Truly, a well-wrought urn

High summer in early Spring: on a day that will set records for March, we drive across the Cotswolds in search of Whichford Pottery. We have come to inspect an urn that has been commissioned to stand in a corner of the gardens at Madingley Hall, where I used to work. The new urn will replace one that had stood in this same corner ever since the Topiary Garden, at the western end of the north terrace, was laid out around the time of the First World War. The old urn had succumbed to frost and was in danger of collapsing. 

Whichford Pottery is a joy, and so is the new urn. Standing side by side with the old, it has the same dimensions and form but is not simply a copy. Its height (nearly a metre) and girth match the urn it will replace; but whereas the new urn was thrown on a wheel, the old urn was formed by the ancient coil method.  It was made in the pottery of Montelupo near Florence: the name is stamped on that side of the urn which for a century has been hidden by the enveloping hedge.

Adam Keeling, who has made the new urn, tells us how a coil pot was made. Walking backwards (he explains) the potter will have coiled a long rope of clay upwards from the base of the pot, each new loop slightly wider than the one beneath to create the gentle swell of the urn up first to the shoulder and then in towards its neck and throat. Not until the approximate shape was established would the surface of the clay have been smoothed and wrought into its final elegant form. Next the old urn would have stood in the Tuscan sun and only when, finally, the clay was dry would it have gone into the kiln.

Now, under the Cotswold sun and with two pairs of great buzzards coiling overhead, the new urn glows. It turns heads: visitors to the Pottery pause and admire its rich terracotta (‘cooked earth’, of course). They are struck by how beautifully it has been made and how well it compares with its predecessor. ‘Stunning’ is the word used by Paula, who has shown us round and introduced us to the potters, and she is right.  Indeed, it more than deserves that celebrated phrase of John Donne’s: truly, it is ‘a well-wrought urn’.

But wait. Is this pot, destined for Madingley Hall, strictly speaking an urn at all?

When Donne wrote ‘The Canonization’ he had a particular kind of urn in mind. The poem starts with the poet telling someone to shut up: ‘For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love’:

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,

   And if unfit for tombes and hearse

   Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse;

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,

      We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

       As well a well wrought urne becomes

The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,

   And by these hymnes, all shall approve

   Us canoniz’d for Love ….

It’s a cinerary urn of which Donne speaks, praising the craftsmanship of the anonymous potter who fashioned (‘wrought’) it on the wheel. This is the same kind of urn that prompted Sir Thomas Browne’s meditation on death and memory in Urn Burial (1658):

In a field of Old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between forty and fifty urns, deposited in a dry and sandy soil, not a yard deep, nor far from one another — not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described; some containing two pounds of bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion; …. The present urns were not of one capacity, the largest containing above a gallon, some not much above half that measure. (Ch.II)

The Madingley urns are far larger than these. The old one, made by a potter whose half-decipherable name stamped into the clay may have been Vincente, was presumably intended for storage, perhaps of oil: the inner surface retains traces of a shiny black glaze. But it’s not an amphora: it does not have the characteristic pointed base, elongated neck or prominent handles. Indeed, the handles of these storage jars are little more than arched flanges below the shoulders of the pot. They would be useless for lifting one of these when full of grain or wine: the pots are heavy enough when empty. The nearest Latin names for pots of this size and shape would probably have been orca or dollum, but in the end I think it’s best to disregard historical or geographical accuracy and simply call them Ali Baba jars.

Such a label lacks seriousness, I admit. So it’s a relief to find that by the end of the eighteenth century ‘urn’ was being used to describe pots with functions other than to hold ashes:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
  

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
  

And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
  

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
  

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
  

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Thus William Cowper in The Task of 1785, extolling the virtues of the samovar. And a little later, Keats’s Grecian Urn (1819) is simply a decorated pot. It’s probably not long after this that the Madingley urns – four in total, and let’s continue to call them urns; after all, whatever their original functional their standing in the Topiary Garden is decorative and ceremonious rather than practical – were first made in Montelupo. When and how they found their way to Madingley, I have no idea. But I’m pleased to think the Whichford urn will now take its place alongside the other three, especially since Jim Keeling, who founded the Pottery over thirty years ago, incised the urn fittingly with a verse by William Blake. The last word of this poem is ‘sunrise’, and the new urn will stand in the only corner of the Topiary Garden to catch the sun – but only in midsummer, and very early in the morning, as I have seen it do.

[photo; the old and new Madingley urns at Whichford Pottery, 27 March 2012

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My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, has now been published by Lutterworth Press. For details and first reviews, click here.

For an American account of the launch of Extramural at the UALL Conference at Clare College, Cambridge, last week, click here. This account is written by Dr James Shaeffer, President of UPCEA, who gave the keynote speech at the Conference.

George Herbert’s ‘brittle crazie glasse’

The other day I went to Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, to give a lecture on the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe. The lecture was entitled ‘Espying Heaven’ and the title derives from George Herbert’s poem, ‘The Elixir’:

A man that looks on glass,

On it may stay his eye,

Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And then the heav'n espy.

It was a happy chance that just outside Beverley, in the village church of Bishop Burton, I came across an intriguing stained glass window by Kempe depicting George Herbert (1593-1633). It’s a good portrait, owing something to the only known  engraving of him. The poet stands holding a book which carries the neatly inscribed text, ‘Lord I have loved the habitation of thine house’, and it is as if Herbert himself has just written these words with the quill pen held in his right hand. In fact they come from Psalm 26 but they are absolutely appropriate to Herbert, whose chief book was his collection of poems published posthumously as The Temple.

