by Tot Taylor
‘Now this is quite nice…’
Jules gazed down at three squares that had arranged themselves in a bracelet on the flagstones. He pivoted and swivelled on his hips so as to be able to read all three at once. Outside, a curtain of mist appeared to have descended almost unnoticeably. The rose garden seeming to glow in the sudden imposed goldness. Black crows squawked as if they knew something; and a strange lull, a kind of dead stop, a restraint, came over the house.
‘Wave… Orange…’
Mawg froze as if struck by lightning – ‘What y’ say?’ – while Jules, fixed in this anglepoise arrangement, repeated more slowly…
‘Wave… Orange…’
‘LOVE…’ Mawg completed the trio in a soft tremolando without daring to turn round and face his friend.
‘How’d you know that?’ The dude turned back towards the kid, then bent down again to check the words.
‘Wave… Orange… Love”
That’s what it says, “Wave Orange Love”. Jules cast round for his bag and his board. ‘Not bad, that…’ he murmured, as he turned to go.
‘There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, “Surf's Up” is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.’
Leonard Bernstein, November 1966.
CBS News Special, ‘Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution’.
Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping, brother John?
‘Surf’s Up’, The Beach Boys, 1966/’71.
(Brother/Reprise RS-6453)
‘English Nature. That’s what it was!’
item: The Rural Stations Project, History/Activities: 1955–2006.
The Rural Stations Project, an initiative to improve the appearance of railway stations throughout the United Kingdom, was born out of Scope, the organisation for people with learning difficulties, and the creation of the Conservation Corps way back in the 1950s. The idea being to involve volunteers in practical conservation work by planting trees and shrubs and also by supplying much-needed aftercare. The first ever Conservation Corps project was held in 1966 at Box Hill in Surrey when 42 volunteers, including the naturalist David Bellamy, cleared dogwood to encourage the growth of juniper and the area’s distinctive chalkland flora.
In 1970, the Conservation Corps changed its name to the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV) and the new name and new logo was launched to coincide with HRH the Duke of Edinburgh becoming patron. In the ’90s the organisation began other initiatives such as the first Woodland Action Week, with broadcaster David Jacobs planting the Trust’s second-millionth tree at Two Storm Wood in Richmond Park, Surrey and the group running its first National Pond Campaign. BTCV also joined forces with Dr William Bird of Sonning Common Health Centre in Berkshire to introduce their Green Gym project. Other related initiatives include the Community Railways Scheme, the Riviera Project and Sustrans.
Scope is currently using gardeners with learning difficulties on a pan-Cornwall venture to supply hanging baskets, planters and seats to mainline stations from Penzance to Gunnislake as well as some of the branch lines. The Riviera Project was commissioned as a major study by the Rail Forum with a brief to formulate a framework for the regeneration of Cornwall’s railway stations, and Sustrans, the sustainable transport charity which complements bus infrastructure improvements such as the much-talked-about Corlink service between Bodmin and Padstow which has branded buses, real-time information boards and links to demand-responsive services. Cornwall became the first county to be selected as a Centre of Excellence for integrated rural transport in March 2001 after demonstrating its ability to address issues of rural travel in an innovative way.
Getting around – being able to move easily between the inland, agricultural B-roads jammed in the summer by coach tours and container vans and the wide coastal plains with their little buses and branch lines – remains an ongoing problem for the people of Cornwall.
So English Nature was what had done it. Put the idea into John Nightly’s head. A new oak bench replacing one put there in 1947 in memory of the village’s war dead had appeared on the platform at Porthcreek. Paid for by English Nature, the plaque announced that it was part of the new Rural Stations Project.
