DELIGHTS
From my
earliest childhood certain prospects and memories have
filled me with such delight that bringing them to mind is
finding oneself unexpectedly before a bright and blazing
fire.
on a dark winter’s afternoon. During the course of a
lifetime of reading I have come across passages in
literature which have ignited that delight so spontaneously
once read they are never forgotten.
This is the beginning of a collection of some of those
pleasures with, when I’ve got time, notes on why they work
so well. More to follow
LEAVETAKING
It seems appropriate to start with a young man setting out
on a journey: and what a journey!. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s
“A Time of Gifts” is one of the great travel books. In
1933, at the age of eighteen, Leigh Fermor set off on an
apparently absurd quest to walk from London to
Constantinople, sleeping in castles and barns along the
Rhine and the Danube all the way to Hungary, where the
first volume of his travels ends. The title refers to the
generosity he met along the way, as if his quixotic plan
somehow revived the youthful dreams of almost everyone he
encountered. He was delighted with everything he saw: his
numerous hosts were delighted with him.
The entire book is a source of great
pleasure, allowing the reader to slog through winter storms
and stroll through sunlit meadows of a Europe that has now
vanished: and the passage I have chosen is a brilliant
demonstration of Leigh Fermor’s superb control over the
English language. Before I talk about why I like it so
much, and what other associations it brings, here it is: A
Time of Gifts, Chapter One.
FROM: A TIME OF GIFTS
BY PATRIKC LEIGH FERMOR
“A splendid
afternoon to set out!”, said one of the friends who was
seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the
window.
The other two agreed. Sheltering under the Curzon Street
arch of Shepherd Market, we had found a taxi at last. In
Half Moon Street, all collars were up. A thousand
glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler
hats in Piccadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by
streaming water, had become a submarine arcade; and the
clubmen of Pall Mall, with china tea and anchovy toast in
mind, were scuttling for sanctuary up the steps of the
clubs. Blown askew, the Trafalgar Square fountains twirled
like mops, and our taxi, delayed by a horde of Charing
Cross commuters reeling and stampeding under a cloudburst,
crept into the Strand. The vehicle threaded its way through
a flux of traffic and splashed up Ludgate Hill as the dome
of St Paul's sank deeper its pillared shoulders. The tyres
slewed away from the drowning cathedral and a minute later
the silhouette of The Monument, descried through veils of
rain, seemed so convincingly liquefied out of the
perpendicular that the tilting thoroughfare might have been
forty fathoms down. The driver, as he swerved wetly into
Upper Thames Street, leaned back and said: 'Nice weather
for young ducks.'
A smell of fish was there for a moment, then gone.
Enjoining haste, the bells of St Magnus the Martyr and St
Dunstans‑in‑the East were tolling the hour; then sheets of
water were rising from our front wheels as the taxi
floundered on between The Mint and the Tower of London.
Dark complexes of battlements and tree‑tops and turrets
dimly assembled on one side; then, straight ahead,
pinnacles and the metal parabolas of Tower Bridge were
looming. We halted on the bridge just short of the first
barbican and driver indicated the flight of stone steps
that descended to Irongate Wharf. We were down them in a
moment; and beyond the cobbles and the bollards, with the
Dutch tricolour beating damply from her poop and a ragged
fan of smoke streaming over the river, the
Stadthouder
Willem rode at
anchor. At the end of lengthening fathoms of chain, the
swirling tide had lifted her with a sigh almost level with
the flagstones: gleaming in the rain, and with full
steam‑up for departure, she floated in a mewing circus of
gulls. Haste and the weather cut short our farewells and
our embraces and I sped down the gangway clutching my
rucksack and my stick while the others dashed back to the
steps ‑ four sodden trouser‑legs and two high heels
skipping across the puddles ‑ and up them to the waiting
taxi; and half a minute later there they were, high
overhead on the balustrade of the bridge, craning and
waving from the cast‑iron quatrefoils. To shield her hair
from the rain, the high‑heel‑wearer had a mackintosh over
her head like a coalheaver. I was signalling frantically
back as the hawsers were cast loose and the gangplank
shipped. Then they were gone. The anchor‑chain clattered
through the ports and the vessel turned into the current
with a wail of her siren. How strange it seemed , as I took
shelter in the little saloon ‑ feeling, suddenly, forlorn;
but only for a moment ‑ to be setting off from the heart of
London! No beetling cliffs, no Arnoldian crash of pebbles.
