The North Country is in great beauty and good heart
Although I do not live in the North, I was born there, and my heart is still there. Each year, in the early autumn, I make a little expedition up north to examine again, and paint, its spare, elegant landscape, hear its soft speech and find out interesting things I did not know. This time I stopped first at Accrington, a little industrial town to the east of much bigger Blackburn. It is a proud and tragic place, for two reasons. First, it has a grand public park, perched on a hill overlooking the town, and crowned by a brown sandstone mansion with a magnificent view across the fells. In 1890, a young teenager from Accrington, Joseph Briggs, went to America to make his fortune. At 17 he joined Louis Comfort Tiffany, the great glassmaker, as an office boy, and worked there for more than 40 years, becoming the designer's right-hand man and manager of his glassworks. Each time they made a new piece, be it vase, tile or ornament, he kept a copy, and he treasured too examples of the coloured window glass and mosaics in which the firm specialised. When he finally retired, he packed them all up carefully and took them home to Accrington, leaving them in his will to the Hawarth Gallery there. Bad times came, when Tiffany-ware and indeed all Art Nouveau were despised and, often, destroyed. People said, 'Why not get rid of that out-of-date muck?' But the gallery said, 'Noah. We'll keep it.' Then good times came, and Tiffany pieces began to fetch huge sums at auction. People said, 'Why not sell that stuff for good money and buy summat nice with it?' But the gallery said, 'Noah. We'll keep it.' Today, Accrington obstinacy means the town has the most complete, beautiful and valuable hoard of Tiffany glass in Europe.
But it also treasures the memory of the 'Accrington Pals'. When war came in 1914, many thousands of patriotic young men volunteered to fight. My father and his two brothers and my mother's three brothers all enlisted together on the same day. Kitchener agreed that such volunteers should serve together in units known as 'Pals'. The 'Accrington Pals' was one such, 1,100-strong, who enlisted together, trained together and then served together. More than 700 were among those who went over the top on 1 July 1916, the opening day of Haig's disastrous battle of the Somme. A week of heavy bombardment by the guns was supposed to have destroyed the German defences, but in fact the Germans were safe in deep dug-outs, and when the bombardment ceased, they were up in good time to machinegun the advancing ranks of the British. Of the Accrington Pals, some 585 were killed or wounded, part of the 60,000 losses we suffered in perhaps the worst day in British history.
From there we drove across the Ribble into my home territory and Stonyhurst, where I was at school. I saw again that magic silhouette of Pendle Hill, which dominates the Ribble and Hodder valleys. It is a place of mystery, once sheltering the wild women who figure in Harrison Ainsworth's splendid tale The Lancashire Witches (1848). I drew and painted it scores of times while I was at school, and last week I drew it again. [was at Stonyhurst to open the new school library, dedicated to St Thomas More (as was the old one, in which I spent countless happy and fruitful hours). This new place is a magnificent affair, the best school library I have ever seen, with all the latest equipment but also light and airy, comfortable, spacious and delectably quiet. In the old days Jewish scholars often described -Heaven as a library, with the angels as librarians, and the blessed as the privileged readers. And this new house of books is indeed a paradise for studious boys and girls to acquire that most valuable of all possessions, a taste for reading.
Much comforted to see my old school in such good shape, acquiring new facilities and resources, and, with 750 pupils, bigger than ever — and evidence, too, that teenagers can be polite and courteous even in these barbarous days — I determined to push north up the Hodder Valley into that northern garden of Eden, the Forest of Bowland. Part of my family came from this wild, strange and arcane place, which few know about and fewer still visit. It is cleft in two by a monstrous declivity known as 'The Trough', its hermetic fastnesses veiled from prying eyes by high, proud hills and dense woods, through which the becks rush in white profusion over their shiny brown stones. I have heard that the Queen owns a farm and plans to retire there — if ever she risks handing over to the foolish Charles — vowing that Bowland Forest is the fairest place on earth. I admire her taste. There is something unique and special about this nubilous and recondite territory.
And so on to Penrith and the Lake District. It was the 65th anniversary of my first visit to this enchanted region, which I have walked from east to west and from south to north many times and which, though comparatively
small in extent, is so gigantic and rich in vistas and wonders, natural virtues and curiosities. As always I went to the Wordsworth Trust centre in Grasmere. which Robert Woof and his wife Pamela have turned into what is, in my opinion, the finest literary museum in the world. They are staging at present a magnificent exhibition devoted to Milton, and Paradise Lost in particular, and the way it has been illustrated over the generations. They have mounted much of it from the centre's own collection, but managed to persuade others to lend their treasures, including superb watercolours by Blake not seen in England for more than a century. Pamela Woof has produced a book on the great poem which rivals in insight and wisdom the key volume A Preface to Paradise Lost by my old mentor at Magdalen, C.S. Lewis. I first read that book when I was 13, I think, the earliest truly grown-up work! tackled.
Robert Woof showed me round the centre's new buildings, finally completed after many years of difficulties — finding a site, getting planning permission, reconciling the demands of scholarship and conservation with the visions of architecture and the exigencies and rules of the National Park, and not least raising the vast sum of money required. The amazing thing about this work — whose entrails are crammed with the latest technology required to preserve the immensely valuable and delicate collection of books, manuscripts, drawings and watercolours which form the core of the centre's riches — is that it blends beautifully into the existing villagescape, so that you do not know it is there until you are almost on the doorstep.
As the rain tumbled down, bringing the fellsides to brilliant life, the becks' long thirst suddenly quenched as they roared in vivid`white torrents down to the valley floor, I saw another comforting sight: a herd of splendid black and white cows being brought back to the farm for milking. Their escorts, blending old and new, were the young farmer and his young dog, just being trained, his handsome wife, immense long bare legs terminating in the briefest of denim shorts, and their fiveyear-old son, seated in an electric four-wheeler, which he was manipulating and steering with the greatest delight and notable skill. Amid all the hardships and ill fortune which small hill-farmers have had to contend with recently, here was one family cheerfully flourishing and radiating happiness. God bless the North of England and all who live there!
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