‘The English Radical and the Gallic Jacobin are brothers,’ he wrote (in An Address to the Electors of West Kent). ‘Let us rally around once more… round the noble standard of Old Kentish loyalty.’ So declaimed the Londoner, the harvest moon sentimentalist.
Churchill was a royalist, rogue Liberal, turncoat; he paid lip-service to the established Church (no private chapels at Chartwell). But Palmer was that extraordinary thing: a fanatic for the Church of England. A fundamentalist of the middle ground. The High Weald was that ground; an extension of William Blake’s Virgil woodcuts.
The walls of Churchill’s studio are hung with his back catalogue, crammed like the Royal Academy Summer Show – in the days when Palmer found his paintings perched a few inches from the ceiling. The lakes and springs and orchards of Chartwell, by Churchill’s mediation, do not become sites of vision. His canvases are resolutely occasional, holiday memories, overworked postcards from the Med; grace and favour villas and yachts. A Cook’s Tour of hobbyism: Marrakech, Venice, Monte Carlo, Jamaica. The Surf Club at Miami. Hot colour generously applied. Lashings of Sickert gravy. There is no attempt to work, by series or season, towards an understanding of this Kentish landscape; no fixation, no obsessive return, under different conditions of light, to the garden and the surrounding countryside.
Churchill didn’t look, he sat. He passed the time. The trick of painting, begun ‘by accident’ (as his daughter Mary Soames explains), ‘took the role of a therapy, distracting him from the traumatic debacle of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign’. No such therapy was available to those unfortunates who were there, in the hell of it. The endless views strung around the Chartwell estate become a gloss on dark history; florid rehabilitation, a strategy for elective amnesia. The paintings are never about the situation the painter is confronting, they confirm the position in which he set his stool: lakes and arbours and beaches. A few palm trees, a distant snow-covered range of mountains.
Churchill took up this practice, as a relief from deep depression, while staying in a rented farmhouse, near Godalming. A tame expert was wheeled in for complimentary advice: society portraitist Sir John Lavery. Then came Sickert, the friend of Degas, frequenter of music halls, murder obsessive: master of varnished darkness, half-drunk pints, the urban condition (boredom). Sickert, not ashamed to use a newspaper photograph as the basis for a composition, taught Churchill to project slides on to canvas, to bypass line-drawing.
If brought to it, if forced, Churchill could be ‘paintatious’ (his word) about Chartwell. The Weald, under snow, as seen from the drawing-room window. The Honorary Academician Extraordinary, exhibiting under the pseudonym of ‘David Winter’, had no trouble in being accepted for the summer show. Samuel Palmer sweated on rejection. The Golden Valley of Underriver was his invention, he affected it; the way future generations have come to see it. He imagined – and therefore established – a secret paradise; accessible in a period of innocence, then lost. The Palmer industry is rudimentary, a few walkers, an art school. The only book on Palmer stocked by Tate Britain was not displayed on the shelves, had to be searched out when I requested it. There was a late flurry of interest in Palmer when his works were faked by Tom Keating, the tricks of vision easily duplicated.
Churchill’s Painting as a Pastime remains in print, along with postcard reproductions, videos, mugs, coasters, key rings. This much-visited, much-admired National Trust property is the ultimate point for the tourist who wants to leave London without leaving London; the paradox of an open asylum in which the demons of history can be drugged with scents, bright colours and a prostituted landscape.
5
After Westerham, we cross the young Darent, and then the M25; heading north. The six-lane section of motorway (naked central reservation, modestly planted soft estate) is balm to our spirits. In the distance, to the east, the road is beginning to curve, anticipating our journey up the Darent Valley. For once the speeding transients are playing it by the book, observing the correct distances between vehicles. There are no jousting heavy-goods lorries travelling in packs. Our river/road is sublimely democratic: it has endured Surrey and Kent, counties that prefer to pretend it’s not there, and it is heading home. Of course, an orbital motorway can’t have a home, but it can have memory, a starting point: Junction la with its toll booths, its sense of being a frontier post. The crossing of the Thames at Dartford. Multiple-choice highways. Essex or the coast. Canterbury, Greenwich. The Bluewater retail pit.
