Wilkie and Henry were heading to Plymouth, where the train line ended, because they planned to take a boat from there to St Germans, over the River Tamar (there was no useful bridge at that time – and even now you’ll find the ferry helpful), and then walk to Land’s End and back. Both men had brought knapsacks and walking sticks and we can also assume that Wilkie was dressed with bohemian eccentricity. He was a small man (short even by Victorian standards), with the tiniest little hands and feet. Once, when he was staying with friends in the country, his shoes fell apart and the only replacement pair that could be found in the house belonged to an even tinier great-aunt. Not that Wilkie cared: he knew he was odd-looking, but he had an eager, sweet temperament and he enjoyed the sparkle of attention and conversation that flowed from his unusual appearance and calculatedly contrary opinions.
There’s a picture of Wilkie hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, painted in 1850 by his friend the pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, the year of the trip to Cornwall. Wilkie is seated, gazing thoughtfully into the distance, his little ring-clad fingers pressed together at the tips (although thanks to Millais they’re not that little ), small round glasses (he was short-sighted), and wearing a sober dark jacket (but with a gold-seamed cravat, watch chain and shirt studs). There’s not much sign of the large bump that rose from his high forehead, the result, it was said, of his own difficult birth. He looks unusually neat – and serious. Young, of course. Maybe even rather depressed (although perhaps that’s how Millais rendered ‘thoughtful intellectual’). What the portrait gives no sign of is Wilkie’s extreme restlessness. By every other account, he was sharp, hungry and a notorious fidget, brimful of ideas and passions, interested in everything and everyone, courteous to others, certainly, but also sure enough of himself to fill the railway carriage with chatter and schemes and urgent talk. Perhaps Henry Brandling was pleased to find that the train was at last pulling into Plymouth, after its long, lurching journey from London.
The two friends headed for Devonport and there they found William Dawle, a boatman who could row them to St Germans, although he insisted they first stop at a tavern in Saltash, just across the Tamar, while they waited for the tide to turn. This suited Wilkie – he was eager to go with the flow – and for the next couple of hours they poured beer into Dawle, and themselves, and even Dawle’s friend (an immense but catatonically drunk ‘shrimper’ who was meant to be helping row the boat, or at the very least entertain them with a song, even though very early in the long evening he lost the ability to move or speak). The place, says Wilkie, was the only light in the surrounding darkness (just think, for a moment, how dark that Cornish night was) and, like all good taverns surely were in those days, it was in ‘festive uproar’, the entire population of Saltash squeezed into two small rooms, ‘shrimpers, sailors, fishermen and watermen, all “looming large” through a fog of tobacco’. The local women were there too, brushing Wilkie’s and Henry’s feet as they left, claiming it was an old Saltash tradition to guarantee their safe return, and all for just a few more coins. It sounds like they were royally ripped off – and happy with it.
When they got to St Germans, with everything closed and dark, Dawle denounced it as ‘a damned strap of a place’. The landlady of the only inn had to be called from her bed (Dawle bellowing from the street that his companions were ‘right-down gentlemen, and no mistake’), but at last the travellers were able to get to bed and sleep through their first night in Cornwall. The next day, once Henry had sketched St Germans church, they hoisted their knapsacks and set off to walk eight miles to the fishing village of Looe.
By ten o’clock that night Wilkie and Henry were collapsed on a hill outside Looe, with Wilkie going on (and on) about how wonderful it is to walk when you want to really see and understand a place. How blisters don’t matter (just sponge your feet with cold vinegar and pop on another pair of socks). How a knapsack becomes your friend, once your muscles have hardened. And who needs trains, or horses, or stagecoaches anyway? When you can be out and talking to the locals. Or chipping rocks and collecting leaves. This was probably so much hot air (Wilkie had to take to his bed when he went on a walking tour with the genuinely hyperactive Dickens seven years later), but I’m still feeling guilty as I roll my car down the narrow road, squeezed between high wooded banks, into Looe and the vast car park on its eastern bank.