I might have been leaving for Richmond, or for a supper of
shrimps and whitebait at Gravesend, instead of Byzantium.
Only the larger ships from the Netherlands berthed at
Harwich, the steward said: smaller Dutch craft like
the Stadthouder
always dropped
anchor hereabouts: boats from the Zuider Zee had been
unloading eels between London Bridge and the Tower since
the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Miraculously, after the pitiless hours of deluge, the rain
stopped. Above the drifts of smoke there was a
quickly‑fading glimpse of restless pigeons and a few domes
and many steeples and some bone‑white Palladian belfries
flying rain‑washed against a sky of gunmetal and silver and
tarnished brass. The girders overhead framed the darkening
shape of London Bridge; further up, the teeming water was
crossed by the ghosts of Southwark and Blackfriars.
Meanwhile St Catherine's Wharf was sliding offstage and
upstream, then Execution Dock and Wapping Old Stairs and
The Prospect of Whitby and by the time these landmarks were
astern of us, the sun was setting fast and the fissures
among the western cloudbanks were fading from smoky crimson
to violet. In the gulfs spanned by catwalks between the
warehouses, night was assembling too, and the tiers of
loading‑loopholes yawned like caverns. Slung with chains
and cables weighted with shot, hoists jutted on hinges from
precipices of warehouse wall and the giant white letters of
the wharfingers' names, grimed by a century of soot, were
growing less decipherable each second. There was a reek of
mud, seaweed, slime, salt, smoke and clinkers and nameless
jetsam, and the half‑sunk barges and the waterlogged
palisades unloosed a universal smell of rotting timber. Was
there a whiff of spices? It was too late to say: the ship
was drawing away from the shore and gathering speed and the
details beyond the wider stretch of water and the
convolutions of the gulls were growing blurred.
Rotherhithe, Millwall, Limehouse Reach, the West India
Docks, Deptford and the Isle of Dogs were rushing upstream
in smears of darkness. Chimneys and cranes plumed the
banks, but the belfries were thinning out. A chaplet of
lights twinkled on a hill. It was Greenwich. The
Observatory hung in the dark, and the Stadthouder was twanging her way inaudibly through
the nought meridian.
The reflected shore lights dropped coils and zigzags into
the flood which were blown into disarray every now and then
by the silhouettes of passing vessels' luminous portholes,
the funereal shapes of barges singled out by their port and
starboard lights and cutters of the river police smacking
from wave to wave as purposefully and as fast as pikes.
Once we gave way to a liner that towered out of the water
like a festive block of flats; from Hong Kong, said the
steward, as she glided by; and the different notes of the
sirens boomed up and downstream is though mastodons still
haunted the Thames marshes.
A gong tinkled and the steward led me back into the saloon.
I was the only passenger. 'We don't get many in December,'
he said; 'It's very quiet just now.' When he had cleared
away, I took a new and handsomely‑bound journal out of my
rucksack, opened it on the green baize under a pink‑shaded
lamp and wrote the first entry while the cruets and the
wine bottle rattled busily in their stands. Then I went on
deck. The lights on either beam had become scarcer but one
could pick out the faraway gleam of other vessels and
estuary towns which the distance had shrunk to faint
constellations. There was a scattering of buoys and the
scanned flash of a light‑house. Sealed away now beyond a
score of watery loops, London had vanished and a lurid haze
was the only hint of its whereabouts.
