Jekyll's association with Robinson was productive, but perhaps even more so was her collaboration with Edwin Lutyens. She met the architect in 1889, when he was only twenty and she was in her mid-forties. There seems to have been instant empathy between them, based on a shared passion for traditional craftsmanship and materials, and the vernacular building styles of the Surrey landscape in which Jekyll was now living and where she created her own garden at Munstead Wood, complemented eventually by the house that Lutyens designed for her. Her popular and influential book, Home and Garden, rushes off into enthusiastic digressions on the virtues of cottage architecture, or on the appeal of an old stone bridge. She is interested in the harmony between plants and natural materials; a photograph in the book of the paved and cobbled path in front of a row of cottages, with a wooden water-butt and plants tumbling from the walls, is a hint of things to come, when Lutyens's elegant steps, balustrades and drystone walls would serve as foils for her plantings.
The Jekyll influence was all over the place at Golsoncott. Lutyens too. The house was not a Lutyens design, but it could well have been, with its rusticated stone pillars on the veranda, its leaded casement windows, its overhanging tiled roof. Very much of its time, very much ‘Surrey school’. And outside one could well think that the distinguished partnership had been at work. The sunken rose garden could be a Lutyens layout, while its furnishings – the regale lilies, the Erigeron karvinskianus and hart's-tongue ferns and Corydalis ochroleuca springing from the walls, the sisyrinchiums clustered in cracks of the paving, the primroses and the Anemone blanda, were all the stuff of a Jekyll plan. Here, for fifty years, my grandmother battled with black spot on the roses and took ceremonial photographs of visiting relations and their new babies, perhaps occasionally beaming an appreciative thought towards those who had inspired the place. Elsewhere, the long canal in the iris garden was an almost exact replica of the Jekyll design of a rill garden in the Deanery in Sonning, Berkshire. And the summer house, the potting sheds and the apple store were all of silvery wood with overlapping boards, nicely vernacular.
Home and Garden was first published in 1900. Jekyll's voice is very different from Robinson's; the confidence is there, but not the didacticism or the note of combat. The style is personal, and distinctly rambling. She describes the building of her own house, and the studied craftsmanship involved. She devotes pages to rapturous but intense observation of the natural growth of a local wood, an odd combination of a precise botanical scrutiny with an outburst of anthropomorphism when she has an oak making a heroic sacrifice for a chestnut being strangled by a honeysuckle – ‘Neighbour, throw out a little branch and send me the enemy. I am doomed already; a little more can only bring the end somewhat sooner…’ There is an account of the workshop in which she did her craft work, surveys of her own garden with detailed and specific suggestions for similar plantings. And then there is an entire chapter on her cats, including instructions on how to give a ‘pussies’ tea-party' for a nine-year-old niece: ‘First a thick strip of fish was laid right across each saucer; an equal strip of cold rice-pudding met it transversely, forming a cross-shaped figure that left four spaces in the angles. Thick cream was poured into these spaces…’ That austere and somewhat daunting figure of the photographs suddenly looks different. Children crop up again in the chapter on how to make pot-pourri. Get hold of any children that come to hand, the reader is told, and set them to work gathering rose petals. There follow precise and elaborate directions on how to lay down the stuff on what sounds like an industrial scale, filling fifteen-gallon oak casks from complex recipes that vary according to the species of rose used.
Home and Garden must have directed the activities of many an Edwardian housewife – and on, indeed, into the twenties and thirties when my grandmother was certainly using it. Her own flower arrangements were very much in the style of Jekyll's elegant creations as featured in the illustrative photographs. It is a beguiling and discursive book (any offer of an editorial hand rejected, one suspects) but also practical, and has to be seen as the forerunner of the later torrent of publications aimed at the aspiring middle-class home owner, and a distant ancestor of the glossy ‘lifestyle’ books that are the staple of every bookshop today.
