultation, but in the sense of the artist having satisfied many of his desires. Sir Thomas Beecham revels in the almost operatic texture of the music – the grand sound of French horns and martial trumpets; the music striding on as if accompanying both Zarathustra and Don Juan, all in one. Once again with SOMM, Lani Spahr’s audio restoration leaves us in no doubt as to the mission of this record label: to establish for all-time, one of the most remarkable conductors’ and composers’ sound archives to be found anywhere in the catalogue. Also on the CD is Beethoven’s Eighth, a work of beauty, lightness, diversion – a recapitulation of all the good things we find in the Symphony No. 1 – and just the prelude needed before the mighty Ninth, the Choral Symphony. Lovers of vintage records will enjoy the mid-1950s sound, and it is truly enriching for us to be able to reconsider and re-assess the legendary musicians of 70 years ago.

But SOMM’s musical exploration of the past goes even further back in time: their first volume of Elgar from the Archives presenting two recordings from the 1920s of the Enigma Variations – one conducted by the composer himself; the other by the founder-conductor of the Proms, Sir Henry Wood. Given that the recording techniques here involved the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra – and Wood’s own Queen’s Hall Orchestra – performing in front of what looks like a large Trinity House foghorn, the sound quality is remarkably clear. Again, sound-supremo, Lani Spahr has done a wonderful job of “French-polishing” this (English) music, and because of it, we can enjoy the glorious playing of the orchestras’ woodwind and string principals in this most famous symphonic warhorse.

The Elgar disc is completed by delicate and sensitive recordings of the Violin Sonata and String Quartet, both works the products of Elgar’s stay in the woodland of West Sussex at the end of the First World War. For Lady Elgar, the slow movement of the Quartet captured the essence of sunshine; and Sir Edward’s chamber music from this southern sojourn was often generally referred to as showing a mysterious “wood magic”. Marjorie Hayward, violin, and Una Bourne, piano, are the soloists in this 1919 acoustic recording, while the String Quartet in E minor recorded two years later, shows the virtuosity and understated English emotion of the London String Quartet.

Finally, again from our own land, the words and music of Easter, and poet, George Herbert, set by Ralph Vaughan Williams. In Five Mystical Songs we sense the growth of flowers, of the daffodil – the Lent lily – and experience the quiet revelations of resurrection and renewal, although not through the usual choral and orchestral forces associated with the work, but in the composer’s own arrangement for baritone, piano and string quartet. The songs were first performed in Worcester at the 1911 Three Choirs Festival, that gathering so associated with such masters of our musical renascence as Howells, Elgar and ‘RVW’ himself. On a new recording from Albion Records and the Vaughan Williams Society, Roderick Williams, baritone, gives a warm-hearted, clearly-articulated interpretation of the songs, accompanied by the Sacconi Quartet – a performance of intimacy and reflection, reminding the listener a little of the atmosphere of Butterworth’s song-cycle A Shropshire Lad. Here, England at Easter-time lies before us: “Rise heart, thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delays, / Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise, / With him may’st rise…”

Posted on by Nicholas Booth

Home Front horrors – and beauties

A Town Destroyed, Poplar 1941, by John Minton. Art.IWM ART 15910

Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art

Imperial War Museum, March 20 – November 1

NICK BOOTH is impressed and moved by images of London under attack

Critics tend to rush by British art of the Second World War: for them there is no contest with the art of the First World War, which was revolutionary and packed with their favoured ‘isms’ – futurism, vorticism, cubism, the aesthetic fallout from Roger Fry’s post-impressionist movement in the years before Western civilisation’s headlong dégringolade to slaughter in 1914.

The art of the 1939-45 war has been judged unambitious and even, in the case of Edward Ardizzone’s work, ‘cosy’. This is unfair. This rather too small exhibition at the Imperial War Museum makes no effort to mount a counter-argument but nonetheless contains many good and affecting things. Probably there wasn’t space to lay out key conversions away from abstractionism and surrealism in the interwar period: that having hymned the world of machinery and progress some artists recoiled from the realisation that technological advances could have very nasty side effects. Thus the world of humans and nature came back into focus.

Then the war cut off Britain from the Continent, and her artists inevitably fell back towards an English tradition for the particular and the romantic. Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art settles for paintings as record, sometimes almost as journalism – but many of the works operate on a much higher level. The show is worked up from Suzanne Bardgett’s excellent Wartime London in Paintings, which came out a few years ago and which is worth getting hold of if you are interested in this subject.

