A Stroll Before Dark: Essays

By Richard Church

In this collection of essays, Richard Church explores themes of countryside, poetry, family, and finding inspiration in the mundane. Split into two parts 'Moving About' and 'Sitting Still', these titles reflect the happy combination of travel sketches with literary criticism, of observations on household duties with the philosophy drawn from a lifetime's study and practice of the art of writing.

First published in 1965, A Stroll Before Dark muses on everything from the wonder of the aurora borealis to the smallest details of life with a refreshing clarity and warmth. Whether discussing the habits of his pet cat, the poetry of John Betjeman, the differences between the changing, and yet unchanging, face of his beloved Kent or a visit to a South African game reserve, Church's readers will be enriched and entertained by the breadth of his knowledge, the elegance of his prose, and, above all, by his compassion, humour, and love of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781448214884

Richard Church

Richard Church was born in London in 1893. At the age of sixteen, persuaded by his father, he took a position as a clerk in the Civil Service where he worked for the next twenty-four years. During that time he worked tirelessly on his love of all things literary, devoting early mornings, between 5 and 7, and most of his evenings to writing and reading. In 1917 this hard regime was rewarded and his first volume of poetry, The Flood of Life, and Other Poems, was published. But real success and acclaim came only in 1926 with the publication of Portrait of the Abbot. In 1930 Richard gave up his position with the Civil Service and began a full-time writing career. He died in 1972, with over sixty books of poetry and prose to his name, having firmly established his position in English literary heritage.

Book preview

A Stroll Before Dark

Essays

Richard Church

I simply skimmed across frontiers

Max Beerbohm

Contents

Part One

Moving About

Chapter 1. The Weeping Willow Tree

Chapter 2. Christmas on the Indian Ocean

Chapter 3. Waiting at the Ferry

Chapter 4. The Realms of Gold

Chapter 5. The Hodden Horse

Chapter 6. Three Swallows

Chapter 7. On Railway Lines

Chapter 8. Bare Twigs

Chapter 9. A Little Praise

Chapter 10. Returned Empty

Chapter 11. Addressing the Multitude

Chapter 12. Birthplaces

Chapter 13. On Second Thoughts

Chapter 14. Dawn Chorus

Chapter 15. The Time and the Place

Chapter 16. A Latin Interlude

Chapter 17. What we Inherit

Chapter 18. Twilight

Chapter 19. Claimants

Chapter 20. A Stroll before Dark

Chapter 21. Visitors from Jaipur

Chapter 22. The Inventory

Chapter 23. Fallow Land

Chapter 24. The Gateways of History

Chapter 25. Greenmantle

Chapter 26. Looking out for Lions

Chapter 27. The Dentist’s Den

Chapter 28. A Tyrant in the House

Chapter 29. A Moment’s Pause

Chapter 30. Fontainebleau Revisited

Chapter 31. From a Window in Tuscany

Chapter 32. When Travelling Westward

Chapter 33. Litter Bugs

Chapter 34. Waiting

Part Two

Sitting Still

Chapter 35. A Blank Sheet of Paper

Chapter 36. In Their Lighter Moments

Chapter 37. Ruskin Re-visited

Chapter 38. A Sizeable Man

Chapter 39. The Doppelgänger

Chapter 40. Unto a Little Clan

Chapter 41. The Art of Forgetting

Chapter 42. The Adverse Critic

Chapter 43. Parallel to Life

Chapter 44. Reluctant to Begin

Chapter 45. The Art of Recollection

Chapter 46. Bells from Parnassus

Chapter 47. The Immortal Jane

Chapter 48. The Triumph of Light

Chapter 49. From Pink to Blue Room

Chapter 50. By No Other Name

Chapter 51. By the Spanish Steps

Chapter 52. The Voice of Hermes

Chapter 53. From Mankind’s Cradle

Chapter 54. The Voices of Kent and Sussex

Chapter 55. On Finishing the Job

A Note on the Author

Part One

Moving About

Chapter 1

The Weeping Willow Tree

Twenty-five years ago I made a garden here, out of the tag-end of a cherry orchard that crowns a Kentish hill-top, and a corner of the field below it. The ground sloped southward, so much had to be done before planting began. Three terraces of ground, two to be grassed, and the lowest, hidden by young yew bushes (which have since become a thick square hedge), to be a vegetable garden. On the top terrace before the house I made a small fishpond by sinking a huge iron tank taken from the roof of the laundry of the neighbouring school. I exchanged it for a six-bar gate and the promise to give an occasional talk to the boys.

