DRUNK ON INK: MY LIFE IN BOOKS, chapter one

I think I can remember learning to read; that’s how I started the first draft of this memoir, but on reflection perhaps I should say, more accurately and less impressively: I think I can remember having learned to read. I wish I could be more precise. Can anyone remember learning to read? It’s a skill as important as learning to walk, but both memories are equally and sadly lost.

My parents must have read to me before I went to school and begun to teach me the alphabet and simple words, but frustratingly I remember nothing about it. I first went to school in 1962 when I was, or was just about to turn, five.  I can remember quite vividly the big high-ceilinged off-yellow room under the bell tower in what was then St Peter’s School, Wokingham (now it’s houses), next door to the Hope and Anchor pub (which was later to become important in my life). But I can’t remember any early lessons or being taught anything. On the very first day (I think, but perhaps I’m transplanting an event from another occasion) we were given small handheld blackboards and pieces of chalk, probably as a way of occupying us. I immediately drew a typical child’s picture of a house - four windows, door, gable, smoking chimney, winding path – but then suddenly had a guilty notion that I was supposed to wait for instructions and would be told off for sullying the blankness of the blackboard, and hastily wiped it, looking around anxiously in case anyone had witnessed my potential misdemeanour. I’m not sure that I like what this incident seems to say about my infant self.

As I say, I have no memory of anyone teaching me to read, which is galling. But I do remember sitting with Janet and John books and suddenly (or so it seems now) being able to make sense of them, and zooming through several at a sitting. When I think about junior school I find it hard to recall many incidents in which books feature, which is strange because reading became an important fact of my life quite early on. Certainly I can remember that when it came to birthdays, books were always, or nearly always, what I chose, usually big factual picture books about such subjects as birds and planes. I can also remember spending my pocket money on Armada Biggles paperbacks (this must have been when I was a little older); I loved these smaller books with their bright, exciting covers. (To an adult’s eyes these designs seem crude, the cheap paper on which the books were printed, and which went brown and brittle almost immediately, horrible, and the ‘perfect’ binding, which meant that pages often fell out, far from perfect. Puffin books, the junior imprint of Penguin, were much better produced.) I think I enjoyed the fact that for a relatively small outlay (two shillings and sixpence) you could acquire something that had the power of instantly taking you away from the routine world as you knew it to an infinitely more glamorous place. My safe and pleasant but humdrum life was no match for the aerial adventures of Biggles and his colleagues. A book, with its shiny, colourful cover and enticing text, was a magical tool, a time machine, an unlimited ticket to anywhere, anywhen. And when you’d finished reading it, you could put it on your shelf with your other books and have them preside over you and your room, which was nearly as good as reading it. It wasn’t like watching a film or television programme, which was intangible and fugitive; a book was solid, reliable, repeatable.

Almost the only time I can remember coming into conflict with my mother was over books, or more specifically about the way they were arranged. I had my books on shelves in my room, (some were probably stacked on any available flat space too), and it was important to me that they were visible. One day I came home from school (I would have been about eight or nine, perhaps) to find that she had put some of them away in a cupboard or chest, no doubt thinking that by thus providing me with more space she was helping me, and that when I got home and emerged from my bedroom (which I shared with my brother, so space was limited) I would be beaming with gratitude. Alas, I was far from grateful. I was cross, upset and tearful at this violation, as I think I saw it. She was I’m sure equally upset by my reaction. I can’t remember the upshot, but sooner or later I must have moved them back so once more their spines stood like sentinels guarding my little domain.

At about the same age I tried to write some stories of my own about a character called Super Teddy Bear, but I don’t think I actually produced anything much beyond the basic concept. I wrote things to order at school, but otherwise my literary endeavours were confined to projects that never got beyond the initial idea, a pattern, I’m sorry to say, that’s continued into adulthood.

I wish I could remember more about the books I read before the age of eleven or so. I remember Biggles (I was a passionate Captain W. E. Johns aficionado) and the Famous Five vividly, the latter red hardbacks still very common today (I don’t think my copies ever had the dust-jackets). I was slightly puzzled by the (as I now realise, fantasy fifties upper-middle class) social background of Julian, George and co, and disliked the illustrations, probably because they looked outdated and so didn’t conform to my idea of what the characters should look like. In fact, the pictures made me cross and I did my best not to look at them. Evidently I had no taste for period detail at that time. I also read the Enid Blyton Adventure series, though not so avidly, and although I tried the Secret Seven I never got on with them; maybe I thought they were too obviously rehashes of the Famous Five. I was still reading Blyton at the age of eleven, which nowadays would qualify me as positively retarded, but we were more innocent and grew up more slowly in those days (or at least I did).