Two beautiful John Minton ink drawings appear early, A Town Destroyed, Poplar, and Looking Down on a Bombed Building by the Thames, Poplar 1941, are small and dreamlike, taking blitzed London and turning it into an inner landscape of melancholy emotion, a sort of visual analogue to Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime stories such as Mysterious Kôr, in which wrecked London ‘is drenched in moonlight’ and looks like ‘the moon’s capital, shallow, cratered, extinct’, and The Demon Lover, in which the evil ghost of a soldier – symbolic stand-in for the malign spirit of war visiting twice in a life – terrorises a woman in her closed-up London home.

A Concert in a Shelter, St. Pancras Borough (1941) by Olga Lehmann. Art.IWM ART LD 1900
A Shelter in Camden Town under a Brewery: Christmas Eve, 1940 by Olga Lehmann. Art.IWM ART LD 1899

Two ink-and-wash paintings by Olga Lehmann portray the subterranean experience of sheltering from air raids. In the swift, brilliantly realised A Concert in a Shelter, St Pancras Borough (1941), the distant stage is a flash of colour in dark, overcrowded cellar. You can almost hear the ‘shelter cough’. Lehmann’s A Shelter in Camden Town under a Brewery: Christmas Eve, 1940, evokes the dingy grimness and looming terror endured under the streets.

Incendiaries in a Suburb (1941) by Henry Carr. Art.IWM ART LD 1518

The prolific, technically brilliant and now largely forgotten Henry Carr gets a good showing.  St Clement Dane’s Church on Fire after being Bombed crackles away – Carr lights up the Aldwych with the eerie glow of a big blaze. The newspaper publisher Cecil King saw the church burning on the night of May 10, 1941, and said the flames and sparks shooting from its spire was “an odd and rather beautiful spectacle”. Familiar Silhouettes shows squaddies lighting up fags in Piccadilly Tube; A Railway Terminus, a tour de force rendering of St Pancras Station vast and dimmed for the blackout, is blown up to wall size; and Incendiaries in a Suburb conveys the horrific surrealism of war without recourse to actual surrealism. There are the silent, blacked-out, deeply usual London homes but the horizon is orange with a demonic inferno, a searchlight roams the sky in which snarls AA fire, a church and its crucifix stands in silhouette, and piercingly bright alien incendiaries land in gardens, the UFOs of 1941. Humans scramble in the gloom. It is more strange and affecting than Magritte’s Empire of Light.

Priscilla Thorneycroft’s tiny ink drawing from the London Underground, Soldier with Child in the Tube (1940-1941), shows the weariness and strain of the Blitz in the soldier’s face. Kenneth Rowntree’s CEMA Canteen Concert, Isle of Dogs, London, E14 (1941), memorably records the tea-and-sandwiches collectivism of wartime entertainment. Graham Sutherland’s The City: A Fallen Lift Shaft (1941) is more fascinating in the flesh than it ever is on the page. When he saw the broken shaft in a ruin near St Paul’s Cathedral Sutherland said it “suggested a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix”.

With a collection as large as the IWM’s it seems strange the show is quite modestly sized. Space should have been found for Charles Mozley’s vivid The Thames Embankment (1940) a favourite of mine. Through misty blue winter London light, we see the view from the Savoy above Embankment Gardens with the National Liberal Club and Parliament in the distance underneath insect-like barrage balloons. A tram whirrs up the road, in the gardens below another barrage balloon is tethered, and to the right looms the ghostly dome of the National Gallery. This was London at the start of her agonies. The pre-war city would take many terrible blows and sustain heavy losses in every sense of the word. Mozley’s ‘monument to a moment’ in time, to use the great David Bomberg’s phrase, is the beginning of the end of the old capital, the city that was so brilliantly brought to life in Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony. The absence of Mozley’s painting is a glaring omission. You can see it here: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/19851

Ardizzone’s large Shelter Scenes, Tilbury, is on show but a few of his pictures from blitzed Silvertown, in the East End, would not have gone amiss. You can see them here: https://www.iwm.org.uk/search/global?query=Ardizzone+Silvertown

The Haberdashers Hall, 8th May 1945, by C. Eliot Hodgkin. Art.IWM ART LD 5311

Eliot Hodgkin’s wonderful The Haberdashers’ Hall, 8th May 1945, appears, though not at the end of the exhibition where logically it should be. This quiet, almost ironic view of the ruins of the hall with the lantern of St Paul’s rising behind is a sort of understated companion to Paul Nash’s 1918 We Are Making a New World. In Hodgkin’s painting here is the end of the European war, the last day; overgrown with weeds and littered with rubble and bent iron; huge and terrible things have happened; nothing will ever be the same again; meanwhile there is silence save for, perhaps, the faint merry singing of VE Day celebrants in the distance. The future will be along in due course.