Beside the iron-clad pond I laid York paving-stones, debris of the bombed London pavements (but that was a year later). Then I bought for a shilling a thin sapling, a weeping willow, and set it to overhang the pond. I imagined that this would be a long-term policy, but within four years that willow was already doing its picturesque job. Indeed, it threatened to dominate the whole garden. We did not object, for it was a graceful youngster. Its fronds of pale green, with tiny yellow catkins, flung themselves out in the spring, and in the winter they hardened into coral-tinted streamers that whipped in the wind, and threaded themselves with snow, or glistened in the rain like copper wire.

Year by year I watched the trunk expanding. Small cracks in the bark quickly filled up, hardly giving time for tree-creepers and tits to suck the sweet moisture that was to solidify and cement the bark into a seamless coat. The willow commanded attention because it was full of temperament. The rest of the vegetation which we planted–the yew hedges, the red plum, the crab-apple, and the utility fruit trees – all flourished, but in a sober and unobtrusive way. They may have been self-centred, but they did not advertise the fact.

The weeping willow, however, became a prima donna. She went in for colour schemes, as I have shown. She took to dancing. Her measures were patterned according to the tunes played by the orchestra of the winds. When a harsh northeaster came snuffling over the hill, she flung a tragic pose, leaning over the pond and throwing out her fronds with all the despair of a Hecuba. But she continued to grow lustily (a habit of prima donnas). In the summer, when a hot day was caressed suddenly at noon by a sighing lift from the south-west, she trembled within her delicate green robe, so that it shook out a few faded leaves and sometimes a tiny cloud of pollen, almost angering my neighbour’s bees who were mumbling there. The surface of the pond was dusty and mottled with the discarded vegetable matter, and the golden carp came up to gasp at it, opening their mouths like miniature vacuum cleaners and sucking in the ichor.

The willow’s visible music must have appealed to the birds also. A green woodpecker made his headquarters there, and could be heard croaking his derisive laughter from spring to autumn. I willingly put up with that satire, because he made so harmonious a colour scheme; his exotic, tropical cap and throat shone vividly in that cool green setting. The blue-tits too, hanging upside down as they milked the catkins, added their gaiety to the willow’s Liberty garment. One hot June night I was wakened by the throbbing song of a nightingale, more daring than most of her kind, who was hidden somewhere in those cool branches. I got up and peered out on the garden. There was no moon, but the sky was so clear that the starlight filled the whole dome with a dusty radiance, making the outline of the willow visible; a ghost-shape of no distinct colour, but suggestive of other-world tints, strange metals and unearthly elements. Out of this cold shape came that burning, pulsing music, troubled yet ecstatic. I registered my impression more prosily than did Keats of ‘that same song’ a century and a half ago in the mulberry tree in the front garden of the villa in Wentworth Place in Hampstead.

Many a quiet tea-party, of two, or sometimes with a few friends, year after year, has been enjoyed beneath that ever-growing panache of green. I can think of books read in that shade, and of conversations whose echoes linger in my mind, the ideas precipitated by them settled permanently with a touch of ‘green thought’, an experience I share with Andrew Marvell. Time has nothing to do with these adventures of the mind hand in hand with the five senses, blessed by the recording Mystery whom we hardly dare to name.

Season after season have gone over my garden, with a recurring likeness that is never quite the same. During the Battle of Britain, and again when the V1 bombs were roaring over Kent from France on their way to London, fragments of steel lodged in my trees and were sunk in my lawns. One such carved demoniac initials down the trunk of the willow. The scar closed quickly, but the signature remained there for years. Then in 1952, the newly arrived blue-grey kitten, Musetta, driven by joie de vivre, rushed up the trunk of the willow and out to a branch overhanging the pond. She could not get down again, and we had to spend an hour with ladders, coaxing her back to within arm’s-length. These are minor memorials, perhaps, but they serve to endear the ever-increasing domination of our weeping willow tree over the rest of the garden. Indeed, neighbours across the valley, some two miles away, have remarked that her cool green glory has begun to affect the whole landscape as they look northward toward us. She has already hidden the major part of the house from them, though my workroom window peers through the upper branches.

The year before last, she cast her leaves in August, following a drought. Then came a winter of floods, and another drought in the spring. Last summer she put out a few, feeble catkins and leaves, which quickly dropped. By July she was a winter skeleton, incongruous among the Kentish luxuriance of high summer. The expert came next winter from Tunbridge Wells, and shook his head. A week later, his team arrived with their gleaming tools, and felled my weeping willow. So this is the last time that I shall hang my harp there. I watched the men at work in the snow. First those still-graceful branches were lopped. The main trunk and limbs stood stark against the January sky. No shelter there for a nightingale! Then the mechanical saw was applied to the base. I saw the ropes quiver. Then the trunk swayed and righted itself, as though crying out, with a last dance-gesture against this discourtesy. Again she swayed, and, after a long swing up and back, she crashed into the snow.