The quotation, though, is puzzling: ‘the habitation of thy [it is ‘thy’ not ‘thine’ in both the King James Bible and the Prayer Book] house’ sounds tautologous, unless either ‘house’ here means family (as in ‘House of David’) or ‘habitation’ means the act of inhabiting a house rather than the house itself. This is actually the first meaning of ‘habitation’ given in the OED, and you could well imagine Herbert agreeing, ‘I have loved inhabiting the house of the Lord’. However, though in his own poetry he frequently uses ‘habitation’ he always means a place to live in:

My God, I heard this day

That none doth build a stately habitation

         But he that means to dwell therein. (‘Man’)

In the Bishop Burton window Herbert is portrayed alongside Archbishop Laud, and perhaps Kempe (or the patron who paid for the window) wanted to suggest that Herbert shared Laud’s views on liturgy and doctrine. Which he may have done – though only so far, as Archbishop Rowan Williams has pointed out. Herbert’s own notion of church ceremonial gave greater emphasis to preaching than Laud’s ever did: his church at Leighton Bromswold in Huntingdonshire was re-ordered during his time as rector in absentia with not one but two pulpits. It is not for nothing that the nearest we have to a contemporary portrait of Herbert shows him wearing a Geneva gown of the kind usually worn by post-reformation preachers. For conducting services he may have worn a surplice and stole, as in this window, but he certainly would not have worn a purple cassock underneath, as he does here: look at his left sleeve peeping out. In other windows where Kempe* has depicted Herbert (there are at least five) he is always shown begowned. At All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, he stands, an austere black-gowned figure, in front of the Great Court of Trinity, his old college. The inscription for this window is also taken from Herbert’s poem ‘Man’:

Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath

                Another to attend him.

Sad to say, someone in the East Riding has taken a pot shot at Herbert, the airgun pellet narrowly missing his shoulder but leaving a nasty crack across his face. It reminds us just how fragile stained glass is – as Herbert knew only too well. In his poem ‘The Windows’ he speaks of ‘brittle crazie glasse’, which puts it perfectly. He weaves a powerful conceit around stained glass:

LORD, how can man preach thy eternall word ?

        He is a brittle crazie glasse :

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

        This glorious and transcendent place,

        To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie,

        Making thy life to shine within

The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie

        More rev'rend grows, and more doth win ;

        Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

        When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and aw :  but speech alone

        Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

        And in the eare, not conscience ring.

A preacher, says Herbert (and he is, as always, talking to and about himself), has the great privilege of being a window through which his congregation may ‘the Heav’n espy’.  But this will be possible only if the Christian story is ‘anneal’d’ - that is, sealed inside the preacher so that he speaks with genuine conviction just as the sacred images and stories are captured in a stained glass window through the glazier’s skill in firing the glass. But if that job is not done properly, the colour fades, the detail disappears and the window does indeed look ‘watrish, bleak and thin’.

It’s a telling conceit, metaphysical in both philosophical and literary senses. And the final stanza, with its appositional phrasing, completes the conceit perfectly: as stained glass needs light to animate the images in the window, so doctrine is lifeless unless the preacher of that doctrine lives – practises – what he preaches. If not, if it’s just ‘speech alone’, then it is merely ‘a flaring thing’ and not the ‘colour and light’ which Herbert so admires in a beautiful window.

It’s therefore fitting that in the earliest and, as I think, the finest of Kempe’s George Herbert windows (West Kirby in Cheshire), the inscription beneath the portrait of the poet should be the first verse of the best poem ever written about stained glass, ‘The Windows’.

* ‘Kempe’ here indicates the work of the Kempe Studios, up to the time of Charles Kempe’s death in 1907; thereafter the work of C.E. Kempe and Co. until the eventual closure of the firm in 1934.

[illustrations:   (i)  George Herbert in a window at Bishop Burton

                       (ii) George Herbert in a window at West Kirby  (photo by Philip Collins)

For information about the Kempe Society, click here.

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, has now been published by the Lutterworth Press. I am now working on a book about the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe, to be entitled Espying Heaven.

Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb

Names, particularly names listed aloud, can produce a powerful litany. Poets make good use of such lists: 

   William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,

            Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,

   And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard  now!

Thus Thomas Hardy recalling ‘Friends Beyond’, but he was by no means the first. The 16^th century Scots poet William Dunbar, in his ‘Lament for the Makaris’, lists the famous poets of the past whom Death has claimed:

   He has done petously devour

   The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour   [makaris: poets

   The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three -

      Timor Mortis conturbat me.

There are few more poignant passages in Shakespeare’s History plays than the roll call of the dead on both sides after the Battle of Agincourt:

Charles Delabreth, High Constable of France,

Jacques of Chatillon, Admiral of France,

The Master of the cross-bows, Lord Rambures,

Great Master of France, the brave Sir Guichard Dolphin.

John Duke of Alanson, Anthony Duke of Brabant,

The brother to the Duke of Burgundy,

And Edward Duke of Bar: of lusty Earls,

Grandpré and Roussi, Falconbridge and Foix,

Beaumont and Marle, Vaudemont and Lestrale.

