We don’t have outfits appropriate to the Rendezvous cafe-brasserie (‘french, fresh, friendly’). Renchi, in truth, hasn’t much of an outfit left. The Rendezvous is packed, a whirl of activity, punters being turned away. Flocks of OAP anoraks use the place as a tea room: pot of Darjeeling and a pale slice of something that is as close as the French come to seedcake. Local artists (and dressed the part) compete for space with cardiac-flushed antique dealers (with too many shirt buttons undone), and motor racing investors whose round tables clink with empty bottles, mobiles parked like six-guns. The harassed young women who run the orders are the only people under retirement age. Smoke, noise, conviviality: to counter the compulsory siesta under which the rest of the town yawns.
The popularity of the Rendezvous is soon explained: look at the competition. Coaching inns with balconies and blackboards offering specials, such as: NO FOOD, REFURBISHMENT. A ‘picturesque “wood clad” pub dating from the 14th century’ and named, in case you miss the point, GENERAL WOLFE (1727–59). The Kings Arms is the High Street’s flagship property: ‘an elegant Georgian Coaching Inn… for a relaxing lunch or a light snack in the bar or Town Jail’. White in appearance, white in soul. We keep walking.
Down at the George and Dragon, we gnaw through some ploughman’s leftovers. Back in 1883, the George boasted of its proximity to the ‘new South Eastern Railway Station’. Westerham still smelt of hops, the brewery flourished. The old ‘posting house’ catered ‘for Gentlemen especially’, offering ‘Pyramids, Pool and the only Public Billiard Room’ in town. Now the sporting spirit has definitively run out, replaced by dedicated afternoon boozing, history like a puddle of ullage. We grind and gum in a microclimate of stale tobacco, spilt stout and clinical depression.
Making conversation, Renchi asked the girl in the papershop (as we stocked up on chocolate bars and water), how far it was to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country place. She couldn’t do distance, miles, metres; didn’t understand the concept. ‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘Where’s your car parked?’ No car. On foot, walking. She looked blank, couldn’t get her mind around it. ‘Five minutes,’ she repeated. ‘Up past the common. Follow the signs.’
Not today. Not if we’re going to make Otford. Save it. Every charity shop in Kent carries a copy (bottom shelf, cardboard box) of the Pergamon Press Churchill and Chartwell by Robin Fedden. Robert Maxwell, as ever, doing his bit to puff Great Men (Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceauşescu). This publication had run through two editions and one revised edition, before the 1974 printing that I acquired in Westerham. It has to be a black propaganda exercise, the dumping of thousands of copies of book ballast – in order to con charity shop vultures into paying £11.80 (two adults, non-concessionary) to visit the place Fedden calls ‘the most important country house in Europe’. Nobody but Maxwell could succeed in flogging a book with nothing but a pink chair on the cover; a pink chair with pink box (or footstool) on a strip of grass by a goldfish pond. An image that is meant, emotively, to spell out: absence. A feeble attempt at invoking the famous Churchill icon – © Life – which turns up here as a frontispiece. The warlord, at ease, seen from behind, pregnant with destiny, hat and a coat (no neck); sitting on a rock contemplating the swimming pool he designed and the lake beyond. It could very easily be a stand-in (as with the famous wartime broadcasts), an actor. But it is an effective summary of the man’s relationship to the land, to Kent. After a good lunch, a morning – in bed – dictating memos, he liked to sit by the pond ‘in a simple garden chair’ feeding ‘fat golden orfe’.
Churchill and Wolfe dominate Westerham; effigies, postcards, memorials in the church. Mementoes and memorabilia designed to tempt us into Quebec House or Chartwell, to remind us of a glorious past that is now largely in the keeping of Americans and Canadians. To move east along the A25, in the direction of Sevenoaks (Brasted, Sundridge), is to progress through an elongated version of Camden Passage, Islington, or the Brighton Lanes: antique shop after antique shop (with, by way of variety, the occasional up-market estate agent). The road is busy and impatient, single file traffic unable to make the adjustment after coming off the motorway. Tourist buses and old folk wrestling with maps. Chartwell, when Churchill motored down, was twenty-five miles from London, from Westminster. These days, as the girl in the newspaper shop so shrewdly recognised, distance has no meaning. Miles only matter to horses and pedestrians. We have to deal in drives measured by the hour. Units of nuisance between pit stops. Road works, accidents, congestion: a geography defined by junction numbers on the M25.
