thomas m wilson

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…

Has England gone, as Philip Larkin thought it was going in his poem from 1972, Going Going?

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

I was in England for the first time in 16 years a week ago.  Was Larkin’s prediction right?

Starting in Cambridge, a friend picked us up at Luton in a hire car and we drove to Wimpole Estate.  It was great to go straight into a country house estate from the airport – we walked around the grounds, walking to the stables which looked like a great architectural monument in itself crowned with statues of a rearing stag and lion. Then to the traditional farm, Home Farm, where the duke of the mid nineteenth century tried to advance agricultural techniques.  There were shire horses, and I stroked the neck of the 19 hands tall Stanley, a behemoth of a creature, deeply calm and nonchalant.  We then walked to a very large walled garden full of flowers and vegetables.  I quickly located the raspberry patch and plucked some succulent dark fruit.  The burst of deep flavour on the tongue made my day.  Standing in an ancient English walled garden, eating raspberries off the bush with friends on a Saturday morning, what a pleasure. We walked outside the walled garden and spotted the stately Wimpole Hall through the parkland of ancient oaks and green grass.  The house awaited, full of treasures.  We walked on and found the church next to the big house.  Inside and outside amongst the strewn and tilted old gravestones, green grass, silence and stillness reigned.  Inside I found a side chapel off the nave where the sepulchres of previous dukes and aristocrats lay in marble carvings.  There was a pleasure I found in being here that was magnified by not having been in England or such country churches with their ancient tombs for so long.  This was all unaccustomed to me. 

Then towards the front door of the house down the gravel drive, and past a row of carved marble urns atop a brick wall.  For once these were not cast concrete urns, but actual huge Italian marble urns, carved with skill.  In the house the room that really wooed me was the library.  Low lit and long with a call, arching ceiling, the room boasted two giant world globes on either side of the desk in the centre at the other end from where you enter.  Marble busts on plinths.  Serried rows of leather bound books in white wooden shelves.  A wonderful room.  A room to make you feel uplifted onto higher ground. A room I could write in.

Outside was a statue next to the house of Samson Slaying a Philistine, a copy of a sculpture by Giambologna, executed around 1562 in Florence for the Medici.  Charles I brought it to England and it became the most famous Italian sculpture in England in the 1600s.  I saw the original marble in the Victoria and Albert museum a few days later.  But what a pick for the front of your house.  Very welcoming (see below)!  Reminds me, and I would have thought anyone approaching the house, of how rapacious and martial English aristocracy has often been. 

We drove to Cambridge.  At 530pm we went to evensong at King’s College chapel.  Sitting in this chapel, one of the greatest pieces of ecclesiastical architecture in the world, where tall fan vaulting makes stone seem as light as air, and listening to the ethereal voices of the choir sing, is one of the quintessential English experiences.  Hundreds of millions of people around the Anglophone world listen to Carols from Kings each Christmas. Being there in the chapel as they lift up their voices you feel close to the heart of England, just as I did picking raspberries in the walled garden of Wimpole estate in the sunshine.  Later that evening we saw another choral performance in St. John’s college.  The students are gone at the moment for holidays so college chapels are often used for such concerts, and such chapels make wonderful settings for such music (even if they do have hard wooden pews). 

Amsterdam…

Walking through Amsterdam taught me that no, its not enough to visit Delft and Leiden and the Hague if you go to the Netherlands.  There is no substitute for the wide canals and tall seventieth century town houses of Amsterdam.  You can walk from the train station of Amsterdam in many directions and keep walking through the ‘historic core’ of the city for street after street, after canal and canal, after block of beautiful brick town house facades, and onwards.  And you’re still in a ‘historic core’.  It is huge!  Other historic cities in the Netherlands have a surprisingly large size, but Amsterdam puts them all into perspective as little brothers and sisters.  This city is unique.  Its like a Protestant Venice.  You walk past a domed church, looking over canals lined with tall green trees, each side lined with beautiful town houses.  And the distance between the two sides of the canal, combined with the height of the six story town houses, gives you a feeling of spaciousness that some other historic cities don’t have.  Of course Venice has it with its lagoon and with its Grand Canal.  But Amsterdam has it as well in its largest concentric rings of inner canals.  I see why generations of tourists have made their way to Amsterdam now.  All the money made by the trading Dutch of four centuries ago had to go somewhere.  Much of it went into this city, in a manner that is most pleasing to the modern flaneur. 

I visited an eighteenth century sailing ship that was a reconstruction of a real East Indiaman made in the 1980s and moored outside the National Maritime Museum. This was different to other museum artefacts or reconstructions of its kind though, as here you can actually climb into a sailor’s hammock, and lay back rocking and considering the cannons lining the ships walls.  Here you can walk amongst cargo down in the vast and cavernous wooden hold of the ship.  Here you can peek through the door of the surgeon’s cabin and see his collection of plants and his surgical instruments beside his bed.  Here you can sit yourself down in the chair of the Master in the Master’s dining room.  The novels of Patrick O’Brian have been important to me over the years for their vivid portrayal of the Napoleonic wars and riding the seas of the globe around 1800 amongst seafarers in the British navy, novels full of humour, literary references, optimism and bravado.  O’Brian has such deft characterisations of people and places, admirals, storms and harbours, from Reunion Island to Mahon.  So to wander freely around this great leviathan of an eighteenth century sailing ship, the Amsterdam, complete with iron cannons, tall oak masts and fluttering flags, quietly moored besides the old Dutch arsenal, was special for me.  It helped me understand the novels more, to understand that long lost world of brothers in arms, making creaking oak castles forever ship shape as they made their way through the big blue world.

The other thing every self respecting tourist does in Amsterdam is go to the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch art. The previous night I had been at a wonderful performance of Carmina Burana, the choral work by Carl Orff that is based on thousand year old medieval Latin poems about love, lust, and the wheel of fortune.  This had made me a bit pensive about Fortuna. How the wheel of fortune lifts us sometimes and dashes us low at other times. 

Regnabo, Regno, Regnavi, Sum sine regno.

(I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without a realm).

O Fortuna!

Then today at the Rijksmuseum I saw the following painting.

It made me think of the lyrics from the music last night, in Latin, but translated into English they would read:

On Fortune’s throne
I used to sit raised up,
crowned with
the many-colored flowers of prosperity;
though I may have flourished
happy and blessed,
now I fall from the peak
deprived of glory.
The wheel of Fortune turns:
I go down, demeaned;
another is raised up;
far too high up
sits the king at the summit –
let him fear ruin!

My favourite work at the museum is ‘Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem’ by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630.