“Here was a royal fellowship of death,” says Henry, as he hands back the list to the French Herald, and this royal roll-call is made to sound all the more shocking when contrasted with the names of the English dead whom Henry calls next:

Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,

Sir Richard Ketley, Davy Gam, Esquire;

None else of name …. (Henry V, IV.viii.92-105)

Roll calls can be created from place names too. In Dylan Thomas’s radio play, Under Milk Wood, the Rev. Eli Jenkins compares his little local River Dewi with the great rivers of Wales:

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,

Edw, Eden, Aled, all,

Taff and Towey broad and free,

Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,

Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,

Small is our River Dewi, Lord,

A baby on a rushy bed.

And well before Thomas, A.E. Housman had gathered together the names of these Shropshire villages:

Clunton and Clunbury,

            Clungunford and Clun

Are the quietest places

            Under the sun.

One of U.A. Fanthorpe’s best-known poems, ‘Rising Damp’, is about the ‘little fervent underground’ rivers of London. She lists them:

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,

Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

And these names return to haunt the poem as the rivers themselves haunt the city, until the last stanza where Fanthorpe warns:

It is the other rivers that lie

Lower, that touch us only in dreams

That never surface. We feel their tug

As a dowser’s rod bends to the source below

Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.

Names ‘tug’ at us too. We could all call own private roll of significant places and significant people. Sometimes it is their very absence from us, and ours from them, that tugs. One of the most moving scenes in the recent TV adaptation of Birdsong was the calling of the battalion roll at the end of the first day of the Somme, when there was almost no one there to answer to their name. In the novel itself this moment prompts an extraordinary elegiac passage, which begins:

Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors ….

These reflections on names have been prompted by a short story I read this week consisting only of place names, specifically the names of villages and towns in Lincolnshire, Cambridge and Norfolk encircling the Wash. It’s the final story in Jon McGregor’s new collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You. All the stories are set in this part of East Anglia, which is one reason I bought the book: I lived as a child in this fenland area, and though it’s now nearly fifty years since I left, the village of Tydd St. Mary and the fields, dykes and drains between Tydd and the sea are still – to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence – ‘the country of my heart’.

McGregor’s stories are experiments in the limits and fissures of language: their force often lies in the resonance of what is not said, of what slips into the silence either side of speech. So a story like Memorial Stone consisting of nothing but names arranged by sound and type (Tathwell to Maidenwell, Bag Enderby and Aby, Dogsthorpe, Hogsthorpe, Dogdyke and Quadring Eaudike – hundreds of names over five pages) is in effect a prose poem. Read aloud, it creates the same kind of mesmeric effect of repetition and variation achieved in music by Philip Glass, but with this difference: that each name, each village, carries its own history and its own stories, created from the memories of and about everyone who ever lived there: parish records, war memorials, roads, schools, houses – all names .

But there is one name missing from Memorial Stone: Tydd. The villages that lie around it are there: Sutton St. James, Leverington, Newton, Holbeach (the coldest place in England last week: -16°C). But no Tydd St. Mary (or St Giles, or Fen or Gote). As I searched for Tydd I felt disappointed, even offended. Somehow an injustice had been done. Absurd perhaps, yet this has preyed on my mind all week. But now I think I have found a way to put things right: I have come up with my own roll call of Tydd – roads, fields, people, pubs. Here it is:

Tydd

Teed, Earth, Flint

Roman Bank, Minerva Farm, Sea Wall

Foul Anchor, Five Bells,

Raspberry Cottage, Strawberry Hall

Tydd St. Mary

Banks, Burrell, Balls, Bills, Hicks

Jack Buck, Catling, Cush Knott, Spinks

Tydd Gote

Pedley, Pearson, Paddy, Pat

Cross Gate, Low Gate, Common Pit

Tydd Fen

Greendyke, Harold’s Bridge, Woad Farm

Salt Field, Oldfield,

World’s End.

[illustrations: (i) Map of the Fens around the Wash

                       (ii) Tydd St. Mary’s Church photo: the author
                        (iii) Tydd Church in a stained glass window by Tom Denny (private collection)

                       

John Betjeman and Windlesham

Writing letters to the newspapers, it’s been said, is an entertaining but essentially solitary pastime. Perhaps, but I was touched by how many friends contacted me to say they’d seen my recent (very brief) letter in the Times. It was about a poem by John Betjeman, and I wrote it in answer to an enquiry from the founder of the Betjeman Society as to the identity of Pam, the mountainous tennis player in ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’. Did she exist? It’s well known that Miss Joan Hunter Dunn was based on a real person, though certainly not on anyone to whom Betjeman ever got engaged, as happens to the nervous young officer at the end of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’. That’s the poem in which Miss J Hunter Dunn appears, ‘furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun’. In ‘Pot Pourri …’, however, the poet goes one further, and ends by describing confidently the scene and the setting for his eventual marriage to Pam -whoever she may have been.  Pamela Mitford? Possible but unlikely: she never lived anywhere near Windlesham.  

This was my letter as published:

Sir, I suspect that John Betjeman’s Pam is as much a figment of his fevered imagination as the wedding he conjures at the end of ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’. He imagines “Windlesham bells” ringing out, but the parish church of St. John the Baptist, Windlesham, has only one bell. When my father was rector there in the 1960s, I was sometimes allowed to ring it.

