by Alan Coren
Cockermouth, Cumberland, was the spot where, on April 7, 1770, William Wordsworth first drew breath, and the location goes a long way towards explaining his characteristic lugubriousness. In the Old Hall, now derelict and seeping, Mary Queen of Scots was received after her defeat at Langside in 1568; her gloom was plumbless, and her host, Henry Fletcher, gave her thirteen ells of crimson velvet for a new dress. This could hardly have compensated for having her army trodden into the mud, but it ranks as one of history’s nicer gestures to Mary. Nearby stands Harry Hotspur’s house, contracts for which had just been exchanged when the new proprietor was butchered at Shrewsbury, in 1403, and within spitting distance can be found a few lumps of twelfth-century castle: this was captured in 1313 by Robert the Bruce, and spent the rest of the century under constant attack and bombardment by any Scots infantrymen who happened to be in the neighbourhood. During the Wars of the Roses, it was first Yorkist, then Lancastrian, and the catalogue of woe was finally brought to an end during the Civil War, when it was demolished by the Roundheads. A mile or so away, at Moorland Close, is the 1764 birthplace of Fletcher Christian, leader of the Bounty mutineers, and the 1766 birthplace of John Dalton, the physicist whose nefarious theories led ultimately to the destruction of Hiroshima.
Given this agglomerated misery, it isn’t difficult to see how young Wordsworth could become aware, very early, of the general rottenness of intelligent bipeds, by comparison with whom the local trees, thorns, and general flora assume a commendable innocence. One imagines John Wordsworth taking his little offshoot on trots through the topography, pointing out the various scenes of butchery and nastiness, totting up the huge casualty list, and pondering aloud on the question of how long it would take that diabolical infant prodigy John Dalton to come up with a hydrogen bomb. It’s little wonder that William decided early on who his friends were, and began associating with daffodils. Not that the idea of Nature possessing a mean streak escaped him, either; the news that Fletcher Christian got his come-uppance for interfering with the rights of breadfruit was undeniably traumatic for young Wm. – thereafter, as the Prelude indicates, he couldn’t break a twig or step on a toadstool without feeling that the crime would be expunged in blood.
He went on to Hawkshead Grammar School, where little seems to have happened to him, except that he befriended a lad called John Tyson, who immediately died, aged twelve, to be later commemorated in ‘There was a boy, / Ye knew him well, ye cliffs and islands of Winander . . .’ This drove Wordsworth even further towards the mountains and shrubbery, who were obviously bound to enjoy a longer life-span and weren’t going to peg out just when William was getting to know them. This was now his period of greatest involvement with Nature, a time spent sculling about the lakes with which the area is infested and grubbing about in the undergrowth, one ear cocked for the song of earwig and slug, the other for That Still Sprit Shed From Evening Air. It rained most of the time. And, as the years rolled by and William grew to pubescence, talking the whiles to roots and knolls, he became more and more aware of humanity in general as a collection of blots and errors. One could rely on the crocus; every year it re-emerged from the turf, developed into its tiny, private perfection, and then quietly pegged out. And other mates of the poet, like Skiddaw and Scafell and Easedale Tarn, changed very little from year to year. But as the maturing bard pottered around Cumbria, he bumped inevitably into some of the area’s human population, later immortalised and now available in paperback, who served only to convince him that after the fifth day, the Almighty’s unerring talent for creating perfection deserted him: the life of Wordsworth the Teenager teemed with mad old women, decayed sailormen, idiot children, dispossessed cottars, impoverished leech-gatherers, bereaved lovers, unscrupulous potters, orphans, mutes, destitutes, and chronic bronchitics. Why the Lake District should have seethed with such sad misfits and sufferers to the point where Wordsworth never met anyone else is a question I gladly leave to medical historians or any similar forager with the necessary time on his hands. But I would just like to point out to all those scholars who have wondered why Wordsworth should have been a believer in metampsychosis (that dubiously scientific process whereby souls pass on from one corporeal form to another as the subsequent mortal coils get shuffled off) that he quite clearly needed the hope it offered: souls inhabiting the forms of Lake District inhabitants were so unfortunately lumbered, that only the belief in their ultimate transmogrification into a hollyhock or woodlouse sustained Wordsworth’s faith in God’s pervading goodness. There is, indeed, much evidence to show that the poet would have given his eye-teeth to have been a clump of heather.
