Footnotes

by Peter Fiennes

  Crossing the Tyne on the ferry, from South to North Shields. It is beautiful on deck in the last of the December light. The river on the turn. Midnight blue and black velvet brushed with orange. Arc lights on the banks. The glow of Newcastle upriver. Cranes swaying in the twilight. There’s half a moon in a spangled sky. I love the smell and slow thrum of ferries.

  When Beryl went downriver in a police launch, she mourned ‘all those boundaries and symbols and monuments pulverised into dust. Nothing left of the yards or the mills or the factories but heaps of bricks and broken timbers’. She bore witness to a landscape of loss. And what Jack wanted to know (‘chilled and aching’, fighting his fever) was whether the centuries of industry, the millions of tons of coal, and the great ships and the enormous fortunes, and the intolerable housing and the lost brutalized lives and the ineradicable black scars that befoul this once beautiful green estuary … what Jack wanted to know was whether any of it had been worth it. What had been the point of it all?

  What great work, I asked myself, owes its existence to those vast profits? What sciences and arts had they nourished? What new graces had they added to English life in return for what they had taken away from here? The ramshackle telephone exchange, at the back of my mind, put the call through, and I heard the bell ring and ring: but there was no reply.

  He has a powerful voice, does Jack, and it’s hard not to be swept along. I have struggled to shake off every one of my fellow travellers. But the Tyne has not stood still. And I am here in different times. Maybe it’s the soft close comfort of the night, and the purposeful, forward plunge of the ferry, but as we head cross-river in the dark I am happy to let Jack’s heroic grumbling recede in our wake. I am instead alert to a sense of promise.

  Slipping down the east side of England. Jack and Beryl and I are all eager to get home – and that’s my excuse for cutting this journey short. Lincoln is the final stop and we all check into the White Hart Hotel at the top of the hill. Beryl has a very nice room with a balcony overlooking the street, and I have a view of the cathedral. We can leave Jack warming himself by the fire in the lounge.

  Lincoln is a very relaxed city. There are people sitting in the pubs in the middle of the afternoon who look as though they are actually enjoying themselves. Tourists or students, probably, but I cannot be sure. The medieval city sits at the top of the hill, with its castle and cathedral, bookshops and pubs, but down the steep hill there is a twenty-first-century high street. It is late afternoon by the time I step gingerly down the narrow way to the bottom, and I am taken aback by all the lights and action. M&S! Pizza Express! Boots and Poundland! Beryl and Jack would not have noticed much of a change at the top of the hill, but I am sure that down here the Christmas lights and the young men dragging carts of illuminated balloons would have held their attention, not to mention Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ carousing from every street corner and some really very keen deals to be had for ‘buttock sculpting’.

  The Edinburgh Woollen Mill is closing down (‘Everything Must Go’). The craft beer shops look glossy and well stocked. The second-hand bookshops are mouldering under the dust of ages. Changing times. Lincoln is lovely, of course it is, but I have recently arrived from some very different high streets and I cannot shake the feeling that everything here is very precarious. There is a veneer that is easily scraped away. It is a cold evening, and there are many rough sleepers in the doorways, even here in Lincoln.

  I head to the cathedral, seeking some solidity. Parts of it have been here since 1092 and John Ruskin thought it was the greatest piece of architecture in the British Isles. Gerald (hello again!) lived in Lincoln later in his life, writing and studying, when his efforts to win the St David’s bishopric were all but over. I hug this bit of information to myself. Evensong is about to start, and I hang about shyly on the fringes, wondering whether to go in (it is being held among the choir, but I’m not sure if anyone can join them). A woman priest sees me and waves me through. ‘Of course!’ she says. ‘But I’m afraid we’re a bit thin on the ground tonight. The cold is keeping people away.’ I am shown to one side. ‘The seats at the back are the most comfortable,’ I am told by another woman priest. I am the only person in my row, although across the aisle there are twelve other congregants, all of them at least eighty years old, staring rheumily in my direction. I feel – and I don’t know if this is the right word to convey my awkward isolation – but I feel Londonish – and lost.