The first Betjeman poem I ever encountered was ‘Hunter Trials’  (probably in O’Malley and Thompson’s Rhyme and Reason) but ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ was the second, and I approved of Betjeman because he had written a poem about the place where I lived. I remember, though, being puzzled that he was wrong not only about the bells but about the architecture. In the last stanza he imagines himself and Pam processing up the ‘Butterfield aisle, rich with Gothic enlacement’, but Windlesham Church was neither built nor restored by Butterfield: it was enlarged, in 1874, by Ewan Christian in a notably plain and unadorned style. At the age of fifteen, I had already been to All Saints, Margaret Street in London (rather to my father’s alarm) so I knew what a Butterfield church looked like, and it certainly did not look like Windlesham.

The village of Windlesham is described in Pevsner’s Surrey thus:

On the Berkshire border, half heath and half meadows. Big C19 houses and a busy nest of Victorian brick boxes on the former; sleek old farms on the latter, which is almost the first true countryside on this bearing coming out of London.

It still has the feel, in parts, of an old Surrey village. Its roads have names like Pound Lane, Updown Hill and Snow’s Ride. This commemorates the infamous highwayman, Captain Snow, who used the local Pelican Inn as his base. (The Pelican is now Woodcote House School, where I began - for two terms between school and university - my teaching career.)

Did Betjeman have any particular connection with Windlesham? Not that I know. I suspect in fact that he chose the village both because its name conveniently rhymed with ‘Pam’ and, more significantly, because of its dactylic sound: dum-diddy. This is the key rhythmic feature of the poem. From ‘pram in the …’ onwards, phrases like ‘whizzing them …’ ‘size of her …’ and words like ‘slippery’, ‘bountiful’, ‘mountainous’ and ‘arrogant’ are all dactyls. They give the poem its momentum.

A friend who contacted me after reading my letter in the paper recalled how easy it was to parody Betjeman. That’s true, of course, and while I was still at school I memorized a splendid parody published in the then infant Private Eye.

Lovely lady in the pew

Goodness, what a scorcher, phew!

What I wouldn’t give to do

Unmentionable things to you!

If old God is still up there

I’m sure He wouldn’t really care,

I’m sure he’d say a little lech

Never really harmed old Betje.

I have never accepted the argument that good poets are literally inimitable: in a way, their very distinctiveness makes them easier to parody. Put this to the test: listen to Dylan Thomas reciting ‘Chard Whitlow’, Henry Reed’s definitive parody of Four Quartets. Betjeman, too, was a good parodist and perhaps it’s one of his strengths that he can easily wrongfoot his readers, leaving us unsure whether or not we are missing a joke.

‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ is itself a good example of what I mean. It’s perhaps a more serious poem than appears at first, paying an oblique homage to T.S. Eliot (who, remarkably, had taught Betjeman at Highgate Junior School). The gauche narrator who hopes to catch a glimpse of the Amazonian Pam is an adolescent Prufrock, washing his face in a bird bath before deciding which path he dare take. Prufrock, indeed, seems a kind of ghostly presence stalking Betjeman’s writing at this time: after all, both title and opening line of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ – “Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn” gesture towards ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

Betjeman insists we pay attention to the title of his poem too.  ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ derives from a once-popular book of the same name. That book survives now, as its subtitle ‘The Classic Diary of a Victorian Lady’ suggests, as a record of an earlier, gentler age. Betjeman’s poem does something similar. Published in 1940 at the start of the War, it accumulates remembered details of youthful summers from a suddenly vanished world: the ambiguous ‘miles of pram in the wind’, the unsettling horses’ hooves, the cheap Players’ Weights cigarette packet trodden into the sandy gorse track. Is it good to rake up these memories at such a time? Potpourri itself reminds one of Eliot’s ambivalence about memory at the start of Burnt Norton:

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Still, scents and shrubs overwhelm Betjeman’s trespasser. The ‘coco-nut smell of the broom’ draws him towards the ‘remarkable wrought-iron gates’ and ‘over the boundary’. He steals into the exclusive world of stockbroker-belt Surrey:  it’s a world hidden behind gorse, conifers, above all behind rhododendrons.  ‘Lucky the rhododendrons!’ sighs the love-lorn poet when Pam, ‘full of a pent-up strength’, swipes at them with her tennis racquet. He knows he’s no match for her, but he can still dream:

Over the redolent pinewoods, in at the bathroom casement,


One fine Saturday, Windlesham bells shall call,


Up the Butterfield aisle, rich with Gothic enlacement,


Licensed now for embracement,


Pam and I, as the organ


Thunders over you all.

‘Redolent’ not only echoes the dactylic sound of ‘petulant’ in the previous line, it recalls the scents and memories evoked in the opening lines of the poem and in its title. But the rest of this last stanza offers an unexpected rebuff to all those who have despised the speaker for his hopeless and inappropriate passion for Pam. They (we) will have to sit and watch as he, the seven-stone weakling, walks triumphantly up the aisle with his Charles-Atlas like bride. Betjeman doesn’t expect his readers to take any of this seriously, of course. Though it is a poem mixing memory and desire, it is also a fantasy enjoying its element of self-parody: no serious poet would write a serious poem with such tortured rhymes  as rhododendrons / Hendren’s or enlacement / embracement.

Betjeman’s whole persona showed him to be a master of self-parody. He loved a joke against himself. Since, indeed, he contributed to Private Eye from its very earliest days (he was the original Piloti, writing the architecture column ‘Nooks and Corners’), it would not surprise me to discover he had been author of ‘Lovely lady in the pew’, the spoof that caught my eye while I was still a schoolboy, living in Windlesham.