On that point it’s a shame the IWM does not possess Carl Giles’s prophetic cartoon from the Sunday Express, August 5, 1945, (the uranium atom bomb ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima the next morning) called It’s Quicker By Rail showing the first appearance of his soon-to-be-famous Family trudging towards or back from their first peacetime holiday along a trainless railway track. https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/specialcollections/files/2020/08/ga5447.jpg The British were moving out of the ruins and into new challenges.

Posted on by Lawrence Freiesleben · 1 Comment

Blackheath

LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN takes a psychogeographic trip through south London

Nobody wanted proper light they want to be in the dark, they liked it, they liked

the little cupboards.  To live a story written in invisible ink, painted in

abstract arcs, but atmospheric, poignant, calm, devastating . . .  Perhaps this

could never happen except in some strange half-apprehension inside?

Hurtling the elevated course[i]

viaducts arching forwards

headlong,

cable-ducting streaming a frantic pulse

while gantries blink at signals vanishing 

gaps before speech

no time to question

twelve tracks in unison, dividing, merging,

aimed reckless

– a geometric exaltation –

at the sharp radius, weed-ragged triangle

of Borough Market Junction

(slow thunder amongst the attics),

braking will have its moment, but now is not it,

now is acceleration,

exploding through the jumbled visual inundation

of miraculous panoramas vaunting the compass

to praise and shun

from slum to gentrification’s skyward balconies

skewed bridges over stalled clutter

horns accusing each other  

St. James’ Bermondsey[ii] – foregrounded – is granted time,

Tower Bridge Road is not.

Scaling steel and dazzle of glass, mirror and kaleidoscope

the solid eras from which they took insolent flight,

splintering visions into the grey-green river’s tidal swell.

Cannon Street or Charing cross . . . default to London Bridge:

this sublime chaos has been overripe for a century,

between the essence of specific words

changing with the hour

the light, the region of Europa, the confident stairways.

Did the bombing try to neaten things or only add another density?

Followed by two or three decades of hopefulness[iii]

(in retrospect overstated, deluded),

soon came the point where things went subtly

yet more incurably wrong. 

More than anything, landscape had always given him freedom. Uninsistent.

It had no care for the human world.

All that dialogue, phrasing, signature, soundwave, all that need and frustration:

it made no impression. It missed almost everything.

Censor the didactic rant to puzzle on the outpourings of runic graffiti

ipton’s Tea, the finest the world produces

disrupting or expanding Deptford Broadway

bloated Arabian Nights or a portal to secret cults

conspiracy conflations overrunning all others

horror sunflowers with erotic intent

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik[iv] is not the genre

nor boombox cars racing their decibels

no wardrobes or courtyards conceal the past

for the hangars of wire are all a-rattle with nothing 

nothing visible

and the indulgence expanding from self-control,

intensifying experience to give a purpose,

rings artificial,

yet undoubtably the ancient and the medieval

exhale through every area of wood or raven black

and transitory 21st century towers alike suggest demise and the diagonal

upon which the air itself will carry their dust

their stone tapes[v] into the clouds and colours

as though history is more than dead structures and the fabrications of books

is rather the ether itself (as some claim love is truth and truth is love)

behind and above all terminal, worn out, buzzing industry

this daily to and fro of mindlessness

the impatient global death-wish.

Take Courage at the Amersham Arms by the double red lines:

I did and I didn’t – no alcohol passed my lips

chalk on the wet wood around the shadow of alphabets

all of these corrections

and all of these failings[vi]

echo from the mesh fence over New Cross station

expectant platforms freed from rush hour below

looking south to Hastings (theoretically),

taste the wash of the tide and the rush of shingle

briefly fade the queue of danger lights shining on bin bags

the pierce of brakes . . .

what first impressions from a precarious pushchair!

boys will be . . . what we teach them to be[vii],

as this mental brass rubbing, struggles corridors into distances

angles waking from the dormant

tries staves to support a cloven harmony.

Obviously, it wasn’t good to have all this contempt. It wasn’t kind.