  The service starts and the choir fills the vast hall with a chant of absolute purity, even if one of them looks distractingly like Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer. Maybe it’s him? I guess not, although I seem to remember an episode of Father Ted when he was dressed as a Catholic priest and this could easily be him, now, in his ecclesiastical robes, just twenty years later. But my unease is slipping away. I’m here. The exquisite woodcarvings in the pews and the soaring stone vaults, the pulse of the music, chants and organ and the strong, high voice of the priest. I’m back here with Gerald. And Beryl, who tried to climb the tower, ‘up to the actual bells, but I had to give up half way because of smoking so much. I thought I was going to die in church’.

  They turn to Psalm 137: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ and I think I might be about to cry. Psalm 138: ‘I will praise thee with my whole heart: before the gods will I sing praise unto thee.’ The angelic voices spiral upwards. I am clutching the seat of my pew and all of a sudden I realize I might be about to come rushing back to the faith I abandoned over thirty-five years ago. Or it slipped away when I was looking elsewhere. There’s a sermon, about greed, and the shops of the lower town, and then we are asked to pray for the library advisory committee and for Philippa its chair and also for someone who died in 1542 and I can see that Graham Linehan is picking his nose and then the service is over and I’m back outside in the cold.

  There is a family walking home with two Labrador dogs. One of the children looks back at the cathedral. ‘What a scary building,’ he says – and maybe that’s what churches now mean to most people. Dark, forbidding places, only seen in frightening films. It is true that a cold mist has gathered around the black medieval walls, but when I look back from the street, with the cathedral lit up in saffron and gold, I am staggered by its beauty.

  I spend the evening in one of the many full and busy pubs. Everyone is smiling widely and looks like they should be in an episode of Emmerdale – although what’s with all the kilts? And then at exactly ten o’clock, with the bells ringing out across the freezing streets, I walk back to the front of the cathedral for one last look. There’s a man stumbling around, all alone, obviously very drunk, and he is trying to light a cigarette while also looking up at the sumptuous, golden façade, with its twin towers and extraordinary stone carvings, and you really will struggle to find anything more beautiful across this land, but as he leans back for an even better look (perhaps straining to see the famous tower clock) he trips and stumbles over a low wall and flounders backwards, in complete silence, before cartwheeling back into the ground and lying there as though he has been shot. The human comedy. It has been playing here for a thousand years.

  ‌Everyone. Somewhere. Sometime.

  ‌Eleven

  Last Supper

  ‘We sat down, jammed together, in a dining-room that can never have held more people in all its existence. It was not full, it was bursting. We could hardly lift the roast beef and apple tart to our mouths. Under the coloured-paper decorations, we sweated like bulls. The ale went down sizzling.’

  J. B. Priestley, English Journey

  Here’s a question. Who would you ask to dinner, if you could choose from anyone in history? Jesus often gets a look-in. As do Dorothy Parker, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Frida Kahlo, Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Malcolm X, Mae West, Confucius … Which is all well and good, but this is my hard-to-beat selection: Enid Blyton, Wilkie Collins, Ithell Colquhoun, Celia Fiennes, Gerald of Wales, Edith Somerville, Violet ‘Martin’ Ross, J. B. Priestle
y, Beryl Bainbridge, Charles Dickens, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson.

  We are going to need a round table. Charles Dickens would sulk and leave early if he found he hadn’t been placed at the head, and he’s unlikely to be the only one. I imagine an old-style room above a pub (anything too modern would be distracting). There’d be wide, mellow, antique pine floorboards (creaking and somewhat off-kilter), a Persian rug or two, a chandelier, that large round table (bare oak, guttering candles, gleaming silver cutlery, small bunches of wildflowers in vases, fresh linen napkins, several crystal glasses each), prints on the panelled walls (maybe some of Ithell’s, to get the conversation rolling), more candles on the walls and mantelpiece and a log fire ablaze in the hearth (it is winter outside). I realize it all sounds very Dickensian, but that’ll please the man himself – and our guests would recoil from any attempt at minimalism.