[illustration: Windlesham Church, c.1970. Artist: Doreen Barlow

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, is due to be published by Lutterworth Press later this month. 

In search of Martha Edith Shotbolt

Martha Edith Shotbolt

Martha Edith Shotbolt, always called Edith by her family, was born in the Bedfordshire village of Maulden in 1860. Her forebears, working on the land, had lived there for generations — and some who bear her mother’s name, Summerfield, live there still.  Her grandmother had been a lace-maker; her mother was a straw plaiter. The plaiting and dying of wheat straw was an important cottage activity in those parts, processing the raw material of the straw hat industry, centred at nearby Luton.

People tended not to leave Maulden. The rector in Edith’s day, the Rev. Charles Ward, held the living for forty-five years. Perhaps it was he or his wife, Susan, who spotted that Edith was a promising girl, for whom something should be done. Certainly, in 1880, the recently-widowed Mrs Ward wrote a testimonial for Edith which described her life’s progress thus far:

"I have known Martha Edith Shotbolt since she was a child — and have every reason to speak well of her. She was in the National School at Maulden first as a pupil, then as a monitor, & finally as pupil-teacher till she left to go to the Training College at Lincoln where she will have been two years next Christmas — She has almost always obtained a first place in all her examinations and is now I hear head of the Lincoln College — Her Bible knowledge & Divinity are excellent — and she generally succeeds well in what she undertakes — She is a Church woman and Communicant and a well-principled girl."

I think it is likely that the Wards had encouraged her to make a career of teaching and arranged for her to go to Lincoln Diocesan Training School, an Anglican college, rather than to the nearer training college at Bedford. How did Edith view the prospect of leaving her village? Was she like Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow who sees teaching as a passport away from her overcrowded home and applies for posts in Kent, in Kingston-on-Thames and Derbyshire, but first has to settle job at a local school before she can get a place at the Training College in Nottingham. If so, did Edith experience the same sense of liberation when she started her teacher training? D.H. Lawrence describes how Ursula felt as she began her course:

It was lovely to pass along the corridor with one’s books in one’s hands, to push the swinging, glass-panelled door, and enter the big room where the first lecture would be given …. Curious joy she had of the lectures. It was a joy to hear the theory of education, there was such freedom and pleasure in ranging over the very stuff of knowledge, and seeing how it moved and lived and had its being. (Ch.xv, ‘The Bitterness of Ecstacy’)

Edith started at Lincoln in January 1879. Her training there lasted two years. As she neared the end of her course, the Principal, Canon Hector Nelson, wrote her a glowing testimonial:

Edith’s testimonial from The Diocesan
Training School, Lincoln

"Miss Edith Shotbolt completes her two years training at Xmas next. She has passed her course here with the highest credit — and with irreproachable character — She has uniformly appeared first in the College and government examinations — Her health is excellent. She gives good lessons and can teach well. I will gladly answer any questions very frankly and at the same time I know of nothing wh shd be kept back.Hector Nelson, Principal and Canon of Lincoln"

The college records show that Edith’s first post was back in Bedfordshire, at Cubbington near Leighton Buzzard. But within two years, and in a rather dramatic move, she had gone north to the Girls’ National School in Market Weighton, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Had any member of her family ever gone so far afield before?  Probably not. But Edith flourished in her new school: an undated report by an HMI Inspector, Mr. J. Tillard, noted that ‘M.E. Shotbolt keeps good order and teaches in an interesting style’. Word of her success reached Lincoln, and the College records were updated:

Went to Market Weighton – did excellent work there – gained her Part. [i.e. her Parchment, giving her the status of a Certificated Teacher] and is married. Now Mrs. Dove.

Indeed she was. Edith had met and married Albert Edward Dove, the school master in charge of the village school in neighbouring Cherry Burton. And by 1891, probably earlier, she was looking after the girls’ division in his school of seventy pupils: another HMI report notes: ‘Cherry Burton: Mrs. Dove renders most efficient aid in this school.’ 

Albert Edward Dove

Edith’s husband was a Yorkshireman, educated at the Great Northern Railway Company’s School in Doncaster. Like Edith, Albert had graduated from pupil to pupil teacher before going to Cheltenham Training College. His first post as a qualified teacher had been at Percy Tynemouth School in Northumberland, and he had moved to Cherry Burton in 1883. Albert was an unusually tall man, at least a foot higher than his wife. In addition to being the village school master, he was the organist of the parish church, and he and Edith were well liked by the parishioners and the Diocesan authorities. When they applied jointly for another post in 1891 (at Rosedale Updale School, near Pickering in the North Riding), one of the Cherry Burton school managers , William Watson, wrote a strong reference for them both: their leaving, he said, ‘will be a great loss to the village’. His own children had been taught by Albert, ‘and it would be impossible for a better teacher to be found. He has the school in capital order and has wonderfully improved it in every way.’ Mr Watson added, ‘Mrs Dove is also a good teacher and I know by what my children tell me that she takes a lively interest in the school.’ At the same time, the York Diocesan Inspector of Schools, Ernest Barry, wrote a second reference: ‘Mrs Dove I knew before she was married. She is a capital teacher and fond of her work.’

