Books Do Furnish A Room

On Chesil Beach

No, not Ian McEwan's novel of erotic failure, published a few years ago and reviewed by me here, marvellous though that was.  Rather, an old favourite from school, J Meade Falkner's Moonfleet.  This is set largely in Dorset, although it goes briefly abroad, as it must have seemed then, to the Isle of Wight and then to Amsterdam.  Written in 1898, it is actually set over a century before, covering about 15 years, with the action starting when John Trenchard was a boy, growing up in a Dorset village in 1757.

He lives in Moonfleet, a village on the Fleet, the long thin brackish lake which is trapped between the land and the twenty miles of heavy shingle which is Chesil beach.  He is entranced by tales of pirates and smugglers and ghosts, and these all link up in a surprising way when he is a little too impetuous in his exploring.  He is drawn into smuggling, and after the accidental death of the squire is hunted as an accomplice to murder, though he is innocent enough.  There is much excitement, much good clean fun and a jolly yarn, before he comes home again, pirate treasure found and ready to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart - though Falkner (there really is no "u") is very imaginative in the way he returns his hero to his beloved Dorset coast.  There is much more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil the plot.

This is a novel which my father - born in 1912 - recalled fondly from school.  It is well written, though with plenty of improbability, and is one of those virtuous novels in which the good in heart win out, and there are reasonbly realistic pictures of people and places, including the difficult and unhappy.  It is not, some say, Falkner's best novel (The Nebuly Coat, apparently, claims that prize), but it is certainly his best known.  It paints a fine picture of south coast smuggling in the 1760s, and is a lively thriller as well: you might want to try it, particularly if you are, at heart, a boy between 12 and 15!

The Fleet is still there of course, a fine bird sanctuary, and there is Moonfleet Hotel, set in this staggering and rather unlikely scenery.  Even if you don't read Falkner's book - or the McEwan - you should walk the beach, on a sunny gusty day with the salt on the wind and the sun in your eyes.

Daffodils

I know this poem is a cliche, but after the cold winter we have had, to see the first bulbs of spring fighting out of the soil is a joy of a quite primitive, visceral sort - and while Wordsworth brings a philosophical viewpoint, the joy is unconfined.  Perhaps a dream of April, rather than lion blustery March, but the promise is there! This is William Wordsworth's The Daffodils.

 

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Lord of the Dance: MP

The Military Philosophers is the third war novel, and the ninth overall, in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time.  Nick Jenkins has not had an interesting war up to this point, although it has made interesting reading, suffering boredom and despair in gloomy surroundings without action or danger.  That all changes in this book, when he finds himself and begins in one sense to enjoy the war, and to do something useful and for which his talents are fitted.  There is some danger, from bombs and the V2, but a great deal of human interest, with a notably international face.  I have written about this novel before, of course, but here are the finds of the 2010 reading.

• I gave up further talk.  Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse ... It occurred to me - one never feels older than in the middle thirties - that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me.

• Until you have met Blackhead, the word "bureaucrat" will have conveyed no meaning to you.

• Most people's sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most a parade of it.

• Afterwards, in memory, the apple orchards were all in blossom ... But it was already November.  There can have been no blossom.  Blossom was a mirage.  Autumnal sunshine, thin, hard penetrating, must have created that scenic illusion, kindling white and silver sparkles in branches and foliage.  What you see conditions feelings, not what is.

 

Wider yet: West Wickham Common to Hamsey Green

Roy and I undertook the fourth section of the London Loop on a brilliantly sunny day in early March, starting at Hayes railway station.  We looped away from the main road, through grassy tracks behind housing estates, down Pole Cat Alley to rejoin the Loop at the Doomsday Oaks – large but largely derelict stumps near the board of by-laws I featured last time.  The day started in a very urban environment, quickly becoming suburban, and then utterly rural, so much so that it was difficult to remember that you were in London at all.  We had 10 miles of walking, largely tree’d, through paths and fields of great pleasaunce.  There was no stately home, but a series of charming prospects and good views – and one near disaster, of which more anon.

