by Hugh Thomson
By my last year, I was exhausted by three serious relationships that had begun well but ended unhappily. I exhausted myself yet further with a major dissertation on Robert Lowell’s sonnets, the literary equivalent of finding a lost city in the jungle. Lowell was famously prolific. Not only had he written hundreds of sonnets, he had published them in multiple versions. Helping me navigate the maze was my supervisor, the young poet Michael Hofmann, who sent me to Christopher Ricks for further guidance.
This was an intimidating moment. Made worse when Ricks, having reviewed my draft dissertation, paused in embarrassment: ‘I think that at one point you may have misquoted T S Eliot.’ It was not a question. I had misplaced a comma in a line of the poetry. Ricks let the moment hang. It was at that moment I realised I would never become an English academic.
Ricks had once, as a conceit, suggested that the entire English course be organised around T S Eliot’s criticism. He had edited Eliot’s verse. He could probably recite, comma perfect, whole paragraphs of Eliot’s prose. I might as well have urinated in the presence of the Pope.
I had already started to turn to film – or rather to television, to ‘broadcasting’ in the fullest sense of the word, finding a wider audience outside what seemed the petty arguments of literary criticism.
Late at night, I went to tell Eric of my decision. I heard him pacing in his rooms as I went up the stairs. He came to the door looking wasted, having been writing a review. I could tell he was struggling because, uncharacteristically, there was no music playing: usually Talking Heads were at full volume, tearing down the house.
‘I keep hearing all these voices in my head,’ he said. ‘Voices of writers.’
Wittgenstein famously urged F R Leavis to ‘Give up literary criticism!’ Despite English being one of the largest faculties at Cambridge and other universities, I felt like agreeing. Of course there was much to be grateful for: the chance to spend three years studying literature was a wonderful gift, which I drew on later. But it was not an altogether healthy discipline. Many of those who studied it became introverted – or even more introverted. As a way of engaging with life, spending your time in an ivory tower reading dead writers with only the odd break for a one-to-one tutorial with an equally introverted professor living in a smarter ivory tower; well it led to strange behaviour. One friend of mine was unaware of the Iranian hostage drama for eight months. Another didn’t know where the faculty lecture rooms were after three years at Cambridge, because he had hardly left his room.
And now I went to see Eric again. He had recently suffered a terrible stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. His sister and the physiotherapists who had been treating him at Addenbrooke’s had told me of his determination to recover. Unable to speak clearly, he could still manage three very characteristic expressions: of approval, with a smile; of dismissal, for those writers or critics like Julie Kristeva he considered beyond the pale; and, most characteristic of all, an ambivalent waving of the hand signalling that his critical jury was still out on the case. What I’d always liked about Eric was this last capacity for uncertainty, so attractive in a critic.
I found seeing him again very affecting. As it happened, I arrived on the day he moved into new college rooms, specially fitted out with wheelchair access. Someone was helping to fill his shelves with the books that had been in storage while he was in hospital.
Everything that had been best about Cambridge English came back to me. What Eric had tried to teach his students was critical honesty. Truth might be a naive critical concept, but you had to be honest to your own initial reaction to any work of art, without falling back on Flaubert’s ‘received ideas’, and stay counter-intuitive when all around you might be falling for the party line.
Eric had a magpie mind. He had shared my enthusiasm for Cambridge’s least-known museum, the Anthropological Faculty’s cupboard of a space in the corner of Downing Street, with its displays of aboriginal shields and Inca headdresses. Of all the loosely described structuralist critics, the one who had most caught my fancy was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, with his Tristes Tropiques and tales of the Amazon and its tribes.
The cold rigour of Cambridge’s climate and puritan endeavour had made me crave not only the comfort of women, but sun and southern skies. I had already spent time in Mexico; I wanted to go further south of the border, to Peru. The lure of travelling, together with that of filming, meant that it was many years before I returned to Cambridge.
