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Whilst sorting through my late father-in-law’s photographic equipment recently, I found a number of files of studies he had made of the ever-changing skies of Devon and Cornwall. He had lived with very bad health in his later years and this prevented him … Continue reading
One March afternoon I climbed over the fence which divides my neighbour’s land from mine, and walked on his farm as though it were my own. I looked on it, not in a jealously possessive way, but simply as I might if there were no such thing as land property and all the people held all the land in common. . The land was here before us and will outlive us. The land is not inanimate, it owns us, and we are just some of its creatures. The land lends us minerals, feeds us, clothes us and when we die it takes back all it has given.
Anthony Wigens was a writer and teacher and wrote his only commercially published book, The Clandestine Farm, in 1981.
Wigens took his inspiration from Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, Gilbert White and Pyotr Kropotkin. He set out to challenge the myth that certain privileged individuals can exclusively ‘own’ the land upon which we all live. The Clandestine Farm is the story of how he translated these ideas into a practical experiment in his local fields and woods.
The scene of Wigens’s experiment was Lockleys Farm, a stretch of land adjoining the garden of his home near Welwyn Garden City; a farm for which one George Baron held the title. In trespassing on his neighbour’s land, Wigens asserted that he was upholding his common law rights. He set out to exercise his right to gather some of nature’s wild harvest and also to raise edible plants in some of the marginal corners the farmer did not cultivate. However, he was scrupulously careful not to take any of the produce which the farmer grew and ‘did nothing to harm them or restrict his privileges. I neither squatted nor expropriated, nor was I a thief.’
Taking his cue from the writings of continental anarchists, such as Proudhon, and the tradition of English utopian socialism, Wigens rails against the iniquities of our present system of land ownership. He cites the Inclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which extinguished most of the common land rights of ordinary people, as the root of the problem.
Wigens sets out to assert these rights once more by systematically straying from his local public footpaths and encroaching onto land for which someone else held the title. He describes how he forages for nature’s bounty and how his efforts meet with mixed success. Good King Henry, Jack-by-the-hedge (wild garlic), salad burnet, puffball fungus and chickweed were all good. But dandelion leaves he finds very bitter and Roman snails chewy and tasteless. Wigens also exercised his right to gather firewood in the woods near his house.
His boldest experiment was to cultivate Good King Henry, a native spinach-like plant, in a neglected corner of one of George Baron’s fields. The point of the experiment was not so much to raise a decent crop for his own family, but to show up the inequalities of the present system of land ownership. Most of our countryside is owned and farmed by a small number of people while the rest of us have little or no land upon which to grow our own food. Yet within these large farms, indeed throughout our rural and urban areas, one finds neglected, fenced-off plots of land lying abandoned, unloved and uncultivated.
Stepping Over the Fence
Wild Garlic
Good King Henry
Salad Burnet
Chickweed
But reading The Clandestine Farm, one cannot help feeling that there is something slightly old-fashioned and middle-class about Wigens’s lone attempts to impose order upon an innately anarchic natural world. He fights a never-ending battle against the native bracken of the spot at the edge of the woods where he wishes to raise his crop. I found myself thinking of my own allotment and the areas upon it I have chosen to leave wild so that the insects and birds can thrive. Indeed, I can almost convince myself that I am not being slovenly, but am following a deliberate and ecologically-sound strategy!
To give Anthony Wigens his due, he begins to realise the limitations of his lone experiment towards the end of this book:
Looking back on the events described in this book, what surprises me most is the solitary nature of all the activities. This was me, just a few years ago before I accepted my own need for a more communal life. And yet what moved me to farm clandestinely moves me still, a need to explore ways of living off the land without owning it, without excluding the rights of others to have access to it… I farm urban wasteland, and I work with others to make these disused plots productive.
Putting aside any quibbles about the practical usefulness of Wigens’s clandestine farming experiment, this is, without doubt, a humane and wise book which raises questions about the ownership of land; questions that are as relevant today as they were to the radicals of the English Civil War. In many ways, Wigens’s clandestine farm was not so much a physical place, as one which lived in his imagination. And the human imagination is the most fertile of all soils.
Not everyone who feels alienated from the land will want to go as far as I have gone. They may not understand why it is so important to take the gifts of the land; they may be concerned to know what the law permits, or to learn what difficulties they may encounter. It is to answer these questions that I have written this book.
Book cover image – Paladin Press
Images 1 and 2 – Bobby Seal
Images 3, 4 and 5 – courtesy of Creative Commons
This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:
‘Selected Essays’ – Virginia Woolf
‘Rodinsky’s Room’ – Rachel Lichtenstein & Iain Sinclair
‘Underground’ – Tobias Hill
‘England All Over’ – Joseph Gallivan
‘The Great God Pan’ – Arthur Machen
‘The Accidental Woman’ – Jonathan Coe
Meanwhile, we were listening to:
‘First Burning Attraction’ – Damien Dubrovnik
‘Stones’ – Colin Stetson & Mats Gustafsson
‘Unhalfbricking’ – Fairport Convention
‘For the Roses’ – Joni Mitchell
And watching:
‘Blow Up’ – Michelangelo Antonioni
‘Two-Lane Blacktop’ – Monte Hellman
‘Daughters of Darkness’ – Harry Kümel
‘Winstanley’ – Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo
Walking along my favourite local route. An old railway track – post-industrial,
abandoned and overgrown, but still indelibly human-made. Cutting and bridge, a levelled
track-bed.