Looe is divided into two – west and east – linked by a famous bridge that is no longer here. Well, there’s a bridge, of course, but it’s not the one that Wilkie made a beeline for as soon as he could. The original was built in 1411, had fourteen arches (‘no two on the same scale’, says Wilkie) and it even had a small chapel in the centre (gone by Wilkie’s day). Celia Fiennes trotted across the bridge in 1698, counting off the fourteen arches and noting that Looe had ‘a great many little houses all of stone’ (it still does), and Turner painted it in 1811, but in 1853, just three years after Wilkie’s visit, the bridge was dismantled to make way for something less inconveniently medieval. I’ll bet the town misses it, now that it’s no longer a busy port for the fishing and mining industries, and its main trade is tourism. But how were any of us to know that our future wealth would depend on hoarding our past? Any true Victorian would have laughed at the idea.
I’m here on an alarmingly hot day in April. I have been steeping myself in Rambles Beyond Railways for so long that it comes as a surprise to find that Looe is full of cars, buses, neon hairdressers and streets surging with people in branded T-shirts and sandals. What on earth was I expecting? Horse-drawn carts and a pilchard industry? When Wilkie was here, the population of Looe was ‘some fourteen hundred; and … as good-humoured and unsophisticated a set of people as you will meet with anywhere’. No doubt he was happy to be out of London, and fired with holiday enthusiasm. He was certainly excited about Looe’s shops:
Let no man rashly say he has seen all that British enterprise can do for the extension of British commerce, until he has carefully studied the shop-fronts of the tradesmen of Looe [selling] … such cosmopolitan miscellanies as wrinkled apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils and fly-blown mock jewellery …
Oh … I see.
But honestly, I wouldn’t want you to think that Wilkie was just another sarcastic Londoner, chuckling at the rustic lives of the hay-headed locals. There’s so much more to him than that, even if he did find it hard to resist an easy joke. He’s still young – and the currents of the time flowed with brutish certainty. Later, Wilkie would do what he could to divert them.
These days the shops of Looe would give Wilkie genuine palpitations. There’s no sign of any ‘dusty nuts’, but there’s plenty of other seaside innuendo on offer, not to mention Cornish crafts, cream, pots, pixies and pasties. Since Wilkie trod these narrow streets we have come an inconceivably long way in our understanding of what it takes to extract money from a casual passer-by and although we all think we’re sophisticated enough to spot and resist the obvious temptations, it isn’t long before I find myself tucking into ‘Cornwall’s best Cornish pasty’ (it’s not), and browsing a shop enticingly decorated with luminous buckets, nets, beach balls and spades, before leaving with a baseball cap and a pair of shorts (well, who knew it would be so hot?). Anyway, when you’re visiting a place that is so reliant on tourism, isn’t it your duty to buy something? To keep feeding the beast.
Looe on a bright blue Saturday in April is all sunshine and seagulls. There’s an easy, aimless drift to the holiday crowds. Small boats sway and duck on the tidal river and people gather at the banks to watch – it’s low tide now – sitting at café and pub tables or shuffling up and down the western side, from the fishermen’s wharf to the nearby beach, gazing at the boats and imagining another life. The air is salty fresh. Some of the boats are offering deep sea fishing (mackerel! shark!) or a trip to nearby Looe Island, where once, long ago, there was a great and ineradicable infestation of rats. It was only ended, or so Wilkie tells us, when every person then living in Looe – men, women and c
hildren – got up early one morning and caught, cooked and ate the whole damn lot, with vindictive relish, ferociously smothered in onions.
Rats or no rats, I’m eating a huge white doorstep of a bacon sarnie, perched on the side of an overturned barrel at the front of a cheery quayside café, listening to my fellow customers get to know each other. Two of them had recognized each other’s Kentish accents – and so, I am pleased to say, had I. North Kent, probably, close to the south-east London border, although I’m no Henry Higgins; I just happen to have grown up in Kent. In fact, could Professor Higgins even pull off his party trick now, of placing the status and provenance of any British person he met, based only on the way they spoke? His (or Shaw’s) point was to expose English snobbery, although you would think, wouldn’t you, that with the amount of exposure it has received over the centuries English snobbery would have shrivelled and died a long time ago. Wilkie, though, lived in a time when the children of Looe could ‘congregate together in sober little groups, and hold mysterious conversations, in a dialect which we cannot understand’. No one here today seems to be speaking a Cornish dialect (and the last native speakers of the original Cornish language had all died off by the time Wilkie arrived), but now I come to look about me, there aren’t even any children. Perhaps they’re all at the beach.