The School House, Denton

In the event, they did not go to Pickering. But by 1895 they had moved, south this time, to Denton in Lincolnshire, their home for the rest of their teaching lives. And what a home! They lived in the school house, a large and elegant early Georgian building. Over the doorway was a fine broken pediment bearing the inscription ‘Learn to know God and thyself 1720’; above that, the arms of the Welby family, lords of the local manor. Here their children - Albert, Vincent, Irene and Vera - grew up. Albert joined the Navy, while Vincent and Vera became teachers. A local clergyman, the Rev. Percival Green, proposed to Vera, who turned him down, so (rather like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice) he proposed to Irene instead. She accepted, and they were married in St. Andrew’s Church. Sir Charles and Lady Welby were guests at the wedding.

The wedding of Edith and Albert’s daughter Irene, 1913.
Albert, Vera and Edith are seated beside the bride.

The journey from Maulden to Denton is only 75 miles up the A1. The distance between the farm labourer’s cottage and the Denton School House (now a Grade II listed building), however, must have seemed immense, especially on that wedding day. Edith’s life, though, remained firmly rooted in her teaching. She published a book: ‘Evans’s Illustrated Object Lesson Book for Infants and Lower Standards by Mrs. A. E. Dove’. This was a handbook for infant school teachers, in effect a series of lesson plans all based on the principle of taking an object or a picture and getting very young children to look closely at everything they see, and then through a series of questions and answers, learning to describe and understand what they saw. Her objects were the plants, animals and household goods familiar to country children: this was very much a countrywoman’s practical view of what village girls would need to know when they became housewives and mothers. A lesson on bees and beeswax for example has a series of very careful outline drawings (done by her husband, Albert) showing the anatomy of a bee; and the questions and answers lead the child to a precise understanding of how a bee gathered pollen and made honey.

Edith’s book

The next lesson moves on to beeswax: the children bring beeswax from home, the teacher produces a piece of honeycomb:

Beeswax is useful for polishing furniture, making wax flowers and fruit, wax dolls and wax candles. It is also useful for waxing thread and bed-ticks. — How do we like to see our chairs and tables look? (Bright, shining.) How do we make them so? (Polish with beeswax.) What else can we polish besides our furniture? (Floors.) What kind of floors may be polished? (Stained floors and oak floors.) Tell the children that often the middle of the floor is covered with carpet, and a border is stained and polished. Tell them also about the polished floors in gentlemen’s houses.

Edith was well aware that many of the girls she taught were destined for life as servants and all of them would hope to become housewives and homemakers, so her object lessons were always practical:

Who has seen a little piece of wax in mother’s work-basket? What does she use it for? (Waxing her thread.) What good does it do? (Make thread go through work easily.) When does she use it? (When making carpets, bed-ticks &c.) Suppose mother has made a new tick for her feather bed, what will she do when she has finished sewing? (Wax the seams on the inside.) What good does that do? (Keeps feathers from coming through.)

Although Edith’s teaching revolved around the lives of infant girls, her own interests extended well beyond the infant school curriculum.  She was a keen gardener and a knowledgeable botanist. She was also a good mathematician, who delighted in setting herself difficult puzzles in algebra and geometry. In the margins of her hand-written recipe book are equations and theorems that were never part of her teaching life: alongside the  ‘economical recipes’ culled from Denton Women’s Institute and detailed planting schemes for the garden of the new home in South London to which she and Albert moved after their retirement, they reveal a mind always active and never narrow. She corresponded with mathematicians on the continent but at the same time never forgot her roots in rural Bedfordshire. When her daughter Vera had to produce a school project, she helped her put together a beautifully illustrated account, with samples, of ‘The Straw Plait Industry’, drawing on her own memories of cottage life in Maulden. Vera herself trained as a teacher of infants at Whiteland’s College (now part of the University of Roehampton) and began her career at Downhills School in Tottenham, a school in the news only last week – trying to resist Michael Gove’s attempts to turn it into an Academy.

Edith died in 1941, the year her granddaughter, Vera’s daughter Doreen Edith, was married to a south London curate called Norman Barlow. Their wartime wedding service was conducted by the same Rev. Percy Green who had once wanted to marry Vera but had had to settle for her sister Irene.

They say teaching runs in families. Edith Shotbolt was my great grandmother; I owe her, in a sense, everything.  If she and Albert had not married, I should not be here to write this account of her now. But I have to admit that until this week, when I uncovered two large packets of old family papers and photographs, I knew almost nothing at all about her. Looking now at the only clear photograph that survives of her, I see her gaze prefiguring a certain look I recognize as my mother’s. And in Albert’s face and balding head, is that almost me I see? Reaching across from my desk to my shelves, I search for, and find, a half-remembered poem by Thomas Hardy:

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion.                                                (‘Heredity’)

[I am grateful to Mrs Guenver Moyes, archivist at the Sibthorp Library of Bishop Grossteste University College, for kindly supplying information about Edith Shotbolt from the College archives.

To Norfolk

To Norfolk. We arrive at the end of an itinerary that has involved commuting between Cheltenham and Yorkshire (West Riding), south Somerset, Yorkshire (East Riding), Lincolnshire and Cambridge. After which, an old flint cottage, a warm fire, two very good friends and two wayward puppies, Peggy and Lily (half cocker spaniel, half shih-tzu) and a well-stocked cellar, offer the perfect retreat.