Soon after the start, we walked through Coney Hall Recreation Ground, a slightly depressing collection of football pitches, playgrounds and pavilions, and a dirty concrete bollard of indeterminate shape marking “the prime meridian of the world”.  But we were soon out of the rec, and walking across to the pleasant church of St John the Baptist, which stands almost surrounded by fields and at the centre of a network of ancient pathways, yet is only a quarter of mile from a major A road and busy roundabout.  Across the roundabout, we entered Sparrows Den – more playing fields – and then into a long stretch of fine woodland, including Spring Park and Three Halfpenny Wood.  In the wood, we crossed from Bromley to Croydon, and thus from Kent to Surrey.  The woods were muddy and leafless, of course, but still lovely in the sunshine, and will shortly be alive with spring flowers.

 

Leaving these woods, we became lost, as the signing let us down – really for the first time in walks – but we soon rejoined the proper route and passed the Sandrock pub in Shirley, arriving at a quarter to noon.  We were cold and thirsty, and a drink of some kind appealed – but the pub was not open.  Now I cannot pretend that the Sandrock was an attractive pub. But it came at the right time.  But we passed on, merely buying a bottle of water in the corner shop, secure in the London Loop leaflet’s assurance that "there are numerous pubs on the route".  Reader, it was not so, and we eventually ate after every mile of the walk was done, at a time nearer tea than lunch.  But back to the walk: we entered an area of mixed woodland and heath called Addington Hills.  Addington was a nineteenth century Prime Minister who followed the mighty Pitt (the Younger) from 1801 to 1804, but I don’t know if there is any connection; he is one of the few Prime Ministers who has served another PM afterwards, in his case as Home Secretary.  He was not highly esteemed, then or later:

Pitt is to Addington, As London is to Paddington.

A viewing platform on Addington Hills gives spectacular views back towards London, very distant to the north.  Looking from heath, birch and pine across Croydon, you can certainly see the Dome, the City of London, and  - on a clearer day – Windsor Castle.

 
 

Hopes of food rose briefly when we found a restaurant just back from the viewpoint, but it was chi-chi Chinese, fluffy and expensive, not at all the place to for two muddy walkers in search of a baked potato or bowl of vegetable soup.  So on, on, across the tramline at Coombe Lane, and through the charming gardens of the 18^thcentury Heathfield House (now a local authority training centre), where we also saw some wonderful rhododendrons, that is, dead ones.   Through more muddy woods, where we found and kicked a tennis ball along, before pocketing it.  Across a road into open grassland, we gave the ball (repeatedly) to an excited dog, who chased it energetically, found a party of people learning woodland crafts and charcoal making, and made our way further south into completely rural country. 

 

We walked down green lanes (like Baker Boy Lane) with London on our right and the open country on the left, indistinguishable in field, wood and glade, through the lovely Mossyhill Shaw, and up into the lanes leading to Hamsey Green at about 3.20pm.  An obliging transport cafe, due to close at half past, provided strong tea and omelette, beans and chips, thus saving our lives, and we caught a bus to Croydon and homeward trains. The rural joy was great, but in all these walks, it has to end at a busy suburb and a railway station – but this is a price well worth paying.

 

Images of a visit to Peru: flora

Our final look at Peru - the plants and flowers.  Peru is an extraordinarily varied country in terms of climate and ecology – coast, desert, jungle, high mountains and the altiplano, a high plain of short grass.  I went in the wet season, and although that description mainly applies only to the jungle, that meant that I saw a lot of plants in bloom, including cactuses.

Many of Peru’s plants and trees are unfamiliar, but I was struck by how many common species I recognised, often wild versions of our garden plant, including begonias, lupins, and pernettya.  Other familiar plants included the potato, available in a staggering variety of textures, colours and flavours, unheard of here in Europe, and forming decorative fields of blue, mauve, yellow and white flowers in soils varying from heavy loams to sand.  Many of the famous tropical trees and climbers are well represented, and a very common tree is the eucalyptus, an import from Australia – valued here for its resilience, fast growth, and usefulness.  Finally, at height especially, there are many versions of the yucca, the hundred year plant, and so on, tall, spiky and statuesque.