I wondered when I would be returning. Excitement ruled out
the thought of sleep; it seemed too important a night … But
I must have dozed, in spite of these emotions, for when I
woke the only glimmer in sight was our own reflection on
the waves. The kingdom had slid away westwards and into the
dark. A stiff wind was tearing through the rigging and the
mainland of Europe was less than half the night away.
It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped
anchor in the Hook of Holland. Snow covered everything and
the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps
and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the
untrodden quay … This solitary entry, under cover of night
and hushed by snow, completed the illusion that I was
slipping into Rotterdam, and into Europe, through a secret
door.
That “slipping into Europe through a secret door”. What a
wonderful touch! The secret doors so beloved of children,
entrance to some enchanted kingdom. But the enchantment is
there right from the beginning, as the taxi sets off
through a London downpour. Jermyn Street becoming a
“submarine arcade”, for example, conjuring vistas of
sea-caves glistening with treasure, and the Monument – that
obelisk memorialising the Great Fire of London – distorted
by the rain as if the street was “forty fathoms down”.
*Two links here: one with arcades, which have a magic all
their own, especially in relation to the rain, and another
with drowned cities. We’ll get to them.
Did you notice Leigh Fermor’s wonderful note that the ship
he’s sailing on has been raised by the tide so he can step
straight onto it from the cobbles? Like an illicit
pleasure? He’s right: it is a special privilege to step right out of
the middle of a city straight into foreign adventure
without the normal paraphenalia of airports and station
platforms and distant docks. It’s like finding that secret
door.
*There’s a link here to the paintings by Claude Lorrain:
we’ll pick it up later.
I realise also that this passage contains a key to why this
whole passage pleases me so much: it’s about departure.
Secret departure. Slipping away right from the middle of
things.
*This links to Great Departures of my own: starting with
the moment in March 1961 when my family boarded a train in
Paragon Station in the city of Hull in Yorkshire to set out
on a voyage halfway round the world to New Zealand. Further
details further on.
Back to Leigh Fermor, now on his ship heading down the
Thames – and his evocation of the coming of night:
“fissures among the western cloudbanks fading from smoky
crimson to violet”. That word “fissures” – making us think
of the gaps between the clouds as canyons, of the clouds
themselves as mountains. Even the phrase “western
cloudbanks” has a resonance of its own – it reminds us of
“the western approaches” and all those other names for
distant but strangely familiar parts from distant time,
like “the Saxon shore” and “the Spanish Main”.
*Let’s have a look at romantic geographical terms in
another place, and make sure we deal with “The German
Bight” and “the fall line” and “sea-islands”.
Back to Fermor: he hits another perfect note right after
the reference to the cloudbanks: “in the catwalks between
the warehouses night was assembling too.” There’s something
pleasingly bleak about the image of the iron catwalks
between the grim, soot-blackened warehouses that makes the
cosiness of being inside the boat even cosier. For me they
bring to mind “Oliver Twist” and the steel-engravings of
Bill Sykes fleeing across the rooftops of London with the
crowd chasing him in the canyons below.
But back to the cosiness of Leigh Fermor aboard ship: not
only the pleasure of being the only passenger “We don’t get
many in December” but the satisfaction of taking out his
“handsomely bound journal” and laying it out on the green
baize table “under a pink-shaded lamp”. What better
antidote to the gathering dark outside than that
“pink-shaded lamp”? And the final touch: when he arrives in
Holland, “snow covered everything … on the untrodden quay”
and he’s able to pass silently and unseen through that
secret door into the continent.
There’s another interesting point about this passage: Leigh
Fermor juggles brilliantly with feelings of comfort
surrounded by hostile elements (the taxi through the
rainstorm, the glowing boat through the darkness) and in
doing so he stimulates our own feelings of comfort at being
in a comfortable chair, or a warm bed, reading about his
exploits. Contained within the pages of the book we’re
holding are snowstorms and miles of empty road and nights
on bare mountains; but we’re safely on the outside. We’re
the comfort that contains the discomfort: a neat reversal
of the situation of the author as he slogs, on our behalf,
across a Europe over which Hitler’s shadow was just
beginning to fall.