The Golsoncott garden now floats free of time and space – preserved in the mind's eye, eloquent of elsewhere and of people who never knew it. But gardening as an activity has always seemed to me to defy the domination of the present. Digging, planting and planning, you move ahead, and look back. My own gardening days are done, but the crispest pleasure that I remember is that interesting sense of displacement. Sorting bulbs on an autumn afternoon – shiny brown tulips, the papery cluster of narcissi, the white teardrops of dwarf iris – you were both here and now but also projected forward into another season, when these things would have undergone their miraculous metamorphosis. Poring over the vibrant pages of a new seed catalogue, you were designing the summer to come – while scribbled notes in last year's catalogues warned against the failures and the misplaced choices. And the seeds themselves were both a sensual delight – glossy pellets, parachutes, thistledown, tiny cuttlefish, flakes, spears, golden dust – and also amazing hostages to the future. Sowing seed in the greenhouse was an act of faith: the ritual of the seed trays, the tactile compost, the blank inviting markers and the special pen was like the performance of some religious office, the invocation of an event that was both impossible and entirely reliable. The seeds were the guarantee of the turning of the world, their strange disguises a coded account of the colour and the exuberance to come.
As an activity, gardening is a combination of immediacy and imaginative projection. Perhaps that is why it is so satisfying – a fusion of physical endeavour with a dream of things to come. A garden is perilously unstable. A few decades of neglect and it melts into the landscape, its existence to be read only by the perceptive. It becomes archaeology, with some tenacious growths hinting at what once was there. Gardeners know this; the fragility of the present is set against the robustness of digging and planting, the emphatic qualities of earth and roots and stems. To garden is to seize the day.
The Sunset Painting and the Harness Room
Above the sideboard in the dining-room there hung a painting by the late Victorian artist B. W. Leader. I always thought of it simply as the sunset picture, and in my romantic years – fourteen through about seventeen – it expressed everything I felt about the country. It was a landscape with a farmhouse and trees; small figures wander along a muddy track towards the farmhouse, where other figures wait in apparent welcome. The whole picture is suffused with light from a rich roseate sky, which is reflected in pools of water in the foreground. The trees are shapely, the detail is precise. You could step into that painting, smell the grass, feel the breeze, walk away into that sunset. A celebration of the countryside, with the suggestion of a tranquil home – and it is a most glorious evening. As a painting, it is a neat instance of the way in which art can condition emotion and response.
West Somerset has crept much closer to London than it was in the 1920s. It was still a long way away in the 1950s. I remember the all-day car journey, with the picnic basket in the boot and the stops for lunch and tea. A whisk up the M 5 and the M4, today, and you're in London. The country was further from the town, in every sense; rural and urban life were appositions. They still are, but not in quite that style of mutual exclusion.
My grandmother went to London once or twice a year, in full fig – fur coat, best hat – and with all her reservations about ‘town’ working overtime. A couple of days would be spent doing essential shopping, paying visits and taking in a play. After which, prejudices satisfactorily confirmed (the noise, the dirt, the crowds…), she withdrew to the civilized world, whence she pressed offers of temporary sanctuary upon family and friends condemned to live an urban life.
In adolescence, my view of town and country was one of stark contrast – a polarity imbued moreover with moral and aesthetic significance. Countr
y was good; town was bad. Country was healthy, beautiful, inspirational and a solace to the soul; town was dirty, ugly, corruptive and dulled the senses. This vision owed a good deal to my grandmother, of course, but it was also a reflection of much received opinion of the time – and indeed of times before and since. It was derived from art and literature, an insidious conditioning that had affected my childhood perception even in distant Egypt, where the classic English divide was unthinkable and unknown. I had been born in Cairo and was growing up there; England was a place last visited when I was six. I knew that it was apparently the centre of the universe, a nirvana of mysterious and unparalleled quality, and that one must feel towards it an unqualified loyalty and affection – though quite how to do this was always something of a puzzle when all one had to focus on were a hazy concept of greenery, a King and Queen, and a distinctive flag which must not be flown the wrong way up. It was evidently a place of diverse appearances (I'd read and seen enough to know that): Phiz and Cruikshank illustrations to Dickens, Shell posters, the nursery calendar on which snow and robins gave way to meadows of gambolling lambs, Alison Utley and Beatrix Potter and Arthur Rackham and Kate Greenaway. But it was clear to me which were the valued aspects, what it was that sent people all misty-eyed and reverent: green fields, babbling brooks, thatched cottages, primroses and bluebell woods. I learned Tennyson by heart – ‘I come from haunts of coot and hern…’ – and tried to get misty myself.