And when I dream
I dream I can fly.
The track passes under a busy trunk road; a concrete bridge, hard, austere and coldly
beautiful in its simple form.
My wings are golden,
Yellow like the dawn
A suitable canvas then for local street artists, none of them with any formal training, but
each successfully creating work that unites the natural and the constructed world. A
sudden splash of light, colour and vibrancy amid a dank liminal space; a jolt to prompt the
walker from a sleepwalk of footfalls into a new and different perception of the landscape.
Fearless, I beat my wings
Against the unyielding glass.
All images – Bobby Seal
Poem – extract from Butterfly in a Jar by Bobby Seal
Until relatively recently, women have been noticeable only by their absence from the tradition of Anglo-American high modernism. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats – these are the names which have dominated the English modernist literary canon, with Virginia Woolf representing a token female presence.
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester & New York, Manchester University Press, 1997)
Katherine Mansfield was, until recently, regarded as very much a minor figure in the development of modernism. But the growth of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, particularly the work of Hélène Cixous and others in France, has led to a reappraisal of Mansfield’s work, and in particular her short stories.
What Mansfield had in common with other modernist writers, including those who were male, is a questioning of the nature of truth and reality; a challenging of the certainties and assumptions that had underpinned Victorian fiction. The very notion of objective truth was viewed as suspect by Mansfield. As David Daiches puts it:
Truth viewed in terms of the conventions and assumptions of a stable civilization ceased to be regarded as truth when it became obvious that that civilization was losing its stability, when its criteria of value were ceasing to be universal, and when its conventions were coming to be viewed as irrelevant.
David Daiches, Katherine Mansfield and the Search for Truth in Rhoda B Nathan (ed), Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield (New York, Maxwell MacMillan International, 1993)
Through the Lens of Gender
But Mansfield brought something else to the modernist table; not just a questioning of the nature of truth and reality, but an appreciation of the crucial role of gender. One of the key assumptions that Mansfield, and other female modernists, challenged was the habit of presenting narrative fiction through male eyes and according to male values. This had implications not just for her outlook, but for her narrative style too.
Katherine Mansfield’s writings suggest a sense of personal truth; a subjective truth based on female experience in a society where women were still marginalised. In terms of form, Mansfield explored these ideas through the short story. This was partly because her writing career was cut tragically short by her early death, but also because this form gave her a structure within which to polish her characters and experiment in form. Indeed, some critics go so far as to suggest the short story format is particularly suited to writers exploring a feminist world view.
Many of Mansfield’s short stories focus on those estranged or isolated by society, in particular women. Bliss is about a young woman struggling to understand her own newly discovered sexuality, Miss Brill concerns an impoverished, lonely spinster and Pictures a struggling singer who is forced to turn to prostitution. Mansfield wrote at a time when women, and some men, were questioning traditional gender roles. The movement for women’s suffrage was demanding political equality, the spread of psychoanalytical theories increasingly gave a conceptual framework to female sexuality and writers such as Mansfield, Woolf and Richardson were asserting that they had a voice which needed to be heard.
As a writer, Katherine Mansfield was particularly interested in exploring female identity and sexuality. Many of her female characters – Bertha Young in Bliss, Ada Moss in Pictures and Miss Brill in the short story of that name – are represented as experiencing a crisis of identity. Indeed, in many cases Mansfield’s female characters can be said to have a fragmented identity, suggesting they are experiencing a struggle to integrate their internal and external selves within the strictures of a male-dominated society. In common with other modernist writers, Mansfield focussed on her characters’ internal life rather than the external world.
Although she generally wrote using a third-person narrative, she is able to shift in and out of the minds of her characters and consistently succeeds in revealing their psychological state. Mansfield used symbolism to give the reader insights into the psychological state of her characters; she used evocative images rather than analytical description. Her short stories are full of these symbols: the pear tree and the cat in Bliss, the fox-fur wrap in Miss Brill and the glove in A Dill Pickle.
Mansfield’s most successful short stories, such as Bliss, have a palpable sense of intensity and power. Her stories are a triumph of style, challenging nineteenth century realism and overcoming the conventional constraints of plot, sequential development and conclusion. Although she was perhaps not central to the modernist movement, Mansfield shared the determination of others, such as Woolf and Joyce, to develop new ways of seeing and describing. In a way similar to contemporaneous changes in the visual arts, Mansfield’s short stories concentrate on communicating moods, impressions and transient emotions.