In my mythology, the M25 is born of the Thames: conceived at Runnymede (by Staines), dying at Dartford. In bloody twilight. Echoes of Eliot: ‘Burning burning burning burning.’ Misbegotten in an up river canoe. Expiring in oil slicks. Grey to grey: the immense skies of the Thames Estuary. Liquid to light: an Aegyptian temple beneath Runnymede Bridge (with its golden bars, its smoky shadows). Out of these mysteries comes a metalled ribbon of consciousness, that saga of simultaneity: a tidal motorway carrying the psychic freight of all the landmass it contains.
The uplift, after the deadening effect of Westerham, is in finding ourselves on Beggars Lane – which flows into Green Lane, before being absorbed by the Pilgrims Way. It feels as though we have come through some sort of test. The hedges are high and the air is ripe (humming, throbbing) – with slurry. We might be the last humans. Uninhabited lanes and deserted farmhouses (protected by barking dogs) remind us, yet again, of The War of the Worlds. Complacency and patriotism, the givens of a great empire, challenged by fanatical aliens, viral invaders, off-screen primitives. It’s wafer thin, a membrane, the liberal-democratic consensus: aspirations, dialogue, technological advances. Pyres of dead sheep, smouldering dumps, are always in the next field. The estate, hidden behind a screen of poplars, contains a row of bacteriological research prefabs, where whitecoats are paid to think the unthinkable. To amuse themselves with ‘worst case’ scenarios.
On a farm, between the M25 and the Pilgrims Way, I take the final photograph that turns out to be something close to what I intended: a mass of tyres holding down a black polythene mound. A long-roofed barn, the kind Samuel Palmer liked to sketch, peeps over the curve of this Michelin dome. Call it: Death of the Motorway. A beach of black rubber necklaces. A negative of the Great White Tent on Bugsby’s Marshes.
Focus, which had been playing up since we left Merstham, gave way entirely: into the Valley of Vision. My spectacles were lost, abandoned, and my camera had a bad case of the Gerhard Richters: Richter pastoral. Snapshots with the shivers. The results, from here on, were truer to the way I felt, the way I really saw the road, than all my previous impersonal loggings. Incompetence meant: insight. Inscapes. The photograph of ‘Renchi on the Pilgrims Way’ is a painterly stew, not an identity card. The abandoned blue shirt, hanging across the white ground of the T-shirt, is a squeeze of Vlaminck.
There is liberation in these soft images. The road sign I recorded, PILGRIMS WAY, is now a long thin shape that defies interpretation; you can’t tell if it’s stone or tin. But the green that surrounds it, busy with black smears, white floaters, has a wondrous ambiguity. I’ve never (on our orbital walk) had the courage to let go in this way, the economics of photography require a visible return. I’m only doing it to keep a record of where we’ve been, the provocative details I’m sure to forget.
There is no detail. Wrecked focal length has pushed me into territory explored and espoused by visionary filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage (friend of the Black Mountain poets). The optics of risk. (‘My first instruction, then: if you happen to have a light meter – give it away,’ Brakhage wrote. ‘We must deal with the light of Nature, then with the Nature of Light. And set your science aside, please, as we’ve no more use for it than what is of it as embodied in the camera in hand.’)
The blurred images, first, simplify the narrative – then worry me towards a deeper, more considered sense of place. What doesn’t matter – script, commentary, hierarchy of significance – vanishes. It seems that the ‘faulty’ camera is now dictating the terms: I didn’t pass it
over to anyone met on the road, no such person existed. And yet, here we are, developed print in hand: Renchi and I in the same image. Two figures standing in a gap in the hedge. Distance is realised by bands of colour. The white lines on the road float free – like angelic footsteps. The camera, unprompted, has produced a double portrait.
Notice: a dead hare. Leaping. Flying. A messenger spirit; ears erect, hind legs stretched. With sharp focus, the creature is a roadside casualty, crawling with flies. Roadkill unworthy of the satchel. Now it’s a force of nature.
The rest of our walk is recorded on the same terms: soft shapes, ripe colour, more dream than document.
Our way, respecting the lie of the land, was straightforward: in theory, on the map. A footpath through Chevening Wood, across the north-flowing M25, to Otford. It had been a long day, but the early evening light, the North Downs behind us, churches among woods, brought us close to Samuel Palmer and his nocturnal wanderings.
