Novel Attractions
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 13, 1999
EMPTY fast-food cartons crackle in the wind. Fresh racist graffiti sneer from the shuttering of boarded-up shops. And outside the bookmakers', fragments of yesterday's dreams flutter in the unswept gutter. Even in the bright light of a new day Borough High Street, Southwark, is a mess. "A heap," as local historian and guide John Williams puts it. A dirty, dilapidated rat-run into the City of London, clogged with traffic.
It was almost ever thus. Roman legions, medieval pilgrims, the new 19th century poor tramped this way, in and out of London to Canterbury and to the continent.
For Borough High Street is paved with history. And to step off the main thoroughfare, into Southwark's alleys, closes and yards, is to enter a land haunted still by the ghosts of centuries past. Literary ghosts.
On the corner of Talbot Yard stood the Tabard Inn, the meeting place of Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims. There commemorated by Rose Alley, stood Phillip Heslowe's Rose Theatre where William Shakespeare acted before switching to the Globe on nearby Bankside. And over in Lant Street is where Charles Dickens lodged while his father languished in the Marshalsea debtors' prison just down the street.
Not far away is the Church of St George the Martyr, where Little Dorrit was christened and rescued from sleeping on the steps by the kindly verger, and the site of Oliver Twist's workhouse. "This is the area where Dickens would have met Bill Sikes and his dog Bullseye, Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Sam Weller, Mr Pickwick, Mr Bumble and many of his other 2,000 or so characters," says Williams.
The historic suburb of Southwark may boast more famous writers per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in Britain, but it is just one of many hundreds of places now joyously promoting their literary associations.
As Sally Varlow, the author of A Reader's Guide to Writers' Britain - aptly subtitled "an enchanting tour of literary landscapes and shrines" - says, "searching for 'storybook' settings and hunting down writers' haunts is not new. "It has become a truth universally acknowledged," as Jane Austen put it, that a reader in possession of a good book gains further pleasure from knowing where the author lived, loved and found inspiration.
It is to meet the increasing demand of those planning "a journey through a land of great writers" that the British Tourist Authority has produced Literary Britain, a free guide that details places associated with almost 100 authors.
They range from the island of Barra in the far north (setting for Compton Mackenzie's rollicking novel Whisky Galore), to Fowey in the far south (where it is possible to follow in the cliff-top footsteps of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. From poet Dylan Thomas's Laugharne in the west, to the headland setting for P. D. James's mystery Devices and Desires, somewhere between Cromer and Great Yarmouth in the east.
There are places associated with children's writers, such as Beatrix Potter (Near Sawrey in the Lake District), and with crime writers such as Colin Dexter (the Oxford of Inspector Morse).
Like Dick Francis (Newmarket), Anita Brookner (Kensington) and Melvyn Bragg (Cumbria), Dexter is one of many contemporary writers featured.
Some lovers of literature may question their inclusion. Joan Wildgust, at the D.H. Lawrence Heritage Centre at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, for example, wonders whether some of today's blockbuster authors will "stand the test of time".
But already included on the BTA's literary map are several writers who have a less touristic take on Britain, such as Martin Amis (London), James Kelman (Glasgow) and, most provocative, Irvine Welsh.
Come, see Scotland and probe what the BTA calls "the hilarious and horrifying underbelly of Edinburgh where junkies struggle to find their next fix".
And why not? As the old advertisement says, travellers should first let their fingers do the walking through the pages and then go see the places. It can only enhance the travel experience.
It can also work wonders for local economies, though literary attention is not always welcome. Ever since John Betjeman wrote "Come,friendly bombs,/And fall on Slough/It isn't fit for humans now...", the Berkshire town has been trying to live down its reputation. Now, it has even asked the new Poet Laureate Andrew Motion to put pen to praise.
Bath
JANE AUSTEN COUNTRY
Few beauties for the beast
SO MUCH to see, so little time. But when in Bath it is tempting, as Sir Walter Elliot did in Jane Austen's Persuasion, to stop and stare at the passing parade of faces and finery, searching for pretty men and women.
Snobbish Sir Walter was not impressed. "One handsome [female] face would be followed by thirty, or five and thirty frights ..." Once, as he had stood in a shop in Bond Street, he counted 87 women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them.
"There certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath, and as for the men! They were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!"
Today visitors are struck not so much by the beauty, or otherwise, of the people, so much as their bustle: Bath attracts annually almost three
million tourists, from backpackers to the sort of big-spending bourgeois that would have been welcomed with open, ahem, hands by "Beau" Nash, the city's famous Master of Ceremonies.
