We are fleas in the fur of Mary Caine’s Dog. The beast is barking at Wentworth. ‘A British camp defends the circle on the dog’s contoured shoulder at St Anne’s Hill, Chertsey,’ she writes. ‘Its steep terraces and woodland walks haunted by a ghostly nun executed for trysting here with her lover… Here the Otherworld begins – the Mysteries of Ceres, Ceredwen, Black Annis.’
Contemplating such possibilities, Renchi stretches out, full-length, on a low wall: he dreams England. Eyes shut, hands resting on belly, feeling the passage of breath, he lets the orbital miles flow into the green world, the distant lakes. It is important to halt at the right place, switch off, put the system into suspension. Spying, cataloguing, recording give way to leisurely meditation. Kevin likes the sound of that. I warn him not to take his boots off, not yet; he must wait for the pub, a couple of stiff drinks. The socks will have to be cut away with a knife.
The woods are filled with wonders. Abandoned cars are part of the ecosystem. Once you get them off the road, on to Rainham Marshes, the Green Way to Staines, the River Lea, they achieve a posthumous status as sculptural objects. Nature loves alien curves and textures. Bugs root into soft padding. Birds nest. Paint, whatever its original colour, shades towards river-bottom green. Rust predicts autumn. We stopped to admire a Wolseley whose headlamps were owl-eyes and whose side-mirrors had twisted to catch glints in the high canopy. Spiders’ webs glazed missing windscreens with tough lace. A mulch of leafmould, like shredded tobacco, cushioned (insect-arm) wipers.
In a clearing, we met two builders in baseball caps. They said they were working on a round white house, a distant relative of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion. Someone, inspired by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff, had created a late Modernist barrel: DNA staircases, screen walls and a panorama of Surrey pastoral. The house was hidden, as in a fairy story, and yet its flamboyantly minimalist design shouted: ‘Notice me, write me up.’
Renchi and Kevin were still talking architecture when, on the road to Chertsey, we found a pub (the Golden Grove) where we could settle ourselves in the garden, without making a public spectacle of Kevin’s feet and the rituals that would be needed to keep him mobile. Pints secured (lemonade and orange juice in Renchi’s case), the Golden Grove became the golden bowl. Kevin eases off his boots, abandons the formerly white socks, and stares at forensic evidence of his overambitious hike. I photograph the damage, while Renchi begs a brown plastic tub and does the Jesus thing with Kevin’s wrecked phalanges and metatarsals. Tendons have contracted, skin is raw or puffed into mushroom cushions. The twenty-six bones, a hundred-plus ligaments and thirty-three muscles are outraged by mistreatment. They’ve carried the journalist around town, into the belly of the BBC, on and off trains, why this impetuous vagrancy? My photographs of feet in bowl are like those water-colours in Tate Britain of the deformities of war, insulted flesh stitched together, torn mouths, missing appendages. Kevin’s ankles have their own imprinted tartan, ghost socks. The originals, a pulp of sweat and blood, would fit over a baby’s head. Renchi, prepared for all eventualities, kits Kevin out in spares, hairy red numbers (to hide the leakage of bodily fluids).
Restored, Kevin decides to curtail the excursion and take a train from Chertsey. This is close enough to the Thames to give his day on the road a certain symmetry, river to river. Decision taken, spirits lift. Renchi consults Mary Caine. Chertsey, it seems, is under the titular protection of Sirius. ‘Chertsey, anciently spelt Cerotes, Sirotes, Certesey, recalls both Ceres and Cerberus.’
I recall the white house on St Ann’s Hill – which brings the other two back to their architectural jag. They have a common interest in a much-discussed private residence in Cambridge. To Kevin this house, thanks to its occupation by Mansfield Forbes (who taught English to Humphrey Jennings, the subject of one of the half-dozen books Kevin was currently working on), was a significant footnote. To Renchi, it was home.
‘Finella’, in the Backs, on Queens Road, was owned by Gonville and Caius College, and leased to Mansfield Forbes in 1927. Forbes, by repute a charismatic and eccentric teacher, didn’t pursue publication. Outside Cambridge, the archivists of the English Faculty, purveyors of gossip, he is unknown. With a little more effort, a frolic with Wittgenstein, a decisive encounter with Leavis, he might have made a teleplay by Alan Bennett. His achievements in friendship are rehearsed in a biography by Hugh Carey for the Cambridge University Press. (Kevin duly picked up a discounted copy for £3.)