Another favourite was Willard Price’s Adventure series, about two young brothers who went around the world having (and the title of the series is the clue here) adventures, usually involving animals. Many of them would undoubtedly seem uncomfortable reading now (they’re all still in print, however) as they often involve catching animals to put in zoos. The most spectacularly unacceptable to 21^st century sensibilities would be Whale Adventure, the thrilling tale of the mass slaughter of these creatures. But I thought the books marvellous, and I expect they stand up as stories pretty well today. (Once, at the age of about twelve, I determined to write a novel, and sketched out the main characters who would feature, only to discover that I’d exactly reproduced Price’s formula, and gave up.)

I also read comics, principally the Beano and Dandy, but others too I now can’t name. Presumably I was quite young when I first read these, and older when I discovered a comic that consisted mostly of serialised prose stories rather than cartoons, the Rover. It was I think the only comic of its type still being published. The very first one I bought had the opening episode of a story called ‘The Yellow Jersey’, about cycling, which the wonders of the interweb tell me was published on April 19 1969, when I was eleven. I read the Rover keenly for some time, I suppose several years, and I still remember the stories about a superathlete called William Wilson, and one called ‘There Once was a Game Called Football’, set in a future in which soccer has been forgotten. Some of the stories were Second World War heroics, often featuring a Biggles knock-off called Braddock. In my later teens, having not read the comic for some years, I looked for a copy of it out of curiosity, but found it didn’t exist any more. By reading the Rover I joined the tail end of a genre dating back, I suppose, to the late Victorian period. I was an unwitting bystander at the death throes of a tradition begun by The Boy’s Own Paper and Magnet. (However, I’ve just discovered that a similar comic, the Wizard, kept going until 1978.)

I’m acutely aware that this is an embarrassingly unliterary reading list. I did however also read and collect Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings and Richmal Crompton’s William books, probably the first books of lasting literary value that I read. I certainly loved reading about the events at Linbury Court Prep School, so much more exciting and patterned than those at St Peter’s, and about the Outlaws' always well-intentioned debacles. I also remember having some Richmal Crompton books for younger readers about a character called Jimmy – which were quite good, though not in the William class – and some by Anthony Buckeridge about a boy, Rex Milligan, at a grammar school, which I thought absolutely wonderful. W. E. Johns wrote some books about a character (a commando, I think) called Gimlet; I took harmless childish delight in the juxtaposition of the titles Gimlet Goes Again and Gimlet Mops Up. I probably read a little Malcolm Saville, and borrowed many books from the library that I've completely forgotten. But I didn’t read many ‘classics’; no Alice, Swallows and Amazons or Railway Children, though I was very moved by Black Beauty. Treasure Island and Kidnapped I think I tried but found uninvolving and didn’t finish. I did read King Solomon’s Mines and Huckleberry Finn (and was thrilled by the first and charmed by the second), but that wasn’t until a bit later, probably in my early teens. 

Reading was undoubtedly a refuge. My home was loving and secure, but rather crowded. I used to take a book with me into the toilet (well, I still do that, of course) and luxuriate in the privacy and solitariness it afforded, undoubtedly taking annoyingly long over the process. And the secret, illicit thrill of reading with a torch under the bedcovers! Cocooned in the warmth and darkness, safe from discovery or disturbance – could there be a finer feeling? Later, in my teens, I would sit up late into the night reading in bed, which is nearly as good. The delicious aloneness as everyone else goes to bed and to sleep, leaving you to pursue your own adventures. The Home Counties in the sixties certainly weren't a hostile environment, so why I wanted a refuge I don't know, but books were my bulwark against the world.

                                                                                         ******************

In a later chapter, or chapters, I hope to write about the books I read in my teens.

You can read chapter two here.