When I returned to the fabled land, aged twelve, prejudices were already set. Shunted between my London and Somerset grandmothers, I knew where I was best off. Never mind that a small voice whispered sedition about the city: interesting, it said… busy, bright, bustling, it said… shops, cinemas, people, fun. But right-minded folk settled for country life, didn't they?
A part of me still believes that. I am a city dweller now, because needs must, but it doesn't feel quite right. It suits me well enough, but an atavistic instinct tells me that something is awry. Partly, this is indeed inclination – a hunger for space, a horizon, things growing, sky and weather – but it is also a cultural conditioning, an unconscious imperative.
We all led rural lives, time was; most of us are descended from peasants. The demographic history of this country records a gradual leeching of population away from the fields and into the towns. A computer simulation of the process would show the cities expanding, sprawling, spreading like a rash in the North and the Midlands, joining up and merging into conglomerate urban masses. The Roman towns were tiny islands amid the enveloping green, but potent signals of the way things would go. Economic circumstance cracks the whip and, century by century, the trickle becomes a steady stream and eventually a torrent until, by the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly 80 per cent of the population are living in towns. A rural world has become an urban and industrial one; most people wake every morning amid smoke, brick, and concentrated humanity.
But at that point a high proportion of Britons were only one or two generations removed from the land – folk memory of it was still strong. The accelerated flood into the towns, cities and above all the new industrial conurbations took place during the nineteenth century. Our great-great-great grandparents, or thereabouts. Near enough for there to be some cerebral link, but so far removed for reality to undergo a sea-change into some kind of mythology. The notion of Arcadia is born – the place for which we yearn, the ideal world in which we should really be. In the process of metamorphosis the brute facts become submerged: the grim truth of existence in a thatched cottage – the punishing labour, the cold, the hunger, the lives chopped short. That long-ago and faraway place has achieved the imperishable glow of nostalgia. It has prompted all those aspirations – the weekend retreat, the retirement home tucked away up a lane. Or, on a simpler scale, the drive out into the country just to check that it is still there, still carrying on as it should. Somewhere in all this there is perhaps a glimmer of genuine ancestral feeling. People do not on the whole abandon a traditional and established way of life except out of necessity. The flight from the land to the differently harsh circumstances of industrial Britain happened because many were impelled to look for work or believed that things might be more endurable elsewhere. Most would have stayed put, given adequate opportunities where they were.
Migration becomes dispossession, as the mythology takes form. Several generations on, those born and bred to the city have now this fantasized vision of that alternative world. They may not necessarily want to be there, except for the occasional jaunt. Remember those London evacuee mothers who beat it back to the East End as soon as they could. But an aesthetic has been established, fortified by art and literature, by advertising, by consumer goods. In the 1930s, aertex-shirted hikers smile from London Transport posters, leaning on stiles with a backdrop of blue sky and fleecy clouds. By the 1970s, we are sprigged out in Laura Ashley fabrics, eating wholemeal bread, hanging corn dollies from our stripped-pine dressers; petrol advertisements show happy families romping through dappled woods, latest-model cars whisk along empty roads amid exquisite scenery. The country has become very near: turn off the motorway and you've arrived. You can bring it into your own home, nicely sanitized – its essence is easily available in supermarkets and department stores. The brute contrast of the 1900s is a thing of the past, or so it seems. There is no longer that mutual exclusion. Every city child knows what size a cow is, now; we all listen to The Archers and watch vet programmes. The country is our birthright; it belongs to us all and plenty of us have a sneaking feeling that that's where we ought to be.