Specs held together with sticking plaster, lectures begun in carpet slippers, a fondness for nephews, nervous breakdown: Forbes played from an orthodox script. The healing part of his story consisted of a love for the Scottish wilderness and a series of epic walks. He painted and composed occasional poems. Most of his life consisted of shrugging off the effects of a dismal adolescence (in the same West Country public school where Patrick White and Lindsay Anderson did time).
Hugh Carey salvages the comic turns expected of a Cambridge man, sympathetic to Modernism. When a friend was done for cottaging, Forbes became convinced that the vice squad were about to raid ‘Finella’. He bundled up the Paris editions of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in an old waterproof and chucked them into the Cam. Panic over, he stood on Clare bridge and supervised, with a pocket torch, while a young research student dived in the murk (without success).
The madeover house in Queens Road is generally acknowledged as Forbes’s greatest achievement. I imagined that, in the casual fashion of the time, ‘Manny’ (as he was known) had built the place from scratch; a gentleman amateur like Christopher Wren. I soon discovered that ‘Finella’ began life in the more prosaic disguise of ‘The Yews’: ‘a Victorian villa some eighty years old of the Bayswater period, of sooty ash-grey brick, with a sloping lawn, overhung with yew trees’. Manny confronted ‘sombre dullness’ with the vigour of a TV virtuoso, a hit squad of carpenters and fabric teasers. He made it new. And cod-Mediterranean: yews chopped, grey brick washed with rose-pink, woodwork and frieze in lemon-yellow.
The story came to me in teasing fragments. At the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, I bought a book on Serge Chermayeff, a self-taught architect (dancer, painter, teacher). Skimming it, I came across a reference to ‘Finella’. I knew ‘Finella’ as the house in which Renchi had grown up. He often talked about it. Finella was supposed to be a Scottish goddess of glass; the Cambridge house traced her legend through mirrors and doors, a ‘waterfall’ encased in the wall of the dining room. The narrative of Renchi’s childhood is interwoven with the geography of’Finella’ and its grounds. In 1973 he published a chapbook, Relations, in which drawings, family snapshots, were overwritten with holograph text to contrive a slender Jungian album of place, dream, antecedents. A cedar tree like an unfleshed spine. An aerial view of the roof: ‘home as centre’. A child in bed. A shared bath (mother). Sisters and father playing a game on the drawing room floor.
I visited ‘Finella’ once, the reception after Renchi’s wedding, figures spilling out of the house, across slanting lawns. Grey photographs of a white afternoon.
The Chermayeff book placed ‘Finella’ in context:
If there was a modernist ‘establishment’ in England at the end of the 1920s, it was centred on the house ‘Finella’ at Cambridge, the home of Mansfield Forbes (1889–1936), a fellow of Clare College, who commissioned a young and unknown Australian architect, Raymond McGrath (1903–76), visiting England on a scholarship, to transform the interiors using a great deal of glass and other modern materials such as copper-faced plywood, ‘Plymax’. The effect was novel and theatrical.
The house was widely reviewed and lavishly praised in the architectural press. Modernism – in terms of a look or a style – was promoted here, in a series of parties, gatherings, debates. Forbes and Chermayeff were much influenced by Eric Gill. Cambridge contacts got Gill the Broadcasting House commission in Portland Place. Gill was the link to the pre-1914 artistic avant-garde in London; an inheritor of Arts and Crafts theories, proselytised in the l
anguage of St Thomas Aquinas.
Chermayeff, who frequently quoted Wyndham Lewis’s The Caliph’s Design (1919), might well have challenged the other members of the ‘Finella’ group (Frederick Etchells, Joseph Emberton, Howard Robertson, Maxwell Fry): ‘Architects, where is your vortex?’
‘On Queens Road, Cambridge,’ would come the reply. ‘Finella’ is where the new ideas cooked: Plymax, glass, pink paint. Mansfield Forbes opened his house for the exhibition of Jacob Epstein’s scandalous figure, the squat (child-carrying) figure of Genesis. Punters rushed the lawns, clutching their shillings. For the duration of this event, Forbes slept on a rubber mat at the foot of the primitive stone-carving.