There’s a narrow triangle of ground at the eastern end of this one-street town, a redoubt known as ‘The Green’. It is dominated by two sculptures. They can’t be called art works. They ignore each other, nervous that they might have to defend their position against legions of dead generals. The western effigy, on the higher ground, was erected in 1911; designed by Derwent Wood, heaved into place on an ornamental pedestal of Portland stone. It’s as camp as they come, a Carry On tantrum; weapon raised more in pique than anger. Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey. Major General James Wolfe repels all incomers (aliens, grockles). His sword is up, his three-cornered hat is cocked; his hose clings to slender calves. He’s going to give somebody a fearful slap.
Down in the dumps, ignoring Wolfe’s hysterics, Winston Churchill sags, his back to London. Oscar Nemon’s monument, donated by the people of Yugoslavia in 1969, is set on a limestone block. This bronze looks like a landslide of molten biro caps. It’s oozy, cloacal; a mash of boiled seaweed. Any day now it’s going to collapse, slither from the plinth and clog the drains. The chocolate Churchill knots his fists, sunk in a deep throne; an old man struggling to raise himself. Straining at stool. Near this spot, he received the congratulations of the town. He stood on a cart, his family around him, to acknowledge the cheers. Now he glares, unseeing, across Tower Wood towards Chartwell. The job of these effigies is simple: alert passing trade to heritage properties where they can spend their money.
I returned to Westerham, on the Sunday after my hike with Renchi, with vague notions of retracing my steps, recovering my lost spectacles – and also locating the source of the River Darent. The Darent, anticipating the M25, heads north at Riverhead, and would give us our route, back to the Thames at Dartford. The river rises near Crockham House, in the hills above Westerham, before dropping down through the Hythe beds of the Lower Greensand. A neighbouring spring at Chartwell lent its name to Churchill’s 800-acre estate – which he picked up for £5,000 in 1922.
I did the tour, beginning at Squerryes Court. I was too early for the house, but was able to walk the grounds. Gurgles and slurps. The dark mirror of the lake. The young Darent enjoying a little aristocrat patronage before slumming it in Mick Jagger’s Dartford. Liquid whispers from Wealden clay infiltrate the salt marshes of Crayford and Stone: rumours of another life, big houses and gravel drives. That must be where the adolescent Mick caught the infection, his compulsion to join the nobs, metamorphose into a dandy and a gent.
Squerryes Court, privately owned, lets in temporary guests, respectful trippers. Cash customers from the suburbs, from Surrey. The Warde family (who lived here from 1731) put up an obelisk to the memory of James Wolfe. One of those damp mysterious things abandoned in an English garden – as if waiting to catch the eye of photographer Bill Brandt. A fog of heavy grain, a couple of lines of valetudinarian verse. There to be found, by those who need to find it; found and forgotten.
Wolfe, aged fourteen, was hanging around in Squerryes Court when the royal messenger (redirected from Greenwich) arrived with his commission. The route to martyrdom was preordained: the Heights of Abraham or the descent from the High Weald. Wolfe seemed sickly/heroic – like Nelson – a mode the English have always admired. Wolfe was a green ghost.
In psychogeographic terms, the man who introduced Freemasonry into the North American continent plotted a path from Westerham to Greenwich Hill. He confirmed the East London ley line celebrated by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It still runs
from Wolfe’s shrapnel-scarred statue, across the Isle of Dogs, to St Anne’s, Limehouse. News, coming from Greenwich, is returned there: obscure Squerryes Court obelisk to much-photographed memorial (via Wolfe Close, Bromley).
Quebec House, where Wolfe lived for his first twelve years (before moving with his family to Greenwich), marks the point where Westerham runs out. Behind the house is the trickle of the young Darent, a puddle you can leap. Wolfe’s former home is a spook show, a sequence of recreated sets in which we are invited to call up the shades of a vanished family. The history lesson, the reason why we are all shuffling through this undistinguished town house, outlines a biography; it ‘explains’ the battles and military campaigns. Muffled oars, assault by impregnable cliff, victory and death. Flags, swords and bloody linen. A memorial industry: ‘statues and songs, paintings and prints’. History is sexy. House detectives, grubbers in fields, tomb raiders: we love them for their ability to make us more than we are. They connect us to a fictional back story.