  The menu is as follows, with something for everyone, except vegetarians:

  Fresh Cornish oysters.

  Soups – one cold (clear consommé); one hot and spicy (mulligatawny).

  Fish – smelts fried in parsley butter.

  Shellfish – broiled lobster.

  Game – roast quail.

  Entrée – roast beef. Vegetables.

  Pudding – spotted dick, with custard.

  Sorbet – orange.

  Cheeses – British.

  Fresh Fruit – strawberries, peaches, apricots, grapes …

  Coffee or Tea.

  Guests will be greeted with a bowl of hot gin punch (made by Dickens). Fresh lemonade is available throughout. The wines are French. The ale is British. Port will be served with the cheese. Brandy to finish. Coffee (with tea for Dr J). The ladies will not be leaving the table, whatever Dr Johnson may say (and nor will any of them be expected to sit on his knee and sing, although Beryl may get the urge).

  Anyway, just the ten courses. They don’t have to be large. We’ll let Dickens carve (there’s no stopping him, so we might as well submit with good humour). Gerald will find it all very surprising, but then again he probably ate lark and swan in his day. He will not be thanked for giving any sermons (on gluttony, for example), but he will be asked to say a short Latin grace at the start of the meal. If he doesn’t, Sam Johnson will put him straight. I don’t think we need any music during the meal – we can save it for later. Smoking is permitted. The windows will be flung wide to help with the fug and the acoustics (there are some very powerful voices here), although there is nothing to see outside but the black empty night.

  I have thought hard about the seating plan. Some of it was easy. Beryl should sit next to Dr Johnson. She wrote a book about him, after all, but I am also certain that he’d enjoy her extravagant stories (so long as she doesn’t slide under the table too early in the evening). Enid should sit next to Dickens. She will be thrilled to see some of his magic tricks, and he’ll enjoy the Whoopee cushion she has brought with her. They can also compare notes about public readings, cruelty to animals and corporal punishment. I think we need to separate Wilkie from Dickens, and Boswell from Johnson (although the last two need to be kept close enough so Boswell cannot fret about missing some choice saying or other). Edith will be very happy chatting to Dickens, and he will be further energized by her beauty and wild laughter (and kept in line by her patrician manner). They can talk about hunting, dogs, servants, Home Rule and women’s rights. Also easy is putting J. B. Priestley on the other side of Beryl (so many notes to compare), with a vast ashtray between them – and also next to Edith (I don’t think they ever met, but they both loved Ireland and are easily roused to delight and indignation). Gerald should of course sit next to Enid (religion) and Martin (politics), while Martin and Boswell would have a scream: gossip, Tory politics, more gossip. I’ve placed Celia on the other side of Boswell because she may remind him not to get overexcited or drunk; then again, because we don’t in fact know too much about her (other than that she was brave and enjoyed French claret and beer and a stormy coastline), we may find they leave together at the end of the night. Dr Johnson will keep an eye on them from the other side of the table. Wilkie, Celia and Ithell, meanwhile, can talk about Cornwall and ghosts and art, all of which are subjects on which Dr Johnson will want to expand (although what isn’t?). If Johnson feels the need to argue with someone, and he will, he has eleven opinionated opponents to choose from.

  At the end of the meal Gerald will say grace again and Dickens will shoot his sleeves and astonish the company with a little bit of magic. Jack, Edith and Martin will perform some music (piano, cello and violin) – and perhaps Celia will be persuaded to sing (who knows what musical talents may lurk?). If she won’t, Enid most certainly will. Edith, Enid, Jack and Wilkie will organize the charades. And Dr Johnson will demonstrate his celebrated impersonation of a kangaroo (to the absolute astonishment of Gerald and Celia), by bundling up his tailcoat at the front to resemble a pouch, and bounding around the room with great, floorboard-shattering leaps. Martin will join in with her imitation of a howling fox terrier (it is extremely loud and life-like). Jack will massage Beryl’s toes. Sometime later, Wilkie will introduce Ithell and Gerald to laudanum (‘let me tell you about beavers’, Gerald begins) and Boswell (very drunk, rebuffed by Celia) will take Dickens to one side and suggest they see if there’s any action to be had outside on the street.