I turned away, blinded by the glare of naked light, and the emptiness around the fishpond. A rook, from the open field beyond, shook his mournful wings and slowly lifted himself away from the scene.

Chapter 2

Christmas on the Indian Ocean

The boat was small, 12,200 tons, but we had been fortunate during that winter voyage. The horrors of storm and worldwide disaster which had swept land and sea that December had been held back like the waters of the Red Sea for the Israelites. We had just sailed down that same Red Sea, breaking through its crisp mirror surface and disturbing the reflection of the hills of Sinai on the Arabia Deserta side, and the coastal mountains of Egypt to starboard, ragged and bare both in fact and in reflection. Four days of this, out of sight of land once we left the Gulf of Suez and the stage-set of so much of the Old Testament.

The heat came up from the south to meet us. It was a personality, and it dominated the manners and daily habits of the ship’s company. The sombre crowd blossomed into whites and swim-suits. It grew communicative, and friendships were made, lifelong, deep-rooted overnight. We were a club; we were a family, and the seventy children aboard swirled round us while we exchanged our life-stories and other confidences over the eleven o’clock cups of soup along the promenade deck, to continue the revelations at night in the saloon, or in the bar, or in odd niches on deck under the constellations and the planets, that burned so conspicuously in this different sky, like old-fashioned lanterns.

But there is nothing new in all this. It goes on still, as it went on during the British Raj in India, and hundreds of Civil Servants, and their wives, have recorded the nothingness of twenty days at sea, jotting down the small contacts in their diaries, and subsequently losing the diaries, and forgetting the experience. Nobody wants to read or hear about it. Travelogues are a bore, even to the confiding traveller himself, if he will only be honest about his recollections.

But that Christmas at sea two years ago has haunted me. It was banal enough, perhaps, for it was composed of all the Dickensian and Washington Irving-like ingredients, compressed into a small compass and imposed upon a confined community. Rumours and inklings of it began while the boat was unloading at Aden. We went ashore there, with a day to spend. I asked the way of an Englishman who had just come out of an office on the main street. He at once befriended us, and took us up in his car to the Old Town in the Crater, to show us the medieval water reservoirs, three great stone ponds, each larger than a swimming bath. They were now dry, grassed over; but even so, gave out a sense of coolness.

Aden has a reputation for being ‘Hell with the lid off’, a kind of mineral grill where human bodies are quickly done to a turn. But it has much shade and vegetation. It even has majestic scenery. Looked down on from the heights above the Old Town, it has a touch of Italian grandeur softening its Arabian harshness. One forgets the vast oil distilleries along the coast. They are dwarfed by the hills which hide the desert behind them. I found myself murmuring ‘Amalfi’, through my anxiety that we might miss the boat. We seemed to be so remote up there, in our host’s charming modern villa, sitting at tea and giving him news of England which he had not seen for over a year. He was the architect of the new town being built to house ninety thousand people, some ten miles out of Aden.

The anxiety was not needed. Travel-neurosis, to which most of us are prone, is one of the greatest energy-wasters. I set foot on board, tired out, having done nothing but stroll, and talk, and sip tea. Only a few hours ashore; and I came back to the boat as though groping my way home; emotional about it.

We lay all night in the harbour, and just before daybreak the siren moaned, waking us. We began to move, turned, and exposed ourselves to the drama of the new moon and Venus setting together. The lights of the town were fading, and the bumboats casting off from the sides of the ship, their gaudy wares catching the first hints of dawnlight, then shrinking again as we moved away. Another departure! I felt my throat tighten, as I stood watching the diminishing scene, the lights blinking down into a thin line, the hills behind rising up and treading over the town, while behind all this the sky began to catch fire, to swirl smokily, brighter and brighter, conjuring the water into life as we left the harbour, rounded the bluff, and met the risen sun. Aden was gone.