Winston Churchill, so they say, looked at the street wall of Quebec House and discovered a hobby that would carry him through the years of Chartwell exile, through the glooms of Black Dog depression, the underbelly of his manic energies. In time, he would pick up his union card and become a self-employed brickie: Wendy houses, garden walls, ponds for carp. Water features drawing on Wealden springs.
Chartwell, off-highway (but lavishly signposted), anchors the south-eastern corner of our M25 circuit. Top-dollar heritage. Major attraction. When I turned up, on a dull dank morning, the car park (two levels and extensions) was almost full. Unculled livestock, the descendants of the herd of Belted Galloway cattle that Churchill acquired from his friend Sir Ian Hamilton, dressed the park; huddling together on high ground. There could be no better place to play at being a gentleman farmer (author, artist, bricklayer). Churchill bought Middle White pigs, a dairy herd. The animals, as the National Trust booklet admits, ‘tended either to die of disagreeable diseases or become household pets’. Black swans were a bonne bouche for Kentish foxes. A dove from Bali is laid to rest beneath a sundial. Indulged poodles and pussy cats are buried under every bush.
House and grounds are a dream of benign domesticity, aristocrats playing at being ordinary English folk; country pursuits, hobbies, croquet, games with the kids. This might explain Chartwell’s popularity; suburbanites (unlanded) feel at home with the aspirations. Life as it might be after a lottery win: swimming pool, pets, rose garden, tennis court, an inconvenient kitchen in which vegetables are boiled to death. Chartwell is not impossibly grand: ‘his and hers’ bedrooms, certainly, but many English couples, given the space, would go for that.
There are notable views of the High Weald from the dining room. Windows down to the floor, lovely filtered light. The circular dining-tables and comfortable chairs (with arms) were commissioned from Heal’s – to Churchill’s specifications. The tables are unstained oak. This suburban fantasy is as fudged as William Nicholson’s painting of Breakfast at Chartwell. In reality, the Churchills rarely took breakfast together. Winston stayed in bed till lunchtime, reading the newspapers, dictating memos to the two secretaries who were permanently on call. The sun-dappled domesticity – cat on table, bantam cock wandering in from garden, fond couple chatting over tea and toast – is a fable of the Good Life.
I stood in steady rain, Kentish mizzle, waiting for the exact hour that would let me into the house. Entry was staggered. Elderly gentlefolk of unimpeachable character guard each room, hallway, staircase. ‘Fresh flowers, daily newspapers and the occasional cigar’ add to the atmosphere. The Express has shrunk to a tabloid since Beaverbrook’s day and the Times has lost its status as a journal of record. Who, I wondered, had the job of smoking those Havanas – until they were suitable butts? Who provided the dark rim of spittle?
A tumbler of well-watered whisky and a comforting cigar were always within reach of the Nobel Prize-winning author (who dictated with the panache of Edgar Wallace), the compulsive painter. Books were everywhere, histories, biographies, volumes and volumes about Napoleon, the occasional novel or humble classic. I noted Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: a first edition, I assumed, lacking jacket. Wilson’s book was published in 1940 – when the Churchills had left Chartwell (too risky, ponds visible to bombers; too close to Biggin Hill) and the house was shut up. So how authentic was this library?
‘On only one recorded occasion during the whole of Marx’s thirty years’ stay did he attempt to find regular employment,’ wrote Wilson. ‘The resistance to the idea of earning a livelihood may, at least partly, have been due to an impulse to lean over backwards in order to forestall the imputation of commercialism which was always being brought against the Jews.’ Karl Marx and his sprawling family, evicted from the ‘fashionable suburb’ of Camberwell, occupied two rooms in Dean Street, Soho. Another heritage myth. Another potential shrine. Churchill was quite effective at commerce, without getting his hands dirty: he had wealthy friends, he got top weight for his journalism and books. He played the market.
We see what we want to see: a drawing room of the kind you might come across in numerous unpretentious rectories, restored cottages, captured farmhouses. Too much furniture: fabric-covered armchairs, baggy sofas, inherited desk, mahogany card table (thought to be rather good, possibly Georgian). Chintz curtains, fading Mahal carpet. There is no nonsense about integrated design. Somewhere for everybody to sit, to sprawl; alcoves shelved, family photographs, paintings by Dad (not Dadd). Look closer. This seemingly commonplace room is hung with eighteenth-century chandeliers that gleam in a vulgar abundance of teardrops. That smudgy view of the Thames, over the desk, is by Claude Monet. A gift from Emery Rose who bought the lucrative foreign rights to Churchill’s books, after the Second World War. It’s a useful conversational piece among the dozens of loosely Impressionist daubs by the householder.
