IN 1999 WE CAME FOR THE ARRIVAL OF ANYA SPARKES, but this time we were six days late.
Nearing Sydney airport Joan points upwards and explains: “Shivaji, there’s a plane taking off”. Shivaji, aged three but old enough to be concerned, replies: “Is that your one?” Fortunately it wasn’t, and fortunately that part of our baggage carrying 18 kgs of presents fell off the back of the weighbridge and was not included in the total. We still have to join the longest queue at London Airport and grumble along with Americans, Asians and Africans, though we are luckier than the stateless citizen I read about who has been living at some international airport for a year. “Surely this is a new car” we say as the Saab glistened in the Heathrow car-park. Only yesterday had Chris finished welding, wiring and spraying a two-year old insurance write-off (it had collided with a deer, and been trucked to Chris’ workshop only the week before). And now the shiny black Saab was carrying us silently at 90 mph towards the West Country. After the sunny Australian winter the English summer seemed cold and I tried out Deidrie’s neck muffler (I have also considered wearing Auntie Ann’s balaclava on my morning walks but did not want any misunderstandings with the local constabulary). If we were sad at leaving behind our grandchildren Rosie, Sophie, Olympia, Isabel, Shivaji and Akula, we are now enjoying the company of Faith and dear little “X” whose behaviour is perfect. Madeleine manages her expertly in the bedroom while Chris plays in the garden with Faith, catching balls and running very fast (Faith, not Chris). The bright-eyed little bundle now wants to see what’s going on around her, and she gets plenty of encouragement. Having been rather clumsy at parenting myself, I am continually astonished at the competence, not only of our children but of our grandchildren in guiding the newborn into that confused universe we call “life”. It was good to see Tim and Kathy again. Gran has gone down a lot but doesn’t complain, loves her room and appreciates the staff. It didn’t take long for the weather bureau to register our arrival and we now have our meals in hot sunshine in the garden, with visitors such as Tim and Kathy, Paul and Amanda, Carmen the midwife, John the gardener, Mary Tanner, Cyril and Kath en route from Devon to Essex, Sandra and Richard en route from Sussex to Cornwall, and Kerrison and Caroline who live in the old stone rectory.
“Passports Please”. My own year or two of statelessness was followed by temporary Guyanese citizenship (it would have been just my luck to have been called up for active national service on the Brazilian border). So, I didn’t mind queuing, as an Australian citizen, at London Airport. I don’t know what passport John the “trading post” holds (he lives in the caravan behind Chris and Madeleine and is always buying or selling something) but he has an address in the northern winters of “Rock Rose, St Helena, South Atlantic”. He is now getting Chris to weld up some broken machinery he is taking back with him. Maybe they don’t have enough broken machinery there. John’s age here is 70 for pension purposes, but at St Helena he is 60 for insurance purposes, and also to avoid the indignity that over-seventy’s suffer in being raised in a net with the luggage off the boat from Capetown. England is now even issuing pets with passports, to eliminate quarantine, a microchip being implanted in your pet’s ear with proof of vaccination, etc.
Travel broadens your stride and, after hanging out the nappies at dawn, I stride in my new seven-league boots across the corn fields and meadows of the Cotswold Way (Cot = sheepfold and Wold = hill). I am chewing ears of corn for breakfast and listening to skylarks high overhead in a blue sky which the weather bureau has forgotten about and left hanging up there for two whole weeks. By walking fast on the return I usually overtake the “Royal Snail”, that is to say Postman Pat in his little red van, before I turn into the Cold Ashton churchyard. Radulph was the first rector there in 1123 and the little church has a “squint” or hole in the architecture to allow those seated in the transept to see the rector, or possibly the other way round. At the village of Pennsylvania the house next to the corn field is called “Corn Flakes”. Further on I come face to face with an inquisitive young fox, and some rabbits running scared, probably from both of us. At the sharp edge of the Cotswolds, the Way drops down into a dark and gloomy tangle of twisted trees straight out of Lords of the Ring. In the middle of this fairy-tale forest I find an old letter box and, wondering what its address could possibly be, I lift the lid of the “Dyrham Wood Message Box” and open the message book. Betty Evans of WA had blistered feet here last year, Harry Jones said “Next time I’m taking the bloody caravan”, and someone had written an order for two kebabs with curry sauce to be collected on the way back next Friday. Even some poetry :”Feet hurt sweaty shirt, Nearly there I don’t care, Need a rest, Pint of best”. Some walkers from Portland,.Oregon passed South on the way to Castle Combe last month, and a Kentucky family were headed North for the iron-age fort at Chipping Sodbury last week. There would have been other strange traffic to the fort along this track maybe 5,000 years ago. My own message, a quote from John Masefield, has no doubt equally confused hundreds of subsequent hikers:
Let them answer
Who reply to every question, as befits an iron time.