Yet, as TV presenter Paul Cresswell says, "Standing in the centre of the city you can't help but feel Jane Austen's presence. Despite all the changes, it's still Jane Austen's Bath."
She spent holidays with her family there in the 1790s, lived there from 1801 to 1806 and, most fortunately for the modern visitor, wrote plenty of observant letters and set two novels there - Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
The latter remains a gloriously mischievous satire of Bath society, taking the waters, gambling and gossiping, swirling annually round "The Season", a time when being seen was far more important than seeing.
According to local guide Jan Hudson, Jane fainted on learning that she would be living in Bath, even then being transformed into its modern-
day Georgian magnificence by the architects, John Wood younger and elder (hence the complaint about a recent planting program that "you can't see the Woods for the trees").
Austen's subsequent ambivalence - underscored by an almost Sydneyside preoccupation with the rainy weather and house prices - appears to be reflected in the comments of her characters.
"Bath is a charming place, sir, there are so many good shops here," says Mrs Allen in Northanger Abbey. However, in the same novel, Isabella Thorpe complains, "I get so immoderately sick of Bath ... We would not live here for millions."
Elsewhere, Catherine Morland enthuses, "Here are a variety of amusements, a variety of things to be seen and done all day long ..."
Today they include the abbey, where an Australian flag flies over a plaque commemorating the country's first governor, Arthur Phillip, the Roman Baths, the old Theatre Royal, the Pump Room, the Assembly Rooms, The Circus and Royal Crescent.
The house at No 1 has been tenderly restored to showcase some of the late 18th century's elegance and a little cruelty - caged Jack Russell terriers running feverishly to turn kitchen spits.
There are J.A. walking tours through "the white glare of Bath", past her homes, into the social venues, beside the site of the haberdashery shop in Stall Street where Jane's aunt was, in real life, accused of shoplifting a length of white lace. (She was found not guilty. Which was just as well, for it was a crime for which she could have been transported to Australia.)
An appropriate starting point is the new Jane Austen Centre, Gay Street. A good introductory book is A Charming Place: Bath in the Life and Novels of Jane Austen, by Maggie Lane.
Although Beau Nash, doubtless, would have approved, some of the literary spin-offs tend towards the tacky. There's a studio where visitors can be photographed as their favourite Austen character. There are T-shirts, carrying quotes such as "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" There are videos.
That said, Bath remains captivating, its architecture breathtaking, its men and women better than one-in-88, beautiful.
Other local literary connections: Numerous. Apart from Chaucer's "Wife of Bath", almost anyone with literary pretensions in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries lived or visited there, including Pepys, William Congreve, Richard Sheridan, Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens.
Other attractions: Costume, postage and American museums; Wells Cathedral is a short drive.
Dorset
Hardy COUNTRY
Childhood revisited
IT IS only after a brisk walk, either through dark woodland or up country lanes overhung by hedgerow, that the modern-day traveller comes upon - seems, indeed, to chance upon - the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, the birthplace of Thomas Hardy.
Late in life, the writer recalled in verse his childhood home, built by a great-grandfather. "It faces west, and round the back and sides/High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs/And sweep against the roof.../Red roses, lilacs, variegated box/Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers/As flourish best untrained..."
Now, as then, it is little more than a few cottages and a muddy track. It is still protected by the surrounding woods from "civilisation", still "absolutely swamped by nature", as literary guide Alistair Chisholm puts it.
It was here that Hardy "lived in quiet, screened, unknown", wrote and drew inspiration for Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From The Madding Crowd. It was from here that he walked to Dorchester, several kilometres distant, and more regularly to Stinsford, in whose stocky, 13th-century church he was baptised and where his heart lies buried.
His little "cob-and-thatch" cottage - considered sufficiently beautiful to adorn the cover of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles - is an ideal starting point from which to explore, books in hand, what can justifiably be called Hardy Country.
The capital of Wessex - the name he chose for the "partly real, partly dream country" of Dorset and adjacent counties - is Dorchester (Casterbridge), "compact as a box of dominoes... country and town met at a mathematical line...
"To birds of the soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys and
crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of green."
As the estimable Chisholm, runner-up to Sydneysider Graham Keating in the world town-crying championships, explains, "Dorset's heyday was some 3,000 years ago. It has been slipping into obscurity ever since. It is now, I'm glad to say, a sleepy county, a very sleepy county."
