Immediately across the great traffic sewer of Marylebone Road from W1, Nw1 stretches from Edgeware Road to King’s Cross and up to Chalk Farm and Camden Town. It’s a great mix of bosquery, Regency delights, railway history, rock’n'roll and squalor.
At the west, it just squeezes in Edgeware Rd tube and the nearby poub where I went to see Virginia’s agitprop play, from which I ran away afterwards so as not to have to have to say what I thought, and also a stretch of Lisson Grove, which was on my bike route from South London, or town, up to Cricklewood or West Hampstead etc, and was a run down but attractive spot
with a nice little market, secondhand bookshops, a nice line in quirk
and one of the finest fish and chip shops, which of course is now An Institution, but then just a good pitstop
on the thin ride north. Just across the way was Marylebone Station
then a sad lovely becalmed place from where few trains ran
and the few passengers sat forlorn
though it has since had a renaissance and is now well used and refurbished
I like a happy ending.
More vastly and decorously, just to the east is Regent’s Park, half of NW1 at least. It is basically a failed housing development, and none the worse for it. Its flowery arrangements were the locus for one of my favourite Beckett stories, and also for my lovely academe. Bedford College was housed there then, and my classical studies degree was gained largely in its arms even though I was technically at unlovely Westfield College, far north along Finchley Road.
The Classics department was housed here
and I would discourse with Dr Dicks
My tutor for Plato and hours spent in gilded argument in a Nash villa in Regent’s Park,looking out at the shining dripping green Inner Circle: it was ironic and after a depressive absence of mine when his concern outweighed his incomprehension,touching, in a ruefully Platonic way.
The barely there Epicurus and Stoicism lecturer, tutorials in a cupboard under the stairs, like something out of Alice: ” there seems to be something coming out of my nostrils which isn’t of my person” he said once: then he disappeared and unlike the Cheshire Cat, that was that.
in a fashion now entirely vanished. I knew even then it was going, and that it was of no practical value, but loved it all the same. I sat in the naff canteen while an Iranian and an Iraqi student made black jokes to each other about their war, or sat outside while the band of some regiment played at the bandstand, until the IRA blew up the bandstand and the band one day and it didn’t seem such a good idea anymore. I walked in the park listening to the roar of the lions coming from dowdy London Zoo in the top corner, or skived off a lecture on a whim to go to Lord’s and watch cricket
in a kind of apathetic stupor heightened by the fact that it was warm afternoon and I couldn’t even afford a beer. A policeman followed me all around the Inner Circle and all the way up to the door of the Nash Villa to tell me off because I had cut across a small section of the park on a footpath. Those were the days: actually London bobbies were always fanatically officious about riding on the footpath.
There was music in the open air theatre (more later) and because I studied at Westfield I met two very important people, who lived in Camden, and so Camden Town became a gilded spot in 1984, and I will tell you its glimmering tale next time. In the meantime, take a stroll. It’ll make you feel glad to be alive.
If you find yourself in Hampton why not visit The Bridget McConnell Gallery and take in an exhibition by Brigid Cole-Adams called ‘Written on the Land’
Here’s an example, which I’m sure the artist won’t mind me posting, if only for one reason: she is Kate’s mum.
and here is the gallery’s gallery of her work. Needless to say they are endlessly indrawing in their actual selves and textures; and we have the particular privilege of seeing them take shape. Reasonably priced too.
Sadly my avatar, one of the finest actresses in the history of actressing has passed on. She lived in Surrey, where all the best people come from, and according to the Beeb had gone downhill since the death of her beloved husband nine years ago. Here’s a selection, includingsome of her work with her husband
Watching that you can see the precision and delight of a great comic actor.
You know how we old people are always banging on about when we used to be booted out of the house in the morning and wouldn’t come home again until teatime because we were too busy making secret castles, fishing with jam jars in the creek, riding our buggies down the hill etc etc.
Fuck it was boring.
Anyway: even if it wasn’t boring, we did go out and not come back except to eat: or did we? I seem to remember a fair bt of slouching around the house getting underfoot, and there was no dvd or internets etc, only toy soldiers and airfix kits with the smell of glue and enamel paint to excite us.