From a huge number of photographs I took, I have chosen just nine, although I’m afraid I can’t identify many of them:

·  Fearsome cactus spikes

·  Cactus flowering in red and in yellow, a common sight in some areas

·  Lupins and begonias from steep meadows at 14,000 feet

·  A drift of red flowers on a scree slope

·  A vigorous bush, also from highish altitudes covered in white flowers

·  Pernettya ... and a charming, frail looking ground plant, perhaps an anemone of some kind?

 


 
 



 

 

Cry hafoc

The kestrel is one of my favourite birds, and I saw it up close on a recent London Loop walk - and took the three photographs on this page; they're not the greatest pictures, as I've had to blow them up a bit, but they're mine and I was very pleased.  The kestrel is richly chestnut in the afternoon sun, and although we didn't see him hover, his flight had all the grace of love and turning.

To celebrate, this week's poem is one of the great masterpieces of Hopkins, master of rhythm.  I love this poem, though I don't to pretend to understand it; I think it is a poem you must not think about word by word, but as a whole, as a kind of physical intuition of a physical prescence, intellectual analysis being abnegated (though if you must know, 'sillion' is the earth turned by the plough, pregnantly curved, clean and sometimes gleaming).  As well as reading the poem, you might want to look at Simon Barnes' recent article in The Times about an encounter with a kestrel, an encounter which brings to his mind the Saxon word hafoc, an hawk.

 

This is Gerald Manley Hopkins' The Windhover - To Christ Our Lord:

I caught this morning morning's minionminion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphindauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier”, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplingwimpling rippling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear”  

   No wonder of it: shéer plódshéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillionsillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”)

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dearah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired.,

    Fall, gallgall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold-vermilionvermilion a vibrant scarlet color.

 

 

Under the Banyan Tree

I reviewed The Man Eater of Malgudi recently.  It didn’t quite work for me, though it had charm and I could appreciate Narayan’s skill and perceptiveness.  I thought his style might work better for me in short stories, a genre I often enjoy, and I found I was not mistaken when I read Under The Banyan Tree.

His style is quiet, lapidary, and understated.  His subjects are human fear, fancies and foibles.  And although his subject matter is alien to me – merely in that I do not know India and the Indians at all well – his story telling style is intuitive and appealing.  The first stories I read were about children and their relationships with parents, especially their fathers:  for example, A Hero is about Swami, a young boy who could not conquer his fear of the dark, and was compelled by his father to face it, torn from the comfort of a light and his grandmother’s closeness.  This results in an attempted burglary being foiled – but far from making the boy brave and his father happy, it merely restores the status quo ante, the father unable to criticise his son after such an event.  Cliché is turned aside, the expected subverted.

Another story, Nitya, concerns an eponymous young man, whose hair is to be shaved off in observance of a vow his parents made when he was a baby.  An argument, intransigence, then a long and uncomfortable journey is followed by moments of farce when the family arrives at the village where the appropriate temple is; they cannot get in, there is no music.  But all this is sorted, and all is ready – except the boy, who eventually, after some spirited argument on both sides, simply runs off to catch the bus home.

Another fine example is Old Man of the Temple, a ghost story without terror, just a little puzzlement on both sides.  A late drive home results in an encounter with a ghost, long ago ruler of some tiny kingdom.  Conversation at cross purposes establishes the two mingling realities, and the ease of death achieved for one, and a safe but late journey home for the other.  Such a story sounds nothing, and indeed it is written with a quiet certitude that this is really how the world works, and you know that: but maybe, your interest will be piqued, even by something so unexceptional.  But in the reactions of the traveller, his driver and the ghost is all human vanity and loss.