Ten random photos

Henry Moore, Little Hadham, Herts

First World War shells dug up from the fields of northern France

Bignor Roman villa, Sussex, the best mosaics I've yet seen in Britain

Seafire (navalised Spitfire) with folded wings

Second World war memorial window by Patrick Reyntiens, Anstey, Herts

Watts chapel, Compton, Surrey

Sheep by Duncan Grant, Lincoln cathedral

Graves in a First World War cemetery, northern France. They almost all have a cross (or occasionally another religious symbol, such as a Star of David), but the one on the left hasn't. I wonder what the story behind this is.

Valencia, Spain

St Paul's Walden church, Herts - a medieval Virgin and Georgian baroque

St Paul's Walden is hardly even a hamlet - just a handful of houses, though there's a pub (with a bar billiards table), and an aristocratic estate, St Paul's Waldenbury (which opens its landscaped gardens to the public a few times a year), and Stagenhoe (once a similar estate, now a Sue Ryder home for the disabled). These are set in gorgeous steeply-valleyed beech-wooded countryside, the foothills of the Chilterns; Hertfordshire at its most fetching.

There's also a quite big church (behind the pub), bigger than can have been needed by such a small settlement, even in earlier more devotional ages. The reason for the size of the building is that it served the people of Whitwell, a substantial village a mile or so down the road, as well as those of St Paul's Walden itself. I assume that the inhabitants of the grand houses (or earlier buildings on the same sites) didn't want to make the journey to Whitwell to worship, and expected the more numerous but less influential populace of that village to trudge from their homes instead. I wonder if the current churchgoing population of Whitwell mutter imprecations against the blue-blooded former denizens as they drive along the B651 on Sunday mornings.

Like so many Herts churches, St Paul's Walden at first glance looks substantially 15th (or early 16th) century Perpendicular. All the windows in the photo at the top of the page have mullions (vertical stone divisions) that more or less go all the way to the top of the window without deviation, (a feature absolutely typical of the style), and the arches are either fairly flat, (typical of the 15th century), or  are grouped together under completely flat hoodmoulds, (typical of the early 16th century Tudor style, as in the three windows on the right of the photo). 

But, again like so many Herts churches, subsequent and more leisurely glances prove this to be not the whole truth. A walk around the church reveals an early 14th century window at the west end of the south aisle (and more on the north of the nave), and 13th century lancets in the tower. Keep going clockwise and you'll find roundheaded windows in the chancel, the only external hint at the wonderful surprise waiting inside.

15th century font

The simple but dignified five bay arcade to the south aisle is also early 14th century; the arches lead you into the spacious, tall and light nave. There are no pews, just chairs, a feature more churches encumbered with ugly, cumbersome, impractical Victorian pine pews should emulate.

15th century screen to south chapel

The very pretty flat ceilings of the nave and south chapel were painted following the designs of the noted High Victorian architects and decorators Bodley and Garner; it's a pity that hanging heaters have been allowed to intrude (though I suppose I have to grudgingly accept that congregations have to be kept warm somehow).

Accompanying the heaters, but beating them hands down in visual appeal, are three superb brass chandeliers, probably 18th century; some of the candle-holders are at pleasing variance from the vertical. The chandelier in front of the chancel screen is topped by a bad-tempered bird (a dove,  representing the Holy Spirit?).

In one of the south aisle windows is this tender early 14th century depiction of the Virgin and Child. Their faces are very worn, but enough survives to give the impression that they're looking at each other fondly, and the colours of their robes still glow. Mary is crowned as the Queen of Heaven and holds a flowering branch in her right hand; this is probably a reference to the Tree of Jesse, a representation of the ancestry of Christ. (I've written about the Tree of Jesse in another Hertfordshire church here.) 

A bird perches on or hovers by her left arm; this is probably symbolic of the soul and its resurrection, or of the Holy Spirit. Alternatively, the bird could be intended to represent a goldfinch, which according to legend pecked  a thorn from Christ's brow on the road to Calvary and was splashed with a drop of his blood; goldfinches often feature in pictures of the Virgin and Child as a means of reminding the viewer of Jesus's eventual fate.* To modern eyes, however, it's simply a charming detail.

Until a decade or two ago this stained glass was under the tower, but was moved, presumably so more people would see it. This was undoubtedly a Good Thing. But there was something numinous about venturing into the relative dark of the tower room, risking banging your head on the organ in the process, to witness it in situ**, its deep browns and reds glowing richly in the afternoon sun. In its current position the colours are not as effective; the clear glass that's been added around the sides to make it fit a bigger window doesn't help. I'm just being a miserable malcontent. Ignore me.

