thomas m wilson

I’m in Stockholm, staying in an apartment on Sodermalm, an island neighbourhood full of hipster cafes and vegan t-shirt shops in the centre of the city.  In 35 minutes bike ride I can get to a national reserve outside the city, and I love the granite covered in mixed forest alongside lakes and rivers full of fresh water. The Swedes are found swimming in this city even when it is only 20 degrees and grey outside.  The other morning I was walking into town along the water front. In the grey light of the cool morning I noticed the head of an elderly woman bobbing through the water to my right. Only in Stockholm…

My favourite building here is the city hall.  The hall and tower has a design influenced by the Doge’s Palace in Venice, but the columns are a massive, heavy carved granite, speaking of the rugged strength of the cold North.  The city in general has clean air and no tourist crush.  The place feels civilised, and has some beauty in its water side location on 14 islands connected by 50 bridges.  The side of the island I am on is brushed by fresh water, which is a relief after being accustomed to only ever swimming in salt water where I live in Perth.

I went to see the Vasa the other morning.  Arrived early to be sure that there were not many people.  The ship rears out of the dimness like a black ghost ship in a fog, complete with grinning lions carved in the ancient timbers, slack shrouds on the decks, and a 600 tons of oak ship of the line from another century and another world.  This is one of the most impressive objects you can see in any museum in the world. A war ship from the 1600s, almost entirely intact and complete. Walking around the hull and looking up the intricacy and inventiveness of the dark oak carvings is a pleasure.  I walked to the back of the ship and looked up, imagined bobbing in a little row boat on the water as the Vasa, in 1628, moments before she sank to the bottom of Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage, moved past me. I thought of how much the viewer would have been over-awed by the majesty of this royal ship of the line and her ornate carvings on her stern and taffrail: Nordic wildmen, roman emperors, snarling lions, and open jawed monsters, light glistening off the 700 carvings of the ship as she headed for the sea.  Or another image: imagine scuba diving on the wreck before it was raised in 1961 to a crowd of thousands, and seeing the grinning skull of a sailor in the dimness and grime of the darkened gun deck, submerged in 30 metres of fresh water.  As I say, this easily one of the most impressive objects in any museum on earth.  The Vasa, the world’s most complete ship wreck from the 1600s, has become a symbol of the low gone glory of Sweden’s seventeenth century empire around the Baltic. 

The next day I was in London.  First the Wallace Collection.  A good collection of Canelettos and other views of Venice.  Wonderful setting for a gallery in one of London’s grandest town houses.  Then onwards southwards, to look at hats at Locke and Co., the place where the king buys his headwear.  This shop was started in the same place it is now in the late 1600s. Then to the gates of Buckingham Palace, ground zero for many people’s vision of London.  I hadn’t taken in the majesty of the statue of Queen Victoria outside the front of the palace, and the great bronze statues around it.  Then onwards for a walk to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where refreshments were enjoyed in its wonderful indoors café full of mosaics and shimmering light.  I saw the Bed of Ware, perhaps the most interesting bit of English furniture, a great early modern wooden four poster bed, covered in superb carvings.  Then outside to enjoy the carvings on the Albert Memorial in front of the Royal Albert Hall.  The representations of Asia and Africa are my favourite bits here – such majesty and confidence. 

Onwards through Kensington gardens, to the Speke monument.  The Speke Monument is a red granite statue dedicated to John Hanning Speke – the first European to discover Lake Victoria and lead expeditions to locate the source of the Nile.  What a great man he was, dying soon after in what may have been suicide or an accident after getting back to England from discovering the source of the Nile in the nineteenth century.  I suspect many people who pass the Speke memorial have no idea who he was, and what wonders he witnessed in the wilds of Africa, and that is a shame. 

The next day I was in Oxford.  I wandered around the Ashmolean museum and enjoyed the top floor where the nineteenth century English painters are shown.  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by a group of young painters who intended to restore to English art a freshness and close study of nature. Home from the Sea by Arthur Hughes (1862) is of a boy on the soft turf at his mother’s grave

And then there is A Study in March by John William Inchbold (1855). The first flowers in March in an English wood come out amongst the hard features of the season… This painting by Inchbold was inspired by the lines from Wordsworth: “When the primrose peeped out to give an earnest of the spring…” Young lambs and a hard blue sky above. The fragility of new life in a harsh world. Ruskin thought this painting exceedingly beautiful.

These were mostly images I knew, but I had never seen the original paintings up close.  It was more of the England I love. 

Later still in Oxford, walking through New College, I noticed these gates. The motto of the founder of the college but perhaps also of the idea of the English gentleman…

Later walking around the Pitts River Museum collection of anthropological artefacts I was reminded how as an 18 year old I had walked here and been inspired to study Anthropology at the Australian National University.  The artefacts here also reminded me of that side of the English character that is the intrepid explorer, from Speke and Burton to Thesiger and Robert Byron.  The plucky and learned traveller who probes far distant tribal societies and their unique view of the cosmos, and brings back the evidence to the ordered world of English gentlemen waiting in their London clubs.  England has for a very long time had this strain of deeply cosmopolitan perspective, unfortunately usually just among the expensively educated.