In 1787, he went up to Cambridge. Everyone drank port and spoke Latin, and the nearest Cumberland beggar was three hundred miles to the NW. Wordsworth was desolate, left the university, utterly unnoticed, and took ship for the Continent. It was here that he burgeoned and ripened under the cucumber-glass of Italian culture and Gallic revolution, suddenly exposed to all that the Lake District was not: Bohemianism took root in the Cumbrian corpuscles, and in the general uproar following the coup of 1789, Wordsworth sang in the streets, went about with his shirt unbuttoned, and seduced the daughter of a French surgeon. Again, scholars have been baffled by the whole Annette Vallon business: why the mystery, the concealment of Wordsworth’s bastard son, the failure to return with its father to England? What the scholars have in textual fidelity, they lack in imagination; even without dwelling on the unwholesome possibility that Wordsworth’s boudoir techniques, picked up at secondhand from observations of Esthwaite sheep, must have left much to be desired, we can make a fair guess at Annette’s response to the poet’s suggestion that she accompany him back to the fells to meet Mad Margaret, Peter Bell, Old Matthew, and the rest of the gang. At all events, Wordsworth came home alone, and unable to face the quiet of the Lakes, took Dorothy down to Somerset, which by now had got a reputation for having Coleridge on the premises. The two met up. Coleridge had already collected a Lake Poet, Robert Southey, and together they had concocted a form of early communism which they called Pantisocracy, so that by the time Wordsworth fixed his wagon to their star, the nub of Bohemianism had been unmistakeably shaped: of these two ur-Marxists, Southey had already distinguished himself for his opposition to flogging, Coleridge was smoking pot and seeing visions, and the pair of them had been writing like things possessed. With Wordsworth in tow, the poetic output stepped up enormously, and in 1798, he and Coleridge hit the market with their Lyrical Ballads, and everyone took off for the Lake District. The years that followed were ambrosial for Wordsworth: at last he could stop mooning about and involving himself with the problems of the educationally sub-normal citizens of Westmorland and Cumberland, and throw himself into the serious business of Bohemianism. Night after night the fells echoed to revelry and pentameters as the wild poets of Cumbria entertained thinkers and versifiers from all over the civilised world. Scott came, and Lamb, and Hazlitt, and de Quincey, until the nights of riot and boozing and composition surpassed anything the literary world had seen since William Shagsper, Kit Marlowe, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and Robert Greene had all stabbed one another in the Mermaid Tavern, leaving the responsibility for Elizabethan drama entirely in the hands of a Mr. W. H. Grobeley, the inn’s landlord, who subsequently wrote it to avoid suspicion falling on his hostelry. No visit to Dove Cottage, Grasmere, is complete without examining the outhouse where Hazlitt’s father, a Unitarian minister of strong liberal views, attempted to put his hand up Dorothy Wordsworth’s skirt, and at Greta Hall, Keswick, can be seen the faded, bloody marks following a fight over the rent-book by its two most illustrious tenants, Coleridge and Southey.
But ultimately, as it will, Bohemianism died. Coleridge left in 1809, went south, and died of opium poisoning. Southey became Poet Laureate in 1813, and took to wearing hats and drinking lukewarm herb tea. In the same year, Wordsworth became the Distributor of Stamps for the County of Westmorland at £400 per annum, and as befitted a civil servant, moved to Rydal Mo
unt, turned his back on liberalism, and finally petered out in 1850, leaving his cottage to de Quincey, who hadn’t touched a drop for the past thirty years.
Today, there are few reminders of those high and far-off times: the occasional grocer with the ineradicable Hazlitt family nose, or the Coleridge lip; fading graffiti on some derelict farmhouse wall, retailing bizarre local legends in the language and forms set down in the famous Preface of 1798; the empty gin-bottles that have bobbed on Ullswater and Bassenthwaite for the past century and a half; a crumbling gazebo on the outskirts of Keswick, built by Southey and from which he would pounce on passing milkmaids. Naturally, there are far more memorials to the more respectable aspects of the Bohemians’ life and work, and during the summer, the roads of the two counties are filled with coachloads of people from Bromley and Philadelphia being driven to Gowbarrow Park to look at the descendants of the original daffodils.