The point is, if you’ll only listen, that the kids now don’t get to do that really: it is all arranged overmuch, but we’ve just discovered that it’s the lack of a quorum that’s the problem. Up at Healesville for a couple of days with Frannie and Finn, Finn’s schoolmate, and three cousins, one female and thirteenish, two twin boys nineish, quorum was attained, and magic obtained.
One whole day playing forty forty home and another half a day playing sardines as well gokart pushing, table football, Monopoly, and two theatrical productions for our delectation, each of ahich required up to four hours’ rehearsal and involved a film noir femme fatale, a fabulous stage drunk, betrayal, seduction and murder, and a butler who kept saying ‘it can be arranged’ like an eight year old Peter Lorre.
We adults just went about our book reading crosswording business, unmolested except to provide sustenance, while they had a clearly memorable time, helped by the hugeness of the garden and house.
This morning Frannie got the train to school; by herself: for the first time, and then as it was a half day, she got the train home again: by herself, which was bit more of an adventure, but all went finely.
Kate and I popped into the Big Dish before meeting her at the station, and as ever it was welcoming and light and everyone there looked as if they had sprung autocthonously from the furniture, and we had the most fantastic haloumi, spinach meltingly cheesey tomatoey pizza. There was a rather severe looking chap who sat in the window, black jacket, black rimmed glasses silver hair, and as I sat down I glanced at the black book in front of him: German Expressionist Theatre.
I sat down and couldn’t wait to tell Kate this, but how to? I grabbed her notebook and pencil but before I could write anything she said :
‘It’s alright, I know what you are going to say’
‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes’
followed by a mutual squirrel of delight. then I glanced over my shoulder just as he opened the book and in a sudden eruption of colour the pages were festooned with dozens of those page marker strips of every hue.
but in fact written in the seventeenth century, by an Anglican vicar. By an Anglican vicar who never married, but was clearly a dyed in the cassock romantic.
The best account I have found of his life while browsing is
“The family tradition of the Herricks is that they owe their origin to a certain Eric the Forester, who raised an army to oppose William the Conqueror, and who, being defeated, was employed as a commander in the Conqueror’s army. In his old age this Eric is said to have retired to his home in Leicester- shire — the county with which the Herricks have ever since been closely associated.” (ibid)
and modestly well off family, with his own father being a goldsmith whose defenestration in 1592 was suspected of being suicidal, nearly forfeiting his estate to the crown, but happily this disaster for his family was avoided, and the young Herick grew up in Hampton, by the Thames, directly across from Molesey where as it happens another English poet spent his boyhood.
Etc etc, until Herrick became a parson and was sent, or in his mind banished, to the village of Dean Prior in Devon:
“situated on the south-eastern slopes of Dartmoor. The high-road from Exeter to Plymouth passes through the scattered village, and within a five miles’ radius of Herrick’s church lie the ancient townships of Totnes and Ashburton. Modern civilisation, as represented by railways and factories, has laid the lightest of fingers upon Dean Prior, and to this day the village, though somewhat shrunk in size and importance, presents to the visitor very much the same appearance that it did to Herrick on his arrival there in 1629.” (ibid)
To the London loving Herrick this rural dump was like the distant exile of Ovid in Tomi, and the villagers:
A people currish, churlish as the seas,
And rude almost as rudest savages.
but he was serious about his calling and remembered long afterwards by the villagers, some of his verses being passed down through an oral tradtion till at least the 1830s. A fervent Royalist, Herrick was removed from his living in 1647 after the King’s defeat and capture, and returned to London, about which he was ambivalent:
More discontents I never had
Since I was born than here.
Where I have been, and still am sad,
In this dull Devonshire ;
Yet, justly too, I must confess
I ne’er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the press.
Than where I loathed so much.
His image:
shows him to be a good living sort of lad with cavalier hair , and verdant tash and a heck of a schnozz, quite unlike the Puritan image which one usually imagines as involving lank stringy hair and a face like a potato (and I am firmly on the Roundhead side!).