The key to many of Mansfield’s short stories is the moment of epiphany; the point at which the character achieves a degree of self-realisation. But this realisation rarely leads to happiness. In A Dill Pickle, for instance, Vera is devastated when she suddenly realises that her former lover, although he is clearly vain and self-opinionated, understands her far better than she understands herself. Or in Bliss, in a moment of aching poignancy, Bertha’s sexual awakening is quickly followed by her discovery of her husband’s infidelity with Miss Fulton. Her pain is expressed by Mansfield’s use of unplayed music as a symbol. Bertha is an instrument eager to be played for the first time:
Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?
Mansfield’s characters live in a world where options for women are limited. Women, in particular the middle-class women that Mansfield was most familiar with, could be daughters or wives; or perhaps left in the socially inferior state of spinsterhood. In between a woman being dependent on her parents and, later, on her husband was a carefully regulated process of courtship. Independence and a career was rarely an option. Married women, unless exceptionally poor, did not go out to work. Schoolteachers had to give up their career upon marriage. Society accepted the working spinster, but not the working wife.
In Bliss, Mansfield presents a society where married women exist in a subordinate position to their husband and where male hypocrisy is the norm. The adulterous husband, Harry, is confident in his dominant position in the marital household. He turns back to his wife, Bertha, after having escorted his lover to the door at the end of a dinner party, still ‘extravagantly cool and collected’.
Rosemary Fell is the rich, bored married woman in A Cup of Tea. Unlike Bertha Young, we learn nothing in the story of her sexuality or the extent of her husband’s fidelity. In some ways, she stands outside the bonds restricting less privileged women of her time. She is:
young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important people and… artists – quaint creatures, discoveries of hers
However, we learn that Rosemary has anxieties of her own. She worries about how she looks – about whether she fits the male definition of an attractive woman. She at first enjoys the adventure of picking up a young woman, Miss Smith, in Curzon Street when she asks her for money to buy a cup of tea. She takes her home, feeds her and promises to take care of her: ‘I’ll look after you.’ However, once Rosemary realises that her husband, Philip, has noticed that Miss Smith is attractive, Rosemary quickly dismisses her. In spite of all her material advantages, Rosemary seems to fear that her husband’s interest in her is only fleeting and dependent on her looks. At the conclusion of the story, once Miss Smith has gone, she asks her husband the question on her mind:
‘Philip,’ she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, ‘am I pretty?
Bliss is Mansfield’s best known exposition of female sexuality. The story opens with Bertha Young’s sudden and growing awareness of her own sensuality as she walks home along the street. At first there is a suggestion that this is a spiritual state, but it is quickly revealed as repressed sexual desire. Upon arriving home, she tries to find an outlet for these new feelings by arranging the fruit that has been delivered for that evening’s dinner party. Mansfield describes this process lovingly and sensually:
There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones.
Bertha stands back to admire her work:
she stood away from the table to get the effect – and it really was most curious. For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air. This, of course in her present mood, was so incredibly beautiful. . . She began to laugh.
Still struggling to understand these new feelings, Bertha goes to the nursery, feeling the need to show her affection for her child. But soon, the nurse hustles her away and Bertha continues to prepare for the dinner party. At the party, Bertha feels drawn to Pearl Fulton, her pretty and stylish new friend. She shows Pearl the pear tree in the garden. Standing at the window of the drawing room together, she experiences a sense of silent, intimate communion with Pearl:
How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?
But Bertha represses any physical feelings she may have for Pearl and realises, for perhaps the first time, that she desires her husband. But Bertha’s ‘bliss’ is soon thwarted. Having embraced the idea of both a more intimate friendship with Pearl Fulton and stronger physical relationship with her husband, Bertha’s hopes in both directions are dashed when she realises that Pearl and Harry are having an affair with each other and that she is excluded from intimacy with both. Some critics, such as Merja Makinen, have questioned Mansfield’s portrayal of female sexuality in Bliss. Having recognised her own sexuality, even to the extent of threatening to overcome the norm of the passive female, Bertha is pushed back into a corner where married women have very little say in how they express their sexuality.
But unmarried women fare no better in Mansfield’s short stories. In Miss Brill, for instance, she creates a bleak portrait of an impoverished, lonely spinster. Miss Brill’s habitual Sunday rituals help maintain her sense of identity:
They were all on the stage. They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all. How strange she’d never thought of it like that before!
She convinces herself that she is part of a community of people who visit the park every weekend; but her illusion is shattered by the hostility of a young couple who mock her:
Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?
Miss Brill’s precarious sense of identity and sexuality is embodied in the mangy fox fur wrap she wears:
Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.