The traditions, too, are dead. Not only is the local population conspicuously sane, sober, ungrieving, unstarving and totally unlike the dramatis personae of Wordsworth’s records, the visitors are similarly unpoetic and unBohemian. They throng the Lake District between April and October in great tweed crowds; they wear sensible shoes, and corduroy knee-breeches, headscarves and duffle-coats, balaclavas and plastic macs; they carry stolid-looking walking-sticks, and rucksacks, and notebooks for pressing bog asphodel and saxifrage in, and Aer Lingus bags containing tomato sandwiches and flasks of Bovril; they have ròsy cheeks, and hearty, uncomplicated laughs, and sturdy calf-muscles; they eat ham teas, and hold sing-songs in Youth Hostels, and go to bed at nine o’clock to listen to the wind in the eaves. Or else they come in Ford Cortinas and Bedford Dormobiles, with primus stoves and Calor Gas and tents from Gamages, to take their children boating on Windermere. And every year, they pay homage at the verdant shrine of someone whom they vaguely remember as being a poet, or something, simply because the guide book has led them to his grave, and because all tombs demand equal reverence. So they stand, heads bowed briefly, in St. Oswald’s churchyard, Grasmere.
Never for one moment realising that Wordsworth himself would have thrown up at the sight of them.
9
The Power and the Glory
Mr. Denis Healey, the Minister of Defence, promised today that Britain would not lose her world lead in the development of vertical take-off aircraft.
BBC News
The other morning, I was standing by the gas-stove, ears tensed for the first, fine, careless cackle of the percolator, and watching the new day creep feebly up the sky with that curious, droopy greyness that characterizes February in London. The days, at this bleak time, never quite make it, never quite manage to look like anything but a dispirited pause between one night and the next. Buses loomed out of the darkness, shouldering the veils of drizzle aside rather in the manner of Akim Tamiroff pushing his way through the hanging beads of some Casablancan clip-joint, and disappeared back into the snivelling gloom. Not, all things considered, a morning designed to render the waking heart delirious at the prospect of unknown delights to come. But one, nevertheless, sadly appropriate to the island over which it had chosen to break.
We live on the first floor, which puts us on an exact level with the upper decks of London buses. Since our flat fronts the road, this means that at any given breakfast brew-up, people pass slowly by, in groups of thirty, and watch me with emotionless eyes as I strive to keep the front of my pyjamas closed; while I, in turn, stare back at them with the cool superiority of a man who in happier days might have been out chopping his way through Sikhs and Boers with terse Victorian purpose. These moments are about the only chance I have to show that breeding still counts, now that the Empire turns out to be something on which the sun never rises.
As, on this particular morning, we stood there, all thirty-one of us, I noticed for the first time a strange, unsettling sadness in the sixty alien eyes. They seemed to be looking to me for hope, for some mute sign that life was more than a tale told by an idiot; but before I could come up with a glance of comfort, a smile of faith, the bus moved on, and, wobbling slightly, they vanished into the gloom. I was deeply moved. The look was a look I had seen before, over the past few months, on faces passing in the street, in eyes across a public bar, in the brave, unflinching gaze of friends and cops and grocers, it was a look which said, with all the terrible expressiveness of silence, ‘What is to become of us?’
I turned again to the percolator, which by this time seemed to be sobbing in sympathy with the general mood, and as I did so I caught the wheeze of the bedroom radio plucking weakly at the ether; my wife was awake, and avid for news. In these post-lapsarian days since the Tories shuffled brokenly into the sunset, England has been gripped by a feverish need for information unmatched since VE-Day. Each dawn, red eyes pop open all over the queendom, tiny, terrified stars in the overwhelming greyness, and wait for the eight a.m. news. In the preliminary silence, one seems to hear the creak of the economy, and the occasional subterranean groan of the trade-gap widening, like some glacier running between Land’s End and John O’Groats and threatening to swallow us all; then comes the Greenwich Time Signal, followed by a BBC voice intoning in old, noble accents the latest catalogue of horrors, the crash of stocks, the leaps of Bank Rate as it fights its way upstream, the rifts between and within political parties, the news that Britain has been bounced out of one more of the rooms in the fickle seraglio that is Europe today, stories of industrial dispute and international embarrassment, of crop failure and metal fatigue – the list seems endless. And, after it all, at ten minutes past eight, we drag ourselves pitifully from our beds with all-too-evident third rate power, and crawl away to work with the aforementioned look in our one hundred million eyes.