But now, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying myself. Irena had come down from London, so we could sample the excellent restaurants that had grown up in Cambridge since the days when there were just a couple of kebab joints and no one had heard of a cappuccino. We had a guest room overlooking Trinity College Great Court, one of the finest views in England. Best of all, we spent the weekend just wandering the streets, without any worry about an essay to be completed.
Looking back at it, that was the real problem about being a student at Cambridge. You had to work so hard, or at least, in my case, worry that you weren’t working hard enough. There was a perpetual anxiety. It would have been a great place to be on holiday.
Seeing the place with Irena’s eyes helped. She had left what was then still Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. The communist state had gone into one last deep-freeze before the thaw of the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It was a repressive place where she was once sent home from school for wearing a T-shirt with a ‘USA’ logo.
When she arrived in England, Cambridge had represented intellectual freedom. She had married her first husband in one of the Cambridge colleges and frequently returned to the place, perhaps also because it was also the home of Pink Floyd, adored by Czech intellectuals, who from Václav Havel and Tom Stoppard downwards had a fondness for progressive rock. Irena had escaped across the Iron Curtain with her mother and came to England not speaking a word of English (the Czechs still taught Russian in their schools). One part of the ensuing culture shock was that by the 1980s no one was playing the music she had expected: Genesis, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. It was all post-punk and new romantic.
Now, as she drove me back to Wandlebury to take another look at Lethbridge’s mysterious chalk figures, she kept singing the chorus from Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, convinced that this was Ozzy Ozbourne’s view of prehistoric England. I was less sure, suspecting that it might be something to do with the Marvel comic of the same name. Either way, the lyrics were not deep: ‘Iron Man: is he alive or dead / has he thoughts within his head.’ Nor did they stand much repetition.
There was a drizzle of rain over the Gog and Magog Hills when we got there. The Iron Age hill-fort at Wandlebury is an odd monument anyway: it must be the only hill-fort in England to have an eighteenth-century complex of buildings and a walled garden within its circular ditch.
Irena’s general interest in English prehistory was low, verging on complete indifference. So I was surprised by the enthusiasm with which she helped identify the outline of Tom Lethbridge’s chalk figures on the grass slope. Using Lethbridge’s old photographs as guidance, we could clearly make out the shape of the central chalk face under the tussocks.
A park warden came over to see what we were doing, perhaps puzzled why a long-haired blonde woman was singing ‘Iron Man’ and playing air guitar as we tried to trace out the shape of the goddess’s head.
‘Ah yes,’ she said, regarding us with the kindly indulgence the English afford to anyone pursuing an unfathomable but harmless pursuit, like brass-rubbing or breeding llamas. ‘I have heard about the chalk figures. We’re closing in ten minutes.’
*
It was ten miles or so from Cambridge up to Ely. First thing on Monday morning, I set off with renewed energy along the towpath beside the Cam, remembering times when I had jogged along it as a student to work off the excesses of the night before, my head full of writers like Thomas Malory, or plays like Cymbeline, or things I should have said, but hadn’t, to a girl.
I had visite
d Ely once before as a student. A day out, with my cousin Rachel Bell and her friend Elspeth Thompson, to get away from the claustrophobia of Cambridge. We had eaten in the Old Fire Engine House and taken great pleasure in winning some goldfish at a travelling showman’s stall on the common. You needed to hit a large balloon with a dart to win a fish. Three Cambridge undergraduates took some while to realise that the ticket for trying cost far more than the price of a goldfish.
It was an innocent time. Since then, Rachel and I have each been through matrimonial vicissitudes and poor Elspeth, who became a fine writer on plants and gardens, took her own life a few years ago, but the shock of entering Ely Cathedral felt much the same now as then: a wave of cold air, like entering a larder, or elevator shaft; the sparseness of decoration, together with an impossible elevation; above all, a repository of silence after the noise and intellectual confusion of Cambridge. Even if you didn’t share in the certainty of faith, it was calming to be with a congregation that did.
For me, Ely is the most striking of all the English cathedrals. It may not have the fine treasures of Durham or Canterbury, nor be as tall as Lincoln, but it has one wonderful advantage: scale. The town of Ely is so small that the cathedral dwarfs the place.