Punchdrunk with history, blinded by uniforms, medals, presentation cigar boxes in malachite and silver, groups of old folk stick and cluster. They lived it once and now they want it confirmed. In writing. In images. They are reluctant to step outside, into the garden. Which way should they turn? Towards the fish pond? Churchill, after a good lunch, would sit on his chair, dripping maggots for his beloved carp. His 1930s paintings of the pond, in reproduction, have something of late Monet: shallow water, red-gold fish shapes among the lily pads. A mood of retirement and contemplation.
The rain brings out the scent from beds of santolina, dripping lavender. Lady Churchill supervised the planting, with advice from her cousin Venetia Montagu. The terraced rose garden with its heavy-headed excesses, the sheer bulk and weight of petals, is an experience that is quite unlike the tokenism of suburban and municipal patches. Terrace to lawn. Vine-draped pergola to pavilion. A line of canvas-backed chairs, tilted against the wall, to let the rain run off. White oast houses beyond an orchard that is heavy with late fruit. Alcoves for private conversation; benches hidden by tall yew or box hedge, summer houses and rose walks.
It is shocking to admit, but here at last is the paradise garden. Water running from rocks, into ponds and pools and lakes. Fruit. Walks offering varied views of house and park. Domestic felicity (underwritten by blood, connections, power). A small paradise is achieved and, despite the ticket-buying crowds, it is present and accessible in a way that the contrived ‘views’ of Painshill, the retrievals of Enfield Chase, are not. Churchill, who saw most of his investments wiped out in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, did a Walter Scott, or Jeffrey Archer, he wrote himself (dictated, flogged his researchers) back to prosperity: a torrent of sonorous hackery, jobbing journalism and cardboard history (in sets, volumes, yards). While the garden evolved. Grew, flourished. It’s hard to imagine Lady Thatcher, banished from power, having much time for plant catalogues. Her retreat in quasi-pastoral Dulwich was very soon abandoned. The rose, for Tony Blair, is only useful as a symbol, a thornless logo.
Chartwell was well chosen. The absolute Englishness of England (soft and sou
thern) is manifest in every photograph; a dream country of orchards that don’t have to be picked, cattle as pets, toy farms, sentimental ecology. The great man bricklaying in a velvet boilersuit, roof tiling in Homburg, gloves, cigar. An old house on the spring line, knocked about, rebuilt by Philip Tilden, to represent no particular place or period. A landscape that is unthreatening, rounded, fertile. A Kentish Arcadia: H.E. Bates’s Larkin family (for toffs). A moderately dysfunctional troop who were amateur in every sense (except that of staying afloat, raising the readies). And the certain knowledge, underwriting this bucolic charade, that Westminster was just over the hills. The car was waiting. On every M25 map, among the nine– and eighteen-hole golf courses (five of them between Godstone and Sevenoaks), is the proud red dot for Chartwell. Chartwell means that it’s time to swing north, to head for home.
If, by whatever accident, Chartwell is the paradise garden, can Churchill be seen as its painter? Now sodden, dripping, I arrive at the Studio, by way of the Golden Rose Walk. The Studio is no euphemism, tumbledown shed or Portakabin: it would be a substantial house in Islington, a terrace in Hackney. The scale of this building, the views on offer, might suit a Rodin or a Courbet. The stuffed bull’s head, provided by Manolete, and hung over the door, doesn’t mean that the old man had any truck with Picasso and Iberianism. He painted from a wooden armchair, his back to the landscape.
On either side of the A21, fixed in permanent opposition, are the emanations of Churchill and Samuel Palmer. Churchill is always photographed looking east towards Underriver and Palmer’s Golden Valley. These are non-complementary versions of the pastoral. Palmer’s innocent shepherds and cowgirls turn agricultural labour into a sacerdotal experience, woods as churches: he was always peeping, surveying, peering shortsightedly through a leafy frame. ‘The dream,’ he wrote to John Linnell, ‘of antepast and proscenium of eternity.’ Palmer, an ‘old Tory’, issued at his own expense a pamphlet denouncing the rick-burning activities of depressed Kentish labourers.
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