All right. I realise that many citizens of the United States, the Soviet Union, of France and Italy and Australia and Japan and all the rest of that gang of unprincipled upstarts currently touting their carpetbags around the market-places of the world and making the Made in Britain label an object of derision among men, I realise that these people, while sympathetic to our decline, tend to feel that we had a good run for everyone else’s money, and that we’re bitching unreasonably now that other flags want to get in on the act. Which is rather like tapping Billy Batson on the shoulder and saying ‘Tough luck, Billy, but Shazam isn’t the code word any more and we’re not telling you what the new one is because we figure it’s about time somebody else had a crack at the Captain Marvel title. Under the circumstances, our advice to you is to open a hardware store in Wichita Falls and leave Doctor Savannah to some of the younger fellahs.’ Fair enough, unless you just happen to be Billy Batson, in which case you’re stuck with a not inconsiderable problem of adjustment.
To return to specifics. I sloshed the coffee into a brace of Coronation Mugs, and, my upper lip a ridge of steel, padded into the bedroom to shore up my wife’s wilting spirits with a few well-chosen words about the unconquerable will and study of revenge and similar snippets culled from our immortal heritage. She lay palely between the sheets, like one whose life has been frittered away on over-attention to camellias, listening to the newscaster reeling off reports of motions of censure on the Government, the wasting sickness of our gold reserves, the current protest march of aircraft workers, the latest lurch in the cost-of-living index, and other gobbets calculated to stick in the most optimistic craw. As the minutes flashed by, loaded to the gunwales with disaster, our commingled gloom deepened to a rich ebony, and I was on the point of hurling the radio through the window in the hope, perhaps, of felling a passing Volkswagen (a distinct statistical possibility), when the announcer paused suddenly, caught his breath, and said
‘Mr. Denis Healey, the Minister of Defence, promised today that Britain would not lose her world lead in the development of vertical take-off aircraft.’
There might have been more news after that, but we didn’t hear it. My wife sat bolt upright in bed, the colour hurtling through her cheeks, her eyes uncannily bright, a
nd clutched at my arm with that reserve of energy normally associated with drowning men in the presence of a sudden boathook.
‘Can it be true?’ she whispered.
I bit my lip.
‘It has to be true,’ I said.
‘A world lead? Of our very own?’
‘And we have it already!’
‘Pray God we can hold on to it!’ she muttered. We looked at one another with new hope. Horizons began to open before us, albeit vertically.
‘I think –’ I said, very slowly, ‘– I think it’s all going to be all right, after all. I think we’re going to come through.’
We drank our coffee in one draught, flung the cups over our shoulders, and offered a brief prayer for those in peril on the drawing-board. We had seen, at last, the thin end of the wedge, and it was a good wedge. Without a weapon of one’s own, you see, without an original working weapon, it’s impossible to hope for greatness. All very well to moan about defence expenditure and the lack of funds for schools, hospitals, pensions, roads, universities and all the rest of that pointless paraphernalia. All very well to brag about your Shakespeares and your Dantes and your Racines and your Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes. But when the chips are down, the chap from Smith and Wesson is the one we turn to. Weapons are the only true curators of our culture, and what in recent months has sapped the vitality of the Island Race has been the increasing doubt as to whether our independent deterrent was worth the sack it came in. While other nations proliferated their Polarises, or lobbed their ICBM’s willy-nilly between Novaya Zemlya and the Pole, we in Britain have gradually come to feel that the idea of having our own personal overkill was but an idle dream. We know that, called upon to swop punches with an Unnamed Foreign Power, we’d be hard put to to raise one megadeath among the lot of us. In all probability, the first day’s hostilities would turn us into mere froth and flotsam; we should go down in history as no more than a patch of choppy water off the Irish coast. But not now. Now that we possessed a weapon in the development of which we led the world, to what glorious heights might we not rise?