“This church deeply in decay has been all but rebuilded generously and piously at their own expense by—”
and then are given the names of the churchwardens and ten other men who loved their church.
It is not simply that it is an old building that makes this church so beautiful (there are thousands of old churches) it is that it contains all its Georgian fittings. Though the date is 1816, the style and quality of workmanship is that of fifty years earlier. I believe the designer was one of the Pinch family who must also have built the cross-shaped village school with its octagonal Gothick style tower in the centre and who designed Hungerford church and later did some churches and houses in Bath and the Isle of Man. Whoever he was, he was an artist.
Through the clear glass windows you can see the Kennet meadows, the brick and thatched cottages of the village and to the south the chalky-green cliff fringed by overhanging beeches of Savernake Forest. The Rector (a squarson) before this one preserved the eighteenth-century tradition I have seen nowhere else. He changed in the chancel and his scarf and surplice hung over the communion rails during the week. He used one pulpit for the service and crossed to the other for the sermon. Grand and reposeful those sermons were in the oil lamplight (now alas, replaced by gas) as one sat penned up in a box pew and saw his fine eighteenth-century figure towering above one in the tall pulpit. He was a great man, loved in the neighbourhood and so no doubt is his successor, but I have never “sat under him” as the old-fashioned phrase of sermon-tasters goes.
Mildenhall is a patriarchal country church. It is the embodiment of the Church of England by law established, the still heart of England, as haunting to my memory as the tinkle of sheep bells on the Wiltshire Downs. It puts me in mind of Jane Taylor’s poem, ‘The Squire’s Pew’:—
A slanting ray of evening light
Shoots through the yellow pane;
It makes the faded crimson bright,
And gilds the fringe again:
The window’s gothic frame-work falls
In oblique shadow on the walls.
And since those trappings first were new,
How many a cloudless day,
To rob the velvet of its hue,
Has come and passed away!
How many a setting sun hath made
That curious lattice-work of shade.2
ST. MARK’S, SWINDON
How different is the atmosphere in the churches of Swindon. The train draws into the outskirts. One hundred and eight years ago, there was nothing here at all but a canal and a place where two newly-built railways joined, the Cheltenham and Great West Union Railway (the Gloucestershire line) and the London to Bristol line, known as the Great Western and which not rack or thumb screw will ever induce me to call Western Region British Railways. On a hill above the meadow was the old market town of Swindon. Then New Swindon was built in the meadow by the Great Western. It was a convenient point between Bristol and London. It consisted of sheds, and a few rows of model cottages with open fields round them. These cottages are of Bath stone taken from the excavations of Box Tunnel. They still exist and are called the Company’s Houses. They must form one of the earliest-planned industrial estates in Britain.
The parishioners of St. Philip and St. Jacob in Bristol entreated the Great Western to build a church for their workers; directors stumped up money, subscriptions were raised, land was presented and by 1845, St. Mark’s church was built.
There it stands today close beside the line on the Bristol side of the station. A stone building, all spikes and prickles outside, designed by Gilbert Scott who was then a young man and who lived to build hundreds of rather dull copy-book churches all over Britain, and to build St. Pancras Hotel, the Foreign Office in London and to restore many cathedrals.
One cannot call it a convenient site. Whistles and passing trains disturb the services, engine smoke blackens the leaves and tombstones, and eats into the carved stonework of the steeple. But it is a strong church and though it is not much to look at, it is for me the most loved church in England. For not carved stones nor screen and beautiful altars, nor lofty arcades nor gilded canopies, but the priests who minister and the people who worship make a church strong. If ever I feel England is pagan, and that the poor old Church of England is tottering to its grave, I revisit St. Mark’s, Swindon. That corrects the impression at once. A simple and definite faith is taught; St. Mark’s and its daughter churches are crowded. Swindon, so ugly to look at to the eyes of the architectural student, glows golden as the New Jerusalem to eyes that look beyond the brick and stone.