I photocopied an anecdote from the Chermayeff book: ‘Barbara Chermayeff remembered “Manny” performing a fake black mass in the mirrored hall, turning off all the lights and making it up as he went along.’
This provoked Renchi, in his turn, to dredge up a memory of his mother. She was a connection of Mansfield Forbes. She spoke about Manny’s prophetic dream of flight: how he saw himself floating over Finella’s shallow roof. Next day came the news of his death.
Hugh Carey mentions the incident in his Forbes biography:
Manny seems to have had a natural affinity with the uncanny; friends often described him as ‘fey’ without the usual implication that he was also ineffective. On the night of his death a Scottish cousin, anxious about him, dreamed that he was teaching her to levitate, then himself flew out of the window at ‘Finella’ over the big cedar tree in the garden and out of sight.
Invented and misremembered rituals gave ‘Finella’ its ability to provoke dreams, communications, dialogues with the dead. It would take an M.R. James – across the Cam in King’s – to do them justice.
You can define the towns of Little England by their ability to deliver 35mm black and white film. Kevin was struggling. He’d used up his single reel on roads, bridges, ruins. And forgotten that he was supposed to procure an author portrait to go with his article. We combed Chertsey and finally came up with the goods in a shopping development that was more car park than mall. Posed among wire trolleys, I squinted at the camera. Then Kevin was on the train and out of it.
The walk had to be commemorated with a book. Naturally. Out of the Jiffy bag, with Kevin’s covering letter (and Latin inscription), fell a copy of Abraham Cowley: Selected Poems. Cowley, a Royalist at the time of the English Civil War, an accused spy, opted for the classic upriver (Ballard) exile: in Chertsey. His bibliography included, along with a political epic (The Civil War), a 1643 satire called The Puritan and the Papist.
Chertsey wasn’t fussed about literary associations. The heritage committee couldn’t summon the energy to run with Cowley (wig and gigolo moustache). He escaped local interment (and possible pilgrimage status) by being buried in Westminster Abbey. In his riverine retirement, Cowley delivered The Visions and Prophecies Concerning England.
Nobody, other than Kevin Jackson, could have written about ‘the incalculable part his [Cowley’s] ghost played at various parts of our ramble, from the Payroll Boys’ incomprehensible gibberish about the “Abraham Cowley Ward” of some local hospital to the Cowley Roads we encountered’. Kevin’s blisters, apparently, were deflating, leaving flaps in the skin of his feet. He squeaked slightly as he hotfooted over Cambridge pavements. He was undergoing a strict physical regime (reading the training manuals, High Sierra psycho-yomping guides), in expectation of joining us on future walks.
*
In the evening light, long shadows on a dull road, we marched on Weybridge. DRIVE SLOWLY ANIMALS. I applaud a red brick semi that has taken the trouble to convert a strip of communal lawn into a paved terrace, topped with decorative balcony (so tight to the house that nobody could stand behind it). Scores of young children in yellow waistcoats (crash-helmets) push their bikes along the pavement.
The sky over Woburn Park sagged with Zeppelin cloud-socks. An hour when bad photographs work best, smearing essence: egg and ketchup colours. Well-licked breakfast plate under a glaze of washing-up liquid.
Dragonflies twitching on nettles. A blue too slight to capture. The diluted English surrealism of a twilight park: a water chute with empty plastic logs, a misplaced Epstein woman drumming robotically (visible wires trailing from her back). A Toshiba showroom designed to look like a roadside temple.
Crossing the River Wey is a big moment for Renchi. A quick turn around a Chinese church (eccentric anti-vernacular, Gothic turrets, Greek Orthodox dome) and we head for the station. Weybridge is a good place to leave for another day; suspended visions of St George’s Hill, phantom Diggers camped among immaculate golf course mansions.
4
16 June 1999. Renchi talked so much about Sara H that she became a real presence in my own imaginings; I saw her work as feeding on (and ameliorating) the momentum of the M25’s perpetual (stop/start) motion. Sara lived outside the orbit. In a comfortable house in a village on Salisbury Plain. A mill stream, coming off the River Avon, ran through the garden.