Even to wish for a magic wand to wave up another life . . .

the lodge house on a disused drive . . .

Only he would ever open the gates between the trees. High ornate gates that would

symbolically exclude or welcome –

if occasionally he felt expansive towards the outside world.

Roadworks now upon the winding hill

funnel the yellow box junction overlooked

by that endless fight of George and Dragon

good versus evil or more complex alchemy?[viii]

From a smile to the left, other soundscapes flow

reducing plastic vehicles to a whispering haze

mind-manacled time zones intersect and cancel

hint forms, images, prospects

even narrative

from tilted rooms fumed with exhaust

from fenced corridors under bamboo screen and radar dish,

stunted palms and arrowslit windows

from country villas stranded in their rowdy future

dilapidated, behind railing and creeper

preceding 40s flats . . . perhaps? (they have a rectilinear austerity).

The projection may be drab 

but climbing Blackheath Hill toward the grass, drought-widening common 

its balconies are not stale,

filled with town and country,

their musics drift above the heavy traffic

the stop and start of hybrid buses

the slant of dreams and aspirations in many languages . . .

“If you can’t satisfy yourself, how can you satisfy anyone else?” runs the wise phrase,

the target of self-knowledge, bow and arrow, individualist parade.

The only trouble being: who but the ignorant, the arrogant or the lucky, can ever

satisfy themselves?

Higher, as the plateau begins to break,

wooded commons buffer zones of peace

where red shuttered bays remember green wartime garages,

until a siren sounds from 80 years past

loud enough to wake Wat Tyler[ix] from his abysmal mooring

reduced to a road sign,

loud enough to date other more recent subjectivities

garnered from artists, writers and characters who preferred art to living,

half-dead or lost, fascinated perhaps 

and wishing to stay that way –

forgetting that at its most vivid, art is life multiplied

or aware that such a level or spiritual leap[x], is too great a risk or challenge

and prudence often worse than a toxin.

Gestures and beauty gone –

You had your chance

and mine is nearly done

there is never finally any way to turn

but take port duty free on the link span[xi].

Is history the attempt of spirit to conquer matter[xii]

or no more than an accretion of grime?

something we should try to learn from but forget,

the circles through which we overlap or not . . .

our one-way flow with no option but to follow

– or a topological map with infinite directions and choice?

Here, the country church[xiii]

invisible tock upon the bookshelves . . .

red bus through the trees and fences that reach backwards and block

all diagonal pursuit

no sleep ever seems just

only a pause between enigmas

unless you switch off to it all and dream of Wales, or a remote coast

or a vineyard in Chile  

as if the dream were all.

That dream could be the dream of the lodge, off the map, disused, forgotten,

but self-sufficient – as in the end we must all become, unless (or even if) we can

rekindle love. Our own fracture is enough, only the landscape or the lover can heal,

not the peer group or the distant friend.

Once it becomes impossible to tolerate life as it is, there is only the light inside. 

The gates opened into woodland sun and shade.

All human drivel died between the avenues

all ambition drowned on the unspoilt riverbanks which followed.

And through the lines, words, shapes, the movement arose,

becoming tastes and notes and colours.

At New Cross station, Sutherland[xiv] asked “Do you think I’ll ever be an artist?”

This was the late 1920s – before the primeval incursion of Pembrokeshire

shattered his mould,

“Or shall I get my father to find me some other kind of work?”

Do such assumptions, signifying class structure, still remain?

Should I have been a meter reader[xv], musing on life’s paradox as I walked my round . . .

never troubling to scrawl any of it down,

never disturb the peace

for anything beyond style or template originality may be too cruel.

Was post-war optimism also when culture began to slither more generally trivial,

relaxed too far?

or can such impressions be blamed on the inevitable drought,

the scrap to maintain one’s personality in the face of the world? . . .

However –

since the developed temperament and will

can banish or dialectically justify all negative reality,

or dissolve material into metaphysical

today’s dull light is more than enough to make us content

avoiding the fairground and the ever-flashing blue lights

of ambulance and fuzz

as we walk, expecting rain, flippant but uplifted,

crossing the parched August space of

Blackheath.

NOTES

[i]    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_%E2%80%93_Greenwich_Railway_Viaduct

[ii]    Neo-classical. This image seems to exaggerate both the height of the viaducts and the closeness of St. James’ Church to the railway: blackcablondon.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/near-bermondsey-church.jpg

[iii]   From 1945 – 1975: arguably the maximum period of post-war hope – during which (for one example) ecological concerns were fully realised but insufficiently acted upon. During which, global corporations became too powerful and greed became a virtue.