I can only see a valley with a million grass-blades blowing
And a hill with clouds above it whither many larks are going
Singing paeans as they climb.
On the way back I raise a brace of pheasants (in plain language I scare a couple of big birds). But yesterday a deer scared me by leaping across the lane in front of me.
Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels, says the Nepal guidebook so: “boil it, peel it, cook it, or forget it”. This, for some reason, reminds me of the missionary who was boiled and eaten in the Marquesas Islands. See later. The book also says take 10 rolls of film, though another book recommended 20 on account of the effect the mountains have upon the amateur photographer. Tim and I are talking so much we cross the Severn by mistake and have to backtrack up though the Wye valley. At Symonds Yat telescopes are set up to view peregrine nests high in the overhanging cliffs. There is great local excitement as four eggs were laid in March and hatched in April. Later we get lost again and park at the wrong end of the Malvern Hills next to a Roman hill fort for some reason called British Camp. I suppose it got nationalised when the Romans left. By the time we walk along the full length of the spine of the Malverns we are delighted to find the Wyche Inn, sandwiches and a couple of pints.
Then, from the front door of the pub the 1500 foot climb to the Beacon now looks much more possible, and it is from here where Tim is standing that one can see 12 counties. We also meet the medieval historian. At 89 he still climbs the 1500-foot steep Beacon. When I mentioned Sydney he described the documentation he had deposited with the NSW State Library. This concerned his grandmother’s fiancee who had been cooked and eaten in the Marquesas together with a New Zealand bishop. But if travel broadens the mind for some, it is about to damage the eyesight of others flocking to Cornwall next week to view the eclipse. The special sunglasses now flooding the market are apparently useless. Paddington station is full of posters warning people to book ahead of the huge crowds expected. But the reverse is happening and people are staying away in droves.
The southbound cattle trucks grind to a halt in a hot, humid tunnel just before North Clapham station as the loudspeaker tells us the previous train had “become defective”. Later I get lost and walk round three sides of Clapham Common (which is not bad considering it is a triangle) to find Sally and Nick Dyer’s oasis of sanity, deck chairs, beer and good company. Nick, fed up with public relations consultants, “ponces in pigtails”, is setting up his own finance company in the city. When I arrive Sally opens the door while booking a flight via her mobile from Santa Fe to Hungary to enable her sister-in-law Jacqui to view the eclipse there. This is the New Britain and I feel I am in unfamiliar territory, or getting old or something. And next morning some replacement scuba-diving gear arrives in a parcel and I hear the hair-raising story of the rubber boat which sprung a leak and capsized in the Red Sea. The local crews don’t like switching engines off because they are so difficult to start, so the propeller sliced through Sally’s oxygen pipe. London transport is in a bad way with the Circle line completely out of action and the Eastern limb of the Northern Line amputated. The main lines are not much better. The train from Bath had been 30 minutes late due to electrical failure, and now today the train back to Bath is “delayed”. There are no phones and I queue up and ask at Information if privatisation has left any phones behind. “Yes, there are some halfway up platform one”, and the only one working is directly opposite a 5000 horsepower locomotive tuning up to an excruciating middle-C as I bellow into the receiver to Chris. A large crowd now gathers at the departures screens and eventually Jacques Tati says something in Esperanto and Morse code over the public address. The crowd, which seems to understand Esperanto, starts to sprint to the opposite corner of Paddington station, past four completely empty first class coaches and jams itself into the four cattle trucks at the front of the train. Here, the mobile phones, essential in today’s unpredictable transport environment, emerge everywhere from the bags and pockets of the chattering classes. I don’t have one but Chris, always utterly reliable even if British Rail is not, is there at Bath station to pick me up.