Everywhere Hardy bookmarks are to be found. Places he lived and work, such as Max Gate, the imposing home that Hardy, who trained as an architect, designed and built himself.
Places appropriated for his novels: Puddletown, or Weatherbury, where the folk were as "hardy, merry, thriving, wicked a set as any"; Puddletown Forest, or Egdon Heath, "a wildhill that had no name, beside a barren down that never looked like summer"; Bournemouth.
This he called Sandbourne, "a city of detached mansions, a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel".
And places and people that have a familiar place in Hardy's fiction and poetry, which he always regarded as the higher form of literature. For example, sit late at night, as Chisholm does on ghost tours, in the churchyard at Stinsford (Hardy's Mellstock) and read Voices From Things Growing... about the dead murmuring, "all day cheerily, all night eerily". Spooky.
But then under the spell of Hardy's frequently gloomy but sometimes humorous work, strange things start to happen. After an appropriate reading by Chisholm in a levelled churchyard, a recent group looked up at a nearby house to see a disembodied arm dangling from a window.
The Withered Arm of Hardy's short story? "Possibly," remarked Chisholm with straight face. Or literary empathy, perhaps. Or confirmation of the ability of the poet to speak from beyond his graves, at Stinsford and Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, where his ashes were interred.
Dorset County Museum showcases Hardy and other local writers. Wessex maps, with the writer's name changes, are widely available, as are many good guides, including Thomas Hardy (Wessex Books $10).
Other local literary connections: Dorset poet William Barnes; the Powys brothers John Cowper, Llewelyn and Theodore, who lived in Dorchester; T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia); Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Other attractions: Stonehenge, Weymouth, Bournemouth, Lyme Regis, the Cerne Abbas giant (a priapic figure cut into the chalk hillside) - all of which are referred to in Hardy's books.
Exmoor
Lorna Doone country
Scene stealer
FOR more than 800 years there has been a squat, little parish church at Oare, a village sufficiently important to have been mentioned in the Domesday Book, but now virtually lost in the deep, folding west countryside where Devon meets Somerset.
An old, local jingle even celebrates its isolation: "Culborne, Oare and Stoke Pero,/Parishes three, no parson'll go to./Culborne, Oare and Stoke Pero,/Three such places you'll seldom hear o'."
That is no longer quite true. Several thousand people annually visit the Church of St Mary the Virgin. They come not to see its wagon-type roof, its 18th-century box pews or its tablet commemorating the Prince of Wales, who popped in while on a hunting visit to nearby Exmoor.
No, almost all come to see the scene of one of the most infamous pieces of skulduggery in 19th-century literature.
It was here, at the climax of R. D. Blackmore's best-selling romance that the eponymous heroine Lorna Doone was to be married to John Ridd,
a farmer living at Plover's Barrow, a house that once stood on the hillside opposite Oare church.
The couple are standing at the altar when "the sound of a shot rang through the church". Lorna's eyes dimmed with death. "She fell across my knees... a flood of blood came out upon the yellow wood of the altar steps... the only sign of life remaining was a drip of bright red blood."
Then... well, it would spoil the story. In fact, it's not such a compelling story. As Exmoor guide Brian Pearce explains, "He's probably too melodramatic and melancholic for today's tastes."
That hasn't stopped the local tourist board making the "Lorna Doone Country" a thriving local industry. And why not? Blackmore, London-born but locally educated, is eloquent when writing about his adopted Exmoor and the craggy, enclosing coastline.
It remains an untamed place, covered in summer by multicoloured heath, comprising pink ling and bell heather and yellow gorse, and still roamed by feral goats on its edges and wild ponies on its plateau.
Once there really lived there, too, "the bloody Doones of Bagworthy, the awe of all Devon and Somerset, outlaws, traitors, murderers", from whose legends Blackmore wove his story.
Today it's possible to visit the simple church, take the path along Bagworthy (or Badgery) Water and walk remote "Doone Valley", where the terrible family lived.
It looks peaceful. Now. "Deep in the quiet valley there, away from noise and violence and brawl, save that of the rivulet, any man would have deemed the homes of simple mind and innocence. Yet not a single stood there, but was the home of murder."
So wild, so majestic is the West Country that it has always attracted writers and artists in search of inspiration. The Lakeland poets were regular visitors. William Wordsworth was reportedly unimpressed, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived for a while in nearby Nether Stowey, in a cottage that now faces The Ancient Mariner pub.