Many of his poems reflect his romantic attachment to the King, and his romantic imaginings, but also describe the rural rituals and goings on of the Devon countryside:
Despite its bucolic setting in which the activities of city and court hardly seem to intrude on rustic simplicity and quietness, Herrick’s world is animated from inside and out by a spirit that pervades its people, places, and things. The sleepy village of Dean Prior, set in remote Devon, is in these poems energized and enlivened by participation in worlds larger than its inhabitants could ever have imagined–a world threatened by an advancing tide of restrictive and restraining Puritan dualism, against which Herrick’s artistry provides a subversive, yet delightful, response.
andthis is the interesting thing, isn’t it, how these people were both alienated from religious authority and swept up in changing and being changed, yet also losing something, an older way of being, as so many cultures today are finding. Even in the seventeenth century Devon was a place quite cut off from the currents of society, where ‘the old ways’ persevered for far longer than elsewhere.
Much later, ted Hughes, in the introduction to his ‘Moortown Diary’ (a luminous book) talks of how particular and enclosed Devon remained still when he went to live there in the early 70s:
“Buried in their deep valleys, in undateable cob-walled farms hidden not only from the rest of England but even from each other, connected by the inexplicable, Devonshire, high-banked deep-cut lanes that are more like a defence-maze of burrows, these old Devonians lived in a time of their own. It was common to hear visitors say: “Everything her’s in another century!’ But what they really meant, maybe, was that all past centuries were still very present here, wide-open, unchanged, unexorcised, and potent enough to overwhelm any stray infiltrations of modernity. The farmers lived lightly in the day and the year, but heavily in that long backward perspective of their ancient landscape and their homes. The breed was so distinct, so individualised and all of a piece,they seemed to me almost a separate race. I could believe they were still that Celtic tribe the Romans had known as the Dumnonii, ‘the people of the deep valleys’ , a confederacy of petty kings, hidden in their strongholds that were only just beginning to come out of the old oak forest’
which, sadly he then says, promptly all vanished…though a friend of mine, an incomer, growing up in North Devon in the seventies and eighties, was told by an old rustic that she’d never be a part of it really because ‘your blood’s not in the trees’….but there is a long stream of stories about, and an endless fascination with, the idea of the old ways still being practised. The Wicker Man for example, and my favourite, which I have never forgotten: Robin Redbreast.
Here’s the synopsis:
Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) is a television script editor who has recently been abandoned by her long-term lover. She has taken ‘custody’ of an old cottage, put her job on the back-burner, and plans to rebuild her life. The village consists of standard sinister types, such as Fisher (Bernard Hepton) the local historian, Mrs Vigo (Freda Bamford) the controlling housemaid, and the handsome outsider Rob(in)/Edgar (Andrew Bradford) who Norah finds practising karate half-naked in the local woods. Norah sleeps with Rob, and falls pregnant because her dutch cap has mysteriously vanished. She begins to suspect that the villagers, and particularly Fisher, arranged for this to happen. She returns to London, but cannot bring herself to have an abortion. When she returns to the cottage, she is prevented from leaving before Easter Sunday (her car is sabotaged and phone disconnected) and becomes convinced that she is going to be sacrificed. In the event, the villagers have been planning to sacrifice Rob, and indeed have nurtured him for this fate for the whole of his life. Norah passes out before Rob is sacrificed (dismembered by axe), and is firmly told by Fisher the next day that no-one would believe her if she tries to tell the police. He also offers to take her baby from her so that they can nurture it as the ‘new’ Robin. Norah refuses and is allowed to depart from the village, only to see when she looks back that the villagers have transformed into their pagan equivalents with Fisher as Herne the Hunter complete with antlers.
from an excellent essay about it by John Williams. That final scene was incredibly compelling and scary at the time (pre Wicker Man) and it has never been reshown apparently, so I only saw it the once, at the age of thirteen, in the house alone, while the wind blew down the chimney and the hedgehogs screamed outside, while from the distance the rattle of a Portsmouth train came across the desolate reservoirs….
So God knows how Herrick must have felt. Apart from his romancing, I admire his delight in dishevelment, a fancy I have always shared, and his generally soft and lush display, even if the classical encomia to the Stuarts do go on a bit.
There can only be one video to go with this can’t there?
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure historical accuracy, it cannot be guaranteed that I was alone when I watched Robin Redbreast, or that it was windy or that there were any hedgehogs or that they were screaming, or that there were any trains passing through Hersham or that I would have heard them. The resevoirs were however, desolate.
![[item image]](http://ia311341.us.archive.org/2/items/robertherrickbio00moorrich/robertherrickbio00moorrich.gif?cnt=0 "[item image]")