The next day I was in a village north of Oxford, and then on bicycles off through the villages and fields to visit Rousham Gardens.  These gardens are attached to a country house, and were designed by William Kent in the 1730s, and maintain the basic pattern he laid out then.  They have never looked better than today.  The owner is 87 and not terribly bothered to make the whole thing into a tourist money making machine, so it is low key and not all that famous.  However the section that is classic English landscape garden is gorgeous, particularly that part where a stone temple and two great stone urns, look down on a sinuous bend in the river Cherwell below, and out over tree tops to a green field on the other side of the river.  What a spot to sit and reflect and contemplate the world and one’s life. 

The next day we drove out to Ickworth House in Suffolk to the east of Cambridge.  We parked outside the grounds of the estate by an old country church.  Walked through the grave stones of course, and into the church.  Visiting out of the way churches in the countryside is something I am quite happy to do (perhaps odd as I’m an atheist, but they are still great Houses of Seriousness) .  Then through the main gates into the estate, and veered left into the woods.  Green leaves and old oaks enveloped us immediately as we walked down the winding dirt path.  An eighteenth century stone’s carvings informed us that this was Adkin’s wood.  I could tell that we all felt refreshed by being in this forest with its ancient, tall trees and mysterious vistas.  Then we burst out of the forest onto the wide, open parkland, dotted with many century old oaks.  These oaks were lustily uttering green leaves to the heavens, thickly limbed and massively girthed.  Onwards, and closer to the house, although we couldn’t see much of it yet.  I knew of Ickworth’s great central rotunda, more at home in classical Rome than the Suffolk countryside, so I was looking forward to seeing it.  As we rounded the path along the east wing of the house the huge rotunda came into view, and we were suitably awed.  We walked closer and could see the bas reliefs of scenes of battles and other events from ancient Rome, ringing the rotunda.  A bold expression of the love of antiquity by the marquesses of Bath deep in the green and rural heart of Suffolk.  We entered the house after a coffee and cake in the National Trust café, and came into the presence of a huge atrium at the centre of which stood a big white marble sculpture taken from Italy long ago.  Walking inside the principal drawing room of the house I saw bookshelves atop which stood marbles busts.  Two of them I could identify as Alexander the Great and Homer.  The dining room had canvases on the walls with three metre tall members of the family looking down confidently – what colossal self-importance these aristocrats cultivated through art works commissioned of themselves.   

The Earl Bishop who had conceived this rotunda as a place to display his art collection from a grand tours of Italy lost all his booty to Napoleon’s troops.  His son managed to buy back during a four year grand tour of Italy with his family much later.  So at least the great sculpture which graces the entrance atrium, ‘The Fury of Athamas’ by John Flaxman RA (York 1755 – London 1826) is where it was intended to be.  Interestingly a descendent (who had been a jewel thief in Mayfair mansions among other things) gave the house to the state and thus the National Trust in 1956, and his son took heroin and lost a 21 million pound fortune on high living and, ultimately, lost his lease tenure in Ickworth (and then his life).  Five centuries of family association down the plug with this last scion in the late 1990s when he died from an overdose. 

We wound down on empty little country roads through Suffolk, over its gently rolling hills and quiet valleys.  Eventually arrived in the little village of Long Melford.  We were there to see Melford Hall, built in the 1400s and ransacked by the puritans in the civil war.  Added to by a few different families, it sits on its smooth green sward with stately red bricks, mellowed by the centuries and the weather.  What a different vision of a stately home to Ickworth.  This I much preferred.  This was a grand house in an earlier era, when ancient Rome wasn’t the fashion, and English red brick towers and medieval style halls were more common.  The interior of the house is full of remembrance of the family that lived here until not long ago – the chairs don’t have little ropes to stop you sitting on them (although you still shouldn’t), and family photos still sit on table tops.  The dark wood hall you enter first is the quintessential version of English country house style from the Tudor era.  The library is superb.  Upstairs the bedrooms are ones you could imagine sleeping in at a weekend party in the Edwardian period – comfortable and human sized and lived in, but still with touches of elegance and style.  The way the upstairs corridor kept unfolding more and more rooms reminded me that this was indeed a grand country residence, if still humble compared to Ickworth House, or the great (read bombastically gigantic) country houses of England such as Chatsworth and Blenheim.  Melford Hall is for me the essence of what I love about the soul of England – a mouldering old country house with layers of history and love and loss and art and wood, surrounded by quiet, green gardens and gently undulating parkland beyond.  And owned by the people through the aegis of the National Trust. Not a hint of the twentieth or twenty first century to be seen.  All that is gone.  What this trip to England taught me is that the old England I love is still there, and without too much effort, just getting out into the country side with a hire car and a National Trust pass, you can experience it still.  How nice it is to know that the England I love is not critically endangered or extinct.  Of course you need to skip the famous country houses such as Blenheim, and go to places like Melford Hall.  Go somewhere that is not famous, somewhere that doesn’t trip off the tour guides lips and is out in Northumberland or Essex or Dorset or Shropshire. But that’s easily done. 

Later that day we walked up to Kentwell House, pass the parish church, over a sty and through a green field.  As the others walked ahead I looked back over the hills of Suffolk stretching away below, church spire rising about the copse of trees in beyond the field and hills beyond that.  It was a long summer’s evening and the sun was still warm. And I imagined walking this same hill and seeing this same view in spring, and in autumn.  In winter and summer.  The poetry of this place, the soul of this place.  It made me feel deeply moved by the beauty of England. 

And then to the village of Long Melford and to Melford Hall…