So it seemed to me then and still seems to me now that life without growth ought to be possible, and that it was not necessarily condemning the town to death to say that Dartmouth should get no bigger.
These then were the first of my ‘General Considerations’. I had tried to show that, like the pretty maid in the nursery rhyme, our face was our fortune and so was worth a little trouble. The next thing to consider was the question: ‘What makes us so pretty?’
Of course the answers come tumbling out. Our setting, with the river in front and the hills rising behind. Our old buildings. Our quaint streets. True enough – but less true than one might suppose. ‘What is there to see in Dartmouth?’ the visitor asks us; and we list our show-pieces, the buildings that get into guide books. The Butterwalk (restored in 1954, despite those who would have preferred a supermarket), Bayard’s Cove, St Saviour’s Church, the medieval houses at the back of the Harbour Bookshop: there really weren’t very many. I passed most of them on my daily walk – and scarcely bothered to glance at them. It wasn’t until I was at the far end of Foss Street, just coming to the foot of Brown’s Hill, that the magic of Dartmouth gripped me; and here the houses were neither old nor beautiful, just pleasant and ordinary. Round the corner where the steps began they weren’t even that. Looked at dispassionately they were quite remarkably ugly. Yet the magic remained. Half way up the steps there were no buildings at all, only walls – and still the magic was there. And so it continued – to the top of the steps, into Clarence Hill, past the old Grammar School, past the Keep, to Mount Boone. Houses, some quite attractive but mostly not; walls topped with tufts of valerian; here a magnolia tree; there a rhododendron. And all around the strong, pure essence of Dartmouth. What was it?
I found the answer in the end, and I wish I could say that I found it on my own, for this is the way to make real discoveries. But at least I can say that on my own I found the man who told me. He was Gordon Cullen and he had written a book called Townscape.
What makes a town? A town being a collection of buildings, presumably buildings make a town, and fine buildings will make a fine town. So one might think, but – and this was Cullen’s argument – a town is more than just the sum of its buildings. It is also their arrangement. It is not just architecture. It is also townscape. Stop and stare up at a building, study its design, and it will arouse a certain emotion. Stand in a street and look around you and this will arouse a totally different emotion. The units of which a town is composed are not houses but streets – or rather those portions of street that you can see at any one moment. So a town is a succession of street scenes, each scene enclosing you in its own small world and telling you that at the end of that world, where the street bends out of sight is a new world waiting to be discovered. So, as you walk through a town, you inhabit a succession of street worlds, and although the architecture of the buildings on either side is important, it is only one of the many components of that world – just as the design of the wallpaper is only one of the components of a fully furnished room. Other things matter: the pavements and the road surface, for instance. You notice these every bit as much as you notice the walls of the houses. Also the shop windows and the street signs. And not only what you might call the fixtures and fittings but also the things that come and go: the motor cars, whether grinding their way down the middle of the road or parked all along one side; yes, even one’s fellow pedestrians – for you cannot separate a town from its inhabitants.
All these things added together make one feel the way one does about a place, made me feel as I did about Dartmouth. It was townscape, then, not just its architecture, not just its age, that gave Dartmouth its peculiar charm. Or as I put it in my General Considerations: ‘the charm of small scale, compactness, giving the pedestrian a very strong sense of being in the town. To the left and right he can almost touch it. In front and behind he can throw a stone and hit it.’
Whether or not this came as a revelation to any of those who later read it, I don’t know: but it certainly came as a revelation to me. Dartmouth is a ‘historic town’, and ever since we came here I have tried to become interested in its history. Chaucer’s ‘shipman’, John Davis and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the voyage of the Mayflower, the battles of the Civil War, Thomas Newcomen and his famous engine: there were plenty of good names and I could list most of them. But they have never been more than just a list of names to me; they have never stirred my blood as I felt they should. Nor has architecture. Rood screens and plaster ceilings, monumental brasses and Norman fonts: these too I can list, and I am glad we have them; but I leave them to others to enjoy. Lesley is the same. I at least have been inside Dartmouth Castle (once, when I took an American visitor to see it). She never has. Abroad we are no better. What most excites the writers of guide books leaves us cold. In Italy we skip the churches and the art galleries and linger instead in the little alleyways. We hurry away from Rome, not even sparing it a glance. Our destination is Tagliacozzo.
Art, architecture and history: Italy overflows with all three, and each year pilgrims flock there in their millions, heading for the art galleries, the cathedrals and the ruins, there to pay homage to the past. But the past is dead, and for me neither the picture on the wall nor the stone on the ground nor the paragraph in the book is enough to bring it alive. Life – whether real or imagined – is movement, purpose, things happening, a sense of the passage of time, hearts beating, blood flowing – something no guide book or conducted tour can provide. But even if I wanted to listen, even if I tried to be interested, in Italy there are too many distractions. The living present swamps the dead past. From the very moment we arrive, the pulsing, bustling, dramatic present seizes us, makes us a part of it and swirls us along with it. Even when we are no more than spectators, sitting at a café table sipping Campari and watching the world go by, we are part of that world; we are on the stage with the actors.