I was delighted to find, in a letter from Palmer to George Richmond (fellow ‘Ancient’), intimations of the appropriate astigmatic vision. Palmer, met in town, was an eccentric figure: short, enveloped at all seasons in a trailing coat, protected by the broad rim of a Mad Hatter’s topper. His arms and legs were afterthoughts, vestigial appendages on a stubby torso. He felt the cold. He wore long white mufflers, layers of waistcoat. His coat was a tent. Every stroll through London was an expedition: pockets bulging with spare rations (biscuits, pies, cheese), inkwells, pens, sketch pads and libraries of books. Eyebrows lofted in an expression of perpetual surprise – the world too much in his face – he blinked behind a pair of large round spectacles. He was well aware of his own absurdity, he knew that he set young ladies ‘a-giggle’. From Shoreham, on 14 November 1827, he wrote to Richmond:
Tell them that herein is my disadvantage – whereas mine eyes are dim save when I look at a fair lady – and whereas I can only see their lustre thro’ my goggles, those said unlucky goggles so scratch’d and spoil’d that all the fire of the love darting artillery of my eyes is lost upon them and rebounds not to my advantage, the ladies seeing only two huge misty spheres of light scratchd and scribbled over like the sun in a fog or dirty dish in a dark pantry, as lustre lacking, as leaden and as lifeless as a lad without a lady. But tell them sometimes to think on me, as I very often think of them, as in sullen twilight rambles, sweet visions of lovely bright eyes suddenly sparkle round me, lume my dusky path – double the vigour of my pace, rebuild my manhood and renew my youth.
Our sullen twilight ramble ran straight up against the Chevening Estate; private road, path denied. A considerable detour. Arthur Mee in his guide to Kent writes of ‘a beautiful public walk through the park’. A walk that is now off-limits. We strain local hospitality by finding a hosepipe, with which to top up our water bottles, alongside a muck heap in the Home Farm.
‘Kent has no lovelier corner so near to London,’ gushes Mee. ‘It comes at the end of a lane that has no turning.’ This is very true. But turn we must, for a weary half-circuit of the park, dropping close to the motorway – before coming back to the village and St Botolph’s Church.
Chevening was the home of the Stanhopes. The house, Mee guessed, was ‘basically probably Inigo Jones’. Basically probable or not, the version I carried home, a smudge among the trees, would require an Indiana Jones to unravel its secrets: the private chapel, the Tudor and Elizabethan tombs that predated the Stanhopes.
Also buried here was the third earl, Charles Stanhope, politician and experimental scientist, who married William Pitt’s sister. Stanhope, aspiring to oblivion, erasure, asked to be interred at Chevening: as ‘a man of no account’. As a politician, the third earl acquired the nickname of ‘Citizen Stanhope’, by proposing to acknowledge the French Revolution. He found himself in a parliamentary minority of one. A medal was struck with that motto.
Mee glosses Citizen Stanhope’s scientific achievements: ‘He invented means for safe-guarding buildings against fire, took out patents for steam vessels, devised printing appliances which he presented to the public, perfected a process of stereotyping, had original ideas about electricity, shared lightning-conductor experiments with Benjamin Franklin, invented a microscopic lens which bears his name, devised a new way of making cement more durable, and found a way of curing wounds in trees.’
He walked about the village, alone, talking to himself, gesturing violently; a care-in-the-community aristo who brooded on cement overcoats for patching wounds in lightning-struck trees. The sort of free-associating, lateral-thinking boffin who might well have conceived of an orbital motorway – before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Before television existed to feather his pension.
My slanted, out-of-focus church tower (St Botolph’s) is a homage to Stanhope. We have to conjure some human presence to revive this latest empty village, this evening set. We’re in the claw of the motorway, the volute of Junction 5. From the road, motorists barely notice the hills, parks, spires: Samuel Palmer quotations. They have no sense of what it is to be in the village of Chevening at twilight; the golds and the greens, the avenue alongside the burying ground. Such (oppressive) tranquillity can only be achieved by taking land into the custodianship of the MOD, the National Trust, an exclusive golf course. The Pilgrims Way, a clear path from Titsey to Otford, suffers from indignities inflicted by private landlords and estate managers.