  My seating plan is below and the age of the guests is given in brackets.

  ‌Twelve

  Larger Than Life

  ‘Barkis is willin’.’

  Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

  Charles Dickens,

  Gad’s Hill to Westminster Abbey, 14 June 1870

  And here, once more, comes Dickens. The Inimitable. Lying on his back, on a sofa, in the dining room of his home, Gad’s Hill, in Higham, near Rochester, Kent. The house on the hill. He had walked past it with his father, when he was a very small child. His father had said that if he worked really hard he might one day come to own it. A ridiculous dream. He has lived here for thirteen years. His immense success. Riding the train between Higham and London. One time, walking through the night, thirty miles from Tavistock Square to Gad’s Hill. And now … it is 9 June 1870 and his doctor, Frank Beard, is here, and his sister-in-law, Georgina, and two of his daughters, Katey and Mamie, and his beloved, hopeless, first-born son, Charley. And Nelly, too. She has been sent for, from her home in Peckham. All here, watching him die. He is, or he was, fifty-eight years old.

  Were they also here, at the end? Scrooge and Micawber, Quilp and Miss Havisham, Sikes, Bumble and Pip? There is a famous picture of Dickens by Robert Buss called Dickens’s Dream, which hangs at his old home in Doughty Street, and in it Dickens is drowsing in a chair, pushed back from his desk (although his eyes are half-open), and dozens of his characters are gathering around him, in miniature, some of them pressing in, a tiny Little Nell on his knee, begging his attention, but also in bed, dying, and there’s David Copperfield, and Krook and Poor Jo, and Marley’s Ghost, and all the Nicklebys (Mrs Nickleby, Kate and Ralph) and the boys of Dotheboys Hall, and the Dombeys and Jenny Wren and the Dedlocks and Skimpole and Betsey Trotwood and Uriah Heep, of course, and Mr Pickwick, and Oliver, Fagin and the Artful Dodger and – there are so many of them, mostly minding their own business, some of them fading away, but others crowding around their creator, with his wild hair and beard, and immaculate white collar, and his pen drooping in his hand. He looks lined, thoughtful, unusually quiet, worn, perhaps sad. He looks like he would be happy for it all to end.

  Dickens’s readers loved a good death scene and he always gave them what they wanted. ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts …’ ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ ‘No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon.’

  No one quite agre
es on his last words, but they are unlikely to have been the ones reported in The Times just after his death: ‘Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.’ Surely he couldn’t have composed these perfectly formed words, not as the stroke claimed him. He wouldn’t even have agreed. What seems to have happened is that he wandered into dinner after a day’s writing, rambled (at times incoherently) to his sister-in-law, Georgina, stood up, swaying, and she said to him: ‘Come and lie down,’ and he replied, ‘Yes, on the ground,’ and he did – just set himself down on the floor and someone fetched a sofa and put him on it and he lay there, mumbling, until he ran out of breath twenty-four hours later. ‘And, it being low water, he went out with the tide.’

  The house in Gad’s Hill is still here, although at the moment it is a small private school and is only occasionally open to visitors. It is set back from the road, approached by a curve of carriage sweep, and the sight of it – so like its photos, in which Dickens poses with family or friends on its front steps – makes me quite breathless. Well, it’s either that, or the brisk twenty-minute walk from Higham station. How Dickens would have scoffed. The house stands on the main Rochester to Gravesend road and in his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens wrote that the days of the coach and the high road were now almost over, replaced by the all-conquering railways. And here we are. There are so many lorries and cars and builders’ vans screeching past that it takes me five minutes to find a way to sprint across to the school.