For there is no doubt that Swindon is superficially ugly. That pretty model village of the eighteen-forties has developed a red brick rash which stretches up the hill to Old Swindon and strangles it, and beyond Old Swindon it runs tentacles to the downs and it spreads with monotony in all other directions. It is now the biggest town in Wiltshire, sixty times the size of the original market town. But I would rather see a red brick rash like Swindon (for it has few, if any, slums) enlivened with Victorian towers and steeples sticking out of it, than I would see a gleaming glass city of architect-designed flats with never a church but instead only the humped backs of super-cinemas, the grand-stands of greyhound tracks and the bubbling cocoa fountains for the community workers.
Swindon is largely a Christian town and much of the credit for that goes to the priests and people of St. Mark’s. It is not Sabbatarian and smug. It has its cinemas and theatres and art gallery and library and sports grounds and the Swindon Town Football Club—but the churches too are part of its life. That is its distinction.
In the Centenary book of St. Mark’s which appeared in 1945, there is a photograph of Canon Ponsonby wearing side whiskers and a beard that ran under his chin but not over it. This saintly Victorian priest (who died in 1945 aged nearly 100), caused St. Mark’s parish so to grow in faith that it built four other churches in New Swindon. One of them, St. Paul’s, became a separate parish. He also caused the Wantage Sisters to open their mission house in Swindon. The work went on under the famous Canon Ross, his successor, and it continues. The most beautiful daughter church of St. Mark’s was built, called St. Luke’s. It was designed by W. A. Masters. Except for the railway works which are awe inspiring inside, St. Luke’s is the only fine interior, architecturally, in Swindon. But it is not with lovely St. Luke’s nor with little St. John’s nor with the mission which St. Mark’s supports abroad, nor with the many priests who have been Swindon men that I want to end. On the steep hill that winds from the old to the new Town there is a church built of wood called St. Saviour’s. It was erected in 1889–90 in six months by St. Mark’s men, mostly railway workers. They did this in their spare time and for nothing. Some of them sacrificed their holidays and their working hours were from 6.00 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. in those days. What faith must have inspired them to go out after a long day’s work and build a church.
Of course, with foundations of Faith like this, St. Saviour’s grew and in 1904 it had to be enlarged. Over a hundred men once again set to work and the church was extended entirely by voluntary labour and in spare time.
St. Mark’s parish for some reason hangs together and is a living community, full of life and spirit. Perhaps it is because Swindon is the right size for an industrial town, neither too big nor too small. Perhaps it is because the sort of work men do in a railway works—“inside” as they call it in Swindon—is not soul-destroying such as one sees in motor factories where the ghastly chain belt system persists. Perhaps it is not beneath the dignity of men. Whatever it is, I know that the people of Swindon first taught me not to judge people by the houses they live in, nor churches only by their architecture. I would sooner be on my knees within the wooden walls of St. Saviour’s than leaning elegantly forward in a cushioned pew in an Oxford College chapel—that is to say if I am to realise there is something beyond this world worth thinking about.
The church-crawler starts by liking old churches, but he ends by liking all churches and o
f all churches those that are most alive are often those hard-looking buildings founded by Victorian piety—churches like St. Mark’s, Swindon.
1 From My Native Village, N. T. Carrington, 1830.
2 From Essays in Rhyme on Morals and Manners (London: Houlston & Co., 1840).
14
COAST AND COUNTRY1
Ventnor
FAR too few people on the Isle of Wight have the sense to go by its railways. These delicious single lines wind through most of the best scenery of the island. Oh, let me advise you instead of sitting half-asleep in the luxury coach with your arm round your girl and the wireless on and the petrol pumps passing and the gear-clashing and brakes squeaking at dangerous corners—oh, let me advise you to go by train. And of all lines on the Isle of Wight, the fairest and wildest, the most countrified, the most romantic is that which runs from Cowes, not Ryde, to Ventnor West, not the main station of Ventnor.
It was by this line that I, almost the only passenger, first came to Ventnor. And if the Southern Railway had any sense it would put observation cars on this part of its system.