Coleridge also wrote Kubla Khan, after emerging from a drug-induced dream, at another cottage near Porlock, one of whose citizens famously
interrupted his reverie.
Exmoor still attracts hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers each year, but visitors should not be discouraged. Even 100 years ago, snobby writers complained bitterly about the "numberless excursionists laughing and calling to each other ... Their proper place is on Brighton Beach, Margate or Ramsgate".
In fact, as Pearce points out, now - as then - visitors do not have to walk far from the roadside to enjoy in solitude the splendours of the Lorna Doone Country.
Other local literary connections: A recent guide lists no fewer than 74 authors who have lived and worked in the West Country, the self-styled "Land of Great Writers". They range from crime writer Agatha Christie (Torquay) to Virginia Woolf (St Ives), from sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke (Minehead) to D. H. Lawrence and German wife Frieda, who were expelled from Zennor, Cornwall, in 1917 as German spies.
Other attractions: Over a huge area, spectacular coastlines, stunning cathedrals (Salisbury, Truro), ancient history (Stonehenge), away-from-it-all wilderness landscapes (Exmoor, Dartmoor).
The Thames
River adventures
Three men and a cat
THERE can be no better place to watch the English at play - "messing about in boats", as Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows, put it - than from the manicured lawn of The Compleat Angler at Marlow on the River Thames.
A bright, August bank holiday Monday morning! A light mist sits lazily on the river, in whose mirror-still waters is reflected the spire of All Saints' Church. Softly, serenely, white swans, occasional skullers glide into view.
Cars, family-packed for a fun day out, creep across the white, miniature suspension bridge, headed for popular spots such as Bisham, Sonning and Henley, there perhaps to hire a rowing boat, or even a vintage launch, from Messrs Hobbs & Sons.
It is a quintessentially English scene, more meaningfully explored through the pages of one of Britain's best-loved travel books Three Men in a Boat, a comic account of a boating holiday undertaken by George Harris, the author Jerome K. Jerome and their tearaway companion, Montmerency the Dog.
The landing of the three men at Marlow was inauspicious. After returning from a dip in the river, they were halfway up the High Street when Montmerency became entangled with a cat. A large black tom.
"I never saw a larger cat, nor a more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its ears and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose...It had a calm, contented air about it...
"Montmerency went for that poor cat at the rate of 20 miles per hour ..." only to stop abruptly and, after a sharp exchange of views, backed off.
A poor start to a brief stopover for shopping. But Jerome, who grew up in the West Midlands town of Walsall, deemed their departure from Marlow as one of the trio's greatest successes. "It was dignified and impressive, without being ostentatious."
It concluded with "as imposing a spectacle as Marlow has seen for many a long day", as men and dog marched back down the middle of High Street to the river, followed by a long line of boys - the grocer's boy, baker's boy, confectioner's boy, cheesemonger's boy - carrying baskets, bags and It concluded with "as imposing a spectacle as Marlow has seen for many a long day", as men and dog marched back down the middle of High Street to the river, followed by a long line of boys - the grocer's boy, baker's boy, confectioner's boy, cheesemonger's boy - carrying baskets, bags and hampers containing their victuals.
"When we got down to the landing-stage, the boatman said, 'Let me see, sir; was yours a steam launch or a houseboat?'" On our informing him it was a double-sculling skiff, he seemed surprised."
Not that the men wanted a steam launch. "There is a blatant bumptiousness about a steam launch."
Jerome found Marlow "not very picturesque on the whole", but he praised its "quaint nooks and corners... standing arches in the shattered bridge of time". He gloried in the quiet reaches of the river, "the soft singing of the waters, the whisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind".
He also recommended walking, up, round Quarry woods, "with your narrow, climbing paths and little winding glades" where Grahame dreamt up Toad, Ratty and the rest of the cast of Wind in the Willows.
To Bisham, whose abbey is haunted by the ghost of "the Lady Holdy, who beat her little boy to death". And to Medmenham, home of the notorious "Hell Fire Club", whose debauched "congregation of irreverent jesters" lived by the motto "Do as you please".
As Jerome amusingly demonstrates there is more, much more to see, by going by boat up or down the River Thames, although the 45 locks and weirs may make it a little too leisurely for modern travellers.
It's also possible to walk the 300-kilometre length of the river, from its official source near Cirencester, Gloucestershire, to the Thames Barrier in Woolwich.