ANOTHER LEAVE-TAKING
Here’s another scene of departure: this time from J. R. R.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. Frodo Baggins, having learnt
from the wizard Gandalf that the all-powerful Ring of
Sauron must be got out of the Shire as soon as possible,
decides, with reluctance, to leave his beloved home, Bag
End – initially for a new house on the far side of the land
of the hobbits. This extract is from the third chapter:
Three Is Company.
FROM: THE LORD OF THE RINGS
BY J. R.R.R TOLKIEN
The sun went down. Bag End seemed sad and gloomy and
dhishevelled. Frodo wander round the familiar rooms, and
saw the light of the sunset fade on the walls and shadows
creep out of the corners. It grew slowly dark indoors….They
shouldered their packs and took up their sticks and walked
round to the west side of Bag End. “Goodbye”, said Frodo,
looking at the dark blank windows. He waved his hand and
then turned and, (following Bilbo, if he had known it)
hurried after Peregrin down the garden path. They jumped
over the low place in the hedge at the bottom and took to
the fields, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the
grasses… They went in single file along hedgerows and the
borders of coppices and night fell dark around them. After
some time they crossed the Water, west of Hobbiton, by a
narrow plank bridge…Then they struck south east and began
to climb into the Green Hill Country to the south. They
could see the village twinkling down in the gentle valley
of the water. Soon it disappeared in the folds of the
darkened land, and was followed by Bywater beside its grey
pool. “I wonder if I shall ever look down into that valley
again,” said Frodo quietly.
The night was clear, cool and starry, but smoke-like wisps
of mist were creeping up the hillsides from the streams and
deep meadows….they marched in silence, and Pippin began to
lag behind. “Are you going to sleep on your legs?” he
asked. “It’s nearly midnight.” Just over the brow of the
hill they came to a patch of fir-wood and went into the
deep resin-scented darkness of the trees to collect sticks
and cones to make a fire by a large fir-tree. Then, each in
an angle of the trees great roots they curled up in their
coats and blankets and were soon fast asleep. A few
creatures came and looked at them when the fire had died
away. A fox passing through the wood on business of his own
stopped several minutes and sniffed. “Hobbits,” he thought.
“Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this
land but never of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a
tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer about
this!” And he was quite right – but he never found out any
more about it.
LONDON CAUGHT IN WORDS
Here’s a description of the kind of corner of London that
you come across, unexpectedly, if you spend any time at all
walking in the city: usually, in my experience, in the
middle of a rainstorm. But this time, in Chapter Two of
Margery Allingham’s classic detective novel “Tiger in the
Smoke” – in thick fog.
FROM: TIGER IN THE SMOKE
BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM
The fog was thicker than ever over in St Petersgate Square
… cosy, hardly cold, gentle, almost protective. The little
close was well hidden even on the brightest of days. Then
years before even the bombers of Luftwaffe had not found it
and so, almost alone in the district, the quiet houses
remained just as they had always been. By yet another
oversight the railings round the tiny square in the centre
had been spared by the scrap merchants, and the magnolia,
two or three graceful laburnams and a tulip tree had
overgrown unmolested. It was one of the smallest squares of
its kind in the city. There were several houses on each of
the two opposite sides, a wall on the third which shut out
the steep drop into Portminster Row and the shops, and on
the fourth, the sharp-spired church of St Peter of the
Gate, its recotry and two minute glebe-cottages adjoining.
The square was a cul-de-sac. The only road led in by the
wall so that all wheeled traffic had to return by the way
it had come, but for foot passengers only there was a
flight of steps at the other end … worn and highly
dangerous despite the bracket street lamp on the churchyard
wall. There were lights in every window of the rectory, and
the two which flanked the squat porch glowed red and
warm-looking in the mist, but with visibility on the road
below almost down to nil, the rectory might have been alone
upon a moor.
The perfect setting for the saintly Canon Avery and his
beautiful daughter to be stalked by the most dangerous man
in London – with the prospect of medieval treasure lurking
in the background.