Not a ‘legacy’ exactly, but something the boss had mentioned more than once. On the rare times the Johns had occasion to visit one of the bracelet chain of stations along the branch line – to collect a shipment of plant feed or to recover lost mail – they would often be shocked by what greeted them. These once well-maintained stopping points appeared desolate and forgotten. Barren outposts of brick and mortar. Closed ticket offices and cold platforms welcomed the uninitiated day-tripper. But little do most passengers realise that once they brave the unwelcoming climate of the stations themselves they can look forward to travelling across some of the country’s most beautiful coastal routes, as Brunel’s broad-gauge track starts off in a deep cutting at Trenile then hugs the cliff edge all the way to Zawn Point.
At Whitesand, station platforms and outbuildings that had previously felt the touch of loving hands seemed now to have been vandalised not only by successive governments but also by local schoolchildren left abandoned in the cold on their way home to isolated farmhouses.
The rafters of the wayside chapel at Corncrake, once hung with wreaths and banners, were now painted over with several coats of unsuccessful colour and lay shrouded in creeper and vine. The flowerbeds at Kingsand were trampled flat. At Lantern Bay, two stations up – with the advantage of the first sight of the ocean – the small waiting-room had been closed since 1980, while at Trenile itself, once grateful recipient of all freight in and out of the Trenile Clay Mine* a scrap-metal yard and car-crusher were the first sights to greet visitors after the locomotive turned the bend into the station.
Waiting at these lonely halts, rail commuters must have bemoaned the lack of planting and floral colour on the railway banks of England’s most outstanding coastal route. Further up, the branch-line stops of St Day and Gull Rock had managed to survive the Beeching Report of the 1960s and the holidaymakers of every long, hot summer since but not local vandals or the Strategic Rail Authority. The St Day ticket-office stood covered in graffiti while Japanese knapweed continued its colonisation of the once-prizewinning flowerbeds and of Cornwall in general.
And so, on the morning of Friday, 1 July 2008, the anniversary of John Nightly’s passing, three lorryloads of cannas and hostas, strelitzias and geraniums, with a back-up of architectural, fast-growing echium and boxes of Mrs Peed’s favourite wildflowers, were lifted onto the platform at Porthcreek.
Packed and crated at Trewin during heart-attack-inducing heat the previous evening, the specimen-quality plants waited patiently as RCN, Robert, Endy, Mawg, Jules and Karen, with the help of two volunteers from the Rural Stations Scheme and a St Eina churchwarden, began planting the things so densely that just one month later each stopping point erupted in a swirl of crazy-colour, its Day-Glo effect so intense that it threatened to dazzle and possibly derail each unsuspecting train driver arriving there.
* On 26 July 1966, the Cornish China Clay Industry received the Queen’s Award for Industry.
item: The Cornishman. 9 September 2008 (Chrysanthemum Day in Japan)
‘Branch Lines Go Psychedelic!’
Stations along the Trenile branch line have benefitted from a gift contained in the will of sixties pop legend John Nightly, who lived for many years at Porthcreek until his recent death. Lorries carrying expensive exotics rolled up at 6am last Tuesday morning as part of an initiative by Scope, the association for people with learning difficulties. A group of volunteers planted beds along the branch-line route.
A spokesperson for the Strategic Rail Authority commented that it would do what it could to maintain the plants but the amount of watering needed, particularly with the recent impositions of
hosepipe bans in the county, ‘might prove a big job’.
Jon Speedwell, ‘Man About Cornwall’.
‘Faster than witches’ it wasn’t. Robert Louis Stevenson got that completely wrong.
As the Riviera Sleeper shunted its way through Liskeard, Bodmin, Lostwithiel and Par, the boy, unable to take the air-con any longer, was out of his cabin and slumped in the window of the deserted buffet car. Facing forward on the sunny side, feet up on the seat opposite, head full of last night's free bar, he attempted consciousness in order to consider his situation.
Mawgan was deeply in love. With Karen – and with Cornwall. Entranced by the wild, restless nature of this mysterious county and the wild, restless nature of its natives. As the train climbed the hilly ground, lifting its passengers high above the green pasture, the mass of detail in every lobelia plot, the red-painted paddle boats tied to each jetty, the assembly of birds picking over every tilled field, he imagined daily life in the settlements below; the reality that might lie along those dusty tracks strobing in and out of view behind railway banks.