Do towns make people or people towns? Does their natural stage make them natural actors? Or did their sense of the dramatic inspire even the stone-mason and the road-maker? Whichever came first, we have found in almost every Italian town we have visited a combination of stage, scenery and cast that has provided us with non-stop drama so intensely absorbing and exciting that our guide book, if indeed we had ever bothered to buy one – has remained unopened. It is to seek this that we make our annual pilgrimage. Not art, not architecture, not history – and yet in a way a blend of all three, brought up to date and spiced with everyday life.
This, I think, is what Gorden Cullen meant by ‘townscape’. It is certainly what townscape means to me.
Having made my discovery I continued to explore; having found one book I looked for others. There were very few. For the curious thing about townscape is that it is almost entirely a natural and unconscious art, not one that has been studied and taught. Where in the past towns have been planned, the aim has been to achieve something quite different: order, symmetry, straight lines, imposing avenues, the majestic. The picturesque jumble, really so much pleasanter, was, it seemed, something that just happened. Was it by chance or instinct? Why were the Italians – and Dartmothians – so particularly good at it? And why are we so bad at it today? The answer surely is to be found beneath our feet. If you build on a plain and the ground is firm you can put your houses where you like; but if you build on a hill with no more than hand tools to shape and level with you must use your land as economically as possible. Your streets will be narrow and they will wind with the contours. The shape of the hill determines the shape of the town: the town is the product of its hill. In Italy you can sense this even from a distance. The distant town is not something alien placed on its hilltop by man. It is as if the hill at its summit has broken into flower and the town – after how many million years of gestation? – has been thrust up from within. And of course in a sense this is true: for the stones of the houses came from beneath the ground, and all man has done is collect and reassemble them.
This is why twentieth century m
an fails. He is too ambitious. He tries to do too much. He disregards the site. He brings in mechanical equipment and cuts through the earth and shapes the rock to his requirements. No need for economy now. Roads can be wide and straight – and dead. It is often said of architecture that good design is good manners – that a well-designed building will respect its neighbours. One might say of good townscape that it too is good manners, that a well-designed town will respect its site and will adapt what it builds to where it builds it – not the other way round.
So although it is the builders of the past whom we must thank for the pleasures of good townscape in general and for the charm of Dartmouth in particular, the builders of today could continue the tradition if we wanted them to. It is not the mellowing of centuries that is needed, not skill or money beyond our means, just the will to do it. And our only excuse for not doing it is that we are twentieth century man and our bulldozers and motor cars won’t let us.
In July, 1963, our Plan for Dartmouth was published. It was, I think, a good plan and on the whole it was well received. But never mind that. This is not the story of a town or of a Society. It is the story of an individual, and a catalogue of activities and achievements is here out of place. The important thing is not what the Society did for Dartmouth but what together they did for me.
For six years I championed the Dartmouth of my dreams, waving my standard aloft, rallying others to the cause, plotting campaigns, battling against the enemy. They were glorious years and I loved them. ‘Towns,’ I cried, ‘are for living in, not for driving through. Towns are for people.’
These six years were almost exactly concurrent with the years when our school library activity was at its height, so that I was simultaneously the champion of two causes, preaching at one moment the gospel of the New Education and at the next the gospel of the Civic Trust.
It was, I suppose, just chance that these two movements arrived in Devon at about the same time, but it was a happy chance for me; for I was, I now suspect, looking for a cause to champion, looking for a chance to speak.
‘Looking’ is perhaps too strong a word; for there was nothing conscious or deliberate about it. And it is only in retrospect that I can guess at the possible subconscious need that steered me in this direction. It was, in fact, two needs.
The first and most obvious one was to fill the vast hole left when Clare went away to school. The second was to find a use for my newly found self confidence and in particular for my newly found voice.
Whether what had happened within me was just a much delayed step in the slow process of growing up or whether it was caused by some event in my life – Clare’s birth or my father’s death, for instance – I don’t know. But the effect was as if a gate had been opened and all Grandfather Milne’s pent up love of teaching was surging through it on to a tongue free at last of its shackles and now able to cope with it. I might still not have achieved that disinvoltura that Hedda had wished to cultivate, but at least I could speak in public without stammering.
So for six years I harangued at my two pulpits; then at both fell silent. Why was this? With the New Education the reason was clear: the cause was failing. But the Amenity Society movement was not failing. Indeed it was gathering strength. Why then did I not redouble my efforts, having only the one battle to fight?
If I attempt an answer to this question it is not only to explain what happened in the late sixties but to point the way to what – of far greater importance – was going to happen in the middle seventies.
A handful of words stick in my memory. They are from the Prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake before his attack on Cadiz in 1587, and I heard them in the chapel at the Royal Naval College in 1951 when they were the text for a sermon.
It is not the beginning [of an enterprise] but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished which yieldeth the true glory. . . .
Yes, this is true and I have always held it so. Well begun is nowhere near half done. Anyone can be an enthusiast for half an hour. Real enthusiasm is like a well constructed bonfire, not flaring up and dying out and then having to be coaxed back to life, but burning strong and steady until all is consumed.