Heavy rains had marvellously swollen the congregation as hordes of disconsolate, sodden tourists joined the faithful for Matins at Bath Abbey. In the first reading I settled back comfortably to admire the magnificent fan vaulting, until I was jolted by the words “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions”. By listening carefully from then on I deduced that this was a very early example of a popular uprising against the Poll tax, and Margaret Thatcher would have been proud of Jeroboam’s savage response to the crowd. With exceptions such as the poetic beauty of Isaiah and the Psalms, much of the Old Testament seems overly concerned with tribal warfare, revenge and racism, and quite at odds with the directions of the New Testament. Meanwhile, back in the abbey, I was once again distracted from the architectural beauty of the ceiling. The sermon sliced a clean line between religion and religiosity, and I thought at one time the turbulent priest was going to recommend the disestablishment of the abbey itself, and I could visualise Joan tugging at my wet coat tail if I were to rise to my feet and cheer. But it has also been said of the average Anglican congregation that it would have slumbered through the Sermon on the Mount, so this one moved thankfully into the finishing straight and closing prayers. We had already been to Mass and found a coffee shop in which to dry off and read the outspoken and highly critical attacks on the Queen Mother in the Sunday papers. So, when we were asked to pray for the QM on her 90th birthday, and I noticed the offending newspaper article lying face up, like an ecclesiastical time-bomb, next to my hassock , I defused it by kicking it under our pew. After all, the Church of England has been described as the Conservative party at prayers, and I didn’t want Joan to be accused of a Popish plot by some latter-day Protestant inquisition. Last week I saw five early- morning balloons drifting north below the remnants of a harvest moon. But in this week’s festival, when an amazing 200 of them took off from Bristol, the wind took them west, out of sight of Cold Ashton.
Gran. The nursing home phoned us early. Tim arrived with a framed photo of Madeleine holding little Anya, adding to the large photo collection of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren around her room. She then wanted to see the babies, we phoned, they came, and we propped Anya up on the pillow. Each time she hiccupped Gran opened her eyes and smiled. I remember that Aunt Dorothy sat up with Great-granny while she died, and now Joan wanted to do the same. We stayed till one a.m. but her pulse was strong so we went home, while Gran lasted another six hours. For her funeral Joan and Madeleine made a tape of Mozart’s Ave Verum and Faure’s In Paradiso. Madeleine had printed cards of Gran’s hibiscus drawing, I read out from Madeleine’s card and Kate’s email words I will always remember: “There is a bond between grandparents and grandchildren that is unique and warm, and even more “unconditional” than that of parents and children.” For the lunch, Tim had prepared his home beautifully and Joan and Madeleine brought chicken casserole and salads. At the memorial at Henford House we introduced Faith and Anya to the assembled oldies, to their obvious delight. The two little girls behaved perfectly.
In September Joan and I went on the Schubertiade music tour, returned briefly to Cockleshurds before QF2 took Joan returning unexpectedly early to Sydney to support Rebecca, and BA143 took me to Kathmandu and to climb in the Annapurna Range.
IN 2006 WE CAME TO EUROPE FOR THE BEETHOVEN TOUR, Madeleine and family were in Australia, and Tim joined us in Paris for three days.
IN 2008 WE CAME TO ENGLAND FOR THE TWINS, via Dijon and St. Petersburg, returning to Sydney via the Amalfi Coast.
The twins. Cold weather drove us out of Russia a week early, just as well since the twins were very early. A girl then a boy on October 29 as yet no names but good weights for twins. We had all walked up the lane that morning to admire the view across the Cotswolds and that evening Chris and Joan were suddenly extremely busy assistants to midwife Sheila, since the other two midwives couldn’t come. Meanwhile, I looked after three eager little girls in the kitchen, though in fact they looked after me, read me stories to calm me down. So Chris, Joan, Madeleine and I have been managing a household of nine, and visits from Chris’ family, and many friends from the village and far beyond. Madeleine of course also competently manages the twins, recently with the help of a double sling that the twins love, and Chris somehow keeps his business going.
An ancient sea had deposited some cockleshells, uncovered when the sunken garden was a quarry for the building, some 400 years ago, of the score of Cotswold stone cottages that are Cold Ashton. Perhaps the shards of broken cockles became Cockleshurds, the name of the cottage, who knows. I am standing in the road looking over the stone wall where the field mice live into this sunken garden, with my clothesline, the girls’ water slide, Chris’ BBQ over on the left, and the conservatory that leads to the back door.