Closing on the M25, by Lime Pit Lane, we pass Morant’s Court Farm. This was where London carters, coming out of town through Bromley, dropped Samuel Palmer’s visitors: the Ancients, John Linnell, William and Catherine Blake. Palmer would send out a boy to meet them, guide them in, by just the way we were walking. Linnell, notoriously careful with his cash, tried to arrange his own transport on carts carrying furniture or farm produce. In 1829, unwell, in need of recuperation, revival of spirits, he arrived with George Richmond at Morant’s Court Hill: to be greeted by ‘a strangely dressed figure with a wheelbarrow’. He was trundled away, oblivious to the remarks of coachman and passengers, towards the village of Shoreham.
The delusion persists: the Valley of Vision, Earthly Paradise, is a one-day walk from London (Charing Cross or Millennium Dome, according to taste). A few hours, drudging through industrial dereliction, suburbs, captured villages, will carry the walker into Arcadia. Or, at worst, the town dweller’s version of it. The dream. Linnell, broken in health, vexed by his large family, wrote to Palmer: ‘I have found so much benefit from my short visit to your valley… I Dream of being there every night almost and when I wake it is some time before I recollect that I am at Bayswater.’
Sleep channels open. Lost highways matted with grass. City life is made tolerable by the knowledge that a single day’s travel will deposit you in this bowl of tranquillity. Waltham Abbey, Shoreham, the Lea and Darent Valleys: paradise reservations. So it seemed. So the Victorian artists (craftsmen, seekers) insisted: selective vision. Varnished and glowing; red and gold and green. William Blake’s methods adapted to piety and sentiment. Rick burning, trade unionism, Luddite outrages: such manifestations of rural discontent were denounced. The Valley of Vision was a Tuscany for weekend runaways in search of the Simple Life (i.e. cheap farmhouse lodgings, cider, music, the romance of hop picking). Palmer loved September. He was always trying to persuade his mates to come down for the hop season; so picturesque, autumnal – exclusive.
The forensic sharpness of Linnell, Palmer – and, in due course, the Pre-Raphaelites – is contradicted by the evidence of my out-of-focus camera. The motorway really could be water. When Blake made his only visit to Shoreham, in a stage wagon (like a pioneer trekking to the American West), drawn by a team of horses, he didn’t appear as outlandish as the Ancients – who wandered the countryside declaiming from Macbeth and talking talking talking. Blake settled in a smoky chimney-corner with his churchwarden pipe, to discuss (with Palmer’s rackety, bookseller father) what they called ‘the traverse of sympathy’.
What should have been our golden road, ou
r ‘traverse of sympathy’, carrying us outside the M25 and down to Otford, was a long-shadowed hell: Palmer’s sticky nocturnes invaded by Robert Crumb. Ugly motors eager to do damage. Rage pods caught between hedges. Better to head off, dodging oncoming traffic in the fast lane of the motorway, than stick with the Pilgrims Way. It’s a rat run, the revenge of the commuters. Deserted villages are coming to life: it’s madness, so we’re told, twice a day. And death-in-life the rest of the time. Lights on, blue TV windows, dogs to walk.
We manage to get off the road – which has no verge – and into the fields, the heavy earth; but we’re soon returned. There is no other route. Every third car is a red Jag: either they’ve been watching too many episodes of Morse, or they want to hide the roadkill on the paintwork. Otford, with its quaint High Street, its proudly timbered survivors, its pond and Tudor ruins, is notable, so far as we’re concerned, for one feature: the railway station.
Here Offa fought a great battle with the Men of Kent. He has my sympathies. A few more miles of the Pilgrims Way (twinned with Brands Hatch) and I’d be ready for Linnell’s wheelbarrow. It’s been a long haul, but we’ve made it to the Darent Valley; now we can head north, back to the Thames.
Our train journeys (reverse commuting) are always unreal. People heading into London are dressed for action, talking compulsively (if in company), unable to sit still if travelling alone. We’re slumped, dirty, silent: if we look out of the window at the flashing suburbs, it feels as if we’re cheating. Train travel is a film for which we haven’t bought a ticket. Otefort. Otta’s ford. The otter is one of the ‘clean’ animals of Zoroastrianism; which, with the dog, it is a great sin to kill. Put aside that grim final hour on the road. Let it be. We’ll be back before Palmer’s hop season is over.
London Orbital Page 40