As I walked on, looking back across the Cambridge plain, the spire seemed even taller than the Burj Khalifa I had seen in Dubai just a few months previously, with its field of fountains playing in a desert, although that is the world’s highest building.
The last stretch of the walk lay ahead: I was detouring from the Icknield Way, whose route was indistinct over the plain (far easier for ancient trackways to be preserved in the hills). But I would end at the same point on the Wash and the coast.
I crossed the county boundary into Norfolk. Depending on their age, stage and inclination, people associated Norfolk with Cromer crabs, Alan Partridge or the Queen at Sandringham. It had only one association for me: a music festival held at a supposedly ‘secret location’, although a secret shared by many thousands. Friends of mine had organised the festival for many decades in the grounds of a large and rambling country house. They started with just 100 guests – an expanded party. The next year friends brought friends, those friends came back with theirs, and within a few more years they had to put on a cap at 2,000 tickets.
The reasons for this rapid success were simple: the presiding spirit, DJ and actor Benedict Taylor, together with his extended family, spread a warmth and enthusiasm to the entire project that enthused all who came; the owners of the house were an intriguing and genial bunch who were prepared to let their house and gardens be invaded each year; admission was by invitation only, which some claimed led to elitism, others to a sense of community and that, like any ‘tribal gathering’, as the first Californian festivals were called, you needed to be part of the tribe. Either way, it was a hot ticket if you could get one.
I went to the very first event that took place there in 1982, while still a student at Cambridge, driving through the Norfolk night in the rain with a male friend who had just been through a life-changing religious experience and was telling me about it; in the way you can share such thoughts when it’s pitch black outside and you’re driving and can’t see each other’s faces.
Arriving at the bulk of this large old house, which was deserted on the ground floor, we wandered across the empty reception rooms towards a spiral staircase leading down to the basement. The staircase was lit up with strobe lights and the Gap Band’s ‘Oops Upside Your Head’, which had just come over from the States, the first trickle in the deluge of dance and House music that was to follow.
There were two bowls of fruit punch as we entered the basement cellars. One was a straightforward, if potent, alcoholic blend of the usual brandy and wine, with the odd bit of fruit; the other was the same, but with added magic mushrooms. Having always liked psychedelia, and after two hours’ driving through the rain and plain of Norfolk with my friend sounding like a Johnny Cash song, I had a healthy glass of the magic mushroom cup. Many others appeared to have done the same; at some stage the bowls of punch had been switched, whether by accident or design. The rooms were full of outrageous costumes out of the Funkadelic and Bootsy Collins mail-order catalogue: gold lamé, leopardskin and feathers, with diamante sunglasses.
This was some years before 1989 and the rave ‘summer of love’. Ecstasy was still just a twinkle in the chemist’s eye. But already there was a realisation that at a time of recession and graduate unemployment, matched only by today’s figures, at least you could get out and dance.
I had just bought a winter coat with which I was inordinately pleased. Cambridge in winter was cold. I left it in one of the rooms as I arrived at the house, then remembered the car keys and my wallet were both still in a pocket. I went back to retrieve them before the magic mushrooms gained too much of a hold. The coat had gone.
Magic mushrooms can induce a floating sensation of calm and ease; but in the wrong circumstances, they can produce deep and traumatising paranoia. These were the wrong circumstances.
I started to sweat. I also started compulsively to ask all the other guests, repeatedly, if they had seen my coat or my wallet or my car keys. I can’t remember where I slept; I’m not even sure I did sleep. It was a long night.
The next day it emerged that someone, after a glass too many of punch, had gone off by accident with my coat, which they duly returned. A rational explanation, which in calmer waters I would have reached myself. But by then I had gone through a night of paranoid, mushroom-fuelled uncertainty in which I thought that my car, money and, worst of all, brand-new coat had disappeared up the chimney of this huge Norfolk house.