In short, these are stories well worth reading, but do not expect fireworks; expect a thoughtful, careful writing, fine perception of the mind beneath the face and the words, and a gentle humour.

Images of a visit to Peru: fauna

Lots of birds in Peru, and without any particular effort, I saw about a hundred varieties, ranging from birds I see at home regularly to the weird hoatzin and the mighty condor.  Seeing, sadly, is not photographing, and the birds did not fare so well as the plants!  But in addition to the birds, there were fur seals, capybara and caiman (a very large rodent and a small alligator respectively), many insects and bugs of all sorts, and the inevitable lizards and geckos of warm climates.  There were also, of course, llamas and alpacas all over the place.  All in all, it was a very impressive experience of the natural world, especially as most of our encounters were incidental to our travelling.

Some of the most impressive of these were only seen at night, so my selection of photographs is very skewed, towards big birds, often coastal, and invertebrates.  Those I have chosen are:

·  A pair of Chilean flamingos, spotted high (at 15,000 feet or more) on the altiplano; my cry of “flamingos” caused the coach driver to do a near emergency stop, much to the discomfiture of a lady in the tiny lavatory at the back of the bus

·  A soaring condor; we watched a stationary one for a couple of hours before one came flying overhead, huge and graceful

·  Pair of Peruvian pelicans, on the coast south of Peru

·  A crashing, clumsy hoatzin, an odd looking leaf eating bird which we found on a freshwater lake in the Amazonian jungle

·  A group of Inca terns, elegantly made up for the party

·  Leaf cutter ants – there’s a great column of them, each carrying a carefully cut out piece of leaf, on which they will grow the fungus on which their larvae feed

·  Another Peruvian pelican

·  A tarantula, living in the roof of our guide’s house in the jungle – this is the pink toed variety, as you can see if you look carefully

·  Finally, a swallow-tailed kite, another bird we saw in the Amazon – great groups of them soaring gracefully above and around us, a relative of the red kite which is, praise be, increasing steadily in Britain once again.

 

 

 
 

 

Dark Tower

Reading The Soldier's Art a few weeks ago, Robert Browning naturally came to mind, in particular his long Grail poem about Childe Roland.  I am not really a lover of the Victorians, Tennyson apart, but I read this again and enjoyed - at the very least - some connections.  The Grail theme is obvious - but there is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner in here, and an echo of The Listeners by de la Mare as well.  It's a bit dramatic and moody for my taste, but there is matter here, and I offer you selected stanzas (the source of Powell's title, and the final few) from Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning.

The illustration is Thomas Moran's near contemporary painting of the same title as the poem.  Grim, isn't it?

(A slug-horn "courts lexical absurdity. For the ‘slug-horn’ which Roland sets to his lips is not an oliphant or lur or bucina or shofar or any other kind of archaic instrument but an early form of the word ‘slogan’ misunderstood by Chatterton and handed down to Browning."  My thanks to John Kerrigan in the London Review of Books.)

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards - the soldier's art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

…

Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

Not see? because of night perhaps? - why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,
"Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!"

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

Man-eater!

Have been reading R K Narayan recently, both some short stories and the famous - almost, to a certain group of aficionados, the iconic - The Man-Eater of Malgudi.  There is a tiger in this story, but that isn't the man-eater.  It is instantly clear that you are in the hands of a man of great talent, and a man who has thought deeply and seen inwardly a great deal.  And yet, and yet ...

Malgudi is a small, archetypical Indian town, and the main character of the book, a small time (and rather unbusinesslike) printer called Nataraj exists in a small, comfortable way there, totally absorbed in the trivia of his work and his tea drinking visitors.  He is utterly ineffectual, and while this gives him charm - and perhaps the love of the gods, who can tell - it can be frustrating for the active reader, who longs to shake him and tell him to pay attention, and to get a grip.