We glide through alder-bordered meadows, past the thatched farms and greeny-grey stone cottages of inland Wight. Little streams and meadow-sweet, Shorthorns and Friesians—an inland agricultural country that might not be an island at all; which is yet like neither Hants nor Dorset.
Then the chalky downs grow nearer, high and golden-brown with grass—the blackness of a tunnel—half a mile of it—and we are out in the jungle of the Amazon, or so it seems. For here at St. Lawrence Halt and all along the sea coast to Ventnor West are strangled shrubs and luxurious undergrowth. Sycamores and ash trees wave above us and below us, old man’s beard and bind-weed clamber over broken stone walls, damp-looking drives wind down to empty stables and huge houses turned into holiday camps are left to ghosts and centipedes, and all the time, between the ash tree branches, an unexpected silver, shines the sea.
Ventnor! Here we are at Ventnor West! Not a sign of a town. But most of Ventnor is a park. The shopping streets are tucked away in a hollow. There are more steps than there are roads, for the town climbs up-hill for 400 feet from the sea, and for 400 feet above the top of the town rises the wooded height of St. Boniface Down. Most towns are horizontal. Ventnor is perpendicular. It is all trees and steps and zig-zag roads and everywhere there are beautiful gardens, public and private.
Some thousands of years ago with a roar and a crunch or may be more slowly and less dramatically than that, six miles of these chalky cliffs eight-hundred feet high, subsided into the channel. But these six miles did not quite sink into the sea. What with streams and falling earth and nature, these fallen cliffs became a luxuriant land of their own. Today they are known as the Undercliff. Artists came to see them more than a century ago, when the sea and rocks and huge chasms were beginning to be appreciated. Many books were published with steel engravings of the Isle of Wight. The nobility and gentry built themselves marine villas of enormous size upon the Undercliff—cottages they called them but we would call them palaces. They bought their crabs and lobsters from the fishermen who lived in squalid cots beside the sand at Ventnor cove. Then Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came to live at Osborne so the Isle of Wight was all the rage and no place more the rage than Ventnor. Little Osbornes were built on every available piece of cliff, every ledge and cranny and each little Osborne had its garden of palms, myrtles and hydrangeas and its glimpse of sea.
And there they are today, unchanged. In the Parish Magazine of St. Catherine’s (the Parish Church of the town) the Vicar pleads for more permanent residents. “There are many people anxious to make their homes in Ventnor,” he says. And I, for the moment, am one of them; though I think St. Alban’s up three hundred and fifty steps would be my place of worship, so long as my heart would stand it. In that mild air which is not heavy, how gladly would I live and die.
Of all seaside towns I have seen, Ventnor looks after its outward appearance best. The public gardens are amazing. The rockery around the sea front, is always a mass of flowers; orange, pink and purple seem to be the favourite colours. The Park is wild on the seaward side but on the land-ward leaning slopes it is red, white and blue with municipal gardening which suits so well this Victorian town.
The sudden valleys in Ventnor between one bit of cliff and the next are so hot and still and so full of flowers that one almost expects a bird of paradise to flit from prunus to prunus or an alligator to slither out from underneath a palm. And then in another hundred yards is open cliff and familiar chalky cliff flowers. Swinburne lies in Bonchurch graveyard here by Ventnor town. No one made the sea hiss and clang in English poetry better than he. The sea he sang keeps Ventnor fresh, for all its tropic vegetation. The sound of its waves on chalk and sand is never long out of your ears; the sound of the sea travels upwards in this amphitheatre of wooded and tremendous hills.
In and Around Freshwater, I.O.W.
The stone of the Isle of Wight; that is what impresses me most each time I visit it. The stones and sands of the Island seem brighter in colour even than the trees and flowers. And these rocks—bands of sand and half-rock are torn up into such shapes, such stripes and colours, such gorges or chines, that one feels that Western Wight is an earthquake poised in mid-explosion, and ready any day to burst its turfy covering of wild, distorted downs.
One goes to Freshwater via the Lymington Ferry to Yarmouth. The little town spreads out along this flat north coast at the mouth of its tidal river. Old red-tiled roofs contrast with silvery-white stone walls; ilex and seaside elms and firs form a dark background. Yarmouth is mostly a Georgian town, in brick and stone with a sixteenth-century church, uneven, rugged and beautiful.