As the festival has grown over the years, and stretched over a long weekend rather than just a night, I’ve enjoyed the way a conventional part of the Norfolk landscape is turned for a few days each year into a musical epicentre with its own energies – a fraction of the size of festivals like Latitude, also in East Anglia, with its 35,000 capacity, let alone Glastonbury in the West Country with its 150,000, but with an intensity and warmth that are hard to beat.
Over the last thirty years we have become a nation of festival-goers. Glastonbury was a joke at the start of the 1980s, a hippie leftover. There was the odd big festival at Knebworth or Crystal Palace (Steve Harley built a scaffold just under the lake there, so that he could jump off the stage at the climactic moment of his set and ‘walk on water’, like any self-respecting rock star). But these were more big concerts to support headliners rather than places where, ultimately, ‘it’s not about the bands’.
Today there are more than 400 music festivals around the country, quite a few in similar ‘secret locations’ shared only with subscribers – like the 6,000-capacity ‘Secret Garden Party’ in Cambridgeshire, which proclaims itself ‘a massive playground for slightly daft adults, with boat races, emotional baggage lockers, science experiments, burning art installations, fire circles, floating sculptures, mobile sound systems, pillow fights and the alternative Olympics’. Emotional baggage lockers? What happens if you lose the key?
Festivals like Glastonbury now fulfil a latent need. We have always been fond of tribal gatherings. Archaeologists profess themselves amazed at the amount of feasting that took place in Bronze Age sites or hill-forts: pork in particular was consumed in abundance, an advance on the bacon sandwiches and hot dogs of today’s festivals. The medieval chartered fairs continued that legacy. It comes back to a central proposition about the English character: that we have the boldness of the very shy. For most of the year we refuse to talk to anybody else on trains and, the national mantra, ‘mind our own business’. But given the chance for a few days to lose our identities in the mix, to be communal, libidinal and Bacchic, we seize it with both suddenly hennaed hands. Just so long as we can go back to being normal on Monday for the office.
*
As always when entering Norfolk, I felt like one of Napoleon’s foot soldiers entering Russia. The county stretched out for ever. When I was yo
ung and foolish at Cambridge, I did very little walking to the north of the city, as I imagined it to be dull and flat. Now that I was older and supposedly wiser and actually walking it, I realised that I had been completely right. There were stretches of the last haul to the Wash when I thought wistfully of the Karelian peninsular in northern Russia, where at least they greeted you with a glass of vodka in every village across the tundra.
Or if not Russia, the plains of America, a landscape that likewise has no curves. Norfolk is bisected by straight lines of poplars and canals. Its fields are like aerodromes. Outside of commuter range from any large city, and with a fishing industry dying on its feet, the county’s density of population now is less than it was in the eighteenth century, when Daniel Defoe was startled by how many people lived in Norfolk. There may well be fewer today than in the surprisingly populous Bronze Age.
Yet Norfolk has a wide-open, empty, frontier beauty – and a buried secret. Under the peatlands to the north of the county, near the border with Lincolnshire, lie the remains of a fascinating civilisation.
After a long slog to get there, I found myself making one of the strangest time shifts in England. I was walking out of the New Town of Peterborough, past the light industrial units of Fengate with all their peripheral bric-a-brac of twenty-first-century urban living – the furniture stores, garages and drive-in plumbing depots – to appear suddenly in the Fens, an ancient landscape of dykes and straight roads and horses looming at me out of the mist.
Stranger still to come to Flag Fen, the country’s most significant Bronze Age ceremonial centre, just a mile or so outside the city’s edge.
Despite lasting almost 2,000 years, from 2500 to 800 BC, the Bronze Age is somehow less visible than either the preceding Neolithic Stone Age or the Iron Age that followed. Stonehenge and the other stone circles are easy and obvious symbols of the Neolithic; the Iron Age has the hill-forts I had followed in a line across the country all the way from Maiden Castle, a very public affirmation on the landscape. But the Bronze Age can get lost, despite in many ways being the most appealing and formative period of all.