thomas m wilson

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.

Last week I was riding a bike through the forests and lakes of the countryside outside the small village of Steinhagen.  The fields of wheat stood tall and thick and ready to harvest, and were bounded by forests of oak, heavy with clambering wreaths of ivy.  A lowering sky of grey but lambent cloud hinted at rain to come, but a deep rural calm lay over everything. As my bikes wheels rolled along empty laneways and paths, I felt like I was deep in the heart of Europe.  Small German red brick farm houses with steeply pitched roofs and half timbered walls peaked out of the wheat or corn fields.  Occasional horses munched beside ancient stables.  Hardly a soul was seen.  It reminded me of a painting by Samuel Palmer, fields pregnant with significance, even if you weren’t sure what kind of significance it was. 

Then over the weekend I walked around Heidelberg.  The old city sits in a wooded and green valley of the hills that create the eastern side of a wide flat river basin through which the Rhine river runs north away from the Alps, far to the south.  In this wooded valley Heidelberg lays along the river. Where Heidelberg’s old town is located at the eastern end of the city the slopes of the valley out of which the River Necker flows (a tributary of the Rhine), become very steep.  The city can’t expand into modern suburbs here as there is no space, there are only old buildings, wooded slopes and the quietly rolling River Neckar.  Yes there are plenty of tourists on the old bridge, but many of the streets are still quiet with the occasional bicycle or passing university student.  Over tourism isn’t overwhelming here. The castle on the hill has been a partial ruin for most of the past two centuries, and was admired for its picturesque location high above the city and nestled among chestnut and oak trees by Mark Twain, J. M. W. Turner and other romantic visitors, painters and poets throughout the nineteenth century.  Walking up the hill to this castle I was reminded of walking up the hill to the Alhambra: a steep and heart quickening stride up a cobbled lane through deep green trees to an ancient fortress high up above you.  The red sandstone that the castle of the castle’s walls makes for an unusual sight.  And from the windows, arches and terraces of the castle you look down and over the River Neckar, over the arches of the old bridge crossing it, to the other side of the thickly wooded valley, with a few nineteenth and eighteenth century mansions lining its further bank.  Above the mansions is a line through the woods, and that is the Philosophenweg (the Philosopher’s Path), along which generations of university professors and philosophers have walked, cogitating loftily high above the waters and the city. 

The city’s university library is another building in red sandstone.  Walking through its front entrance is a lesson in dignity, gravitas and beauty.  If only all library’s imparted such lessons in stone to those passing through their portals.  (I should know – often they don’t!)  This is a university library that tells its students that you are in an important place, a hallowed place.  Heidelberg University, incidentally, was the model for the modern research university in the United States, first kicked off by John Hopkins in the late nineteenth century at its founding in the 1870s.  Earlier in the day I had entered the Jesuit Church of Heidelberg.  I have previously had little interest in baroque Catholic German church architecture – generally I find it overly artificial and it leaves me cold.  However this church, with its tall white nave and glass crystal chandeliers, and small touches of green and cold colour at the top of the capitals of the pilasters on the nave’s piers, did touch me.  The organ was playing beautiful descending notes, and the place was illuminated by a pure light everywhere, with only a small handful of worshipper and tourists wandering through.   

Tomorrow I leave Germany, but I’m glad to have come if only for a few days.