But Nataraj doesn't, and so he finds himself unwilling to turn away Vasu, a circus strongman turned taxidermist, who proposes himself as a lodger, albeit one who brings worry and even fear rather than rent.  Vasu creates all sorts of difficulties for Nataraj, culminating in his threat to kill a temple elephant that Nataraj has been the means of saving from illness.  Needless to say, the elephant is spared, and justice done, although unofficially.  Nataraj, amongst others, is suspected of a serious crime, and even he seems to doubt his innocence or his friends' loyalties in this difficult period: I saw myself as others saw me and was revolted by the picture. 

But all is well, and the printing - a special magenta colour is used on fruit juice labels to provoke thirst - goes on as we leave our hero restored to the bosom of his wife and the chatter of his good for nothing friends.  This is all supposed to be very funny, and I could see that it was - but somehow it didn't really make me laugh, and indeed at times I found it tiresome.  I don't quite know why was this was, unless I must put it down to my slight prejudice against fiction from or about India (I know, I know, this is a ridiculous and unfounded prejudice).  Perhaps you will get the joke - I think Narayan is worth the effort, and I will read the short stories, and be interested to see what Cornflower has to say about another Malgudi story, The Painter of Signs.

Lord of the Dance: SA

In The Soldier's Art, Nick Jenkins knows despair.  This is the second of the three war books from Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music of Time, but there is no war in it - just the bleakness of life working in a dead end job under Widmerpool's obsessive military bureaucracy, and the comedy of being a living, observing being.  General Liddament is a joy, as is our first view of Finn (VC), and the blitz evening in London, with its tragedy, ignorance and superficial gaiety, is a an absolute masterpiece. Here is what I wrote about it last time through, and here are a few apercus from this reading:

I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all the undertakings of life; but then, plenty of actors have little enough.

"Told me you were a reader ... didn't you?"   "Yes, I am.  I read quite a lot."    I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications.  At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward - in contrast to love - is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.

(on Browning's Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came) Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.

Images of a visit to Peru: colonial memories

Inevitably, when you are in Peru – especially urban Peru – then Spain is all about you, intolerant, uncompromising, and still not always loved.  The most obvious impact, after language, is in the architecture, especially of religious and public buildings.  This is most intense in the main towns, and the central squares (always called Plaza de Armas) of Lima, Arequipa and Cusco are elegant, green, safe places, and you could easily be in Spain – though perhaps the people and the surroundings are a little more relaxed, informal, and green.  But in the remote villages, too, there is often a Spanish style church, unpretentious and undecorated, and often therefore with a naive charm the over-decorated cathedrals and monasteries of the large cities lack.  Here are a handful of views:

·  El Cordano restaurant, just off the Plaza in Lima, well worth a visit – an old-fashioned, friendly establishment with excellent food and friendly atmosphere, much patronised by the locals

·  The ornate wooden galleries of the Archbishop’s Palace in Lima, providing a shady place for ladies to watch events below

·  Two views of the Santa Catalina monastery in Arequipa, once a huge establishment with hundreds of nuns, now much smaller, though still as physically impressive.  Originally a dazzling white, it is now painted in these fierce blues and oranges, strangely impressive in the blinding sun

·  A decorated pillar (top of post) in the second cloister of the Jesuit Church in Arequipa – there are three cloisters, one elegant and imposing, one smaller and intensely decorated on every possible surface, and a third, tiny, irregular and domestic

·  An unassuming country church in a village in the Colca valley, not far from Chilpas.

 




 

Death of a Cat: a moral fable

I feel some hesitations about putting up this week's poem - I know several readers, most especially Dark Puss, will be alarmed.  But it's a fine poem by Thomas Gray - so seldom we hear of him in connection with anything except Eton College and a country churchyard - with a moral (and political?) point.  It's also very nicely put together, though the eighteenth century language takes a little getting used to.  Here is Thomas Gray's On a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes:

 

'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream:
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first, and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched, in vain, to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretched, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between:
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to ev'ry wat'ry god
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
A fav'rite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

Lord of the Dance: VB

In Anthony Powell's Valley of Bones, Nick finds himself in the army, slightly older than his colleagues and unlike them, not from a lower middle class Welsh small town background; army life away from war proves a good mirror for understanding himself and concepts like will and action.  It is also extraordinarily perceptive and funny.  My earlier post draws attention to the mix of minute social perception and large scale history, and it is certainly true that the three war novels of the sequence - this is the first - are drawn on a larger, more worldly political canvas than earlier ones.