‘Well,’ asks John, ‘and what do you want to do in North Norfolk?’ I know at once how to reply. ‘I want to walk by the sea, I want to read and I’d like to write.’ John and his wife are writers, biographers both, and their house (a former pub, the name still emblazoned in the stained glass of the front door) is full of books I wish I owned. ‘Then we’ll go to Holkham beach tomorrow,’ says John. And we do.

There’s a heavy sky, and it’s cold enough for snow. We approach the beach through pine woods, and then skirt some prodigious beds of samphire grass. ‘Shakespeare must have got it wrong, don’t you think?’ asks John. ‘Surely there cannot really have been a samphire gatherer plying his ‘dreadful trade’ half way up the cliff face?’ But I am not thinking of King Lear at this moment. As we cross the dunes and onto the great expanse of empty beach, I’ve been trying to think who wrote a novel I know that’s partly set at Holkham. The answer is Hilary Mantel.

I’m surprised it takes me even a moment to recall, for I think A Change of Climate is a great novel, though I suspect it will only be remembered by literary historians - if at all – as an early novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall. As we head towards the sea, our feet crunching each step on fragments of razor shell, I wonder why I am so sure it is a great and not just a good novel. There are distractions, of course – a colony of star fish, perfectly shaped and all perfectly dead on the sand, a skein of geese in perfect V-formation overhead – but A Change of Climate has, I conclude, the following claims to being called ‘great’.

First, it is a novel in which life and death are refracted and enacted through the eyes and in the lives of children and adults. This is how it begins:

One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.

Sometimes events and people in the book are seen only through a glass darkly (glass and mirrors are central images) but eventually, with a shattering surprise, the plot reveals an appalling evil which has confounded the lives of people who are only trying to do good. Then the scope of the book, which appears at first to be utterly provincial, is astonishing: its action moves between remote north Norfolk via the townships of apartheid Johannesburg into the silence of a central African hinterland and back to Norfolk. I think its themes are profound and its success, in terms of its construction, its insight and its writing, absolute. It’s a book that has made me think deeply: I have written about it and lectured on it and yet (following Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic) I know it is a book that has still not finished saying everything it has to say to me.

One should of course, not use words like ‘great’ lightly. Still less, ‘greatest’. At the Cheltenham Festival last October, we heard Claire Tomalin and John Carey agree confidently that though Dickens was the greatest English novelist, Vanity Fair was the greatest English novel. They didn’t pause to say why, but they should have done. After all there are plenty of other candidates: Jane Austen or George Eliot perhaps, or Wuthering Heights or Women in Love? Anthony Trollope, writing in his Autobiography, had an unexpected choice, but he was prepared to give his reasons:

I myself regard Henry Esmond as the greatest novel in the English language, basing that judgment upon the excellence of its language, on the clear individuality of its characters, on the truth of its delineations in regard to the time selected, and in its great pathos.

Just last week, Howard Jacobson declared in The Guardian that ‘on account of his bridging the chasm between the serious and the popular’ he ranked Dickens second only to Shakespeare. What’s more, he thought that Great Expectations ‘was up there with the world’s greatest novels’. Here’s why:

It vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth. Back, back we go in time and convolution, only to discover that the taint of crime and prison which Pip is desperate to escape is inescapable: not only is the idea of a “gentleman” built on sand, so is that idealization of woman that is at the heart of Victorian romantic love. (Guardian Review 07.01.12, p. 17)

Built on sand …. Here at Holkham the wind has got up and is swishing the sand across the beach.  The cloud is starting to break. For the first time today there is a glimpse of weak sun. John leads us back over the dunes towards the car, and as we go I try to remember the ending of A Change of Climate:

The air held snow. Often it promises, but doesn’t perform. She put her hands in her pockets of her coat, and began to walk uphill to the car park. The cloud had thinned, and as she walked the sun showed itself, fuzzy and whitish-yellow, like a lamp behind a veil.

Just like now.

[photo: Holkham beach, Monday 9 January 2012

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, is due out in the Spring, published by the Lutterworth Press. You can find details of the book, and read the opening chapters, by clicking here.

Re-reading Julian Barnes (ii): on poetry and 'the poet'

Tony Webster, the central character and narrator of The Sense of an Ending, has a lot to say about poetry in the novel – more than you’d suspect, from a first reading. At school he is taught by a young English master ‘just down from Cambridge’, Phil Dixon, ‘who liked to use contemporary texts , and would throw out sudden challenges.’ One  he throws out is from T.S. Eliot’s  ‘Sweeney Agonistes’:

Birth, copulation and death,

That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks;

Birth, copulation and death.

He asks, ‘Any comments?’ and indeed the whole novel turns out to be (as we realize by the end) a commentary on exactly this theme. Tony’s school years are the mid-1960s, that groundbreaking era of the Penguin anthology The New Poetry and Ted Hughes’ series on BBC Schools’ Radio, Poetry in the Making: indeed, he remembers

how, when we were discussing Ted Hughes’s poetry, he put his head at a donnish slant and murmured, ‘Of course, we’re all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.’

Tony loves this line of Phil Dixon’s and later, at university, tries it out on his girlfriend Veronica. She is not impressed. When he admits, ‘It was just something my English master said,’ she replies, ‘Well, now you’re at university we must get you to think for yourself, mustn’t we?’  Trying to get Tony to think for himself is something she will do again, angrily, later in the novel. Her rebuke at his failure to understand the events of the past, the circumstances leading to the long-ago suicide of his school friend Adrian, reverberates backwards and forwards through the novel:

You just don’t get it, do you? You never did, and you never will.