This glass would be the knock-out attraction of many churches, but St Paul's Walden has something to top it: the chancel screen and chancel, of 1727 and 1762. (Recently the altar has been moved from the east wall to the east of the nave, spoiling the view of the screen quite badly.) An inscription on the back of the screen proclaims: 'THIS Chancel was first Repair'd and Beautifi'd by EDWARD GILBERT  ESQR of the Bury in the Year of our Lord 1727'. (Relish the 18th century use of capitals and apostrophes.) The decoration of the screen is immensely rich (indeed, almost too rich for its size), as if the unknown designer*** couldn't resist using every device and motif he knew. Front and back are equally ornamented.

There are four fluted slim Corinthian columns, each with its own diminutive entablature, from which spring arches. Above these, on the left and right, scrolls morph into pairs of putti which support elaborate urns; these features are flanked by pairs of slightly smaller urns. The central, wider arch is topped by ogees (i.e. S-shaped curves) and three more urns. Everything is exuberantly carved and garnished with fancy finials. 

The reredos on the east wall of the chancel is similar to the screen, though with satisfying variations; the columns have become square pilasters, and the central arch has lost the ogee and gained a pair of putti, while the putti on left and right support segmental pediments. Below the window is a Lamb and Flag (representing Christ), and above a book surrounded by fruit and palm leaves. The book is inscribed (in Greek) 'The New Testament' and surmounted by a flaming heart (a surprisingly Catholic feature at this date).

Until 1946 the space now occupied by the window was simply a niche; in that year it was opened up and filled with stained glass, a Crucifixion by Hugh Easton. 

This vision of Christ as Superman, Hollywood-handsome, ready to zoom up into the sky with his cape billowing behind him (though at least he's wearing his underpants inside his clothes),  doesn't appeal to me at all. It's very similar to Easton's 1949 west window of St Dunstan's, Stepney, including the strange two-dimensional green marble cross. (See here.) At least the Stepney window has a bleak (almost post-apocalyptic) cityscape at the bottom, giving it an interest the St Paul's Walden version lacks.

I assume that the reredos and screen date from 1727, while the stucco decoration on the walls of the chancel dates from Gilbert's death; an unobtrusive inscription on an urn reads 'EG ob. 1762'. Two putti frolic around it, not looking at all grief-stricken; the one on the right has traditional feathered wings, but those of the one on the left look like a butterfly's. 

On the north wall Gilbert's coat of arms is displayed, featuring, rather bizarrely, a single armoured leg. (The same motif appears on some ledgerstones.) The decoration of the barrel-vaulted ceiling is extremely attractive (though once again heaters spoil the effect); the highly successful green, cream and white colour scheme is by Raymond Erith from as recently as 1972. 

The delightful wrought iron gate to the chancel is presumably contemporary with the screen. The pulpit, however, is Edwardian, and clearly designed to harmonise with the screen. The chaste chancel stalls, which take their inspiration from late Georgian furniture, are c1945. Another ledgerstone, continuing the tradition and finely lettered, records that they were erected in memory of Dorothy Dewar and her son John, a pilot in the Second World War, 'who, after fighting thro' the Battle of Britain, was lost on patrol 30th March 1941.' 

I've probably visited St Paul's Walden church more than any other in Hertfordshire or anywhere else; it's always open, is set in beautiful bosky countryside with a circular walk passing two pubs and a tea shop, and is endlessly rewarding, with elegant contributions from the 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It's one of my favourites.

* Or possibly the bird is pecking at Christ's hand and feeding on his blood, a symbol of the Eucharist.

** I assume that the glass was made for the tower window and has always been in the church. However, the Victoria County History (1908) states categorically that 'there are no remains of old glazing'. Improbable as it seems, the authors of this magisterial book must have overlooked it. Is it possible that, very fortunately, the same happened when the iconoclasts arrived? There's no trace of any other medieval glass in the church, and it seems unlikely that only one window (and that one hidden away in the tower) was adorned with stained glass, so the others have either been completely lost through accidental damage (possible, but wouldn't some fragments survive?), or deliberately smashed. This would most likely have happened during the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), or possibly during Elizabeth's reign, or during the Civil War and Commonwealth in the mid 17th century. The VCH suggests that the ground floor of the tower was once used as a living room; can we imagine that the Puritan vandals missed the Virgin and Child because they were shut away in what was effectively someone's home?