Behind the tree sits Chris’s cubby house, large enough for the girls to live in, if only their parents would let them. Way round to the left are the onions and carrots that go into the large tureens of soup, and the tree that provides apples for apple crumble. And so, for four unexpectedly sunny afternoons the girls have helped us pick nearly 15 pounds of blackberries and helped make jam and crumble. For those who don’t know this little cottage, a back door leads to the laundry through the conservatory that raises tomatoes in summer and warms the cottage in winter. The laundry is mostly occupied with Madeleine’s printing machinery and leads into the kitchen and, across the hall, into a comfortable clutter of dolls houses, musical instruments and a large open fireplace flanked by settees and drying logs. Alongside the hooks that carry heavy outdoor gear, rises a steep flight of stairs leading to two bedrooms, a study that is now the girls bedroom, and a bathroom of eccentric hydraulic performance. In our snug bedroom sloping plaster ceilings reach down to the window, the top of which is no higher than my waist. Over the centuries have been added what is now Chris’ engineering workshop, an electronic workshop, and a garage. Some ten years ago Chris acquired and rebuilt a Saab that had hit a deer at speed. Early this year Chris acquired another Saab for £250 that had thrown a con-rod through the crank case. Chris switched motors, sold the old Saab for £100 for scrap, providing Joan and me with luxury motoring. Easy when you know how! The three girls and I have sketched the old village church, its ancient tombstones, and the view down the valley in which snuggle the little rounded hills into which sheep have cut their own horizontal contour maps. And Joan and I have spent four days with Avril, one day driving from Lewis to Old Hastings by way of Pevensey. There, we cleaned up Great Granny’s grave nestling peacefully between the Roman castle and the Saxon church. Tim has taken me to several Cotswold villages, he and Kathy came over for Madeleine’s birthday, we have seen Zsolti and Helen, watched Faith doing Scottish dancing, and seen a fair bit of Bath on frequent shopping expeditions. Chris has received the short American documentary on the Cold Ashton black Puma with interviews with Faith (who saw it one night) and Madeleine (who made the plaster cast of the paw print).
The England visit did tend to centre on the twins but also on the activities of the girls. They showed us where the best blackberries lurked, and we took them to see We are going on a Bear Hunt at the Theatre Royal. Also in Bath, we watched Faith at Scottish dancing. Here the girls are returning their library books (so many they need the cart) to the mobile library that visits once a week. And here is Tim at Bourton-on-the-Water and, with me, at Castle Combe. We stayed with Avril and we disturbed some deer in Knowle Park before peeping through the railings at the magnificent castle that Henry VIII had bought ht cheap from a debt-ridden bishop.
Avril was showing us round Lewes. “Ann of Cleves lived there, and that’s where Thomas Paine stayed for a while.” For both the French and American revolutions Thomas Paine had written their bills of rights. I had been slightly disappointed in his famous Rights of Man until I came across his last, little known work Agrarian Justice. But, by the time he wrote that, it was all too late for him to say “Hey, wait a minute.” History is like that, it has no reverse gear.
From Lewes Avril drove past that dreamy undulation in the downs known as Firle Beacon, stirring memories. One was of an unforgettable spring morning in my school holidays at Windyridge, with a plaintive cuckoo just beyond the hedge, early mist clearing in the valley below, with Firle’s soft outline up there on the edge of heaven. Later Tim and I got to know Firle well, with the Long Man, a giant outline cut into the chalk long before the Romans. Later still I was to drive Joan, to meet my parents, past the same magic places, the Morris Minor’s hood down on a warm summer day. And now, Avril was driving us up a rutted track to St. Michael and All Angels at Berwick. Tim and I, in all our explorations of the South Downs we love, had somehow missed this little church. Built in the twelfth century looking across the downs to Firle Beacon, a nineteenth century curate had tried to restore Catholic elements to Anglican worship such as the importance of symbols, beauty, colour and the sacraments. This initiative was then picked up in the twentieth century by artists from the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa and Quentin Bell and, for an hour we gazed at the vivid murals that have made this little church unique amongst English parish churches.
