AND ANOTHER THING
Oh, to be in downland Wiltshire, now that April's there
PAUL JOHNSON
h, to be in England, now that April's there!' wrote Browning. Yes, but which England? There are so many. Small though it may be, England contains scores of different regions and micro. climates, dis- tinguished from each other by minute vari- ations and peculiarities which are fascinat- ing to note. We spent the Easter weekend in downland Wiltshire, a warm and spa- cious land with marked characteristics of soil and vegetation and weather, not pre- cisely reproduced even in other downland areas of the south. It is much loved by those who live there (or who visit it often), not least by John Aubrey who lauded its men and stones whenever the opportunity arose.
The house where we stayed is justly famous for its comforts and hospitality, for its vast lawns and kitchen gardens, delight- ful borders and the specimen trees — many of them identified and marked by the experts as the largest in Britain — in its cathedral-like arboretum. Oddly enough, the week I was born, in autumn 1928, Eve- lyn Waugh stayed there — the then owner, Geoffrey Fry, was his brother-in-law — and wrote enthusiastically to Harold Acton about its 'great peace and luxury'. He recorded in his diary: 'Towards the end of our visit I managed to do quite a lot of work', which included his first attempt at Popular journalism, 'Too old at forty?'. For this contribution to why-oh-why feature writing, the Evening Standard paid him £10, a lot of money in those days. I thought of Waugh, scribbling away at his well-paid tosh in the library, and imag- ined him glancing occasionally across the garden at the low hills beyond. This is a land of milky softness. It is made of chalk, which underpins everything with its spongy, springy tenacity, like a deep layer of white Plasticine. It exudes upwards into the grass- es and crops, bushes and trees, so that its creamy richness softens down the verdure into a consistent pale emerald, as though the entire countryside were faintly lactat- ing. In the fields and on the hills the chalk occasionally breaks through to the surface, forming pale patches in the green fur. The recent heavy rains invited this ubiquitous substance to make its presence felt and seen even more than is usual, so that it oozed up in white, opaline puddles and cre- ated mirages of phosphorescent mist. It seemed to get into the higher air too, so that low clouds radiated a subdued white glow and the chalkiness toned down the rays of sunlight into pale chrome-yellow shafts.
Despite the softness it was bitterly cold last weekend, the wind rolling the white clouds across the slopes of the downs and occasionally precipitating their icy contents into billowing sheets of driven snow, the flakes big and heavy and wet. Through these white blankets of chilly moisture, the weak April sun shot its feeble rays, creating memorable colour effects of pale gold and pewter, sepia and indigo, especially at twi- light.
I sat and exulted at these grand and sub- tle skies, wondering what Turner would have made of them. Of course both he and Constable were active in this area, having a particular fondness for the stone quarried at the village of Chilmark, of which the great cathedral of Salisbury is made. This form of limestone reflects light in the most remarkable way, so that the actual colour of the cathedral appears to change accord- ing to the time of day and the state of the weather. A comparison of the many paint- ings and watercolour drawings Turner and Constable produced of Salisbury shows how accurately they captured this chromat- It's a shrinking violet.' is display of mutating blues and silvers, creams and golds and greys.
However, though Turner and Constable are no more, the English landscape tradi- tion continues, albeit often faintly, in the barbarous age of the Brickies and the Sero- tas, the Saatchis and the Rosenthals, and all those who would undermine our splen- did national tradition — and genius — for the exact rendering of nature's subtleties. As it happens, the house where we stayed contains an outstanding recent example of the genre, by the late Michael Andrews. Some years ago our host commissioned Andrews, a painter who combined power and sensitivity in equal measure, to create a large-scale panorama of the downs, woods and fields around the house. Andrews took his time about it — five years, in fact — but the result majestically conveys the contours and shapes, the textures, colours and milky opacity of this sensuous piece of country. The work is huge, about six feet by five, and must be one of the finest pieces of land- scape art produced in Europe during the last 50 years. I have seldom seen the physi- cal appearance of a particular English region, or in this case sub-region, rendered with such sympathetic accuracy.
On Monday we drove on into our beloved Somerset hills, and into a different world. Here the earth is red, the greens undiluted, the light has a distinctive west- ern glitter and brightness, and the skies are in a state of constant turmoil and mobility. Wiltshire inspires great prose but in the Somerset hills, particularly our Quantocks, poetry bursts out of its wooded womb. Here, almost within sight and hearing of my house, Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote their first notable poems, which were put together as Lyrical Ballads and pub- lished in nearby Bristol exactly two cen- turies ago this year. Thus the Romantic Movement was born. Astonishing to think that Turner and Constable, Wordsworth and Coleridge (and Keats and Shelley, Girtin and Bonington, Scott and Byron and Jane Austen) were contemporaries, draw- ing inspiration and sustenance from these same delectable landscapes of southern England, rejoicing particularly in their local variations. We do not have creatures of such genius today, alas. But the landscapes are still there, the trees and stones, the forms and colours, the light-effects and visual dramas, for us all to enjoy and mar- vel at and thank God for.
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