The diesel picked up speed over the Liskeard valley, steam rising from the pampas below, rhododendron and claxus pines glistening in the perfectly horizontal light. The patchwork of radial fields at Lostwithiel, the town with the most beautiful name in England – literally ‘lost forest’ – reminded him of his mother’s patched jeans. This now-insignificant stop was once the busiest port in the South West, an exporter of tin and wool, boasting its own tannery and creamery, until the river silted up and the village died, to be reborn 100 years later as a ‘must-visit’ for antique-hunters and tripadvisors. Nowadays, Lostwithiel is mainly known as the connection for branch lines taking surfers to Newquay and walkers to the Looe valley.
Mawgan slumped further in his seat. Cottages with a pony and bathtub keeping each other company in the yard were dotted about the line from St Austell to Truro, the final stretch of the journey. Their gardens pruned to buggery by gardeners with nothing better to do. Plots cultivated by leaseholders who watch for new growth each day. Further up, valleys of sheep and cattle. They seemed happy enough at six in the morning, grazing with their offspring beside the old Great Western tracks.
A few miles further still and sunlight. The hard glare of a new summer. Mawgan had been well educated by the plant-hunters of Trewin. Before coming to the South West he would have been pressed to name much more than the common daffodil. Now, both the proper Latin forms and Endy’s old wives’ alternatives tripped off his tongue. ‘There’s Aeschynanthus,’ he’d say – or in Endy’s terms ‘lipstick vine’ – casually dropping it into a conversation with Robert. ‘Didn’t we ought to cut that verbena down… ?’ Though Mawgan had never yet been motivated to cut anything down himself. But the family at Trewin was tight-knit. It was a batch, a group – a genuine band of persons, not just humans – with a common group personality. Or at least it had been, up to just a few months back.
Now of course, things would never be like that again. Nothing would. Everyone understood that. Though the vegetation would die off and regenerate, the inhabitants of Trewin weren’t quite so sure about themselves. The business of growing exotics was now as much of a local fixture as the quarries and the pits had been. And the tin mines, the Methodist chapels, the hidden coves, the low clouds and hanging mists, the sparrowhawks, the ants, the winding lanes and trails, the constant cacophonous but somehow comforting bleat of the gulls… And the magical promise of the coast path.
The wild west. Wild West indeed. The wild west had been invaded. By nannies and the nanny state. The upside being that every area of land worth exploring was ‘protected’, an Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) or a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), if the planning authorities wanted to take notice. If they didn’t, there’d be a Jetstar garage or a Tesco/Sainsbury’s/M&S sitting where wildflower meadows, grazing land and bird settlements used to be. At this particular moment Trewin Farm ought to have been designated a Psychologically Very Sensitive Area (PVSA). Because of what had occurred. At the moment, he wasn’t even sure if the white farm really existed. Or if it ever had. The kid didn’t know anything about anything. No one did. Nothing definite.
Mawg picked up last night’s paper. The area surrounding Penwith and Kerrier was in the news again. Its fragile ecology under pressure because of the impact of holidaymakers, caravanners, developers, local planners, county planners, local councils, county councils, local government, national government, even the environmentalists themselves. Mawg tossed the thing onto the seat opposite. He didn’t get it. Didn’t at all realise the consequences of recent events. What had just happened to him – to all of them. But he knew one thing about it, about Cornwall. He knew that he would never leave.
Obituary: Jana Feather-Areia. Died 14 February 2004, aged 56.