[iv]  Both the music and specifically (in the line above this one), Dorothea Tanning’s painting of 1943: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/64/

[v] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069316/  1972 British television horror drama film written by Nigel Kneale.

[vi] https://genius.com/Songs-ohia-travels-in-constants-lyrics  (paraphrased) lyrics written and performed by Jason Molina: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTcNpD1YyoI&list=RDbTcNpD1YyoI&start_radio=1  at 12.46 – 13.39

[vii] Slogan on a screen or billboard?  [visible but small in the top right of the roadworks photo –21st August 2025]

[viii] From https://brill.com/view/journals/rt/13/2/article-p195_4.xml  :

“It is the purpose of this paper to interpret the legend of St. George and the Dragon in terms of alchemical symbolism. While the victory of the Christian hero over the Dragon is traditionally interpreted as symbolic of the triumph of good over evil, it is argued that both combatants represent the four alchemical elements: air, water, earth and fire. Instead of a duel of opposites their combat transmutes the coiled-up energy of the dragon into solar light, which manifests as the beautiful princess of the myth. The conclusion is drawn that there is a dialectical movement of force in the battle between St. George and the dragon. The hero releases the antithetical power of the dense, dark matter symbolised by the dragon so that the elements of a polarity do not remain contrasted but are resolved creatively.”

[ix] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Tyler

[x] Søren Kierkegaard et al

[xi] Link Span, BTF film of 1956, directed by Michael Clarke. See: www.imdb.com/title/tt1754135/  “This documentary from British Transport Films, follows 24 hours in the life of three British Railways Channel ferry services.”

[xii]  Colin Wilson paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee in Religion and the Rebel (1957) reprinted by Aristeia Press in 2017, page 130.

[xiii] Charlton village is the one here of many.

[xiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Sutherland  While Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire landscapes may not be “realistic”, personally, I wouldn’t think of them generally as “surreal” – which word to me indicates an element of attitude, even a degree of literary willing, more evident in (for example), Paul Nash’s gently surrealist, Landscape from a Dream, or in Dorothea Tanning’s, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tanning-eine-kleine-nachtmusik-t07346

Sutherland’s best Pembrokeshire work celebrates the mystery and reveals the hidden power and primeval qualities of the landscape. However, I can see how, given that his landscapes are often ‘more real than reality’, this can easily be associated with surrealism, and at times he does utilize a more surreal approach. In fact, it could be argued that the most relevant aspect of surrealism, is not the exaggerated drama of melting watches and so on, but simply an ability or a moment in which one sees and notices things more vividly. Walking through a suburb of Heysham yesterday, gradually moving into a heightened sense of seeing, I was reminded how ‘surreal’ so many houses and gardens can look in bright daylight, the layout of shrubs and pots, the window surrounds and porches etc – all those aspects of daily life it is so easy to take for granted or disregard. Down on the prom, I was reminded of Paul Nash’s short essay Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism published in The Architectural Review (Volume LXXIX, April 1936, pp. 161-4). Nash himself distinguished between the work of artists belonging to a Surrealist group, distinguishing their work by a capital ‘S’, and “artworks, situations, objects or locations that have a dreamlike character or incongruous settings that evoke disquiet or the uncanny. These, he describes, as surreal with a small ‘s’.” See: www.paulnashdorset.co.uk/timeline/1936#

[xv] https://internationaltimes.it/?s=meter-reader  Obituary for my father, 2024.

Posted on by Ian C. Smith

England’s North Sea Coast

IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island 

Arriving back in England after so many years I first visit my birthplace near London where even the smells have me reminiscing.  From here the plan is to travel south along the Thames Estuary, then north along the coast.

 As we were freed from Sunday school we all heard the short screech of brakes.  A boy who lived near me was known for scaring drivers by sauntering saucily in front of them.  I think I disliked him because he was bolder than me.  I feared being run over after seeing a stricken dog’s blank eye bulging from its stilled face in the gutter.  The jam factory closed until Monday, its usual burnt sugar smell diminished, my parents chose to potter in our miniature garden while our roast dinner bubbled in the oven, contributing to the neighbourhood olfactory menu change, rather than cleansing their sins.  Our junior scripture, wasted on us, was their chance for a break.  My mother had no idea of my commitment to her.