One of the prettiest buildings in Yarmouth is a private house called “The Mount,” built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, of white bricks. Its beauty is all in its proportions—the relation of window to wall space, and the planted clumps of trees around it affording its owners a glimpse across the Solent to Hampshire and the New Forest. Most of the finest old houses and towns of Wight are inland, or along this uneventful north coast. The worship of the sea and nature in the raw is at its earliest a late-Georgian cult.
Newtown, near Yarmouth, once a town is now only an oyster fishery, and a few old cottages arranged in streets on an eminence in the salt marshes, with estuary all round. It sent two members to Parliament until 1832. The Town Hall remains, a Jacobean building, but where are the Mayor and Corporation? The market days and fair days? Ask of the sea-birds that sail above its vast, deserted stretch of harbour water. “Gone, gone,” they cry. And Newtown is now one of the most romantic and, thank heaven, least visited places in all the Island.
Freshwater with its red brick villas is quite out of tune with the local styles and colours. Once, no doubt, it was lovely—a little straw-thatched village with cottages and church of honey-coloured stone on the most inland reach of the tidal river Yar. But there are still hilly lanes in it, and a few fields.
In its best days Tennyson knew it. His house at Farringford, now an hotel, is still the loveliest big house in Freshwater. It is a long, low Georgian building in a sweet and fancy Gothic style of the period, a good deal older than Tennyson. It has its little park of elm and ilex, and its main views, as usual, away from the elements. It is an enlarged version of Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire, where Tennyson was born. Even the scenery is somewhat similar, being chalk downland. But the sea, instead of lying beyond miles of Lincolnshire marsh and fen, is almost at your feet.
“Something betwixt a pasture and a park
Saved from sea breezes by a hump of down”
wrote Sir Henry Taylor, and that still describes Farringford; the hump of Down is High Down with Tennyson’s monument on top of it, and white chalk cliff falling sheer for five hundred feet into the channel.
To walk along High Down towards the Needles is like a thrilling and terrifying dream. Behind stretches the coast of Wight to St. Catherine’s Point, a seri
es of changing effects from this whitest of white chalk (white paper or linen look cream-coloured beside it), to the pink and honey and gold and grey of the points behind us. Probably this south-western coast of Wight is the longest stretch of unspoiled and colossal landscape in the south-west of England. The few houses visible along it are old thatched farms in hollows of the downs. Not even the convoys of luxury coaches bowling along the coast road take the remoteness from these stupendous stretches of coloured and distorted rock. And here ahead are the Needles. The turf narrows, till suddenly you are aware that there is sea on either side of you, milky-green four hundred feet below, and the Needle rocks themselves glitter and lean sideways out of the sea. Then just when the point might have narrowed to but a razor’s edge of turf, there is a fence so that you have to turn back. And this is the time, if it is afternoon, to take a look at Alum Bay which is on the Solent side of the Needles. I came to it first the usual coach way, parking where the ice cream kiosks stand among the gorse bushes, came from the villa-dom of Totland which is like Bromley or Muswell Hill set down by the sea.
Alum Bay is a well-known “beauty spot,” and I suspect such places. But of all “beauty spots” I have seen, Alum Bay is the most certainly entitled to be called beautiful. An L-shaped bay—the long part of the L a pearly height of chalk cliff 400 feet high, stretching out into the sea, no sand below it and the great merciless cliffs cf chalk glittering brighter as the sun moves round to the west. And here above a shingly shore is a series of promontories not quite so high as the chalk. Walk along the shingle to the arm of chalk, and then look back at these capes. One is brilliant gold; the next is white; the next purple; the next grey; the next black with streaks of green. In great broad bands these strips of colour run down the cliffs, turning the sky pale with the richness of their colour. “Alum Bay; one side of it a wall of glowing chalk, and the other a barrier of rainbows,” says my good Victorian guide book, and it does not exaggerate.
First and Last Loves Page 16