When Miss Brill returns home from the park, chastened by her confrontation with the young couple, all her lonely sadness seems to be embodied into the fox wrap:
She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
In Pictures, Mansfield represents a female central character not even able to hide behind a mask of genteel poverty of the kind projected by Miss Brill. Ada Moss is a singer, out of work and penniless, she lives in a dingy top-floor bedsit for which she struggles to pay the rent. Even her looks, which once brought her regular work on the stage, are fading:
She flung off the bedclothes, and sitting on the side of the bed, furious and shivering, she stared at her fat white legs with the great knots of greeny-blue veins.
Without the respectability and relative material security provided by being attached to a man, she must sell herself at an endless and dispiriting round of agents and auditions. The story presents a snapshot of one such day, when the rent is overdue and she cannot find work. Tired and in despair, she meets a man in a café and goes off with him, seemingly to sell the only thing she has of her own for the money to pay her rent:
Five minutes later the stout gentleman heaved himself up. ‘Well, am I goin’ your way, or are you comin’ mine?’ he asked. ‘I’ll come with you, if it’s all the same,’ said Miss Moss. And she sailed after the little yacht out of the café.
Mansfield’s short stories present a bleak picture of life for women in early twentieth-century England. For married women, even those from the middle classes, life frequently brings alienation, powerlessness and sexual frustration. For single women, their social position makes them even more vulnerable to exploitation by men and often brings loneliness and poverty.
Power and Alienation
As a modernist writer, Katherine Mansfield developed new ways of seeing, interpreting and recording the world around her. Her short stories demonstrate a determination to move away from narrative forms dominated by the all-wise, authoritarian, almost exclusively male, writers of previous generations and to write in a way that represents, in a direct manner, the feelings and responses of her characters. Mansfield was not a political writer, but her stories are rooted in the social, cultural and political upheavals of her time.
Concepts of alienation were by no means new at the time Mansfield was writing – Karl Marx developed the concept into a radical and secularized critique of society. He focussed, in particular, on the alienation of the working class under capitalism. Sigmund Freud took notions of estrangement into the personal realm, focussing in particular on human sexuality. He highlighted the problem of the split between the conscious and unconscious personality. Repressed or unacknowledged desires, Freud argued, were the chief cause of psychological illness. Repressed sexuality is a frequent theme in Mansfield’s short stories; most notably in Bliss.
Bliss makes no direct reference to the suffrage campaign nor to contemporary demands for women’s equality. However, it clearly represents Mansfield’s expression of the subordination of women; a subordination that gave rise to these movements.
Beneath the superficial contentment and material comfort of Bertha’s life, Mansfield portrays a smouldering sense of alienation. She shows the reader a society where women are estranged from their own bodies and from any expression of their sexuality. Bertha struggles to come to terms with her new-found sense of her own sexuality, the ‘bliss’ of the title. We get to know nothing of the origin of this new feeling in Bertha. Her reactions to it are complex – she both embraces it and fears it:
It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply.
She is alienated from her body and Mansfield describes her attempts to find external channels to express her new desires – fruit, her child, a pear tree in the garden – before Bertha comes to the conclusion that it is her husband, Harry, that she desires:
At those last words something strange and almost terrifying darted into Bertha’s mind. And this something blind and smiling whispered to her: ‘Soon these people will go. The house will be quiet – quiet. The lights will be out. And you and he will be alone together in the dark room – the warm bed . . .
But this is a false epiphany: the evening ends with the shattering of Bertha’s dream when she overhears Harry arranging a meeting with Miss Fulton. All she is left with is the pear tree in the garden and seemingly no legitimate outlet for her bliss. Harry, on the other hand, holds the power within their marriage and is able to maintain respectability, an ordered home and children with Bertha whilst at the same time enjoying sexual fulfilment outside that marriage with Pearl Fulton.
But Pearl’s position is perhaps even more precarious than Bertha’s. She relies on her youth and looks – qualities which are by their very nature ephemeral – to attract powerful men such as Harry. Both women are united in a common need to rely on men to give them their sense of self; to feel a sense of purpose.
At the time that Mansfield was writing, Freud was developing his psychoanalytical theories in Vienna. Analysing the social and sexual relationships of the time, he asserted that neurotic symptoms were the product of an unresolved conflict between unconscious impulses and conscious ones. The repression of one’s sexual feelings, which society of that time demanded of all, but especially of women, lay at the root of what Freud called ‘hysteria’ or what, currently, we would call mental health problems.
Bliss is arguably Mansfield’s most accomplished work. She presents a surface story of a day in Bertha Young’s life. However, beneath this she incorporates more sombre tones which, through suggestion rather than exposition, question the nature of Bertha’s new found feelings. As the story unfolds, Mansfield confirms her credentials as a modernist writer by her skilful combining of incident, image, symbol, and structure. These subtly point to the socially-determined obstacles which hamper Bertha’s expression of her ‘bliss’.
A Dill Pickle also explores this area of the power relationships between men and women. Vera and the unnamed male protagonist of the story were once lovers. After a six year hiatus they meet again in a café; whether by chance or arrangement we are not told. A Dill Pickle is typical of many of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories in that it seems to start in the middle; the reader is not told what happened before the story starts, nor what comes after. Although the story is told from Vera’s viewpoint, we learn very little about her. The man, on the other hand, although un-named, provides a great deal of detail about himself.
Vera and her former lover reminisce about the time they spent together. He has clearly prospered since the end of their relationship:
Now he had the air of a man who has found his place in life, and fills it with a confidence and assurance which was, to say the least, impressive. He must have made money, too. His clothes were admirable, and at that moment he pulled a Russian cigarette case out of his pocket.
Vera, on the other hand has gone down in the world since they parted; her beloved piano has gone: ‘sold, ages ago’, and she no longer has time for music. As a woman alone in a male society, a woman with a past, she struggles to make a living. With only thinly disguised glee, he highlights the power imbalance that prosperity has created between them. She fascinates him still, but he is no longer in her thrall. He makes a point of reminding her of the letter she wrote to him at the end of their relationship:
I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote to me as you did – although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever – such a true picture of me.
With carefully chosen anecdotes, he parades a world of travel and the fine things of life before Vera. He confesses he was ‘such a kid’ before, but now he seeks to impress her with the wisdom and sophistication he has gained. Vera is tempted, but the balance of power between them has clearly shifted. She leaves swiftly and without a word, as if trying to snatch at some last remnant of her dignity. Although the man’s crushing sense of his own self-importance is made clear, Mansfield also suggests a hint of egotism on Vera’s part too.
The latter decades of the nineteenth-century saw major changes in the rights of women to keep their own earnings and inherited wealth through the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882. Further advances were made in the early twentieth century through changes to custody and guardianship law and the introduction of universal suffrage. However, Katherine Mansfield was able to demonstrate, through her short stories, that women throughout this period were kept in an almost universally subordinate position to men. Mansfield’s achievement was made, not through polemic, but through the creation of stories containing characters of great psychological depth; characters with a tangible inner life.
Mansfield’s Women
Some critics have regarded Mansfield as a failed novelist who plied her writing trade in the somewhat lightweight arena of the short-story. Virginia Woolf once suggested that Mansfield was lacking ‘the ability to plot larger structures’. I would contend, however, that Mansfield was, in fact, an innovative and profound writer who happened to work mainly in the short-story form. She was unashamedly a woman writing short stories about women. Indeed, it can be argued that Mansfield did not need to write a novel; she was fully occupied by continually experimenting and trying to write the perfect short story.
Perhaps Mansfield’s greatest achievement was, in style and content, to question the nature of truth and reality and to present a new truth and a new reality, written from a female perspective. There were a number of factors which encouraged Mansfield’s experimentation with new ways of writing: the rise of the psychoanalytic movement, the shock waves created by the Great War and the general questioning and challenging by artistic movements in all spheres of expression.
Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, snarns, snickets – say the names of paths out loud and they become a poem or rite – holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths.
‘The Old Ways’ – Robert MacFarlane (2012)
The names trip off the tongue with honeyed ease, seeming to touch upon a folk memory. Well-worn ways leading somewhere, even though the destination is not immediately apparent. A poetry of footfalls; a loving caress across the land.
The plan was a riverside walk, following the Dee from Holt towards Bangor-on-Dee and then back again. A fine day for a walk, mild and sunny; the best walking day of the year to date. And what better place to start? Holt is a fine medieval village with a fourteenth-century sandstone bridge linking Wales and England and the ruin of a castle built by Edward 1. The Romans had a brickworks here which supplied the clay tiles for Deva, as Chester was known then.
My pretext was to do some research for a novel I’m writing, but who needed a pretext to walk on such a glorious February day? For anyone who’s interested, this poem will give you some idea of the content of the novel.
It would be a long walk; some eighteen miles to Bangor and back, but we could always cut it short and head back if we needed to. Anyway, it was such a lovely day and the going on flat, established paths across water meadows would be easy. A grassy path bound by hedges led us down from the village to the castle and the riverside where we were to start our walk. I remembered the castle from previous visits, set on a sandstone bluff some fifty metres from the river. We were aware there had been snow a couple of weeks before, followed by heavy rain the week after, but we’re town-dwellers and it hadn’t occurred to us that the water meadows, as the name implies, would be flooded. In fact, the castle had gained a moat and the riverside path had been submerged under a lake.
I had always thought Holt Castle was quite a sad, forlorn ruin but, with the river in flood that day, it looked stunning: with its sandstone plinth and stonework glowing warmly above the glassy sheen of the floodwater.
We explored round the edges of the newly-formed lake. We didn’t climb into the castle this time, but I have to confess the lure of its forbidden gateway has proved too difficult to resist on at least one previous visit. Funnily enough, though, the ruin is actually more interesting to explore from the outside.
Having been thwarted from our planned walk upstream, we decided to head back through the village and pick up the path downstream towards Aldford by crossing the bridge over to the English side of the river at Farndon and following the riverside path. Farndon bridge is made of local sandstone and has stood at this important crossing for more than six hundred years. Legend has it that the bridge is haunted; locals and visitors have reported sightings of a Civil War royalist soldier on the bridge. Over the years there have also been regular claims of people hearing the screams of two children who were reportedly drowned when pushed from the bridge in medieval times.
We didn’t find any spirits, or none that made themselves known to us anyway, but we did find a lot more water: the meadow was flooded here too and the riverside path towards Aldford was under water. Although we couldn’t follow the river in either direction, we didn’t want to go home – it was a great day for walking and we hadn’t even started on the coffee and sandwiches yet! It was also probably a little to early to retire to one of the many enticing village pubs. So we decided to walk – no map, no plan, no destination – just walking for the sake of walking; seeing where our feet took us.
The French Situationists wrote about walking without an overt purpose as a political act. Guy Debord’s concept of the dérive took walking into the political arena by replacing the everyday, permissible ways of navigating the landscape with the idea of a drifting journey on foot during which one paid close attention to the changing moods and resonances the landscape suggests. Rebecca Solnit echoed this approach more recently and advocated the merits of allowing oneself to become lost. Writing about a Virginia Woolf essay on walking in London, she comments:
For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. This dissolution of identity is familiar to travelers in foreign places and remote fastnesses, but Woolf, with her acute perception of the nuances of consciousness, could find it in a stroll down the street…
‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ – Rebecca Solnit (2005)
So with the way upstream and downstream cut off, we walked up the slope from the bridge and into Farndon and along the main street of the village. Fancy led us to take the first left in the village, past a few cottages and out onto an increasingly narrow lane. Half a kilometre or so along the lane we came to a public footpath sign which led us through a gap in the hedge and into open farmland. Very open farmland; large, flat fields of grass ready for when the overwintering cattle were turned out.
The River Dee to our west and, beyond that, the Welsh hills were the only significant features in this prairie-like landscape. So when did all this happen? When was it that this corner of Cheshire started to resemble parts of East Anglia? Farndon, once famous for its small strawberry fields, has had its small-scale farms rolled over by agri-business. Hedgerows and wildlife pushed to the margins and all diversity of cultivation eroded.
The late John Seymour wrote about change of this kind affecting our countryside back in the 1970s:
‘We can’t stop progress!’ is the parrot cry of the inane. Of course we can’t stop progress, but we can decide in which direction we wish to progress. I am crazy about progress. I want us all to start progressing towards more decentralization – more self sufficiency.
The agri-businessman has no regard for the permanent fertility of the land he holds – he merely uses the ground as a base to hold up his plants. These he feeds with imported chemicals , sprays to combat the inevitable disease, and keeps from weed competition by more imported chemicals.
‘Bring Me My Bow’ – John Seymour (1977)
In the early years of the twentieth century major industrialists began to follow the ‘scientific management’ principles of F W Taylor. Exponents of Taylorism analysed work flows for the purpose of ironing out blockages and speeding up production. Human beings were regarded as just another part of the production process.
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.
‘Principles of Scientific Management’ – Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911)
Later in the century, the same principles began to be applied to farming: bigger fields, fewer workers, more machines, more reliance on the petro-chemical industry.
First of all there is a trend for everything to become bigger and bigger. We call this quality ‘economies of scale’.
He was a deeply worried man when he showed me how dependent he had become on the industrial system, and if anything really went wrong, then the farm would collapse.
‘Good Work’ – E F Schumacher (1979)
We enjoyed our walk but, as we followed a wide circle of the farmland surrounding the village, I had a growing feeling of there being something vaguely unsettling about these fields; a cognitive dissonance of wandering through a place that looked something like the countryside, but which felt like a factory.
We walked on tracks, but not tracks worn by the feet of people over many years, but tracks built for farm machinery to access one field and then another. These were clearly not MacFarlane’s ‘old ways’ but were the desire lines of a highly-efficient farming business. Yet, in the corners and margins, odd bits of unregulated life were mercifully still to be found
Footpaths are mundane in the best sense of that word: ‘worldly’, open to all. As rights of way determined and sustained by use, they constitute a labyrinth of liberty, a slender network of common land that still threads through our aggressively privatized world of barbed wire and gates, CCTV cameras and ‘No Trespassing’ signs.
‘The Old Ways’ – Robert MacFarlane (2012)
This past month at Psychogeographic Review we have been been reading our Christmas presents:
‘The Old Ways’ – Robert MacFarlane
‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ – Rebecca Solnit
‘London: The Autobiography’ – Jon E Lewis
‘The Magic Toyshop’ – Angela Carter
‘Holes’ – Louis Sacher
‘Standing in Another Man’s Grave’ – Ian Rankin
Meanwhile, we were listening to:
‘Kind of Blue’ – Miles Davis
‘Virtue’ – Emmy the Great
‘Eyes Set Against the Sun’ – Mira Calix
‘Emika’ – Emika
No films this month, but a couple of TV programmes worth catching:
‘Borgen’ – BBC 4, UK
‘Utopia’ – Channel 4, UK
Goodbye, blue sky
Goodbye, blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye, blue sky
Goodbye, blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye
from Goodbye Blue Sky by Joni Mitchell
Godbye sun. Goodbye blue sky. Skyreburn, August 2011
A reminder to look up and see the greatest free show on/above Earth
We had an old copy of The Riddle of the Sands in our house when I was a boy. It seemed to me that we’d had it forever, though the inscription in it told me that it was actually a school prize from the 1950s belonging to my Dad’s cousin. I’m not sure how it ended up with us.
From early childhood that book fascinated me, although I didn’t actually read it until I was a teenager. What captured my imagination right from the first were the pen and ink maps that illustrated the text. Maps of Germany’s East Frisian coastline and sea charts of the channels and sandbanks around the island of Nordeney. For me, with the feverish imagination of a child who spent rather too much time in his own head, these maps were a rich source of day-dreams. Dreams involving the sea, sand and swift boats. Boats like the Dulcibella, in which the two heroes of The Riddle of the Sands, Davies and Carruthers, sailed these waters.
I only read the book once in my teens, but it lived on in my imagination so vividly that I kept that copy with me when I left home to go to university and afterwards when I lived for a time in Germany. Though I never read it again, at least not until very recently, I would still take an occasional look at those maps, as if to try to recapture something from my childhood.
I packed the book again, of course, when I split up with my German girlfriend of that time and decided to head back to Britain. But before leaving Germany, perhaps on a whim, but more likely to try to satisfy a long-held wish, I decided to make a short visit to the Nordsee coast.
I took the train from Bremen and arrived at Norddeich-Mole at just after eight thirty. It was still light, this being June, but I’d missed the last ferry to Nordeney. The smell of HB cigarettes and currywurst lingered in the booking hall. I walked out into the street quickly before the familiar aroma could wrap its clinging, pleading fingers around me.
As I walked I felt for the letter in my pocket just as I had a dozen times or more aboard the train. Gabriele would be in Berlin by now, with the rest of the band. And Rolf. What to do until morning? I really couldn’t face going into a bar or checking into a pension. For a start, I couldn’t be bothered making the effort to converse in German and was really not in the mood for easy bar-room bonhomie. I decided to find somewhere to wait and, perhaps, doze, then catch the first ferry in the morning.
I sat on the harbour wall, leaning against my rucksack and gazing across the silver-grey sea towards Juist and Nordeney. Cold, shallow waters, treacherous currents and shifting sands. A landscape constantly changing, but somehow always the same. Davies and Carruthers, Erskine Childers’s yin and yang alter-ego, came to know these waters well, and almost died in the process.
So why am I recommending this book in a psychogeographic blog? Well, it’s something to do with the fact that it was a very particular landscape that inspired Erskine Childers to write his only novel. His descriptions, in turn, fired my imagination and caused me to be marked by a landscape I hadn’t even visited; though in my mind it felt very familiar.
And to understand the novel one has to understand its writer. Robert Erskine Childers, like his main protagonist Carruthers, was a pillar of the British establishment: born in Mayfair to an Anglo-Irish land-owning family, Cambridge graduate, parliamentary clerk and veteran of the Boer War. But, like his other leading character, the unconventional Davies, Erskine Childers was a man not given to doing exactly what was expected of him. He became a committed Irish nationalist in later life and was executed by a Free State firing squad.
Robert Erskine Childers
At the start of the book, Carruthers joins Davies on his yacht, the Dulcibella, in the Baltic. Davies reveals that he wishes to retrace his previous voyage around the sands of the Frisian Islands, where he had been deliberately run aground, and almost killed, by Dollmann, a German salvage operator. Davies suspects that Dollman is, in fact, English and works for the Germans. Together they find Dollmann and discover plans for a large invasion force of German ships. They attempt to force Dollmann to return to England but he commits suicide, jumping into the sea from the Dulcibella. Carruthers and Davies return to England and Germany’s plans are revealed to the British Government. Carruthers ends his tale at this point, making clear to the reader: “our personal history is of no concern to the outside world.” (p. 297).
Childers’s reveals his plot in The Riddle of the Sands with careful and steady patience. His writing is rich in description, conveying in great detail the skills required to sail a small craft. He carefully evokes the eerie landscape and seascape of the Frisian Islands, which were familiar to him from his own sailing trips in these waters. The descriptions sometimes weigh heavily on the narrative, but they are important to Childers’s objective; he wished to warn of the danger of a German invasion of England, with shallow-draft craft utilising the shelter of the maze of islands along this coast in order to launch a surprise attack. In this context, his meticulous descriptions of tides and channels and the continual reference to the accompanying maps and sea charts are as important as the plot itself. He seems to feel his efforts have been vindicated in a postscript to the book dated March 1903:
It so happens while this book was in the press a number of measures have been taken by the Government to counteract some of the very weaknesses and dangers which are alluded to above. (p. 307).
The Riddle of the Sands can be read on several levels: spy fiction, political polemic and a character study of the nature of masculinity through our understanding of two young, upper middle-class Englishmen. It is also a novel in which the nature of the landscape determines the psyche and the actions of its protagonists. Indeed, the ‘sands’ can be said to be the dominant character of the whole book.
The Riddle of the Sands can also be said to be part of a sub-genre known as the invasion-scare, or invasion-paranoia, novel. Three decades earlier, Germany’s success in the Franco-Prussian War established her as a major continental power. British popular fears of German intentions were often expressed in fiction. George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) was an early example, and the genre reached its peak around the turn of the century, particularly with the writings of William Le Quex, who was vigorously promoted by The Daily Mail.
Invasion-scare fiction both played on and induced apprehension amongst the public and, in some cases, produced hysteria, paranoia and Germanophobia. The Riddle of the Sands addresses many of the concerns expressed in invasion-scare novels. But its tone is altogether different. The two English protagonists respect and admire their German rivals. Davies speaks approvingly of the German Emperor: ‘By Jove! We want a man like this Kaiser.’ (p. 97)
The characters of Davies and Carruthers are slowly revealed as the plot of The Riddle of the Sands develops. Childers’s great achievement is to create two of the most memorable protagonists in British spy fiction; these are characters with breadth and depth. Taken together, Davies and Carruthers can be said to be representative of two key strands of the British national character. One represents the certainties of tradition, the other a return to a more dynamic form of patriotism. Working in unison, Davies and Carruthers overcome Dollmann and cause the German invasion plans to be cancelled.
I slept fitfully on a bench in the small ferry terminal and took the boat over to Nordeney early the next morning. The island was larger than I had expected and decidedly more built up than the remote, wind-swept place of my imagination. Though just a couple of kilometres from the harbour, on the island’s northern side, there was a sandy beach which stretched out for several kilometres in either direction. The tide had turned and I stayed on the beach watching the waters recede. Eventually I was rewarded with a prospect of shimmering sand and mud stretching out towards a distant Nordsee; invisible, somewhere beyond the haze of the horizon.
In one of the most memorable sequences of The Riddle of the Sands, Davies and Carruthers paddle a small dinghy from their mooring just off Nordeney to a salvage depot on the nearby island of Memmert. Their aim is to spy on Dollman and his contacts from the German navy. It is a hazardous journey: darkness, sea mist, shifting sands and a maze of channels, some with strong currents. And all the time the danger of being spotted and arrested as spies. Having spent the night in a very comfortable guesthouse, I set out to recreate their journey at low tide the next day. On foot.
I realised just how foolish the idea had been when I spoke with my hosts that evening; they were horrified at my venture were full of tales of how unwary walkers on the sands had been swept away and drowned. I survived, obviously. By a circuitous route, avoiding some of the deeper channels whilst wading through the shallower ones, I managed to cover perhaps a quarter of the distance towards Memmert before having to give up and turn back.
I didn’t reach my destination but, in attempting to do so, I was able to experience at first hand the haunting landscape that had captivated Erskine Childers nearly a century before. The huge expanse of silver-grey sands and above the dome of sky, almost crushing in its enormity. And, save for the odd call of a sea bird, there was a silence that was almost tangible. Above all else this landscape gave me a sense of timelessness, a feeling of connection with Erskine Childers and with Davies and Carruthers.
And what of Gabriele and Rolf? Well, I believe they didn’t last as an item, but the band went on to record several albums and were quite big in Germany. They even had one international hit single. I bought a copy in my local Woolies. For old time’s sake.
Flâneur O’Connor
All images accessed by courtesy of Creative Commons
‘My garden is made of stone’ – Mark E Smith (Psykick Dance Hall)
‘My garden is all overgrown’ – Tony McPhee (Garden)
With a front door opening straight onto the street
you have to be careful you don’t let the heat out,
that’s how that global warming started.
And all that dust on your shoes
it ruins the carpet.
Flesh of Victorian brick, and below,
the bones of a forgotten dream,
alive only in his imagination.
Resonances and vibrations,
pouring balm on bricks and mortar,
striving to heal old wounds,
those slights upon the character of the landscape.
And when you walked with her to the pool,
what did you know of all this?
This layer upon that, you call it old
but it was merely last year’s modern. Remember?
Crested newt and floating beer can.
The odour of festering drains and
dust of crumbling brick.
These were hills, those were fields
And through this shady dell
flowed a musical stream.
Ghosts and shadows crouch at every turn.
Scratch and they bleed,
speak and they flee.
Jerusalem the Golden,
that artichoke of the soul,
an echo in Annie’s memory.
Rheinhardt takes her by the hand
and joins her helter-skelter walk.
Unsteady, with cider breath, she wanders
through one landscape,
following the map of another.