• It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan

• (About the adultery of a sergeant's wife, and his subsequent suicide) Makes you glad you're married ... don't have to bother any more about women

• Nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react

• (On a sudden death)  As in musical chairs, the piano stops suddenly, someone is left without a seat, petrified for all time in their attitude of that particular moment. The balance-sheet is struck there and then, a matter of luck whether its calculations have much bearing, one way or the other, on the commerce conducted. Some die in an apparently suitable manner, others ... on the field of battle with a certain incongruity.

• I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illustrates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.  Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

 

 

Wider yet: Petts Wood to Hayes

For our third section of the London Loop, Roy and I had a longer day planned, almost 12 miles, and a visit en route to a notable and famous house.  We met at Petts Wood station early on a very cold morning, but for the first time, in brilliant sunshine.  We left Petts Wood and walked down a depressing shopping street, quickly leaving it for urban parkland of Jubilee Park and Crofton Woods. We came to Farnborough, which our book thought a lovely village, but I feel the author was over-influenced by the idea of a coaching inn (not exactly a rarity on the major roads out of London) and a ridiculously twee and over–ornate old smithy.  We pushed rapidly on, passing through the churchyard of St Giles the Abbott, a pleasant church with a mighty Yew, and were once more among fields and woods, although we eventually left the true and narrow way of the London Loop itself to detour to the village of Downe, home to Charles Darwin.

We arrived at Downe at lunchtime – repaired to the George and Dragon for a splendid plate of fish and chips – and then made our way across the fields to Downe House, Charles Darwin’s home for 40 years, and now in the guardianship of English Heritage.  He came here, hypochondriac or invalid, to escape the noise and social pressures of London, and stayed for the rest of his life.  Curiously for a man who had sailed around the world on the tiny Beagle, Darwin called the countryside of Downe "the extreme verge of the world"!  The place is interesting to see – it’s rather a pleasant house, in a lovely location, and still wonderfully away from it all considering its proximity to London – but, as so often, fails to convey anything really interesting or useful about its famous inhabitant.  A desk, even the great Darwin’s desk, is just a desk (I know, I’m hopelessly insensitive to atmosphere), and no different because one of the most influential books of all time was written there!  However, I have read much about Darwin and about this house, so I was very pleased to add a layer of detail to my impressions, and the ground floor rooms are attractive and faithful to their arrangement when Darwin was there (upstairs is exhibition space).

  
Out in the garden is another treat for those who can feel the history in stones and gardens (and, yes, a little bit for me too); you can walk down through the kitchen garden to the “sand walk”, a footpath of some 200 yards or perhaps more with the shape of a noose on the end of a rope.  Here Darwin walked for exercise and undisturbed thought; here he pondered on The Origin of Species, and later on his final work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Nowadays, those who follow in his footsteps are unlikely to influence the world in quite so dramatic a way, and very likely to see and hear the planes from nearby Biggin Hill airfield!

The afternoon was pushing on when we had finished at Downe House, so we struck off at a sharp pace down country lanes and then across more fields and pleasant woods, this time in the grounds of Holwood House.  We came across the (now ruined) oak where Wilberforce and Pitt discussed a bill to end the slave trade around 1788, and the formal bench to commemorate their conversation, overlooking attractive Keston Vale.  (The ambition was eventually realised in 1807, postponed because of the Napoleonic Wars).  Down through Fishponds, on to  
West Wickham Common, again notable for oaks and byelaws – see the photograph below -  another bylaw forbids you from disturbing volunteers (militia) at training, or men playing cricket.  Home from Hayes station, in spite of Roy’s determined effort to lead us in the wrong direction at the last.  Best day of the walk so far, and the longest!