The elderly Kentish couple are in Looe on a train trip from home, and their new, younger friend is a Man of Kent who ‘moved down here five years ago’. His daughter and her husband ‘live in Spain now and are always posting food on Instagram’. ‘Oh,’ say the elderly couple, ‘our two grandkids live in Oz and are on holiday all the time. Thank heavens for Skype.’ I have Wilkie on my shoulder, listening to this strangeness, but I actually think what would strike him most (once he’d got used to the idea that his ‘all-conquering Railway’ had set everything and everyone in motion, and that so much and so many had been smoothed and spread across the globe, and once he’d stopped marvelling over our smartphones and motor cars, our plastic straws, bare legs and miraculous teeth), I think what Wilkie would notice is just how subdued the town of Looe has become.
Looe is still, as Wilkie wrote, ‘one of the prettiest places in England’. It has a lovely (thank you, Enid) holiday air and a zip and sparkle to its streets. But it’s no longer unusual in the way that Wilkie once found it. Of course it’s not – but when Wilkie was here he found himself swept up into a boat race and bazaar when ‘all the women fluttered out in [the sun’s] beams, gay as butterflies. What dazzling gowns, what flaring parasols, what joyous cavalcades on cart-horses, did we see on the road that led to the town! What a mixture of excitement, confusion, anxiety, and importance, possessed everybody!’ Until, predictably, it rained with shattering force, and everyone raced for the tea rooms, except for three German musicians who continued to honk gloomily through their brass instruments, and the usual ‘inveterate loungers’, and ‘seafaring men who cared nothing for weather’. The party continued indoors, with everyone bawling and rushing around with ‘steaming teakettles and craggy lumps of plumcake’. I’m told this is now a fair description of Looe on New Year’s Eve, with added strong lager; but on the day I visit I’m just one of a low-decibel crowd of middle-aged tourists, drifting through the tourist shops, fretting and cooing over the silver charms and the lace.
Wilkie took the rain as a sign to leave Looe. He had stayed much longer than he’d intended, kept in thrall at the inn by ‘the smiles of our fair chambermaid and the cookery of our excellent hostess’. Even today there’s something more to Looe than its tourism; at the very least, you will find that the fishermen still gather at the wharf to sell dressed crabs and fresh mackerel. Many are heavily bearded in a muscular, salt-lashed way that’d put a Shoreditch flâneur to shame. Wilkie, at this stage in his life, was still clean-shaven – he was yet to grow the all-encompassing beard that would come to dominate and define his appearance. That came three years later, on a trip to Italy with his new friend Charles Dickens and an artist called Augustus Egg – all of them beardless at the time – and I think it was Wilkie, if I’m reading the letters right, who first grew a tentative moustache (mocked by Dickens) that over the next few months spread and enveloped his cheeks and chin and then tumbled in profusion to his chest and eventually flared and crackled like a hairy living counterpoint to his great domed forehead. Beards became immensely popular with Victorian men in the 1850s as a way of flaunting their imperial masculinity, and even, it is said, as a tribute to the soldiers of the Crimean War (who had no way of shaving), although I suspect that Wilkie’s era-defining whiskers probably had more to do with laziness than anything else. He always dressed with flamboyant disregard for convention, but he was a notorious sloven. Especially once the laudanum took hold.
Wilkie and Henry headed north for Liskeard and I speed after them. We pass under disused railway bridges and race by steep banks of young grasses and ferns and great floods of primroses, dizzying, oceanic outpourings of yellow that drag at my heart. We are leaving the narrow coombes and dense woods of Looe far behind. The sky widens and stretches – the colour seems to leach out of it – and then I know I’m on the right track because ‘a single turn in the road brought us suddenly to the limits of trees, meadows, and cottages; and displayed before us, with almost startling abruptness, the magnificent prospect of a Cornish Moor’.