*** James Paine (1717-89), who probably worked at the Bury, has been plausibly suggested as the designer of the stucco decoration of 1762, but he can hardly be responsible for the screen of 1727. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (1911)**** states that the chancel 'is of Renaissance character, and is said to have been designed by Wren.' I include this attribution only as an example of the rustic optimism of an age before the study of art history became established. 

**** The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments was founded in 1908 and was intended to make county-by-county inventories of all England's notable buildings (built before 1700, though later volumes gradually extended this date to 1850). Hertfordshire was the very first county to be tackled, and it took only three years for the book to appear. Later volumes were very much slower to be published, and when the last one emerged in 1977 still only about a quarter of the country had been covered. The RCHM still exists in some form, as part of Historic England (formerly English Heritage).

A Happy March 25 New Year to any readers this blog might have

'Stonehenge I', 1973, Henry Moore, (intaglio print and lithograph)

Most cultures celebrate the New Year in the spring or autumn. For example, Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, is usually on March 20 or 21, and Ugadi, New Year's Day for the Deccan region of India, generally falls in March or April. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is most often in the early autumn, while Gujaratis celebrate Bestu Varas in October or November. 

Why, then, do Western cultures, and cultures influenced by the West, celebrate it on January 1, and why am I wishing you a Happy New Year today, March 25?

As the earth doesn't pass a marker post on its journey round the sun, any date that's chosen as marking the new year is bound to be questionable and random, but some dates are more questionable and random than others. The most questionable and random of all is January 1. What happens in nature on that date? Absolutely nothing. It's just the middle of winter, and not even the exact middle (which would make some sort of sense), merely an insignificant day in the earlyish part of that season. (Throughout this post I am writing from the perspective of the northern hemisphere; apologies to any readers below the equator.)

The Romans were the first people to make January 1 New Year's Day, in 153 BCE. (Previously, until 222 BCE, it had been May 1, and the Ides of March (March 15) after that.) Quite why they did this remains obscure, at least to me. Professor Wikipedia explains that this was the date on which the Senate was convened, and when civic officials took up their posts, but that doesn't explain why January 1 was chosen for these events. I once read somewhere that the new year was the beginning of the military campaigning season, so, as the Empire expanded and troops had further to go before reaching the areas where they were to be operational in the spring, the date of the new year had to be put back to give them more travel time. This sounds vaguely plausible, but I don't know if it's true.

There are four dates that could justifiably be chosen as New Year's Day: the winter solstice, on or about December 21, the shortest day and longest night; the spring (or vernal) equinox, on or about March 20, when day and night are of equal length; the summer solstice, on or about June 21, the longest day and shortest night; the autumn equinox, on or about September 23, when once again day and night are equal.

'Stonehenge IV', 1973, Henry Moore, (intaglio print and lithograph)

As I implied in the opening paragraph, most cultures chose times around the equinoxes, when the major seasonal changes occur, as their new years. Early cultures must have watched the turning of the seasons far more attentively and anxiously than we do now. Everyone knows that Stonehenge is aligned on the summer solstice sunrise, but less widely known is the alignment with the winter solstice sunrise. This must have been a key event in the lives of the people then. It's easy to imagine that they observed the shortening days nervously, fearing that if they displeased the gods (or however they imagined the forces governing nature) the nights would go on getting longer and longer until there was no daylight at all. The solstice must have been joyously celebrated, as they knew (or at least hoped) that at last the light would start to overtake the dark. It's possible, even likely, that this was their new year, and this seems to me to be a thoroughly suitable date to chose, though as far as I know no existing cultures have adopted it.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, conventions considered to be pagan were abandoned and Christian ones invented. The Second Council of Tours in 567 decreed, entirely sensibly in my view, that January 1 was not the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, they seem to have failed to rule definitively on when exactly the year did start. Throughout the Middle Ages (and well into the Early Modern period) the new year was variously observed in different places in Europe as Christmas Day, March 1, March 25, and Easter. Christmas Day makes some sense, as it's near the solstice, March 25 is near the equinox, and Easter is sometimes near it too, and at any rate is always in spring. (It's obviously symbolic that the Resurrection is celebrated when nature is reborn.) Where March 1 comes from I'm not sure, but it too is in spring.