Yet all the same one can perhaps draw a distinction between the enterprise itself and an individual’s contribution to it: the two need not run concurrently. We have our entrances and our exits, and if it is wrong to go too soon, it can sometimes be worse to stay too long.
It was like this in Italy. When we landed in 1943 I was an enthusiastic Sapper officer eager for a front seat in the coming battles. My enthusiasm lasted until I was wounded just over a year later, then it burned out. This was partly loss of nerve, I admit, but not wholly. When I returned to my Company the battle was still on but things were different – different faces, different atmosphere. I didn’t want to go back to my Platoon, much as I had loved it. I had finished with being a Platoon Commander. I had finished with the Company too. I had done what I had set out to do. I had proved what I had wanted to prove. It was time to go, and I was glad to accept a more peaceful and less arduous role in another Company.
It was like this now. The best of our battles, so it seemed to me, had been fought and the greatest of our victories won. Perhaps I didn’t want to go on saying the same thing over and over again.
Perhaps I didn’t want to listen to others saying the same thing over and over again. Whatever it was, my particular task, I felt, was finished. Once more it was time to go.
I am still a member of the Society I founded but I am now only a spectator. It was no bloody head that took me out of the battle. It was simply that we moved from our house on the edge of Dartmouth to another, four miles away. And when we stopped being town-dwellers to become country-dwellers it was perhaps natural that I should transfer my affections from townscape to landscape.
2. Country Life
For ten years we lived in a house on the edge of the town. Then, quite suddenly, one evening, we decided to go.
But before I say why we left, I must say why we came.
The house had everything we were looking for. It was within pleasant walking distance of the bookshop (for in those days we had no car), yet at the same time it was virtually in open country. It was away from the main road, approached by a narrow, rural lane, and it faced the sun. It was however a house that had come down in the world. Its roof had gone, its floors were rotting away and it was inhabited only by chickens. All it had to offer now were four thick stone walls. But this was all we needed, for it gave us the added pleasure of doing our own restoration. It had been built as the coach house for the big house below it. The coach and horse had lived on the ground floor; the coachman and his family had occupied the floor above. But the last coachman and the last horse had long since departed and all they had left behind them to record their existence were the horse’s manger and the house’s name. We kept the one – though it served no particular purpose – but we changed the other. Swinnerton Lodge Coach House: after all it was not so much a name as a description, and one that was bound to lead to confusion with Swinnerton Lodge itself. So we changed it to Spriggs Holly, after the little hamlet in the Chilterns where we had got engaged.
In later years, when people asked ‘And did you do it all yourselves?’ I was never immediately sure if they meant did we mix our own cement and hammer in our own nails, or did we merely make plans and elevations and lists of specifications, leaving the mixing and hammering to others. In fact we did neither. Both were totally beyond the capabilities of a working bookseller and a nursing mother. We called in an architect and he fixed the builder. But we did from time to time say ‘Yes, that’s how we would like it’, and to that extent it was our own work. And when it was sufficiently nearly finished to be habitable, and when what remained to be done could be done at leisure by two amateurs when the rest of the day’s work was over, the three of us moved in. And then we could start work on something else as well, on what it was that had really decided us to buy a derelict coach house: its ga
rden.
It was a walled garden growing vegetables and fruit. If the house had decayed, the garden certainly had not, and apples, pears, plums, currants and gooseberries were all in good working order. It lay beside the house, long and thin, running parallel with the lane, parallel with the contours of the hill. The hillside here was steep, and the garden had been terraced into it to reduce the slope. So at the bottom it was six feet above the lane and at the top six feet below a field. The two retaining walls, their job done, were continued upwards a further couple of feet, thus preventing those above from tumbling down on to those below. Hence the field was hidden from the garden and we were reminded of it only when cows came down to peer over the wall and perhaps experiment with a mouthful of newly-planted pear tree. But we could see it from our bedroom window, stretching away to a line of elms, curving upwards until it curved out of sight. It was a view I specially loved, and I would stand at the window every morning, looking out, absorbing it all. It was a beautiful field, so close that I almost felt we owned it. Sometimes we would put a ladder against the wall and then we could climb up and walk in it or sit on its grass. At the near end was a cluster of hazels, and on a summer’s evening we could often hear hedgehogs rustling and snuffling among them. And on hot days the cows would come and stand beneath their shade.
Here we lived for nine happy years, proud of our house and our garden, slowly improving both. The garden needed a lot of work, for we wanted flowers and lawns as well as fruit and vegetables; and so the slope had to be terraced into level areas supported by dry-stone walls. Luckily there were plenty of stones from the old house left behind by the builders, but rather less helpfully they had also left behind a lot of rubble which they had spread in a layer about a foot thick over most of the ground I intended to use. So after I had collected the stones that were worth saving I then had to move the rubble, rescue the topsoil, reshape the subsoil, build my wall, bury the rubble behind it and replace the topsoil: it was a complicated business.
The Path Through the Trees Page 25