Riding his luck, that silly boy had also ridden a car’s grille.  We both had sensible older sisters.  I had already crashed my sister’s bike, breaking my arm.  His travelled to the hospital in the ambulance, comforting him.  He wasn’t badly hurt.  The rest of us rocketed home with our dramatic news.  My mad dash was impeded by a stitch from clutching my collar.  My sister, perhaps not always so sensible, had instilled in me the belief that when you see an ambulance you must hold your collar until you see a dog, lest your mother died.  Like some of us, the American T-shirt had yet to emigrate.  Due to regular unwanted sightings of ambulances, often from buses, and dogs, although numerous, hiding when I needed them most, I only disproved my sister’s morbid dictum much later, a tardy laxness ending with guilty relief.

My family emigrated to Australia where that boy’s family also headed, where he became a policeman.  An early school leaver, like him, I also found employment in an asteroid belt of hazards, a welding shop, where I fantasised about travelling.  Sparks arced from steel melted by heat in that flashy crackling ghetto, shadows pulsing where men toiled to make ends meet.  Tension simmered beneath crude camaraderie like a live nerve, with me Rilke’s panther trapped in a cage.  I kept quiet there about my burgeoning reading solace.  In that acrid netherworld of freckled light immigrants padded their vocabularies.  That masquerade of spectral figures with shields and wands wearing identical overalls, who could have been space warriors, or prisoners, did little for the immigrants’ language education.  Morale was weary, likewise, morality.

A newly-wed German listened to, asked, and copied us, occasionally with odd results.  He managed to explain about an impending weekend visit to his English aunt, another immigrant, but, unlike us, well-to-do.  Grasping a finger-printed mug of sweet black tea I tried to help with advice he sought regarding manners, etiquette, while others competed to hector us with vulgar suggestions.  On the Monday after his social call the German raged in pent-up, back-to-front mispronounced oaths that doubled up the blue-flashed denizens of our Tartarus, the molten metal mob, in guffaws.  The posh aunt had cut him like an oxy-acetylene torch in front of his bride, felling him with outraged scorn when, uncomfortable in his pressed suit, the German lad had suggested: ‘Would you please shift your slack arse to pass the fucking jam, Auntie?’  Or words to that effect.

Overcoming my velleities, bridges burned, finally educated but love still elusive, I feel so alive back where I started with my boyhood imagination.  Driving through England looking hard at everything, I wonder about all I have missed while away, their shadows and echoes, now, in this cliché, my supposed mid-life crisis, albeit early.  Anxious, I, now we, move on, never stopping long in my ancestral land of ancient sorrow.  In Norfolk, an argument east of The Wash, ours no larksong at break of day arising, we approach an old man wearing a cloth cap with a horse, both their noses whiskery in grey light.  A man, a horse, a cart, a sign.  Should be a palindrome.  Yes, my argumentative partner, her Australian accent rapid, twangier than mine, wants to take the ride, but with the reins in her experienced hands.  English caution irritates her.  The old man hears us out before agreeing to a test drive.  He watches, worried.  But I understand the need for money.  Scavenging gulls also scrutinise her merry-go-rounding Wells-next-the-sea’s otherwise empty carpark.  Sticking close to the old man, deferential, I talk her up as if sharing secret knowledge.  You’d think she was Clancy of the Overflow’s direct descendant.

Our high seat a magic carpet, carriage erect, pert bottom sticking out like Chaucer’s Alisoun’s, her impatience with the Brits is ever-present.  The morning air, still, with few cars, brings to mind Eliot’s certain half-deserted streets, and regular glimpses of the North Sea captivate me, horseshoes echoing on tarmac.  That horse taking over, I ask my abrasive Queen Boudicca – East Anglia’s own – how she knows where to navigate her chariot.  ‘The horse does,’ she says.  ‘We’re just along for the ride,’ a fair description of our relationship.  Early shoppers like figures in a Lowry painting stop, stare at the strangers with the familiar horse, its pace increasing.  I wave to them languidly.  ‘We must be heading back,’ my woman says.  Wanting to believe her compelling logic, concerned, I ask if she is in control.  ‘Hardly,’ she says. ‘Stop waving like the queen, you show-off.’  She does seem happier.  In her element, I suppose.  Beyond the horizon I picture Europe, geography as reality, mind fizzing only with travel’s romance, not the errancy of our ways.  Then the old man looking lonely.  Flushed with success, she is kind to him.  Relief in his tone, he says he knew we would be all right, his demeanour a wavering lighthouse beam of warning we might well heed.