Why did they choose dates near rather than on the solstice and equinox? The answer to this is that they did choose exact rather than approximate dates. The Julian calendar had been instituted in the 1st century BCE, and by the 6th century CE the dates were already significantly out of synch with the seasons. So by 567 the spring equinox occurred on March 25.

March 25 seems to have been the most commonly accepted date for New Year's Day, at least in the British Isles. This explains, incidentally, the date of Christmas, which some find puzzling. It's symbolically satisfying that Mary was visited by the Angel Gabriel and impregnated by the Holy Spirit on the first day of the year, and March 25 is still celebrated by Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation (also known as Lady Day). As the human gestation period is nine months it naturally follows that Jesus was born on December 25.

For more than a thousand years Christendom celebrated the new year in spring, not January. Some find this very difficult to accept, but the picture above provides visual proof. It shows a page from the baptismal records of Stratford-on-Avon parish church (the cross marks the entry recording the baptism of Shakespeare's sister, Joan, on April 15, 1569). You can see that the dates before March 25 are reckoned to be in the previous year.*

When the Gregorian calendar (a necessary and welcome reform) was introduced to most of the Catholic world in 1582, it was decided that the year would revert to beginning on January 1. This is a mysterious decision; a date in spring could easily have been retained, and the world would be better-ordered now had Pope Gregory XIII done so. If it was thought that it was confusing to begin the year in the middle of a month, March 1 (which was already New Year's Day in some people's estimation) would have been a sensible compromise. Or, more radically, as the calendar was undergoing a major overhaul anyway, it could have been adjusted a little more so that the spring equinox was on March 1. Whether these possibilities were considered I don't know. But presumably Renaissance humanism had made classical culture something that even the Church wanted to imitate, and so the Roman date for the new year was adopted, condemning the world to a simply daft convention.

'Stonehenge A', 1973, Henry Moore, intaglio print and lithograph

The date of the new year didn't officially change in Britain until the abandonment of the old Julian calendar and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which happened as late as 1752. (England, along with some other Protestant countries, had previously refused to accept it, as it was seen as Popish.) However, well before then many or even most people accepted January 1 as the de facto beginning of the year. It's clear from Pepys' diary (written in the 1660s), for example, that he acknowledged this, but I'm not sure why.

When Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar, the Julian calendar was eleven days out of synch with the seasons (and therefore with the Gregorian calendar and much of the rest of Europe). This had some bizarre consequences; for example, Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes (the author of Don Quixote) both died on the same date, April 23, 1616**, but they didn't die on the same day.

If the year begins on March 25, then the reason for the otherwise seemingly bafflingly random beginning of the UK tax year, April 6, becomes clear. In Britain in 1752 eleven days had to be dropped from the calendar; people went to bed on September 2 and woke up on September 14. (Some were unhappy at this change, but the stories about riots provoked by it seem to be untrue.) However, the Treasury wanted the year to remain 365 days long so they extended the tax year, previously beginning on March 25, by eleven days. So for the rest of the century the tax year began on April 5. 1800 would have been a leap year in the Julian calendar but wasn't in the Gregorian, so once again the Treasury added an extra day. Since then the British tax year has started on April 6, which is just the kind of wonderfully logical illogicality that I love.

Spring - this is so obvious that it shouldn't need saying, yet it's ignored by everyone who persists in accepting January 1 as New Year's Day - is the beginning of the year. In mid-winter nature is dead, or at least dormant; nothing is being renewed or reborn. Spring is when life restarts. Daffodils spark into bloom, birds are chirpily flirty, tractors arduously plough the fields, farmers expectantly plant seeds, lambs and calves struggle onto wobbly legs, hibernating animals woozily wake up, the days get warmer and evenings at last begin to get lighter and we begin to consider the possibility of sitting outside. Exactly when spring begins is a matter of dispute, but whenever it does, that's New Year's Day. You can make a very good case for New Year's Day being on the spring equinox (March 20 in 2016), but I prefer the traditional time-honoured date of March 25. It was good enough for a millennium and more, and it's good enough for me.