But there is a paradox here. The creation of Arcadia has also widened the chasm between town and country. The image of rural life is accessible; there is a sense in which we can live a proxy rural life from the city centre, nowadays. But those who actually live in Arcadia – above all those who still grub a living from it – don't see things in quite the same way. For them, reality can be a contemporary version of the deprivations of another century: unemployment, low wages, inadequate facilities, absence of choice. The summer influx of voyeurs may mean economic salvation for some, but it is also a reminder that we are two nations.
Golsoncott had a mere toe-hold on agricultural economy: my aunt kept some Devon red polls, for marketing purposes, and a crop of hay was taken from the top field. But she and my grandmother were quite clear about their alignment. ‘Trippers!’ my grandmother would snort, confronted by a car-load of holiday visitors in the lane; she would sit behind the driving wheel with a basilisk stare, forcing them to back to the nearest passing place. Locals have right of way. When an incomer who had bought a nearby cottage made the terrible gaffe of grumbling to Rachel because a farm trailer had spilled manure near his gate, he was silently ostracized. My grandmother's attitude towards west Somerset was one of uncompromising patriotism; nowhere else matched up for natural beauty and the sterling qualities of its inhabitants, though she would concede that the South Hams in Devon were quite pretty. Arcadia indeed, but a down-to-earth Arcadia of mud, muck and weather.
There was a copy of Tarka the Otter at Golsoncott. Summer reading for me on the veranda, once again, aged fourteen or so. There was also Bevis, The Story of a Boy, and works by Mary Webb and W. H. Hudson. The household had never been a bookish one; what was on the shelves represented stock middle-brow reading of the 1920s and 1930s, and as such tapped in with a vengeance to the literary taste for the romanticization of rural life. I read Mary Webb – Precious Bane and so forth – with interest but some perplexity, looking with new eyes at those around me. Could the private life of a Somerset hamlet be like this? I had met up with Mary Webb before, on my parents' shelves in Egypt, and had been even more bewildered. Some years later, coming across Cold Comfort Farm, I realized with the glee of revelation what was going on here. Oh, the sukebind, the sukebind… A country spring would never be the same again.
Literature has a lot to answer for, where concepts of the countryside are concerned. Thomas Hardy, of course, but crucially also the animisti
c school exemplified by W. H. Hudson, who saw the natural world as the source of mystical solace, a lost paradise reflecting the irretrievable animality of childhood: ‘The return to an instinctive or primitive state of mind is accompanied by this feeling of elation, which, in the very young, rises to an intense gladness, and sometimes makes them mad with joy, like animals newly escaped from captivity.’ Rima, the heroine of Green Mansions, is just such a primitive free spirit. Childish rather than child-like, one may think; I find the book quite unreadable now, but to dip into it is to receive an eerie echo of early reading affinities – at fifteen I was enthralled. More palatable is A Shepherd's Life – a eulogy of nature and the simple peasant lot on the Wiltshire Downs in the early 1900s.
Richard Jefferies, publishing in the 1880s and 1890s, is the great popularizer of nature and rural life. Bevis was a huge best-seller and still very much around in the 1920s and 1930s; a generation grew up on that vision of a boyhood fantasy world amid an idyllic countryside. Again, the climate seems uncomfortably mawkish now, though the nature stuff interestingly evokes a landscape not yet blasted by pesticides and intensive farming. And The Toilers of the Field brings the same qualities of precise observation to bear on the lifestyle of the Edwardian farm labourer, serving up an almost sociological account. There was a copy of Jefferies' Red Deer on the Golsoncott shelves, as one might expect – exact accounts of Exmoor ecology, red-deer habits and hunting practice.
Henry Williamson also wrote of the Exmoor deer, in 1931, prompted by the bill before Parliament in that year to put forward the pro-hunting argument, much as today's defenders of stag-hunting do. That bill failed; one notes that the arguments on both sides almost precisely parallel those favoured today, with the then League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports acting as advocates of the bill. Williamson's impassioned defence reads a little oddly, given the theme of Tarka the Otter, in which the eponymous hero is hunted to death by the otter hounds. But Williamson was clearly a rum bird, and consistency may not have been high on his agenda. Fervent advocacy of the glories of nature and of wildlife was his signature tune, putting a new spin on the nature novel, but in direct descent from Jefferies and Hudson.