Sara was the one who guided Renchi (and others) around the heat-contours, the dispensations of Stonehenge. She was a painter. Her regular shows – still life, animal – sold out. The work was meticulous, unsentimental, based on close observation. Pet portraiture, had she continued with it, would have provided a decent living. The singularity of the beasts, the glint, was assiduously recorded; hyperreality as a branch of Surrealism. There was nothing soft or splashy about this work. Fruit displaced its own weight, cut a shape in the consciousness: Zurbarán, not Renoir. A memory world captured in a convex mirror.
And then, abruptly, the career was aborted. Sara, under the control of a spirit guide, struck out on an epic undertaking. She was instructed to abandon the garden produce, moggies and curs, and move into abstraction. Abstraction in which every line had a moral integrity, every curve mapped a dream motif. The manageable format of the earlier oils replaced by vast canvases – which had to be painted, fast, in a narrow, off-kitchen extension. Stacks of canvases, calling for expensive paints and brushes, were produced to order.
What were they like? Renchi struggled to describe them. He spoke of the magnitude of the task, of quantity. Technique. The Wiltshire house with its inherited furniture, lived-in rooms, creaking stairs, tight corridors, was bursting with the product of this merciless grind. Each canvas had a narrative, an interpretation that only Sara (handmaiden to her unappeased instructor) could deliver. The meaning of the series would not be revealed until all the paintings – three, four, five hundred – were exhibited in one place.
Coming off our walk to Weybridge, we felt that it was the right moment to break away, a trip to Salisbury Plain. By leaving the road, witnessing Sara’s dream maps (a project as mad as our own), we might achieve an overview. Whatever compelled me to spend two years expiating the shame of the Millennium Dome was as fierce and inexplicable as Sara’s daily ritual in her studio.
Anna was up for the outing, by train to Alton, where Renchi would meet us and drive us to Sara’s house. The first breath of morning air, on the kitchen doorstep, was hot. London was sticky with pollen, obscure allergies were activated. Pass a particular building, pause at a road crossing, and the sneezing would start. The fits were not related to trees or bushes, they were triggered by memory, previous attacks, forgotten journeys.
The Nigerian mini-cab was late. It had gone to the wrong Albion. We were forced to dodge, double back; foot-down detours to avoid the sombre (Farringdon Street) march of the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’. We jumped on the train as it was moving out.
Settled in an almost deserted carriage, we met a young sculptor, friend of Renchi’s stepdaughter, who was also interested in witnessing Sara’s work.
I’ve always enjoyed – pre-privatisation, pre-Hatfield and Clapham and Paddington – riding on trains. Real time cinema, floating landscapes. And now there is the bonus of linking up, seeing from a different perspective, areas we have walked through. It was important, Renchi and I agreed,
to get the first circuit done: start each walk, fresh, from the point we stopped on the previous outing. Which meant that quite significant locations – such as Royal Holloway College, Holloway Sanatorium – demanded a supplementary visit.
A walled estate, effectively restored and policed, the Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water was the ultimate heritage-asylum conversion. Discreetly positioned, within a few miles of Windsor Castle, Eton College and the liberties of Runnymede, the sanatorium catered to the carriage trade. Socially awkward relatives of the well connected were boarded out: inconvenient pregnancies, mild eccentricities, boozers, society dope fiends. No headbangers, no drooling imbeciles, no lowlife. Marienbad on the Bourne.
Mervyn Peake was treated with ECT in Virginia Water: the Holloway Sanatorium as an electro-convulsive manifestation of Gormenghast. In more recent times, the poet John Welch, undergoing remedial therapy, was given the task of burning medical files.
Thomas Holloway, the philanthropist responsible for college and asylum, spent £40.000 on the Belgian Gothic building. He consulted E.W. Pugin, launched an architectural competition, and named Crossland, Salomans and Jones as the winning firm. It wasn’t charity, wealthy relatives would pay a premium to lodge patients in a set every bit as extravagant as St Pancras station hotel.
How many lunatics was Holloway expecting? The restored sanatorium buildings, rebranded as ‘Virginia Park’, seen through ironwork gates, are grouped like an Ivy League campus (imposing, pastiched). Big Ben tower, numerous chimneys, turrets, archways, cloisters: Holloway Sanatorium was a magnum opus. The architect William Crossland, pupil of George Gilbert Scott, made a huge emotional investment in this paradise of the slightly disturbed. Everything about his pitch was wonky.
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