On our last Sunday Robert King arrived with helicopters for the girls and these were still angrily buzzing the ceiling next morning. On Monday Kate’s amazing parcel of decorated baby wear arrived and, on Tuesday at Bristol airport the girls said they would soon visit us in Australia. Easyjet to Rome from Bristol was a fraction of the normal fare from London. But we paid extra for “priority boarding” which seemed to be a guarantee that you would actually get a seat. As we rattled along the runway the pilot admitted he had forgotten to order the sandwiches, but Joan had brought some in case. Above Rome airport a tempesta furiosa spun us out of orbit to Pisa to refuel and try again. At Ravello, high in the mountains above the Amalfi coast, we enjoyed loafing around and doing very little for six days. We stayed at Hotel Parsifal, Wagner had composed somewhere up here, and read again about the Bloomsbury Group, who stayed in the Villa Cimbrone and scandalized the natives.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
Place names. Tim and I once had a competition to find numbered place names; I can remember five only: Once Brewed, Tooting, Three Bridges, Sevenoaks, Tenby. Here in Wiltshire some local names, like the Lamb Inn and the Dog Inn, seem a little lacking in imagination. Some, like the White Lion and the Black Horse are at least descriptive. I suppose the Saracens Head is now politically incorrect, and the Horse and Hounds probably soon will be if Tony Blair’s backbenchers wind him up any more. While Joan and I enjoyed a half of cider at the Hop Pole Inn the conversation at the bar concerned search engines not threshing engines, and Mac apples rather than those that grow on a tree. Then there are lovely names like the Little Harp, the Live and Let Live, and the Druids Arms at Stanton Drew, named after its Neolithic stone circle and therefore historically incorrect by at least 5,000 years. Over in Marshfield, an apt name if you go there across the fields, the Lord Nelson probably dates from Trafalgar and the Catherine Wheel is at the head of the beautiful St Catherine valley. The first vicar at Marshfield commenced duties in 1228, the church being modernised in 1470. A very young parishioner had recently written a prayer: “to pray for my grandma and my cat who are both growing older and more elderly”. But the little Saxon church at Bradford-on-Avon, where Joan and I used to stop on the way to visit Gran in Warminster, must be 1000 years old. The White Hart at Castle Combe is, of course, famed for its patronage by the three Hogan sisters, and their shopping assistant, in the summer of ’97. And, from Cockleshurds Cottage, the thirsty traveller, perhaps even the shopping assistant, goes past the Elizabethan manor, the 14-room rectory, and the old schoolhouse, then through the churchyard and past the glebe to his destination at the White Hart at Cold Ashton. All of these names and addresses seem to be linked by public footpaths, semi-public footpaths called “Permissive Ways”, and private fields often containing bulls, escape from which may involve barbed wire, electric fences and nettles. One such escape took me through a farmyard and the following conversation with a farmer: “You’re an early walker”, “Yes, I get up a five”, “Silly bugger”. And some destination addresses are unpredictable, those of the hot air balloons drifting overhead driven, as are some in the House of Lords, by wind and hot air. July 31st is Lammas Eve, and in medieval times Lammas, or “loaf mass”, marked the beginning of the harvest season The name Lammas was hijacked from a much earlier feast day known in Gaelic as Lugnasadh.
Some surnames in England are reserved, so you can’t have a surname like Devonshire or Dorset unless you are a Duke or an Earl of that address, although their passport address is probably Park Lane or Mayfair and financial address a tax haven in the Bahamas.
English language. I have been reading Inglesi a paperback by an Italian about the English, from which I now quote and adapt. English is the most widely used language in 101 of the 171 countries in the world, it is used in 3 out of 4 business letters, 3 out of 5 TV broadcasts, half the scientific papers, and 80 percent of computer data in the world. There are 500,000 words and 300,000 technical terms, 18 words for toilet including loo and bog, but not dunny or the motorway superloo. The French are still called frogs but the Italians are no longer wogs. “Abroad is bloody and all foreigners are fiends” said some 19th century English aristocrat. But nowadays British holiday-makers go to France for the wine, Greece for the suntan, Spain for a brawl, and to Italy to ignore any other fellow nationals they may meet in Venice or Rome and, after a couple of strikes and a mugging, to echo the nineteenth century traveller who wrote that “The Italians were the only black spot in a magic land.”
Linguistics. At a youth athletic festival in Birmingham I once acted as translator between our team from Bristol and the group from Motherwell in Scotland. There was a brief example of the Bristol accent in an earlier chapter. Here from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens I will try to give an example of the Scottish:
Aye saw the auld mune late yestreen, with the noo mune in herr arlm
O captain if we gang tae sea I fer we’ll cam tae harrm.
Noam Chomsky, as well known for his contributions to linguistics as for his devastating political criticisms of American foreign policy, is an expert in computer language theory. At a far simpler level, I had amused myself at Telecom trying to develop libraries of commands made up of strings of three-character parts of speech, for example: DspErrRed or “Display Error Message in Red”. In the TV series The Wire, the equivalent verbs, nouns and adjectives require subtitles to be understood. But each sentence contains a large number of fillers, words beginning with F, requiring no subtitles. In one episode an educated crim asks his inarticulate sidekick why he uses so many F words. “Yo man, without dem, how I make myself understood?”