Better still, perhaps, read the book. Plan a few day trips. Hire and mess about in a boat. Toast, as George, Harris and Jerome - now thankfully "Three Men out of a Boat" - good "old Father Thames".
Other local literary connections: West Street, Marlow, alone boasts many. Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wife, Mary, the author of Frankenstein, lived and worked there, as did T.S. Eliot and Thomas Love Peacock. The riverside hotel takes its name from the book reportedly written by Isaak Walton there in 1653.
Other attractions: Henley-on-Thames, Bisham, Windsor are all within easy reach, if not row.
Eastwood
D.H. LAWRENCE COUNTRY
Country of my heart
LITERARY guide Joan Wildgust pauses, screws up her imagination and, with arm outstretched, sweeps round theatrically. "And it was somewhere here, in this very building," she announces, "that young Bert Lawrence would be sent each week to collect his father's wages."
D. H. Lawrence, that is. "A sulky child. A queer boy, though not in the modern sense," she explains, as she elaborates further on the significance of Durham House, in the drab East Midlands town of Eastwood.
The young Lawrence - bookish, a bit of a mummy's boy, who loathed sport - hated visiting the house, a rather splendid Victorian building that a century ago was a mining company office, is now a heritage centre. "You can imagine how he was teased mercilessly by the miners and the other boys."
Talk about a prophet being without honour in his own country. David Herbert Lawrence, born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in September 1885, was taunted as a child, shunned as a youth and, when his "mucky books" attracted international attention, disowned as an adult.
As Wildgust, an erudite, wonderfully good-humoured guide, recalls, contemporary attitudes were, perhaps, best summarised by an Eastwood man who boasted, "...'e were nowt b'r a mardy [spoiled, whining] bugger. We kicked 'im outa Eastwood, and we kicked 'im outa England ..."
Now, of course, they want him back. Have brought him back ... to the place he once described as "the country of my heart", to the people he used to help populate his novels. Chatterley, for example, was the name of a local accountant.
Visitors can tread in his footsteps along the Blue Line Trail to Durban House, a "handsome redbrick building, almost like a mansion", as it is described in Sons and Lovers, where his early life and difficult times are, sensitively, imaginatively brought to life.
They can inspect the little corner house, at 8A Victoria Street, where he was born and lived for the first two years; see the redbrick Gothic Beauvale Board school where he was taught by "Knocker Bradley" (he hated that, too).
They can visit the mine, Brinsley Colliery, where his father, Arthur, worked; tramp the fields where he would "hunt for mushrooms in the long grass, or perhaps pick up a skulking rabbit"; stroll through the village of Cossall, which as Cossehay provided the background for The Rainbow.
Brinsley is now closed. Indeed, where once 36 pits could be seen from the top of the town, none now operates. And there's the rub. The prophet without honour is now being used, understandably, to turn a profit in a place devastated by the decline of the coal industry.
Today there's a Lawrence Cafe, a White Peacock craft shop. The traveller half expects to see a butcher advertising "Lady Chatterley's liver".
Quite what Lawrence, who spent part of his exile in Australia, would think of it can only be imagined. Shortly before his death, he wrote a nostalgic piece recalling childhood memories of "a country so lovely...a man-made England so vile".
It was, he wrote, "still the old England of the forest and agricultural past; there were no motor cars; the mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape; and Robin Hood and his merry men were not very far away".
But as the view from his tiny bedroom in Walker Street still confirms, "little local speculators already began to straggle dwellings in rows, always in rows, across the fields: nasty, red-brick, flat-faced dwellings with dark slate roofs".
How strange that more than 70 years after his death Lawrence should now be helping to change for the better that bygone Eastwood of "rat-trap" homes, nagging wives and disheartened, betrayed, beaten men.
Other local literary connections: Lord Byron, who had homes at nearby Newstead Abbey and Burgage Manor, in Southwell; Alan Sillitoe, the author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, grew up in Radford area of Nottingham.
Other attractions: Sherwood Forest, heart of Robin Hood country; Newark with its castle and Civil War history; Southwell, famous for its minster.
Case Notes
Destination: England.
Getting there: Cathay Pacific flies daily to London ex-Sydney (including one stop over) from $1,978 return (plus tax).
What to see: The Literary Map of Britain is available from the British Tourist Authority; phone (02) 9377 4400, fax (02) 9377 4499 or visit its Web site at www.visitbritain.bta.org.au
More information: Contact Cathay Pacific on 13 17 47 or see page 8 for European bargains.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald