by Ian Sansom
‘Miriam!’ protested Morley. ‘Molly has never been in Sussex before and—’
‘I was here for Goodwood, actually.’
‘Some very pleasant Canalettos in Goodwood House,’ said Morley. ‘Did you make it to Chichester Cathedral?’
‘I did not, no, alas,’ said Molly.
‘The only cathedral visible from the sea,’ said Morley.
‘Which brings us to rule number two,’ said Miriam. ‘No church crawling.’
‘Church crawling?’ said Molly.
‘It’s like pub crawling,’ said Miriam.
‘What’s pub crawling?’ asked Molly.
‘There’s going to be no crawling of any kind, pub or church, so it doesn’t matter,’ said Miriam.
‘But there are so many churches in Sussex!’ said Morley.
‘I think you’ll find there are churches just about everywhere, Father.’
‘But you know that the one Sussex legend known to everyone—’
‘Everyone?’ said Miriam.
‘Everyone,’ said Morley, ‘is the story that the devil was so enraged by the number of churches in the county that he dug a dyke to let the sea flood them, hence the Devil’s D—’
‘No dykes, real or imaginary, Father.’
‘No dykes,’ said Molly.
‘None,’ said Miriam. ‘And no churches, flooded by the devil or not.’
‘But the Sussex milestones, Miriam!’ said Morley.
‘The Whatstones, Father?’
‘The churches in the Downs are called the Sussex milestones, Miriam.’
‘I don’t care what they’re called, Father. Let me be clear, there is to be no church crawling on this trip.’
‘Miriam!’
‘Father.’
‘St Andrew’s in Steyning?’
‘St Whosoevers in Wheresoever, no.’
‘St Cuthbert I think it was who was supposed to have cared for his mother, pushing her in a barrow—’
‘I don’t care which saint did what to whom or where, we are not wasting our time on this trip with churches, Father.’
‘Wasting our time?’
‘Is what I said, Father.’
‘But St Anthony’s at Cuckmere Haven?’
‘No, Father.’
‘Magnificent fourteenth-century building, Molly.’
‘Magnificent or not, Father. It’s a no.’
‘Lullington? Tiny little church, Molly. You could pop it in your waistcoat pocket. I think it’s only about sixteen feet square.’
‘A rather large waistcoat then, Father. Let me repeat, for the last time: no churches, however big or small.’
‘What about castles?’
‘Castles? No!’
‘Sussex is peculiarly well-endowed with castles, Molly. It has a history of coastal defence and feudal lords. Amberley, Arundel, Hastings, Herstmonceux.’
‘This is not going to be an Ancient Monuments, Tudor Cottages, Pewter, Oak, Ye Olde Inne and Kynde Dragons kind of a thing, Father. We are driving directly to Lewes and that’s it.’
Miriam had turned back to face the front.
‘Gardens?’ asked Morley rather sheepishly.
‘Are also verboten, Father.’
‘Gardens!? But there are extraordinary gardens in Sussex, Miriam!’
‘I’m sure there are, Father. But that’s no reason for us to visit them. There were lovely gardens in Babylon and we haven’t made a trip there, have we?’
‘I think strictly speaking, Miriam – I think I’m right in saying – all recent scholarship would suggest that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were a poetic construct rather than an actual place. As well to say that we haven’t visited the Garden of Live Flowers in Through the Looking Glass.’
‘You know what I mean, Father.’
‘A better example might be to say that we have not visited the gardens at the Villa d’Este or the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Soochow.’
‘Father! No gardens.’
‘What about Bateman’s at Burwash, Kipling’s place?’
‘No.’
‘But it has a superb kitchen garden.’
‘I don’t care if Mr Kipling grows actual kitchens in his kitchen garden, Father. We are not wasting our time visiting gardens.’
Morley, ignoring her, started singing a tune. He liked to sing. His usual choice were hymns ancient and modern, but the tune he was now running through sounded distinctly operatic.
Miriam turned back again.
‘And rule number three,’ she said, grinding her teeth. ‘This is really for you, Molly, but also for Father. No singing.’
‘But Molly’s a singer, my dear,’ said Morley.
‘Indeed,’ said Miriam. ‘Though I like to think most of us could knock out a “Casta diva” or a “Nessun dorma”, if we needed to – but we refrain from doing so in public, while people are driving.’
‘But Molly’s a professional singer, Miriam.’
‘Which is precisely why she should be saving her voice for her performances over the next few days. We wouldn’t want the vast, expectant opera audiences of Sussex being deprived of her dulcet tones now, would we? And as for you, Father—’
‘Me, Miriam?’
‘Yes, you, Father. I don’t want to hear any more of—’
Morley continued warbling away.
‘The catalogue aria!’ said Molly.
‘From Don Giovanni,’ said Morley.
‘Yes, we all know our Mozart operas, thank you, Father.’
‘Molly is Donna Anna,’ said Morley. ‘Do you know the catalogue aria, Sefton?’
‘I can’t remember the whole thing, Mr Morley, no.’ Or indeed any of the thing.
‘Sung by Leporello. A list of Don Giovanni’s conquests.’
‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo/ Delle belle che amò il padron mio;/ un catalogo egli è che ho fatt’io;/ Osservate, leggete con me,’ sang Molly.
‘Yes, very good,’ I said.
‘In Italia seicento e quaranta;/ In Alemagna duecento e trentuna;/ Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna;/ Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre,’ continued Molly. ‘V’han fra queste contadine,/ Cameriere, cittadine,/ V’han contesse, baronesse,/ Marchesane, principesse./ E v’han donne d’ogni grado,/ D’ogni forma, d’ogni età.’
‘Brava!’ said Morley. ‘Brava!’
‘Or bravo,’ said Miriam.
‘I love the catalogue aria,’ said Molly. (The gist of it, as Morley then insisted on explaining, is that the Don is a man with considerable appetites and the song is a catalogue of more than a thousand women – peasants, countesses, baronesses, women of every rank, size, shape and age – with whom he had consorted.)
Miriam started up the car.
‘Well,’ said Morley, in his usual way attempting to smooth things over and gee things up. I turned and noted that he had been clutching in his hand a book, Baxter’s Select Sketches of Brighton, Lewes and their Environs. It looked like the sort of book that would contain a lot of wood engravings: just his sort of thing. He silently tucked it away by his side, a sure sign of defeat. He straightened himself next to Molly.
‘Let us once more abandon ourselves to that oblivion of care, that solitude and that fond companionship that calls to us from the open road. There is surely nothing that has yet been invented by which so much human happiness is produced by so little human effort and—’
Morley always delivered some version of this little speech when we set off on one of our tours.
‘And rule number four,’ shouted Miriam.
‘What?’ said Morley from the back.
‘Rule number four,’ said Miriam. ‘None of that.’
‘None of what?’ said Morley.
‘You know full well what, Father.’
And with that, Miriam stamped on the accelerator and we were away.
CHAPTER 15
‘THE TOWN OF LEWES,’ to quote Morley in The County Guides: Sussex – and remember I’m abridging here, picking and choosing
for the purposes of illustration, for though the book is certainly not bad, if I say so myself, it is long – ‘is perhaps better set than any town in England. A solid, neat, substantial diamond displayed against the dark majesty of the primeval Weald […] in Lewes we find perhaps the essential Sussex, prehistoric Sussex, Roman, Norman, Tudor Sussex, the Sussex of yesterday, today and, one hopes, of tomorrow […] Just fifty miles from London, and situated on the slope of a hill, surrounded by the magnificent amphitheatre of the English countryside, the ancient keep may dominate the town, but this brightest and most precious of towns is kept, as it should be, by the country.’
Lewes excited and encouraged what one might call Morley’s ‘enraptured’ prose style. At its worst, his writing, and indeed his conversation, rather resembled the Jacobethan furniture at his home, St George’s, back in Norfolk: rather garish, rather ornamental and entirely unnecessary. Critics of his work occasionally referred to the ‘Oriental’ flavour of his work, meaning its excessiveness, and implying in some way that it somehow was not English. Certainly at his best he wrote rather like Marco Polo – and at his worst like a second-rate Victorian narrative poet. For Morley, everything about Lewes was either a ‘graceful Georgian’ this or an ‘ancient Tudor’ that. ‘Lewes,’ he writes in Sussex, ‘is truly picturesque in that Italian sense of pittoresco – in the manner of a painter. Magnificently disorderly, the Georgian, the Gothic, the Tudor and the Norman tumble together, as if in constant play.’ (So pittoresco is Lewes, indeed, that it features largely in Morley’s book on Irregular Beauty, published in 1939, a celebration of raggedy-edge borders, rough-mown paths and wildflowers at the very moment at which all such things were about to be destroyed.) Basically, it was guff: entirely true of course, insofar as it went, which was entirely too far towards fancy and folderol for my taste.
Like so many of the English towns and villages and cities we visited during our years together working on The County Guides, Lewes is indeed a fine place, one of the best, indeed, and more than capable of speaking for itself. Our guides, it seemed to me, were often vast amplifications of places and of persons that required neither boost nor boast, and yet we often remained entirely silent on the very matters, the very sites, the scenes, the episodes and the incidents that affected us all the most and whose implications and consequences are felt even today.
In The County Guides: Sussex, for example, there is no mention of what was happening at the time in the county of Sussex as a whole or indeed throughout the country as a whole – the abdication crisis, the challenges faced by the National Government, an abandoned baby found on a hillside outside Worthing, arguments over planning consents in Chichester – let alone events in Ethiopia, Spain and in China, news of which filled both the local and national papers. The County Guides: Sussex might as well have been written in 1837 or 2037 as in 1937.
And this was the problem, in the end, this was the great flaw in The County Guides: like any archive or record, however vast and seemingly comprehensive, however ambitious and grand a projet, the books were in fact partial, distorting and deceiving, acts of erasure and elimination just as much as they attempted to be honest and inclusive, exercises in pure fantasy and imagination just as much as they purported to be collections of memories, observations and facts. As Mr Chamberlain was soon to discover, to his and our great loss, every word and every sentence hides as much as it reveals.
There is certainly no mention in The County Guides: Sussex of Lizzie Walter, twenty-one years old, a teacher, daughter, sister, whose story has long since been forgotten, and whose destiny was about to become tragically entwined with our own. Lizzie Walter who drowned, in Pells Pool, on the night of 5 November, Bonfire Night, 1937: the night we arrived in Lewes.
According to Morley in Sussex, entry into Lewes is recommended in summer, in the morning, from the west by way of the magnificent old road that winds along the foot of the Downs, above the water meadows of the Ouse and through an avenue of beeches: magical. We in fact came into town from the east, having taken a circuitous route, under clouds, in autumn, and in foul moods: dreadful.
Miriam had driven wildly and recklessly the whole way from Brighton, enraged by her father and furious with Molly. It was something of a relief, therefore, when we finally made it to Lewes in the late afternoon, by which time preparations were well under way for the evening’s merrymaking and mayhem: shops had been boarded up, crowds were already gathering, and vendors were setting up their stalls, selling sticky black toffee and hot chestnuts. It wasn’t just me who was glad to have arrived safe and sound in Lewes: I think we were all relieved. Morley and Molly had settled down to harmless nattering in the back, and Miriam was slowly calming in her rage, bringing the Lagonda purring rather than roaring into town, where everywhere there were posters on billboards and newspaper stands, promoting and advertising the evening’s activities, in the unlikely event that there might have been anyone accidentally passing through the town that day who was not already aware that 5 November in Lewes is renowned, spectacular, special and altogether a grand occasion.
My own favourite advertisement, which appeared in several shop windows, showed a young man with dirty bandaged stumps for hands and the motto, ‘Never Mind! The Fireworks Were Worth It!’ It wasn’t entirely clear whether this was intended as a warning or an encouragement, but it was certainly arresting. Small boys with guys were collecting for the Cripple Fund – all proceeds going to the town’s many stump-handed young men, no doubt – and Morley was doing his level best to explain Guy Fawkes Night to Molly, who was perhaps the person at whom all the advertisements were directed and targeted, since she had no idea of what it was all about or what to expect.
‘Every year,’ said Morley, ‘the town of Lewes gives itself over to revelry—’
‘Bacchanalian revelry, Father,’ said Miriam, who’d had me light her a cigarette on our entry into the town, a sure sign that her rage was subsiding. I tended to smoke when tense, alarmed or alert: Miriam tended to smoke when calm or in the act of calming.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Morley, ‘bacchanalian is probably the right term—’
‘It is definitely the right term,’ said Miriam, exhaling smoke.
‘Oh, good!’ said Molly.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ said Miriam.
‘To commemorate the Gunpowder Plot—’ continued Morley.
‘The Gunpowder what?’ asked Molly.
‘Oh for goodness sake, woman, read a book,’ said Miriam, under her breath.
‘Which is marked throughout England on 5th November, in commemoration of the events of 5th November 1605, when someone called Guy Fawkes – Prince of Sinisters! – was arrested with his fellow plotters, who were attempting to blow up the House of Lords and assassinate the Protestant King James I.’
‘I see,’ said Molly, who clearly did not.
‘Here in Lewes on 5th November they also commemorate the local Protestant martyrs,’ continued Morley, ‘who were burned at the stake in 1557 as part of the Marian persecutions.’
‘The Whatian persecutions?’ asked Molly.
‘Under Mary I, Bloody Mary, Catholic queen of England, 1553 to 1558?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Molly. ‘Mother of Elizabeth I.’
‘Half-sister,’ said Morley.
‘God help us,’ said Miriam.
‘There was a man called Dirick Carver, I think it was,’ said Morley, ‘who held prayer meetings in his home in Lewes, and he had his Bible thrown into a barrel on a bonfire and then he was burned in the barrel himself.’
‘Oh dear!’ said Molly.
‘He managed to throw the Bible out; it’s still on display in the local museum, I think. I hope so. That’s one for us, Sefton.’
‘Jolly good, Mr Morley.’
‘So basically they’re commemorating lots of horrible things,’ said Molly.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘That happened a long time ago.’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘All togeth
er and all at once?’
‘Precisely!’
‘Horribly efficient,’ said Molly.
‘Ha ha!’ laughed Morley. He seemed to laugh at Molly’s every attempt to amuse, whether it was actually amusing or not, and she vice versa.
‘Unlike some races and nations, we are capable of holding two ideas in our heads at once,’ said Miriam, again under her breath, but just within my hearing.
‘It’s far too cold in England in the autumn and winter to be outside commemorating one thing only,’ said Morley.
‘Ha ha!’ laughed Molly.
‘Can I ask, are you of the Catholic persuasion yourself, Molly?’ enquired Miriam, in another billow of smoke.
‘Well, my dear grandparents were from Ireland—’ began Molly.
‘Well done them,’ said Miriam. ‘But the question is, are you a practising Catholic yourself?’
‘I would describe myself as distinctly lapsed, my dear,’ said Molly.
‘Indeed,’ said Miriam.
‘So, yes,’ said Morley, rather anxiously, ‘the great South Down Saturnalia. The Capital of Bonfiredom. Lewes Bonfire Night is I suppose the closest thing in England we have to something like your Mardi Gras.’
‘As in New Orleans?’
‘Indeed,’ said Morley. ‘And as in many other countries with their carnival traditions. Ours is just a little bit—’
‘Darker,’ said Miriam. ‘And bleaker.’
At that moment a firework came whizzing past the car. ‘And much more dangerous,’ Miriam added. ‘Come on,’ she said, pulling up outside the White Hart Hotel and extinguishing her cigarette. ‘We’re here.’
Morley, Molly and Miriam made it into the hotel unscathed by fireworks, leaving me to haul in their luggage and to survey the High Street.
Lewes, like every other town in England in those days had a fully functioning High Street, with a coal merchant, a timber yard, an undertaker, builders and decorators, a fishmonger, greengrocers, bakeries, a barbershop: it had everything. I have to say, I liked the place instantly.
Morley, Miriam and Molly were scheduled to meet Morley’s friends the Hudsons in our hotel for a quick meal – Miriam referred to it as a ‘scratch supper’, Morley described it as ‘tea’, Molly described it as ‘a dinner’ – before the evening’s excitements and activities. I was not invited to whatever it was, which was not a disappointment: the prospect of the meal did not appeal. The Hudsons were old friends of Morley’s who had decided to turn their magnificent home a few miles outside Lewes into a venue for grand opera. Molly was to be the star of their opening, a performance of Don Giovanni, which had originally been scheduled for Bonfire Night itself, but which had been postponed for a few days due to ‘technical difficulties’. To understand exactly why on earth anyone would want to turn their magnificent home in the country into a venue for grand opera, with all its attendant difficulties, technical and otherwise, it would be necessary to know Mr and Mrs Hudson, or at least to be familiar with their type. For anyone not familiar with their type, allow me to explain.