There followed two days of serene monotony; down the Gulf of Aden, round eastward to the Arabian Sea, along the wedge-shaped coast of southern Arabia. It was a formidable wall, without an observable sign of life, either vegetable or animal. Just rock. Just stone. Yet it took on a character that made it something more; something that made it both the beginning and the end of things; ossified history, and at the same time a threat. Down the coast of the early stages of the Red Sea we had seen similar mountains of barren rock, but they at least had an occasional sign of human life; villages, patches of sere green. But here – nothing! It was terrifying, or would have been so had we not been gradually moving out to sea, softening the threat, removing it several centuries further back, perhaps. But the very indifference of its removal re-constituted the threat. One word summed it up; the word ‘Wait!’; half uttered, and only half heard. ‘Wait!’

But we did not wait. We plugged on, to the rhythm of the engines, over the glassy surface of the Arabian Sea, and I plagued myself trying to ascertain where these motionless waters became the Indian Ocean. Another day passed, and nothing happened, except that far to the south we saw a whale spouting. He was almost out of sight, blubber-down below the horizon. I say nothing happened, but hour by hour we were shadowed by shoals of flying fish. Shadowed is hardly appropriate, for flying fish are made of light. As they spring obliquely out of the water their anatomy shines through the transparent plastic of fin and body. They glitter. Even when they plunge up out of the water to bury themselves in air, they are electric with vitality.

Aboard much was happening, once we withdrew our gaze from the fascinating, crowded nothingness of the sea, and looked around the decks. The day was December 23rd and preparations were afoot, or aplank. The wide open deck at the back of the promenade was being tented in, with sailcloth and flags. This immediately enlarged it, to about the size of the floor of the Albert Hall, whereas before it had been merely a turning point for the daily health-walk of the over-fed passengers. We had to put up with that indoor effect for the rest of that day and the evening. We sat about in this concert hall subdued in mood, and lowering our voices to more confidential tones. The sentiment of Christmas had already taken possession.

So Christmas Eve found us in mid-ocean; really ocean and not merely sea. Vastness predominated; above, around, below. For the waters were so clear that we could stare down into the depths, giddy with the conviction that we were falling over an ever-receding cliff-top into another universe. It looked cooler than the surface world over which we were gliding. Heat competed with vastness, and during the afternoon it won. The sun itself was dissolved into its own glory. It could not be seen. But it could be felt. Its power penetrated even into the air-conditioned dining saloon, where the first of the seasonal feasts was served at lunchtime.

It was a northern, temperate zone meal, and it knocked the adults down. They slept the early afternoon away, under the drug of light and heat; slept on deck, in the cabins, and the saloons. Only the seventy children survived. Perhaps they had been denied a meal, because of the shape of things to come. Then at four in the afternoon the ship’s bell rang, and Goan boys went round banging the mealtime gongs. The sleeping ship woke, and the children, who had been half-suppressed for a couple of hours, came surging up to the bows of the ship, monitored by seamen. Up above, on the promenade deck, the adults watched the scene, pleased with their handiwork in dressing up the infants in party-clothes.

There was a shout, a shrill scream of ecstasy, from the little Pied Piper crowd in their frills and ribbons. Father Christmas, in the correct beard and dressing gown, climbed aboard over the bowsprit – yes, really climbed aboard, with a huge sack on his back, and lumbered forward on a tide of infant humanity into the main saloon, where a ceiling-high pine tree stood, covered with rime. The Master of Ceremonies, a West Indian lawyer who had made himself beloved by everybody aboard during the voyage, now took charge, and there began the greatest, wildest, yet most harmonious children’s party I have ever witnessed. I did not see Bob Cratchett, but I am certain I saw his creator, Mr Dickens, in a gaudy waistcoat and benevolent beard, treading through the cotton-wool snow and trying on the paper hats that were to be had by the dozen. And the sack when opened and its contents distributed by Father Christmas (still bone-dry) contained exactly seventy presents for those seventy children.

Were they subdued by the vastness of the Indian Ocean, and the temperature of 98 degrees? What do you think? I even felt chilly myself.

Chapter 3

Waiting at the Ferry

Recently I had to drive up to Norfolk on a job of work. This journey has in the past been a simple matter, for I live some twenty miles due south of the Gravesend to Tilbury Ferry across the Thames estuary, and I have always enjoyed winding my way down the back streets of the old Kentish town of Gravesend. It is like coming into personal contact with Charles Dickens, for the character of the place remains, with but minor modernizations, as it was when he spent much of his childhood there.

Another pleasurable connection with the Ferry is that it transports me in ten minutes not only from Kent into Essex over a stretch of water that is one of the busiest in the world, but also it carries me from one country, I might even say one civilization, to another quite foreign. The countryside of Essex is different from that of Kent. Its green is a flatter green, its sky rounder. Its fields and farms are spacious and bare, whereas those of Kent are luscious and intimate. I will not go into