* If the year begins in March, then the names of the months September, October, November and December (meaning the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months, respectively) make sense.

** Disappointingly, this turns out to be not exactly true. Most reference books state that this is when Cervantes died, but recent research has established that he died on the 22, and was buried on the 23.

Learning to look with Alec Clifton-Taylor

Alec Clifton-Taylor (1907-85) in Bradford-on-Avon

Alec Clifton-Taylor's television series Six English Towns was first broadcast in 1978. I can't have watched it on its first run, because I didn't have a television then; I suppose I caught it on a later repeat. He begins the first programme of the first (of three) series (on Chichester) explaining that he intends to offer the viewer 'an exercise in looking', and that's just what the programmes are. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that Alec Clifton-Taylor taught me the art of looking.

He was educated at Bishop's Stortford College (does this mean that like me he was born in Hertfordshire?), and Queen's College, Oxford, where he read history. He then spent a year at the Sorbonne, but his father, worrying as parents are prone to do about their children's future prospects,  induced him to leave and go into insurance-broking. However, he was so miserable that he persuaded his father to allow him to go to the Courtauld, where he trained as an art historian (still a relatively rare subject in Britain at the time), and graduated with a first in 1934. He became a lecturer at the University of London Institute of Education and the Royal College of Art, and during the war served in the Admiralty. He returned to university lecturing in 1945 until he became a freelance at the age of fifty in 1957, and lectured throughout the world, including thirty-two states of the USA.

He wrote reviews for Country Life, and probably for other publications too, and advised Leicestershire County Council on the purchase of art works for display in schools. (I doubt very much if such a job exists today.) He didn't publish his first book until 1962, when he was fifty-five, and it's his masterpiece. If he'd never written anything else, nor made a single television programme, The Pattern of English Building* would still guarantee him a seat on the top table at the banquet of writers about England.

As he explains in the Foreword, 'the principal purpose of the book' is 'to try to increase the pleasure of those who travel about the country with open eyes', (truly a noble and praiseworthy ambition), by showing 'the close relationship between the geology of our country and the traditional materials which go to the making of the pattern of English building.' So the book is arranged neither chronologically nor stylistically nor county-by-county, as architectural guidebooks generally are, but according to the materials from which the buildings are made. Some of the chapter titles give a flavour: 'Limestone', 'Tiles', 'The Unbaked Earths', and some of the running headings are even more enticing: 'The Varieties of English "Marble"', 'Whitewash and Applied Colour', 'Shingles and Weather-Boarding'. Reading the book, packed as it is with years of looking and learning, enables you to notice and appreciate details that would otherwise go unobserved.

He co-wrote books about stone and brick, and contributed essays on geology and building materials to eighteen volumes of Pevsner's monumental series The Buildings of England. He wrote about cathedrals and churches, notably English Parish Churches as Works of Art (1974), which, as its title reveals, again avoids trotting out the usual stylistic or chronological approaches in favour of a more original perspective. In it he concerns himself solely with whether buildings and their contents are beautiful or not; you can't read or listen to him for long without realising that he is a man of strong opinions about good and bad buildings. (To oversimplify somewhat, local materials = good, materials imported from elsewhere = bad.) I don't always agree with him - he never misses an opportunity to knock Victorian stained glass, for example - but he always argues his case knowledgeably and urbanely, and he always makes you look more intelligently and pleasurably.

Having waited till he was fifty-five to publish his first book, he left it till seventy before he became a television star. He presented a programme about Gothic architecture in the series The Spirit of the Age in the mid-70s, and this lead to his being commissioned by the BBC to write and present Six English Towns (made in 1977, broadcast the following year), which was an instant hit. This in turn lead to Six More English Towns (1981) and Another Six English Towns (1984), and he became a familiar and much-loved figure.**

Much of the success of the programmes can be ascribed to his genial charm. He's everyone's favourite grandad, abundant chalk-white hair sometimes crazily anarchic in the wind. He wears what looks like the same light grey suit for the majority of the eighteen programmes, daringly donning a rather dashing brown one for what proved to be the final episode.*** He talks with just enough of a patrician accent to give him authority but not enough to make him seem outdated or pompous. And he has the gift of talking at just the right level, using technical terminology but explaining it as he goes along without sounding patronising. He doesn't need any gimmicks (though he does have two little tics that can become a bit annoying once you've noticed them: he frequently and quite noisily sucks air into his mouth, sometimes mid-sentence, and occasionally he gets caught for a fraction of a second with mouth wide open and face contorted, especially as he emphasises something). He just talks, and occasionally gives a little demonstration (for example, of how pargetting is done in the programme on Saffron Walden), and the camera shows us what he's talking about. It's as simple as that.