Wilkie dismissed Liskeard as an ‘abomination of desolation’. After encountering ‘a nonagenarian old woman with a false nose, and an idiot shaking with the palsy’, he checked into the worst inn in Britain, where the landlady reluctantly handed him and Henry two sheets each and left them to make their beds in a room with nothing but six immense wooden tables (‘like dissecting tables waiting for “subjects”’). We’ve all been there. I remember staying with Anna in a B&B in Kingsteignton in south Devon in the late 1980s where the smell of rancid chip fat mingling with air freshener was so powerful that I actually wept pine-scented tears of oil. The landlady could not have been kinder. ‘Don’t worry about Norman,’ she chirruped, as she steered us towards the stairs and past a small dark room in which some large, dank animal seemed to shift and stir. ‘He’s normally the life and soul of the party. But he’s been a bit off colour of late.’ I spent the night sweating and tangled in the nylon sheets, waiting for Norman’s soft tread on the carpeted floor, his hand on the doorknob and a rattling, unhinged whisper: ‘It’s time to PARTY’. But when we got down the next morning, as early as was decent, there was Norman at the breakfast table, a dowdy man with sad eyes and a repertoire of heartbreaking jokes. We each had a fried egg slopping in oil – and were far too polite to turn it away. Wilkie should count himself lucky for Liskeard’s corned beef, about which he made such a dreadful fuss.
I stop for lunch in an empty pub in St Cleer (where is everyone?), and accompany Wilkie down the hill to the ruined remnants of St Cleer’s Well, a fifteenth-century shrine dedicated, so Wilkie tells us, to the honour of St Clare, the twelfth-century founder of an order of nuns (the ‘Poor Clares’) who gave up all their worldly goods to pursue a life of healing, charity and prayer. Wilkie mooched around the well, while Henry sketched, pondering how things had changed since the days of St Clare, nuzzling at the crumbling, ivy-clad walls (the Victorians loved a good ruin), musing on the power of the ancient church that once so innocently linked ‘the beauty of Nature and the beauty of Religion’, the loss of faith in his own day and the ‘melancholy language of desolation and decay’. And I find myself doing the same, except now the well (enfolding its holy spring) has lost even more of its old magic. There are new houses here, crowding right up to the surrounding low stone wall; several cars are parked a couple of yards from the well itself; and just across the road children are shouting at the school gates (it’s the end of the school day), although this is a cheering sound. Wilkie wrote about the ‘cottage-girls’ who greeted him shyly by this well, over 150 years ago.
Wilkie was offered a drink from the holy waters by an old woman (she brought him a glass for the water and a
rose from her garden) and he wrote that the only thing that hadn’t changed in 400 years was the little pool itself, still ‘pure and tranquil as in the bygone days’, although I’m sorry to report that all you’ll see now is a sludgy puddle with a couple of plastic bottles rammed up underneath an iron grille. What’s more, according to John Betjeman’s Shell Guide to Cornwall, St Clare had nothing to do with St Cleer – the latter was a Celtic saint whose shrine was presumably placed on a much older site of worship. Something pagan. So Wilkie was all over the place, although he surely has a point when he says:
There has been something of sacrifice as well as of glory, in the effort by which we, in our time, have freed ourselves from what was superstitious and tyrannical in the faith of the times of old – it has cost us the loss of much of the better part of that faith which was not superstition, and of more which was not tyranny.
And here indeed stands Wilkie, at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, with the furnaces lit and the iron wheels churning, straying into the lost corners of ancient Cornwall with the railways howling at his back; and there’s Watt and Darwin and Marx just ahead or all around; and everything is aflame and unmoored and on the move; and Wilkie, even though he’s right in the middle of it, can see the revolutionary power of what they are doing. And it is! It’s dazzling. The planet-stripping energy and wealth that is being unleashed. And it is also heroic, the courage that is needed to create these things and to face down the ingrained tyranny of the old beliefs. Although, as Wilkie sips his water by the holy well, he understands that something else is also being left behind, unnoticed in the noise and excitement. And now, today, I’m not even sure we know what that was. It’s not faith or God. But there’s something. A continuum or a connection has been broken and here we are, 150 years later, surging forward, full steam ahead, all alone and seemingly out of choices. Or no longer in any position to choose.
Footnotes Page 6