Jana Valerie Feather was born in Cambridge, England, on 18 June 1948, and attended the St Mary’s Girls school in the town. In 1966 she won a scholarship to Girton College, where she read her Architecture and Fine Arts Tripos, resulting in her Master of Arts degree and diploma in Architecture. In 1970, at Clare Hall, she prepared her PhD thesis on planning and urban design in Central America, going on to become a leading expert on sustainable methods applied to public buildings, and also on recyclable power. She married the Chilean musician Juan Carlos Areia and lived with him in Santiago before moving back to England and Cambridge in 1988, where she lectured at the School of Architecture until her death. Dr Feather was also lecturer in Architecture at the Open University. In 1996 she became UK chairman of ECHO, the international action group for research into tidal changes and their consequences. Her father was the distinguished educator and musician Dr Janislav ‘Jani’ Feather; her mother the celebrated cellist Valerie Gyorsarev. In later years Jana Feather-Areia specialised in the design of acoustically humanised buildings, her memorials being the concert hall at Rialka, Chile, the Bashawitz Temple Auditorium, Houston, Texas, and the Santa Rocha Center for the Performing Arts in Caracas. She was a trustee of the Sandz Museum until 2000 when she first became ill.
Waterstone’s bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London WC2. 24 August 1994. Iona St John Firmin reads from her memoir, Iona & Friends.
The day I met John he was the heavenly person I had ever set my eye on. John was out-of-this-world… He was out of the other-world as well! [laughs nervously] He did not know what… day it was. He was charming… in his fresh-pressed suit and scarf, which was copied by all the fashion designers and really became a big ‘style’… for Swinging London, as they said – although we never did that, behaved like Swinging London. [laughs] we never knew it was there… we were wrapped up in ourselves, in those days – and those ‘old time’ manners which had been put into him by Frieda, his mother Frieda, a beautiful woman, physically… exquisite… Because of her, he had this sand-blond hair and a little, little bit… Norwegian speaking… A ‘lilt’, as they said. Which of course made girls wild and made him, John, literally… irresistible to all the women he met… Sadly, I suppose in a way, that is the case.
[Iona speaks more softly] I think myself lucky to spend these years with John… the years we spend together. He could have anyone he wanted, but… nonetheless at that time… he wanted me. [looks round for her glass]
[In the revised version of the book, commissioned by her publishers to add more spice and ‘sex-up’ the story, Iona expands on some of John’s more personal habits]
My husband was… unusual… in other ways also. When he moved into Queen Square and for the first time lived by himself, I went to the bathroom one morning to see a large pile of folded-up toilet sheet. John had folded each paper he was going to use eight times over before he used it. Carefully folded over, these… piles of paper, waiting to be used. The sides and tops perfectly lined up, and sat neatly on top of each other. I didn’t mention this to him. But later on he told me Frieda has insisted he always fold the loo sheet eight times. Eight times for… hygiene reasons, when he used the toilet. His mother was a
big influence on John… [picks up the glass of golden liquid]
Ten minutes later:
I said to John… this is the doctor you have to go and see. John looked at the note: ‘Dr Sansar Miller, 17 Clitterhouse Crescent, NW2’. I said she will be your… saviour. Because I sure he will be and it was then he went to the macrobiotic diet… which I had already adapted… a long time ago. He went to it in a big style, cutting the carrots up in triangles because in the book it said that carrots… as a vegetable, liked, preferred, to be cut as a triangle, and that of course they might then feel better about themselves and do you more health good… Perhaps they would be healthier for you, if you cut them the way they liked to be cut…
Dr Niels Hansen, Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark. June 2006.
Situated right in the heart of Copenhagen, Christiania occupies an old army barracks that was squatted when vacated by the military in the early 1970s. The land is owned by the Danish Ministry of Defence. The commune itself standing on the site of a 17th-century fortress constructed to keep out the Swedes. No cars, no tarmac roads, no street lighting and therefore no light pollution. It’s possible to see many stars and many star clusters in Christiania.
Niels, an experimental film-star, now town councillor at the commune, is sitting in the smoky fug of the Moonfisher Bar on the main square of the 34 hectares that make up Copenhagen’s Freetown. ‘Black Sheep from all the Classes Unite’ is the motto of the village.
‘When John came here in… ’72, to kind of… try to… sort out his life, I think it was just to… just get away from England and all the stuff about the accident. But also to try to get him away from the SUMHA rehabilitation.