Except occasionally we see him clambering up scaffolding with astonishing agility for a man in his seventies, and once he is pictured perched vertiginously on the triforium gallery of Durham cathedral, a good forty or fifty feet up.

I've already mentioned that he wasn't slow to criticise when he thought it justified, and this has brought him the reputation among the ill-informed of being opinionated (in the pejorative sense); 'chirpy curmudgeon' and 'pontificating snobbery' are two phrases that crop up if you Google his name. This is wildly unfair. What emerges most strongly from his books and programmes is his love of and enthusiasm for good architecture. Although it's true he's not slow to excoriate ugly or out of place buildings or their details, and bad use of materials, especially those from the Victorian period and the 20th century, he is equally quick to give praise when he thinks it deserved, whatever the period. For example, he considers the Millburngate Shopping Centre (built 1972-76) in Durham to have filled an important site 'with tact and ingenuity.' The programmes succeed largely because he communicates his pleasure so infectiously, and we are encouraged and enabled to share his delight.

The programmes also succeed because they now have a period charm. In the programme on Saffron Walden he bemoans the amount of traffic in the town, but by today's standards it looks almost car-free. Music is used very sparingly, and is almost never played underneath speech. (One thing that irritates me about current documentaries is the seemingly incessant music, most of it distracting and unnecessary.) I want to put in a good word for Jim Parker's gorgeous, wistful piece for trumpet and piano, which features as the title music for the last series. The director isn't afraid of silence; the programme on Saffron Walden begins (after the title sequence) with eighteen seconds of near-silence: no music, no commentary, just distant birdsong. Eighteen seconds might not sound long, but current directors wouldn't risk anything like that, presumably fearing that the viewer would lose interest and turn over. The camerawork too belongs to a different, more leisurely age, often lingering over small architectural details for seconds at a time.

The series were issued as VHS tapes, and currently all eighteen programmes are available on Youtube**** (though they're very lo-fi). The first one is here. I find it hard to imagine a more pleasurable way of spending an odd half an hour (or forty minutes in the case of the second series) than sitting down and letting Alec Clifton-Taylor teach me how to look.

                                                       ***************************


* The book went through four editions, the last, published posthumously in 1987, incorporating Clifton-Taylor's latest notes. It's easy to find secondhand copies on the internet, but it's currently out of print, a sad state of affairs for such a key book.

** The eighteen towns are, first series: Chichester, Richmond, Tewkesbury, Stamford, Totnes, Ludlow; second: Warwick, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Saffron Walden, Lewes, Bradford-on-Avon, Beverley; third: Cirencester, Whitby, Bury St Edmunds, Sandwich, Devizes, Durham. I am in the happy position of having the pleasure of visiting Berwick and Sandwich for the first time still to come.

*** You can read an appreciative article (partly) about Clifton-Taylor by Jonathan Glancey, from the Guardian in 2000, here. In it he twice refers to Clifton-Taylor's Viyella shirt, tweed jacket and 'wobbly hat'; he's quite possibly right about the make of shirt - Clifton-Taylor favoured checks or single-colours - but he wears a tweed jacket in only a few episodes, and never I think a hat (he sports a black umbrella when it rains). Glancey is I suspect mixing Clifton-Taylor up with John Betjeman.

**** I've expressed qualms about the ethics of Youtube before. It doesn't seem so bad using it when the material you're watching or listening to is decades old (though the copyright laws don't agree), nor when the material was produced by the BBC, as if you're a licence fee payer you've already paid for it or at least contributed to it. Another factor to be taken into consideration is whether or not the material is available elsewhere. At the moment, the only other way of watching the Six English Towns series is by trying to find copies of the old VHS tapes (none seem to be currently obtainable), so watching them on Youtube doesn't harm anyone's income. But this is about to change. The first series is due to be released on DVD in September 2016 (not by the BBC, but by Simply Media). Wonderful that a new audience will have their eyes opened.