Poetry is something else that Tony doesn’t get. When Phil Dixon sets his class an unseen poem (in the best I.A. Richards tradition: no title, date, or author) and asks Tony’s friend Adrian Finn to say, in simple terms, what the poem is about, Adrian replies confidently,

‘Eros and Thanatos, sir …. Sex and death. Or love and death, if you prefer. The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict. Sir.’

As with the Eliot quotation, this declaration of Adrian’s neatly foreshadows everything the rest of the novel will be about. But Tony doesn’t get it: when Dixon turns to him – ‘Webster, enlighten us further’ – he can only say feebly, ‘I just thought it was about a barn-owl, sir.’

Here Julian Barnes plays a game with the reader. Which poem did Dixon set his class for practical criticism? It sounds as though it should be one by Ted Hughes, but it isn’t. There’s been some anguished discussion about this on the internet, but no one has yet found a poem about a barn-owl that is apparently about sex and death too.

This ‘spot the poem’ game is only a tease. Much more significant is ‘Spot the poet’.  There is one poet Barnes never allows Tony to name, but from and about whom he quotes throughout the novel. He refers to him simply as ‘the poet’, suggesting not only that he is attached to this one above all others, but also that we as readers should be able immediately to identify him: we just have to pick up the intertextual echoes for ourselves.

The poet is Philip Larkin.

The first echo comes very early. When Tony is introducing himself and explaining why he needs to return ‘briefly’ to ‘some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty’ he is reversing the key lines from ‘An Arundel Tomb’. ‘Time has transfigured them into / Untruth’, writes Larkin about the earl and countess lying hand in hand on top of their tomb, betraying the ‘stone fidelity / They hardly meant’. The Sense of an Ending is about the unreliability of memory, the dangers of nostalgia and the fallibility of history; the fact that Tony admits from the word go that his memories are only approximate and that they have been ‘deformed’ into certainty is an admission that he will be an unreliable narrator.

But, this novel reminds us, all narrative is compromised. As Adrian will later put it to their history teacher: ‘We need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’

Later, Tony will quote more directly from Larkin. Talking about the patterns and procedures of courtship in the early sixties he describes the sequence of fumblings and trade-offs that went all the way ‘up to what the poet called “a wrangle for a ring”’. The line comes from ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (‘Sexual Intercourse began in 1963 …')

A critical document in the novel is a page from Adrian’s diary. After University, Adrian had briefly become Veronica’s boyfriend but – to Tony’s dismay – had committed suicide not long afterwards. On this page (which Tony does not see until he is in his sixties – divorced, bald, recently retired, living alone) Adrian had written cryptically about ‘accumulation’, the multiplying responsibilities and consequences of relationships. Tony, who is trying to make sense of Adrian’s suicide, his ending, takes a simpler view of life:

We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

What the poet actually says is this:

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution.

This comes from ‘Dockery and Son’ where the speaker is disturbed to discover, at a college reunion, that one of his erstwhile contemporaries, Dockery, has a son already at the college while he, like Larkin himself, is still unmarried, still childless. Later, Barnes makes Tony conclude - lamely and mistakenly; he still does not get it - that Adrian had committed suicide simply because, like Larkin,  ‘he was afraid of the pram in the hall’. (This is a quotation not from Larkin but from Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise ,1938: ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’ – Larkin, however, admired Connolly and quoted this dictum with approval.)

I think ‘Dockery and Son’ is a crucial text for understanding ‘the sense of an ending’ with which Tony wrestles. It’s one of the most unillusioned of Larkin’s poems and a precursor to ‘Aubade’. Although its final lines are never quoted or directly echoed in Barnes’s novel, they speak all too resonantly of Tony’s failure in life:

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

And age, and then the only end of age.

In a fit of self-reproach Tony asks himself, ‘What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully?’ He decides that an appropriate epitaph for his gravestone would be ‘Tony Webster – he never got it’. Unlike Larkin, however, Tony did have a child, a grown-up daughter, Susie, who (as he is fond of saying about other people) ‘is not central to this story’. He contrasts her with a brain-damaged adult he has been shown by Veronica and whom he assumes (mistakenly) must have been the child of Veronica and Adrian, and the reason for Adrian’s suicide. In his final homage to Larkin, he says that having a normal, functioning child is the most any parent should ask for: ‘May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.’ The poem to which he refers is Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’, and the baby was Kingsley Amis’s daughter, Sally, born in January 1954.

I was shocked, before Christmas, to read in the TLS that one reviewer had found The Sense of an Ending ‘hilarious’ (Graham Robb, TLS 2.12.11, p.16). Hilarious it isn’t. Tony Webster may be a poor fool, but he isn’t a buffoon. True, he hath ever but slenderly known himself; but what sense he does finally make of life – of his own mortality as well as of Adrian’s suicide - comes from Larkin’s poetry.  This much, at least, he gets. Unseen and unidentified, ‘the poet’ is Tony’s touchstone, a critical presence in the novel, ‘central to this story’.

 [illustration: photo of Philip Larkin, from the cover of Further Requirements (London: Faber and Faber 2001) and the cover of Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (London: Jonathan Cape: 2011); cover design by Suzanne Dean.

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, is due out in the Spring, published by the Lutterworth Press. You can find details of the book, and read the opening chapters, by clicking here.